Reflections Read Online Free Page A

be in the last stages of exhaustion. One of the four dies as the girls pass, and the others roll back down the slope. The rest of the wood is full of similar groups. They are there day after day, tirelessly and all apparently insane.
    Of course we all know at once that each group is playing a different game of Let’s Pretend. But anyone who watches this wood, or anywhere else where children habitually play, will quite soon notice a number of things, all of which ought to have great importance for anyone who is interested in writing for children.
    The first thing is how often children play these kind of games. It seems to be something they need to do. You can see they need to, because they are all so happy. The second group of girls is only pretending to be frightened. None of the groups are quarreling or crying—only screaming, dying, or ignoring one another. The next most important fact is that the children are all in groups. In five years watching this wood I have scarcely ever seen a child obviously playing this kind of game alone. Solitary children do not act mad. He or she may be wandering in the wood imagining things, but it will not show. Acting out a Let’s Pretend game does seem to be a social act. I am sure that it is when I see how sexist the various games are. None of these children seem to have heard of women’s liberation. The girls say, “Let’s pretend we’re all queens,” and the boys, “Pretend we’re soldiers”—and though I haven’t a notion why the other girls are screaming at bushes, they are not playing with the boys. It really does seem as if Let’s Pretend games are children’s way of practicing being a girl or a boy—as they see it—as well as learning how to behave in a group.
    You can see this is true when a quarrel breaks out. All the quarrels in the wood happen—with someone in tears and someone else bleating, “I’m not play-ying!”—when the children are trying to play a game like hide-and-seek or building a tree house, which does not involve make-believe. The rules allow both sexes to combine in these games. And it is hopeless. All children under about thirteen are so bad at cooperating. I watch them in exasperation, each one running about as if they were the only child there, without the slightest notion of how to get together with the rest. They really do seem to need some sort of Let’s Pretend to make them combine. And the thing which seems to allow them to get together is the thing which makes the games seem so mad to an onlooker: they at once seem to enter a sort of enchanted circle, where they are in control and nothing outside matters.
    Now a book is another form of this enchanted circle. Any book, whether realistic or fantasy, is a self-contained world with the reader in control (if you do not like the game the writer is playing, you can always stop reading). My feeling is that children get most from books which work along the same lines as they do—in other words, by Let’s Pretend. I am not saying that a fantasy needs to ape children’s games, but I do think it should be not unlike them in a number of important respects. Above all, it should be as exciting and engrossing as the games in the wood. I aim to be as gripped by a book I am writing as I hope any reader will be. I want to know what happens next. If it bores me, I stop. But a book has an additional asset: it seems to be real. If you say in a book that a certain thing is real, then in that book it is real. This is splendid, but it can also be a snare. I find I have to control any fantasy I write by constantly remembering the sort of things children do in their games.
    Notice, for instance, that the children in the wood are very wisely not pretending too many things at once. They say “Pretend we’re all queens,” or “Pretend we’re explorers,” and part of the point of what follows is to find out