Kids Get It

I love this Margaret Atwood quote. Partly because I love her writing, which pushes adult readers to consider reality all chopped up and mixed in with fantasy... and partly because I often say something similar: children are better equipped to "get" stories that ask us to suspend our disbelief. They don't even know disbelief yet... they don't have those boundaries. Their imaginative world and the real world exist as one, and there's something pure and joyful about that.

We could all use a little bit of our childhood back when we read. And as we live daily life, for that matter.

Children don’t read ‘genres’; they read stories. Below a certain age, they don’t distinguish between ‘true’ and ‘not true,’ because they see no reason that a white rabbit shouldn’t possess a pocket watch, that whales shouldn’t talk, or that sentient beings shouldn’t live on other planets and travel in spaceships. Science-fiction tropes aren’t read as ‘science fiction’; they’re read as fiction. And fiction is read as reality. And sometimes reality lives under the bed and has very large teeth, and it’s no use pretending otherwise.

—Margaret Atwood

source: Electronic Squid