Bookalicious

When I was in fourth grade, I played the Humbug in a theatrical production of The Phantom Tollbooth. Most of the actors were kids, but the woman who played the narrator was a real live grown-up actor with a bewitching voice. I can still hear her saying the opening lines of the book:

There once was a boy named Milo who didn’t know what to do with himself—not just sometimes, but always. When he was in school he wanted to be out, and when he was out, he longed to be in. On the way he thought about coming home, and coming home he thought about going. Wherever he was, he wished he were somewhere else, and when he got there he wondered why he bothered.

I teach children’s writing, and I’ve recited this opening many times to students when we’re talking about character. I like it because it makes me look like I have a thousand ready references at my disposal—when it’s really just a piece of thirty-year-old detritus banging around in my head that takes up the space of things like the due date of my electricity bill, the last known location of my keys, or the name of this person I’ve just been introduced to. But it also serves as a great object lesson in making the middle grade protagonist.

This opening tells us immediately the most essential thing we need to know about a main character—what he needs. Milo might tell us he’s bored, but we can see it’s more than that—he longs for something to interest him. It’s a neat trick Juster pulls off, turning boredom into active wanting, the sort that gets a reader to care about a character. And this opening provides a map for the story to follow; it tells us that he’ll go on a journey, and over the course of that journey will learn how much there is in the world for him.

This is the lot of the middle grade protagonist–someone who has a need so profound only a narrative journey can fill it. Like Meg Murry, who, we learn in the opening of A Wrinkle in Time, has been told so many times that she does everything wrong she’s started to believe it. Or Holes’ Stanley Yelnats, a boy who seems to have the worst luck in the world. They have external needs too—Meg’s father is missing mysteriously, and Stanley’s about to go to an epically bad summer camp—but that external story is the impetus for an internal journey.

I tend to go into my books with only a few broad defining characteristics of my protagonists. (I have friends who fill notebooks with character details before they start. This is both organized and admirable, and I am neither organized nor admirable.) For The Shadow Thieves, the beginning of my trilogy about two eighth graders battling the Greek gods, I knew two things about Charlotte: she would be a redhead who, unlike most redheaded heroines, was very proud of her hair, and I knew that she would regard the world with some combination of apathy and disdain. But this meant her journey was clear; the story of the book would have to be about her engaging with and finding value in the world. For Charlotte, saving the world wouldn’t be about learning that she had the power to, but rather that it was worth saving. So much so that ultimately she would have to be willing to sacrifice herself for it. And the book would have to push her there.

When I started Breadcrumbs, I knew Hazel would be a reader, that she would feel like she doesn’t belong anywhere, that she would be deeply uncomfortable with the way the earth constantly shifts under her feet. And, externally, she was about to lose the one thing she felt most sure about—her best friend.

There’s a difference between what characters might think they want and what they actually need. If you asked Mary Lennox what she wants at the beginning of The Secret Garden, it probably wouldn’t be finding community and spiritual healing through extreme horticulture. My Hazel wants to get her best friend back–more, she wants everything to stay the same. What she needs is something else altogether.

The journey might not take the character where he plans on going, but what’s important is that there’s a journey to be had, that while he might not know it, the protagonist is reaching his hand to the reader and saying, I have to go somewhere. Come with me, please.

In her bio for The Tale of Desperaux, Kate DiCamillo tells us about her inspiration for the book, a boy who asked her to, “write a story about an unlikely hero. One with exceptionally large ears.”

“What happens to the hero?” DiCamillo asked the boy.

“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s why I want you to write the story, so we can find out.”