Illuminating fiction

A young read­er recent­ly wrote to me:

“We [my sixth grade] thought your book [Nev­er Mind] was real­ly good, but at times it was hard to imag­ine. If it was made into a movie we could visu­al­ize the char­ac­ters bet­ter and how they react­ed. For exam­ple, Har­ry Pot­ter is a series of books that were turned into a movie. Since the movie fol­lows the books, it is eas­i­er to com­pre­hend what was going on in the book.”

It is com­mon­place to refer to the mod­ern age as one of intense visu­al­iza­tion, TV, inter­net, film. And while it does not make me hap­py to acknowl­edge it, young peo­ple are far more like­ly to look at images than words on a page. As sug­gest­ed by the young read­er above, it is one of the rea­sons why read­ers strug­gle with read­ing books.

There is a solu­tion: More illus­tra­tions for mid­dle grade and even upper grade fic­tion. There are won­der­ful illus­tra­tors these days, and they should not be con­fined to pic­ture books. I have absolute­ly no doubt that the suc­cess of my Pop­py books, may, to a vital degree, be found in the illus­tra­tions by Bri­an Flo­ca. His art doesn’t just illus­trate the texts, they are a sig­nif­i­cant part of the sto­ries. Con­sid­er Bri­an Selznick’s work. Con­sid­er the pop­u­lar­i­ty of graph­ic novels.

In short, there are count­less ways to illus­trate fic­tion. Pub­lish­ers do them­selves (and their read­ers) a real dis­ser­vice by not illu­mi­nat­ing fic­tion. More art may mean even more read­ing of text.