To care or not to care

 Photo: the writer's own

‘The only thing a reader wants, at the end of the day, is to care about a character and a story.’

This sentence had me thinking for a long time. It's a quote from Writing Irresistible Kitlit by Mary Kole, an author and editor who cares passionately about giving writers the skills they need to encourage children and young adults to become totally engrossed in reading. 

Recently a friend recently lent me Flamingo Boy, by Michael Morpurgo. The book is a story within a story, which is a difficult thing to pull off convincingly, but Morpurgo does it simply and beautifully. 

The by-line on the cover reads, ‘It’s the people who don’t fit in who change the world.’ 

The characters include a family of travellers, who take their hand-made carousel from place to place, and an autistic boy with a gift for communicating with birds and animals. The writer  makes it easy for the reader to identify with these people who ‘don’t fit in’. The story is set in the Camargue in World War 2, an era when ‘misfits’ were often treated insensitively and unkindly, much more so than they are today.

How does Michael Morpurgo do it? How does he make us care deeply for a boy seen as weird by others, and a girl whose whole family is looked down on as gypsies?  Well, he has a wonderful gift for showing how his characters react, for helping us to experience what they are experiencing, to feel what they are feeling. He makes it ok to be different. He also lets us see that ‘baddies’ have a good side; that it’s better to look for something good in negative or nasty characters than to be fearful or to want to give them a bad time back. He never tells us this. Not directly. He has characters we want to stay friends with forever. And somehow, I think we will.

 “A new commandment I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

John 13:34-35

Veronica Bright is a prize-winning author of short fiction and drama. She writes occasional book reviews for Transforming Ministry. She is the ACW short story adviser, and co-ordinates the ACW Writing for Children group, whose members meet up on Zoom. For more details look on the Writing for Children Facebook page.