The Narrative Great Chain of Being, Part I

If your high school English class was similar to mine, you probably learned something about The Great Chain of Being. This, we were taught as we drummed impatiently on our copies of whatever Shakespeare play happened to be on the curriculum this year, was an Elizabethan concept of the order of the universe. A hierarchy: at the top of the chain, superior to everything else, was God. Right under God came the angels. And then humanity, with several subdivisions as obviously kings were superior to priests who were superior to peasants… you get the idea.

As ought to be clear, since few ever raise subjects learned in high school English class of their own accord, I’m interested in this now not for its own sake but because I keep encountering something that reminds me of it. It’s pretty ubiquitous: I hear it from Internet commentators, bloggers, and essayists; writers, both professional and soon-to-be; and consumers of all sorts of media who come from all sorts of backgrounds. This thing is the NARRATIVE Great Chain of Being.

The major media in which story play a role get ranked roughly as follows, from worthiest to least:

LITERATURE
PLAYS
MOVIES
TV SHOWS
COMICS
VIDEO GAMES

Of course, there are many subdivisions within each of these categories. For instance, literary fiction or real-world fiction is ranked superior to genre fiction like science fiction, fantasy, or mysteries. And any narrative intended for adults trumps any narrative intended for children, so much so that young adult, middle grade, or early childhood books may slip a few rungs down the ladder and wind up on equal footing with the less complex TV shows or even (gasp!) comics intended for adults. The technical quality of a narrative can also affect its perceived quality: a video game with state-of-the-art graphics is naturally “better” than one that doesn’t strain the abilities of its console.

I’m not into video games enough to argue that Wii games are just as good as PS3 games (although I know which I personally prefer). But I have been working on manuscripts for middle grade and young adult fiction since I was eleven; and I’ve been working with others who write the same and/or picture book manuscripts since I was about seventeen. So I’ve encountered a fair deal of people who seem to feel that children’s books are somehow less… worthwhile, intelligent, difficult to create, meaningful, I don’t know, pick your favourite positive adjective.

Now, there are two ways in which they might mean this and in which this Narrative G. C. of B. seems to operate. The first, that certain media are limited in ways other media are not and therefore are incapable of generating the same magna opera as their unlimited siblings, translates as follows: there’s just something about the form and therefore content of children’s books that makes them not as good as books for adults. The second, that because of this, storytellers need to have less talent and to put in less work to create “inferior” media, gives us this: writing children’s books is easier than writing books for adults. Although it’s backwards, I’m going to blog about this second idea today.

Every serious would-be children’s writer out there has encountered someone at conferences or online who’s just picked up children’s writing because “it seemed easy”. Now, I’m sure there are excellent, dedicated writers out there who present themselves in this unfortunate fashion, but I’m sorry to say that the majority of people I meet who do so have no idea what they’re talking about. They often haven’t read many books in the field in which they want write. They seldom have much writing experience, which is okay in and of itself, but they also don’t seem to feel that they need any. They tend to want instant results — a publishing deal right off the bat, sale of film rights optional — without showing any acknowledgment of the work that would be needed to achieve them. Sometimes they honestly don’t know how much work goes into writing; worse, sometimes they do know but just expect to be natural geniuses, special snowflakes for whom everything will be different.

You may here wish to object: okay, Sarah, it’s been your misfortune to meet and read about some people like this. But even if they’re mistaken in how what they believe to be true will affect their own success as writers, don’t they have a point? Picture books are only 32 pages long. Their plots are less complex than those of most if not all adult-oriented fiction. If you want to write fiction without risking a huge “deposit” of time and effort, it does seem like you’d be better suited to writing picture books.

Yes and no. All those things I just wrote about writing picture books are true, but they leave out the most important fact: good* picture books are difficult to write. They are! Why should being shorter make a difference? Few would suggest that writing good sonnets is a piece of cake, although they’re quite short. It’s true that writing long things is difficult in and of itself — keeping at a project takes effort and dedication, which aren’t easy — but it isn’t as though every type of challenge has a “difficulty” rating that can be described as a single number and ranked with that of other challenges. You can’t say, “Ah, writing long things is a 6, but writing good short things is just a 5, so novels require more effort than picture books.” Fitting good, striking ideas in a shorter format is a different type of difficulty. Although most of us have preferences about which type of difficulty we’d prefer to tackle, that doesn’t make one task easier than the other.

You can get away with a lot in a novel that you can’t in a picture book. Not one word of a picture book can be out of place; the market is so competitive and the audience so discerning (do you know any readers of literary fiction who will throw a temper tantrum if they don’t like what they’re reading?) that everything — plot, characters, illustrations, text, cadence — has to fit together perfectly. In 32 pages. And on top of that, it has to be original, inspiring, exciting, thematically interesting.

Don’t get me wrong: difficulty of creation doesn’t automatically make media worthwhile or art. Some writers report that their most beautiful stories came to them as if by divine inspiration. And there are plenty of things that take lots of hard work, like baking a puff pastry or quitting smoking, that, while worthwhile, don’t create good stories. All this and more in Part II!

But my point today is, storytelling is tough, period. There’s no one media in which it happens that’s easier to create just by virtue of the format of that particular medium. Some individuals might find one type of format easier to navigate than another, but a story is a story. And creating a good story, no matter how it’s told, requires hard work, lots of talent, and at least a dash of luck.

*Doing anything badly is easy, at least the first time. Bungee jumping, for instance, is rather difficult to do badly twice.