I don't remember why Mika says I
| Writing, Mind Garden, Children's books
Mind Garden is told from Mika’s point of view from the first paragraph on. He says “I” for twelve chapters.
Why, I have no idea.
I am not being coy. I went and checked. In every draft of the manuscript I still have, Mika says “I” on the first page, and I cannot remember a moment when I decided that. Whether there was an earlier version in the third person, I cannot establish. I do not think so. I cannot prove it.
What I can do instead is read the book again and write down what the perspective actually does there. Not what I meant. What is on the page.
The stomach reports before the head does
The first scene is a maths test. The sheet lands in front of Mika, white and empty, headed “Fractions and Decimals”. The next sentence reads: “My stomach flipped.”
Tell the same moment from the outside and you get something like: Mika was nervous. That is a summary. A flipping stomach is not.
A few lines later the numbers “seemed to blur and dance, like they were playing keep-away with my brain”, and what worked yesterday is gone. “My mind was completely blank.” A narrator standing outside watches a child go blank. Mika is inside it, and so is the reader.
I do not think I planned any of that. I can only see that it is the difference.
The voice needs an ear
The book rests on one idea: that thoughts are something that grows, and that you get to choose what you water. For that to be more than a claim, the reader has to hear the thoughts. The way a child hears them.
In the same scene there is a voice. The week before it said “No one wants you on the team”, when Mika got picked last for basketball. Now it is back, louder than ever, with something new.
A narrator from the outside would have to describe that voice. He would have to say that Mika is tearing himself down, and in naming it he would already have defused it. Mika does not name it. He hears it.
Something else happens in the same paragraph. Mika himself links the maths test to the basketball thing. Nobody explains the connection to him. He notices it while it is happening to him, and that is the whole difference: you can reject an interpretation, you cannot reject a memory that shoves its way in.
What the perspective costs me
Everything Mika cannot know.
I cannot tell you what his mother thinks while she turns off the light. I cannot tell you what goes through his teacher’s mind as she collects the tests. Every piece of information about an adult has to pass through a nine year old, and he misunderstands half of it.
Most of the time that is a gain. With Ada it became a problem.
The Ada problem
Ada is Mika’s godmother and the character in the book who knows something. But a nine year old narrator cannot certify her as wise. A child does not carry that authority. If the book said “Ada is clever”, nobody would take his word for it, and the character would be finished.
The sentence is nowhere in the book. Ada is done, not judged. She stands in the doorway with two steaming mugs of cocoa, she adjusts her glasses and runs a hand over a notebook cover, she raises an eyebrow and remarks something dryly. Mika reports what he can see. The reader does the rest.
The clearest case is the garage. Mika has a failed attempt behind him, everything lies in pieces, he tells her about it. Then this: “Ada didn’t answer immediately. Instead, she went to the workbench in the garage and brought out tools, glue, and small colorful tubes of paint.”
She does not answer the question. She builds the answer. A child can report actions reliably. Other people’s thoughts, he cannot.
The decision that matters most in that scene is one I only noticed now: Mika’s scepticism stays in. “I was skeptical, but Ada wouldn’t be deterred.” Had I let him admire her, the passage would have turned into a sermon. Instead he doubts, the reader then sees that it holds, and Ada gets her authority without anyone asserting it.
That this is a described technique I only read later. The literary scholar Sonja Klimek set it out in 2017 in kids+media, the journal of the University of Zurich, using Andreas Steinhöfel’s “Rico, Oskar”: the reader has to go beyond the narrator’s horizon of understanding, there are reactions from the other characters in the dialogue, but no higher authority correcting his misjudgements.
Klimek adds straight away that whether ten year olds manage that is unresolved. It would take reading studies, and those do not exist.
So I do not know either. I only know that it felt right while writing and still does while reading.
What I take from this is less comfortable than I expected when I started: I learned more about my own book by looking than by thinking.
This piece is by Dr. Wahed Hemati, author of the children’s novel Mind Garden: As You Think, So You Grow for children aged 9 and up.