A Child's Wisdom

So the other day I was taking care of my little brother outside. Now, except that he needed someone to watch him and he prefers to play with someone, my being there was rather superfluous, which allowed me to speculate upon the abilities of young children in general and three-and-a-half-year-olds in particular.

Of course not all children are the same. After all, not all three-and-a-half-year-olds can do simple addition and subtraction. However, he gave me much to ponder.

My conclusion was that young children are natural storytellers. For one, they have not yet reached the point where they delineate true and false in relation to what has happened and what has not. If we tell him about some event that has happened in the past it is just as real for him as what he tells us he has done before and as real as what is happening around him. Often when children tell adults something, the adults respond by asking, “Really?” This is a question children would not think to ask, for it implies a certain degree of disbelief, of cynicism, which they do not yet know. Their minds are still free to believe anything.

As he played with a newt from the gully, he showed his innate sense of narrative. Everything we did had to be done a certain way and in a certain order.

It is these reasons that make children such good storytellers, and yet there is one thing they lack: they have not yet developed a sense for what is interesting to hear about and what is not. If you ever listen to them telling a story, you will notice that they tell everything in the order it happened, leaving nothing out. Perhaps, though, it would be more accurate to say not that it is a lack but that it is something of which they have an over abundance, their sense of the importance of everything being so strong that they hold each and every thing with equal regard.

As children grow older they lose so much. That is why children often seem so happy, while adults do only rarely. As they grow, they forget their natural creativity, reducing everything to the black and white, true and false, of the adult world. They learn to doubt, to disbelieve. They narrow their sense of the important to rest upon a limited number of things that have little meaning for them. Thus they not only lose their ability as storytellers, but also they lose the ability to live happily.

It is for this reason that Jesus said we must become like children if we wish to enter heaven and that the kingdom of heaven belonged to such as these.

For writers this is especially important. We must have a child's creativity so that we move beyond the hard lines accepted as facts and dare to attempt what we never would otherwise, a childlike confidence in our work, and also a child's wonder at the world. This is what shall produce fruit.

Yet once we have that precious fruit—that first draft—we must be able to continue on. For this it is necessary to have abilities gained only with maturity: the ability to judge and assess the work, and the ability to be able to listen to others and learn from what they have to tell us. It is these that shall enable us to improve both our craft and our stories so that we may create works that may be of lasting influence in the world.