Writing “Heavy” Books for Children With a Light Touch
Author Lisa Graff shares her strategy for writing “heavy” books for children, including a topic that she avoided taking head on…until now.
“Why do we so often forget that children are not emotional beggars? They understand these feelings every bit as well as we do, and are torn by them as often. There is, in point of fact, no such thing as an exclusively adult emotion, and children's literature deals with them all.” —Natalie Babbitt
Over the past 20 years, I have carved out a small niche in the world of middle-grade literature, primarily by writing about “difficult” topics in a kid-friendly way. In Umbrella Summer, I tackled grief over the death of a sibling. The Great Treehouse War is about divorce. Far Away centers on a long-kept family secret and the complexity of truth. And in Lost in the Sun a pre-teen grapples with extreme guilt over an accident that killed a classmate. My “bread and butter,” as it were, has been finding a way to balance these emotionally wrought topics with the humor, lightness, and joy that is essential to keep a young audience reading. I like to think I’m pretty good at it.
And yet, there was one story I always thought I could never write.
In Lost in the Sun, which was published in 2015, the protagonist, Trent, befriends a girl named Fallon with a mysterious scar across her face. Trent and Fallon bond mostly over baseball movies—but also over their difficult pasts. Fallon’s past, however, remains a mystery for the entirety of the book. While she eventually discloses to Trent how she got her scar, the reader is not privy to the story. I made this decision for lots of reasons—but one of them was that I knew Fallon’s backstory was incredibly heavy, and involved sexual abuse at the hands of her uncle. That, I figured, was not something I wanted to explicitly write about in a novel for children. It didn’t seem like something I could write about. Not for that age group.
My readers, however, thought otherwise. Although Lost in the Sun came out over a decade ago, I still to this day receive letters and emails from children asking for Fallon’s story. Most of them, I think, are simply curious. But a few of them have picked up on the teeny tiny subtle (so subtle no adult I know has ever found them) clues I left in the book that point to the truth behind Fallon’s scar. And they have told me outright: “We want that book.”
Because the thing is—Natalie Babbitt was right. (Of course she was right. She’s Natalie Babbitt.) Children are not emotional beggars. And, sadly, as much as we adults may want to assume otherwise, many of them have experienced awful things. They deserve books that reflect those experiences—so they can understand, and heal, and contemplate, the same way adults do when they read “heavy” novels. Likewise, children who have not had such experiences deserve books that let them delve into other people’s realities from a safe distance, one of the key steps on the road to empathy.
And so, eventually, I set to work writing Fallon’s story—which would eventually become the stand-alone novel A Scar Like a River—as so many of my readers had requested. Once I made my mind up, the path forward seemed obvious. To balance the heavy subject matter of Fallon’s past with the sometimes-serious-often-ridiculous realities of middle school, I needed to do one thing: Tell the truth.
I pulled not only from traumas of my own, but from brighter memories too. Because even when life is at its most tumultuous—when a family member dies, or gets sick, or when past atrocities come to light—all the other day-to-day “stuff” of being human doesn’t go away. Homework is still due. There are rehearsals for the school play. Maybe your two best friends start to crush on each other. And that “stuff” is important too.
So is the silly stuff (maybe it’s even more important than before): Ad-libbing ridiculous song lyrics with a frenemy. Trolling your dad in the “feminine hygiene” aisle. Utterly failing at teaching your dog the polka. The key, I’ve found, to writing books on tough subjects for a young audience is the same as it would be for any other audience—to make the characters’ lives feel realistically full. Make the characters feel full, with emotions both devastating and jubilant. If you can balance the two sides of that scale just right, I honestly don’t think any subject matter is off-limits.
Check out Lisa Graff's A Scar Like a River here:
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