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  • Something Has to Happen
  • Natalie Babbitt (bio)

It has occurred to me recently that there is a difference between juvenile and adult fiction, which is so obvious that it has somehow escaped at least my attention, though I and all of us who write for children have always had to deal with it: child heroes, like their flesh-and-blood counterparts, being powerless, innocent, and mainly unformed, are acted upon rather than acting. That seems simple, and yet it profoundly affects the construction of a story and defines a fundamental variance between the two literatures.

Since the child hero is acted upon, there has to be a plot to a children's story. Without exterior action there can be no story at all. Interior action —that is, the workings of characters' thoughts, personalities, and accumulated experience of their own lives and those of the people around them —is rare in children's books. Children, and by association child heroes, haven't been around long enough; they are not experienced enough to be much guided by reflection, and have very little control over their own lives. Things must, therefore, happen to them, things from which we hope they will learn. And things happening is simply another term for the unfolding of a plot.

Things used to have to happen in adult fiction, too, but not any more. Short stories in The New Yorker, for instance, are mostly devoid of events. They have no discernible plots. The idea of things happening is so unusual nowadays in adult fiction that Joseph Heller could call his second novel Something Happened and keep us turning the pages to find out what in the world it would turn out to be. I suppose you could say that modern adult fiction accurately reflects modern adult life, at least here in safe and insulated America. Nothing much does happen to most of us, after all —nothing you could call an adventure —unless we make it happen, which fact is apt to come as a distinct surprise.

Perhaps this is why adventure novels, and adventure movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark, seem to critics to be fare only for the unsophisticated —escape fare which bears no relationship to reality. But whether this is true or not, there is a difference even between adventure novels and movies for adults and those intended for children. Even though the action in both is all exterior, the heroes are different: the older ones act, the younger are acted upon. [End Page 7]

You could probably make the claim, without too much fear of contradiction, that all stories for children are adventure stories, if by that you mean stories in which the action is exterior. This may be too broad an interpretation of the term "adventure," and yet it would be difficult to find a children's novel in which the child hero does not have an adventure of some sort, an adventure on which the plot hangs and from which the child hero will learn the necessary lesson. For there must be a lesson, though that is a more disagreeable way of putting it than to say that the hero must change somehow and thereby grow. Child heroes will always change somehow, even though they are almost always the tools of the action rather than its initiator.

The rare child hero who does initiate action must do it in secrecy, and always in fear of being discovered by an adult. There is exhilaration in the secrecy, perhaps, but it is also inhibiting and makes these heroes furtive little people, while the adults around them come off as remarkably obtuse and credulous. The children in the movie E.T. keep their alien hidden till the very end. They can do nothing overt. They know, like Mary and Colin in The Secret Garden, that they will not be allowed to act if their project is known.

It would seem that we are not saying anything very healthy about honesty and authority in stories like these, but they do reflect the fact that if children are to act, independently and imaginatively, if they are to make things happen, they must, as in their fiction, be...

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