“That sounds like fun.”

If I meet peo­ple social­ly, and there is one of those casu­al exchanges, “What kind of work do you do?” and I answer, “I write books for kids,” they almost inevitably answer, “That sounds like fun.” Or, as I heard today, “That’ll keep you young.”

I wish.

There are all kinds of ways to under­stand what peo­ple are say­ing here. Are they sug­gest­ing that writ­ing for young peo­ple is all fun and games, that it’s easy? Are they pro­ject­ing  that such writ­ing is about fairy tales, and drag­ons, and rhyming alpha­bets, so that I’m liv­ing an extend­ed child­hood? Might they be say­ing, “Hey! You get to avoid the adult world!” I don’t know, of course, but I rather sus­pect it’s some­thing along those lines.

Read­ers of these notes know that the kind of writ­ing I—and my writ­ing friends—do is hard.  All writ­ing is hard—if it’s to be good. But is it nev­er fun? 

Every once in a while—and they are most­ly long whiles—when I write, I sense that what I’m doing is good. It’s not smug­ness I feel. Nor is it, curi­ous­ly, even a feel­ing that I am writ­ing well. What hap­pens is the sen­sa­tion that I’ve come to real­ly know my char­ac­ters. That more and more they are com­ing alive. That they, not me, are writ­ing the book. Now, that’s fun.