Seeing a Story through New Eyes
By Keith Cronin | November 8, 2016 |
At the time this post is published, I’ll be at the Writer Unboxed UnCon in Salem, MA, where I’ll be leading a discussion on the impact of language on storytelling. So it seems appropriate to post something along the same lines, particularly given the interesting experience I had just prior to drafting this piece.
My daughter’s 30th birthday was several days ago, and as I prepared to shop for birthday presents, I asked a couple of female friends for book recommendations. One of those recommendations surprised me: The Velveteen Rabbit, the classic children’s book by Margery Williams.
The friend who recommended it – an educated and extremely intelligent woman who’s probably in her late thirties – said that she re-reads the book several times a year. I told her I had read it (or had it read to me) as a child, but couldn’t remember reading it as an adult. (Crap. This means I probably never read it to my daughter. Bad parenting, Keith. Bad parenting.)
My friend remarked that she had never read it as a child, but had discovered the book as an adult, and it remained one of her favorites. Intrigued, I bought an inexpensive ebook version of it, and read it in probably 15-20 minutes. It was a fascinating experience.
Getting reacquainted with a classic
First of all, I totally did not remember the story. I mean, I remember liking it as a kid, and had some vague recollection about it revolving around a toy that becomes shabby and worn, but I couldn’t recall any more details than that. So I was surprised multiple times by where the story went, including its conclusion (fear not – no spoilers).
Next, I was surprised that for a short book intended for children, the language is actually very adult, with a hint of subtly satirical humor that would have sailed right over my head as a child.
For a long time he lived in the toy cupboard or on the nursery floor, and no one thought very much about him. He was naturally shy, and being only made of velveteen, some of the more expensive toys quite snubbed him. The mechanical toys were very superior, and looked down upon every one else; they were full of modern ideas, and pretended they were real. The model boat, who had lived through two seasons and lost most of his paint, caught the tone from them and never missed an opportunity of referring to his rigging in technical terms. The Rabbit could not claim to be a model of anything, for he didn’t know that real rabbits existed; he thought they were all stuffed with sawdust like himself, and he understood that sawdust was quite out-of-date and should never be mentioned in modern circles. Even Timothy, the jointed wooden lion, who was made by the disabled soldiers, and should have had broader views, put on airs and pretended he was connected with Government.
I’m sure his kind of sophistication in a children’s book made it much more easy for parents to endure when being asked to read the story aloud for the umpteenth time. In that respect, I think Ms. Williams’ book set an example that we see widely adopted today in the CGI-animated movies we see from Pixar and Disney. I absolutely LOVE those movies, and am always impressed at how they succeed in appealing to – and resonating with – viewers of all ages, from toddler to senior citizen. That’s good writing.
A talent for timelessness
Another aspect of The Velveteen Rabbit that surprised me is that for a book just six years shy of being a century old, it doesn’t seem dated. Probably the most outdated reference is the title itself: I don’t think most of us use the word “velveteen” anymore. But I think you’d agree, it makes for a far more poetic title than “The Plush Rabbit.”
Sure, there are references that make it clear this was set in another time, such as when one character is stricken with scarlet fever. But there is a timeless quality to the story that is really compelling, and – to me, at least – worthy of further study. After all, wouldn’t you like to write a story that people are still reading a hundred years later? I know I would.
Let’s get metaphysical
Okay, so Margery Williams succeeded in writing a book that is timeless and appeals to all ages. But she didn’t stop there. She also showed a willingness and an ability to use a very small book – just under 4,000 words – to ask some very BIG questions, such as this one:
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
That’s probably what impressed me most about this book – and is likely why my friend re-reads it so often. Ms. Williams used the simple story of a stuffed animal to ask one of the biggest existential questions possible, and then created an entire mythos for answering that question. All in under 4,000 words. Again, that’s good writing.
Making an emotional connection
A theme we see echoed time and time again in the posts we read here at WU is how crucial it is to make an emotional connection with our readers. This is another one of the strongest aspects of The Velveteen Rabbit. Williams does a wonderful job of capturing the depth – and the purity – of the love that can exist between a child and his toy. If you’ve seen any of the “Toy Story” movies, I submit that they each owe a substantial debt to this book.
And like those movies, the book shows how loving relationships can grow, change, and evolve. Further, it shows how two beings who love each other may each be experiencing and perceiving that love in very different ways – again, a very adult perspective, but captured in a realistic and childlike way.
There’s a whole lot of story here
As you may have gathered, there’s a lot going on in this deceptively simple story. I’ve spent a lot of time studying story structure over the past few years, focusing in particular on the theories and methodologies of Chris Vogler (modeled on Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey”), Blake Snyder (“save the cat” approach to “story beats”) and Michael Hauge (six-stage plot structure with inner and outer journey).
While the theories these writers espouse each have their own distinct slant, they also have much in common, and are each laid out in a sequence of steps (also called stages or beats). So out of curiosity I tried mapping The Velveteen Rabbit to some of those steps (again, trying to avoid spoilers).
- Setup – a view of the normal world, and a statement of the theme: The book begins when the rabbit is first given as a gift. We are introduced to the other toys, including a Mentor figure, and the theme is stated: being loved makes you real.
- Call to action/catalyst/turning point: The boy’s favorite toy goes missing, so the rabbit is called into action to replace it (by a nanny who just wants the kid to go to sleep).
- The new world, giving the hero a glimpse of his potential essence: The rabbit and the boy share new adventures, and their love begins to grow.
- Complications and higher stakes: The rabbit is getting more shabby and dirty, and has a chance encounter with strangers who make him directly question his own reality. This is a great moment, which calls to mind the scene in the movie Shrek where the antagonist mocks Shrek for daring to think that he – a lowly ogre – could ever win the affection of the Princess.
- Point of no return: A very real hint of danger is introduced, as we are given a piece of information that makes us – but not the rabbit – aware that his life is in danger. The rabbit’s love remains steadfast, a factor that will be important going forward.
- Major setback/all is lost/dark night of the soul: It appears that there’s no hope for the rabbit, as a very final sentence has been issued.
- Resurrection/final push: The rabbit’s reaction to his situation attracts the attention of a force stronger than himself, and he is both saved and transformed.
- Aftermath/hero’s return/final image: The rabbit is now living fully in his essence, and has a very new and different encounter with the one he loves.
Those who are familiar with the story structures I’m borrowing from will note that I’m mashing them up and only roughly approximating them, and there’s a good chance that you might have assembled or aligned those components differently. But the main point I’m trying to make is that even in a very short story written for children, the author manages to take us on a rich and complete emotional journey, and the protagonist has distinct “before” and “after” states, in this wonderful tale of transformation.
I was different when I first read this: I was a child. Now I am an adult. But now I’m also something else: a writer. And as an adult and a writer, I’m both fascinated and humbled by how an author who wrote a children’s book about a stuffed animal nearly a hundred years ago has managed to create something so timeless, universal, and – to reference a thought-provoking recent post from Donald Maass – profound.
As I may have mentioned, that’s good writing.
How about you?
What are some books you loved as a child that you rediscovered as an adult? Do they still hold up, even when seen through an adult’s eyes? What about through a writer’s eyes? Have you encountered any other children’s books that had adult messages? (Charlotte’s Web comes to mind, but I suspect there are others.) Please chime in, and as always, thanks for reading!
Image licensed from 123RF.com
[coffee]
Author of the novels Me Again (originally published by Five Star/Gale), and Tony Partly Cloudy (published under his pen name Nick Rollins), Keith Cronin (he/him) is a corporate speechwriter and professional rock drummer who has performed and recorded with artists including Bruce Springsteen, Clarence Clemons, and Pat Travers. Keith’s fiction has appeared in Carve Magazine, Amarillo Bay, The Scruffy Dog Review, Zinos, and a University of Phoenix management course. A native of South Florida, Keith spends his free time serenading local ducks and alligators with his ukulele.
I just love this post and the Velveteen Rabbit. My other favorite PB is The Little Engine that Could. I don’t think I’ll ever stop reading PBs :) Children ask important questions and some of the best literature is for kids.
I didn’t have any PBs growing up in India but I loved all of Enid Blyton as a child, esp. her Brer Rabbit books and they hold up to multiple readings as an adult. I loved Charles Dickens and one of my favorite things has been to introduce my children to the great British authors I grew up on.
I discovered American children’s literature after I had my own children. What a treasure trove! Some of our favorites, in no particular order:
Kitten’s First Full Moon by Kevin Henkes
The Secret by Lindsay Barrett George
Great Joy by Kate di Camillo (the illustrations by Bagram Ibatouille are to die for)
Fire, Bed and Bone by Henrietta Branford
Airman by Eoin Colfer
The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall
A Long Way from Chicago by Richard Peck
and not American, but The Little Prince!
I don’t have the same relationship as many of you do, rediscovering an old children’s classic. I come from a storytelling background; my mother, my aunties and grandmother all told wonderful stories that I now recognize as folktales. And they endure. However, I was reading adult books by the time I was 12, and all those authors: AJ Cronin, Thomas Hardy, Lloyd C Douglas I re-read on a regular basis. And every time, I am astounded at the richness of their books.
Have a wonderful time at the UnCon. One of these years I’ll have to make it up there … once our nest is empty.
Thank you, Vijaya, for the kind words and those excellent book suggestions.
I do hope you can come to an UnCon someday. This is my first, and it’s pretty darn magical!
Hi Keith–
Your post goes in my own writer’s toy box of fine things. I like the way you’ve applied a compressed treatment of story structure to The Velveteen Rabbit, and I will definitely read the book. What you say here makes me regret not being in Salem to actually meet you and the other WU core community members.
What holds special meaning for me in your post is your emphasis on how great stories compel readers, both children and adults, to make the unconscious leap into belief. This compulsion is all the more special when it’s accomplished “through new eyes.” That’s really what fiction must do–make believers out of readers.
Some years ago, a friend of mine, now dead, published a book she’d co-written with her mother, titled A Bear Called Charlie. It told the story of a child’s teddy bear that ends up in a carton of castoff items in an attic. It remains in the attic all through World War Two (the family is broken up because of it), and for twenty years more. A woman then buys, sight unseen, some boxes at an auction. On the drive home, she almost crashes her car when the bear speaks from the backseat. Like The Velveteen Rabbit, A Bear Called Charlie works a definite magic.
I like to think my own self-published short novel Just Bill does something of the same thing. It’s a fable for adults about dogs and owners living on a Florida golf course. I’m not sure it tracks through all the stages of structure you describe, but writing Just Bill, doing my best to imagine the world through the eyes of dogs and their human families was truly a liberating experience. If I succeeded, the story compels belief.
Thanks again for your post. It’s a true “teaching moment.”
Thank you, Barry – I’m so glad you found value in this post. I just downloaded Just Bill, and look forward to reading it!
My daughter had her own Velveteen Rabbit when she was young. It sits on the shelf in her room now. She is 25.
Every time I read this story to her as a child, I cried. Not just a tear, escaping the corner of my eye. No, the sobbing sort of tears that would interrupt the story and make a little girl ask her mommy why she was crying.
It is the depth of that emotion, IMO, that makes the book a classic.
Taylor, isn’t it amazing how powerful such a deceptively simple story can be?
This is why I chose children’s books for my real writer career path. There’s something uniquely magical about telling a story that will stay with a child well into adulthood. Whether we realize it or not, the books we read as children have probably done more to mold our world view and beliefs than any number of the textbooks that were ushered past us during our school years.
One of the first rules of writing “kidlit” is to never write down to your reader. Clearly, the author of The Velveteen Rabbit did not succumb to that temptation. Nor should we. Despite what we see on the Cartoon Network, kids will devour anything that makes them think about the big issues and their place in the world. Those fresh new brains are working overtime. What we feed them makes a difference.
My favorite book as a child? Give me any Dr. Seuss book, but The Grinch Who Stole Christmas must be near the top (now that I think of it, most of my favorites were Christmas themed…that would explain why I turn on the Christmas tunes the moment Halloween is over).
Thanks for the post. I’m terribly jealous that you’re at the un-conference!
Thanks, Ronald – I wish you could be here, too!
And I’m a MAJOR Dr. Seuss fan – there is SO much wisdom in those stories.
Keithster:
“Fascinated and humbled…” Isn’t that where, as artists, we should always hope to find ourselves?
I can’t think of a book I read as a kid that I’ve returned to as an adult, because I read some pretty basic stuff. Hardy Boys. Tom Swift. Danny Dunn.
But there was one book I struggled with in sixth grade: Treasure Island. I should have been up to it but for some reason (laziness) I didn’t measure up to the challenge.
I’ve returned to the book recently and admire it greatly (not just because of the TV series “prequel,” Black Sails). I’ve found the portrayal of Long John Silver in particular so deftly managed, with sympathy and contempt interwoven so slyly, that I’m in awe.
That said, there is a children’s book I picked up recently and “read” (it’s entirely in pictures) every couple weeks: The Farmer and the Clown. Same idea: a real journey, sophisticated theme (the possible bond between opposites), heartfelt characters. And a marvelous twist for an ending.
Have a great time at the UnConference. And thanks for this. It’s resonating. More and more as I think about it.
David, thanks for the recommendations. Clearly I must check out The Farmer and the Clown – and re-check out Treasure Island!
Hope our paths cross soon…
AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories — The House at Pooh Corner etc — touch on truths like this as well. It’s also written for adults as well as children and can be read and reread through a lifetime. If you can, get the version with the original Ernest Shepard drawings, which are gentle and subtle and charming.
Anne – GREAT point. Winnie the Pooh was a HUGE part of my childhood, and has stayed with me forever.
A lovely story whose premise and presentation has weathered fads and many cartoon characters and remains a family favorite. New editions come out frequently with illustrations that support the story. But it’s the story that children remember–not the illustrations. That’s what is real. Thanks for this post.
Thank you, Beth. I’m thinking I need to pick up a hardcover of this book – something to keep, and ultimately pass on…
This reminds me of a C.S. Lewis quotation: “I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last. A waltz which you can like only when you are waltzing is a bad waltz.”
Great quote, M.E. – thanks for sharing that!
I loved The Velveteen Rabbit! So much going on in that short story. Now I wish I still had my old copy.
You are so right about Pixar movies. I was grateful to have movies my kids could watch over and over that I would also enjoy. I am still in awe of how those movies (Toy Story and A Bug’s Life were my faves) and Shrek were able to provide multiple layers of meaning (esp in the humor) so that everyone had fun watching, and as my kids grew they found new things to love.
Enjoy UnCon!
I read TVR at age 60 when I purchased it for my new granddaughter …. an eye opener for all and filled with truths for writers… and dreams for children…
Your analysis is stuffed(no pun) with perception. I need to try to sharpen that trait for my next project.
Thanks
Ralph
Written so long ago — is that why it’s written so intelligently. Before the perceived need for children to be treated as children. It reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s admonition to women, back in the 1920s (in “A Room of One’s Own”), not to write from “woman-consciousness.” She felt the writing would be sterile, and that women should write “woman-manly” and men should write “man-womanly,” and thereby would the writing be fertilized and be lasting. So, maybe that’s the problem with a lot of children’s books — there’s too much “child-consciousness.” I don’t know. What say ye?