This is the philosophy behind my breakout session at the 2009 summer workshop: "Sweatin' the Small Stuff.
The picture was an unremarkable watercolor that hung above the couch in our living room ever since I could remember. The focus was a red barn with a road leading to it, flanked by tall trunks with generic leaves feathering the branches. Deciduous trees is all I can say about them; at the time I couldn't even have said that much. The scene probably reminded my mother or dad of someplace special to them; otherwise I don't know why it had pride of place in our living room for so many years. I never even asked.
But I remember noticing one day that the artist had not rendered the trunk in solid brown, as I (and everybody else in fourth-grade art class) was accustomed to doing. There wasn't much brown in it at all; mostly a mossy gray with deep grooves in the bark, represented by streaks of black. Nor were the leaves rendered literally (as in nature) or symbolically (as in the childhood convention of a puffy wad of green), but perceptually. These were leaves as the eye and brain embrace them; a cloud of variegated green, with unexpected dashes of yellow and brown, even black and white.
The observation revolutionized my tree-drawing. My trunks were now vertical ridges of brown and black, not solid cylinders (the brown was still inaccurate, but most crayon boxes don't contain a tree-bark gray). Leaves were harder, because they took more time. But I'm convinced that if I had progressed further in art, I could have painted trees in oil or acrylic as well as any craft-fair artist, and perhaps even sold a few to hang above living room sofas--where another child might see my efforts and start noticing real trees through my interpretation of them.
This is a function of art: to help us see how we see. An artist learns to observe things themselves and mediate them for others, who then learn to perceive those things in new or more accurate ways. In the same way, an author studies experiences and renders them for the reader in ways that help the reader understand something of the depth and quality of life. This is the special privilege of a children's writer, I think. Children perceive and express reality in blocky shapes and broad generalizations. Other kids fall into two groups: "nice" and "mean." Feelings are basic: mad, glad, sad, bad. A house is a box with windows and the sun is a circle with radiating lines. This doesn't mean that children themselves are simple; we know they are very complex creatures. But they have a lot to learn.
One way a children's writer can help her readers learn is by mediating reality as accurately as she can. Writers tend to fall into conventions, too: the equivalent of drawing trees as a cylinder and a puff. These are called clichés--not merely hackneyed figures of speech, but stereotyped characters and situations. A certain amount of "hackney" is permissible; if your first-string characters are vivid and memorable, for example, you can allow some stereotypes among the benchwarmers. But the best writers don't just tell a story; they mediate reality.
One way to do this is by the details a writer chooses to include. Sticking with trees, let's say our main character Stacie has just been told by her parents that the family is moving from Missouri to Utah. Utah!? All she knows about it is that it's brown on the school map of the USA. Brown = desert, bleak, hot, dusty. She stomps out to the back yard to sulk, and drops on the ground beside her favorite tree. What kind of tree is it? If it's oak, she can lean her head against its scaly bark and scratch up acorns in the soil. If it's maple (and the right time of year), she can toss up a few helicopter seeds and watch them spin to the ground. She may not be able to put it into words, or even into a concept, but she's relating to her own place, knowing that she'll have to exchange it for a completely different place where she won't have these trees. The texture of her life will be different--how will she adjust?
Of course, a writer can overwhelm a story with minutia which, though accurate, obscures both the narrative and the deeper truth. There's no formula for where to put the details and how much to include. An artist does not render every single leaf, but decides how to communicate the multiplicity and variety of leaves by a particular technique. An author communicates vastness of life by focusing on snippets of it, rendered more or less accurately by the details he chooses to include.
I can remember being alerted to reality by certain books I read as a child, just as I was alerted to the real appearance of trees by careful observance of a picture on the wall. The frame got my attention, then the technique, and with a little noticing I was able to express the object more accurately. Not only that, but to see it more accurately. That's the highest calling of an artist and an author: helping others to see.
