The English author, poet, and poet laureate Ted Hughes was, as well, a writer of children’s literature, and in the foreword to Children as Writers 2, a collection of prize-winning pieces in a children’s literary competition run in 1975 by the Daily Mirror newspaper, he made some observations which can only help us adults understand better what makes for writing that is alive and pulsing:
Children’s sensibility, and children’s writing, have much to teach adults. Something in the way of a corrective, a reminder. Theirs is not just a miniature world of naïve novelties and limited reality—it is also still very much the naked process of apprehension, far less conditioned than ours, far more fluid and alert, far closer to the real laws of its real nature. It is a new beginning, coming to circumstances afresh…. Preconceptions are already pressing, but they have not yet closed down, like a space helmet, over the entire head and face, with the proved, established adjustments of security. Losing that sort of exposed nakedness, we gain in confidence and in mechanical efficiency on our chosen front, but we lose in real intelligence. We lose in readiness to change, in curiosity, in perception, in the original, wild, no-holds-barred approach to problems.
These remarks struck my attention because it can be difficult as adults—elementally difficult—to come upon “circumstances afresh,” as Hughes puts it, and to realize that our many complaints in struggling to write more fluently might have a lot to do with how far we have traveled, and necessarily so, from a child’s “naked apprehension” of that same world in which both they and we live and move and have our being. What we oppose to their “exposed nakedness” is our sophisticated conceptualizing, that ever down-pulling, fixing tendency which is part of us now because our language is set up to name things, and so with every noun we fasten tight a world that is in truth ever on the run. Alert, the child’s mind moves with the moving and hits the mark by sighting the center; distracted, our mind freezes and loses that moving focal point, to talk of what’s off the center.
We can see this opposition between action and things, center and perimeter, in many of the sentences we write casually and only occasionally revise. What, for example, might be the difference between he expressed his doubt about the likelihood of the project’s success and he doubted the project would succeed? Or between the company experienced significant loss in revenue and the company lost significant revenue? The first of each is misfocused and inflated: is it really his expressing something that we want to point to, or that he doubted? Is it that the company experienced something, or that the company lost significant revenue?
A child’s mind wants to know what’s really going on, not an idea about what’s going on. That “more fluid and alert” apprehension Hughes is talking about answers why the second version of each of these examples is the better one: without that space helmet covering its head and face—the central site of our five senses, remember—the childlike mind perceives and then states, rather than conceptualizing, as we adults habitually do: we too perceive an image, but then we look around it and state what is peripheral, not central, to it.
All this, though, might amount to a counsel of perfection, and perfection is not, we are thankful, ever possible. We will improve our prose in real measure, though, if we can use Hughes’s insights about the childlike vision of things to change our tendency and to make clear for us again the direction of our unreachable goal, because it is in a right striving that we will better our work. And that striving means to see and say—that’s all. A child’s intelligence, which we should properly distinguish from an adult’s reason, can still sustain the undeflected power of the image, facing it in a direct line of approach and capture without being distracted by related but lesser goings-on. That is why precision is said to be at the heart of one’s literary style—because a fine style sees and says the heart of the matter.
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