Read Online Reflections by Diana Wynne Jones - Free Book Online

seemed, it struck me as hard on them. So when I was asked if I’d like to try my hand at an adult novel, I most joyfully agreed. To my great surprise, writing it and, after that, receiving the comments of an editor revealed all sorts of additional hidden assumptions about the two kinds of writing. Most of these were quite as irrational as the shame of a grown man caught reading teenage fiction. They ran right across the board, too, and affected almost everything, from the length of the book to its style and subject matter. And nearly all of them—this was what disturbed me most—acted to deprive me of the freedom I experience when I write for children. Furthermore, when I thought more deeply about these assumptions, I found they reflected badly on both kinds of writing.
    To take the most obvious first: I found myself thinking as I wrote, “These poor adults are never going to understand this; I must explain it to them twice more and then remind them again later in different terms.” Now this is something I never have to think when I write for younger readers. Children are used to making an effort to understand. They are asked for this effort every hour of every school day, and though they may not make the effort willingly, they at least expect it. In addition, nearly everyone between the ages of nine and fifteen is amazingly good at solving puzzles and following complicated plots—this being the happy result of many hours spent at computer games and watching television. I can rely on this. I can make my plots for them as complex as I please, and yet I know I never have to explain them more than once (or twice at the very most). And here I was, writing for people of fifteen and over, assuming that the people who read, say, Fire and Hemlock last year have now given up using their brains.
    This is back-to-front to what one usually assumes, if one only looks on the surface, but I found it went much deeper than that. At first I thought it was my own assumption, based on personal experiences. Once when I was doing a signing, a mother came in with her nine-year-old son and berated me for making The Homeward Bounders so difficult. So I turned to the boy to ask him what he didn’t understand. “Oh, don’t listen to her ,” he said. “ I understood everything. It was just her that didn’t.” It was clear to both of us that his poor mother had given up using her brain when she read. Likewise, a schoolmaster who was supposed to be interviewing me for a magazine explained to me that he had tried to read Charmed Life and couldn’t understand a word, which meant, he said, that it was much too difficult for children. So he didn’t interview me. He was making the surface assumption that children need things easy. But since I have never yet come across a child who didn’t understand Charmed Life , it occurred to me that he was making the assumption about himself . But it was a hidden one, and when I came to write for adults, I realized that it was something all adults assumed. I grew tender of their brains and kept explaining.
    This makes an absurd situation. Here we have books for children, which a host of adults dismiss as puerile, overeasy, and are no such thing; and there we have books for adults, who might be supposed to need something more advanced and difficult, which we have to write as if the readers were simpleminded.
    Anyone examining this rather surprising assumption will see that it comes all tangled up in at least one other one: that books for adults are supposed to be longer . Everyone appears to know this. There are jokes about the fifth book in the trilogy—for longer seems to mean “lots” as well—and it would probably startle most adults to discover that an average children’s book picked at random from my shelves (it happened to be To Tame a Sister , by Gillian Avery) runs to 260 pages of very small print, that T. H. White’s The Sword