Some books teach children how the world works. The best ones teach children how the world could work — if only the laws of gravity took a day off, or a swan learned trumpet, or a girl turned into a giant blueberry in front of an entire candy factory.
That last image is the one that pretty much changed my life. I was twenty-four, re-reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for probably the fifth or sixth time, when I hit the scene where Violet Beauregarde swells up into a giant blueberry, while Willy Wonka calmly explains the science of experimental chewing gum as if this happens every Tuesday. Roald Dahl didn't just describe a transformation — he made it funny, strange, and completely logical within the rules of his own invented universe. I remember putting the book down and thinking: I want to try to write something like this.
That moment eventually became The Worldwide Dessert Contest, my first novel, populated with the kind of wild insanity I believe children's literature can exist to deliver: John Applefeller and his ever-changing desserts, a head judge with a caramel apple welded to his face, roller-skating apple pies, a flying apple soufflé balloon, and Captain B. Rollie Ragoon, a magical chef who speaks only in rhyme. None of it is objectively realistic, but all of it is true within the context of John Applefeller’s quest to win the Silver Spoon — and true, I hope, to the spirit of the books that raised me.
Dahl isn't alone in this tradition, of course. There are lots of examples. Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth turns idioms into literal landscapes and puns into plot points, trusting young readers to keep up with wit most adult novels wouldn't attempt. E.B. White gave us Louis, the mute trumpeter swan in The Trumpet of the Swan, who solves his very real problem — he can't honk, after all — with a seemingly impossible solution: he learns how to play the trumpet. (I remember reading that book in one sitting when I was ten). And George Selden's A Cricket in Times Square imagines an insect who plays symphonies by rubbing his wings together, filling a bustling subway station with music no one expected to hear there.
What connects these books isn't whimsy for its own sake. It's the confidence to take an absurd premise completely seriously — and, as a result, allowing a child's imagination to stretch.
There is a particular kind of craft required to pull this off. Anyone can invent a talking cricket or a girl who turns into a blueberry. The skill lies in treating that invention with a straight face — in building rules for the wacky world and then following them faithfully, so the reader never feels cheated, only delighted. Though obviously played for laughs, Dahl takes Violet's transformation seriously; he gives Wonka a full, deadpan explanation involving his three-course chewing gum and the malfunctioning blueberry-pie course, delivered with the objectivity of a scientist. That commitment is what separates true zaniness from mere randomness. A story can be as strange as it wants, but it has to believe in itself first.
This also might be, I think, why these books last. Children may not remember the plots of many things they read, not in detail. But what sticks are the images: a swan playing taps on a trumpet borrowed from a music shop, a boy driving a tiny car through a tollbooth into a land where Rhyme and Reason have been banished, a cricket's wings turning a newsstand into a concert hall. And hopefully, in my work, a hapless dessert chef who enters a dessert contest with the world's largest apple pancake. Those pictures lodge themselves somewhere permanent, long after the reader has forgotten who the villain was or how the conflict resolved.
Zaniness also gives children permission. Permission to imagine a world stranger than the one they're handed, to trust that their own odd ideas — the ones that seem too silly to say out loud — might actually be worth building a whole book around. I don't think it's an accident that so many writers trace their own beginnings back to one of these scenes. For me a blueberry girl rolling out of a factory led me to roller-skating apple pies. So if anyone asks me why John Applefeller’s desserts do what they do, I’ll give the same answer Wonka would: of course they do. What else would you expect?
Written and Submitted to Olympia Publishers by Dan Elish.
Author of King of Broadway, The Worldwide Dessert Contest, and The Silver Spoon
