Barbara Kingsolver raises the question of why a novelist would have a child as a main character. An author of children’s literature may have the answer.

In her review of a novel for adults in tomorrow's New York Times Book Review, Barbara Kingsolver praises the fact that two of its three main characters are children. She says this is uncommon, because novels used to be written by “men and childless women. Writers lacking an everyday acquaintance with children are less likely to conceive them as literary personalities…But in the era of attachment parenting…why should modern writers fail to include child characters in fiction for adults?”

Is “an everyday acquaintance with children” the key determinant of whether a writer features children? What is the process of writing fiction? All I know about Kingsolver’s writing process is that, as she says on her website, she goes into an altered state of consciousness, with “words flooding into my brain” (she doesn’t say from where):

“I tend to wake up extremely early with words flooding into my brain.  If I don’t get up, they’ll continue to accumulate in puddles, so it’s a relief to get to the keyboard and dump them out.  I’ll take a break to have breakfast with my daughter and walk her to the school bus.  In the afternoon I’ll break again to meet with my assistant, Judy, to review the day’s mail pile and decide how to respond to requests.  But if I’ve really gone into novel-never-land, the time disappears.  I sometimes look at the clock and am stunned to see that six or eight hours have passed while I sat motionless in my chair.”

So I will have to look elsewhere for a clue as to what makes a writer focus on children. My theory is that the key determinant would be the writer’s relationship with his or her own child-aged alternate personalities, as illustrated in a past post about an award-winning author of children’s literature, reprinted here:

Monday, January 11, 2016

Katherine Paterson: Award-winning author of children’s literature writes to comfort and change her “frightened, lonely, nine-year-old” alternate personality.

“With every book I have written there is a reader whose life I have been determined to change…there is an audience from the very beginning…that reader is myself…

“But why children? If I am, in fact, writing to change myself, a forty-six-year-old woman, why don’t I have the decency to publish for other forty-six-year-old women and leave the innocent children out of it?

“…Let me explain. When I walk into a room full of well-dressed people, I never walk in alone. With me is a nine-year-old who knows her clothes are out of a missionary barrel, her accent is foreign, and her mannerisms peculiar—a child who knows that if she is lucky she will be ignored and if unlucky she will be sneered at…I can [never] excise that frightened, lonely nine-year-old or [do I] even want to…

“The reader I want to change is that burdened child within myself. As I begin a book, I am in a way inviting her along to see if there might be some path through this wilderness that we might hack out together…some sheltered spot where we might lay our burden down…” (1, pp. 55-60).

Paterson knows, objectively, that the child is a product of her own mind, but, subjectively, she experiences the child as different from her regular, adult self and not just a metaphor.

She and the child are not how she feels in different circumstances or moods. Rather, she and the child are often present and conscious at the same time; for example, while she’s writing and the child is her audience, or when she and the child walk, together, into a crowded room. This is an example of “double consciousness,” an old term for multiple personality, discussed in past posts.

The nine-year-old child is an “alternate personality,” but the word “alternate” is somewhat misleading, because, in multiple personality, more than one personality is usually conscious and present at any given time. The personalities “alternate” in the sense that only one is “out” and predominantly in control of behavior at any given time. But another personality is usually present and monitoring the situation from behind the scenes.

Some personalities are not co-conscious (are not aware of each other), but other personalities are co-conscious, as are Paterson and her child-aged personality.

Since multiple personality begins in childhood, child-aged personalities are common.

1. Katherine Paterson. A Sense of Wonder: On Reading and Writing Books for Children. New York, Plume/Penguin, 1981-1995.