Telling Stories Out Loud: A Guest Post From Mac Barnett

In Make Believe, Mac Barnett celebrates the power of storytelling in children’s literature and encourages imagination at any age. In this exclusive essay, the beloved author shares his experience in writing the story and bringing it to life as an audiobook.

 

When I was recording the audiobook for Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children, I wanted it to feel like I was just talking to you, although of course I was in a room by myself talking to nobody—no one there to nod, or laugh, or smile, no, I was utterly alone, except every few minutes a guy would come through my headphones and tell me my stomach made a noise.  

Still, I hope listening to it feels natural. And despite solitude and the stomach-noise man, recording it felt natural too, because audiobooks are a relatively recent, technologically mediated way of doing something very ancient and human: telling stories out loud.  

I love telling stories out loud. On my summers home from college, I was a camp counselor, and reading picture books to my campers was what made me want to write for kids. Although Make Believe is my first book for adults, over the last twenty-two years I’ve made more than seventy books for children—picture books, novels, graphic novels, and board books. Children’s literature retains a close connection with the oral tradition. Most picture books are read to kids, not by them. But children’s novels are often read out loud too, in the home as a nightly ritual, or at school, by students or the teacher, a chapter a day. Families listen to audiobooks on long drives. In this way, children’s books work their way into the family lexicon or classroom culture. And they give children and grown-ups the chance to talk about a common story—and maybe learn a little more about the book and each other.  

Any adult who’s read a book to a kid has probably had the experience of being startled by a child’s brilliance. Kids notice things in the pictures that we don’t see. They find subtle connections between pages and conjure stunning interpretations we could never dream of. Even very young children are alive to the beauty of spoken language, what Margaret Wise Brown, the author of Goodnight Moon, called “the two-year old’s delight in sheer sound and pounding rhythms” of words. Although adults underestimate them, kids are in many ways ideal readers of poetry and fiction. They possess keen senses, an appreciation of the absurd, an openness to new forms and ways of telling stories, and a comfort with ambiguity, with “not-knowing.” Children are, in general, more willing than adults to do the real work of reading, to wrestle with a new story and figure out what it means. 

Make Believe is a book for adults about books for children. It’s about the rich potential of children’s literature and the brilliance of the kids we write for and read with.