Writing About Children's Literature:
Wind in the Willows

For this class you will not be writing about Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows, but it's a very popular book, and we can use it as an example.

The first, and many feel most difficult, task is to find something to write about.

You may be used to reading a story and writing a summary or a bit about the author or a review (thumbs up /thumbs down), but that will not do for this class; this is a class in literary analysis. That means you need to look at some significant idea or issue or theme or technique (I'd not recommend looking at technical elements of style unless you've got some solid background in analyzing fiction) of the work. Yes, I understand that this is a lot harder than just writing a plot summary, but analysis requires you to show your thinking (not your likes/dislikes) about a subject, your ability to find substance and thought in what you read. Analyzing a children's novel is the same task as analyzing Shakespeare's The Tempest or Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. You will need to develop a thesis, which means you will need some point to argue and support.

A thesis USUALLY is developed as an answer to a series of questions you ask about the work (in this case, the book). After reading Wind in the Willows you might wonder:

1. Although Disney focuses primarily on the adventures of Mr. Toad, Grahame looks mainly at Mole; which one is the main character and why?

2. Why is the story called Wind in the Willows (originally Wind in the Reeds) and not The Adventures of Mr. Toad or The Adventures of Mr. Mole or both?

Both of these questions are excellent because they look at ideas that almost demand answers which are open to interpretation; they are not simple fact questions (such as what is the name of the horse pulling the caravan in the novel), and the answers will require looking at various parts of the novel for support. They require explanation, are open to debate, must be expanded on--all what you will need to develop a four-full-page (minimum) essay.

Here's the next step: look for answers to your questions; look for patterns in the book; eventually you should find some single area you can explore in a paper. Your thesis might be, for example,

Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows is named for a force of nature rather than a single character because, on one level, the book pays homage to the power of nature versus the decay of industry and technology.

Yes, this is a long sentence. You WANT a long and very-specific (focused) sentence that clearly states an idea that (and here I'll repeat myself) requires explanation and expansion, that requires examples from the book for support. The thesis does something elss; it determines what will or will not be in your paper. For example, a long discussion of Toad as a washer woman doesn't really have anything to do with this thesis. Looking at Toad causing chaos with his motor car, however, does fit this thesis because it's an example of the "decay" that the automobile has caused to the quiet villages and landscapes, and the automobile clearly represents "industry and technology."

So at this point you can consider what bits of the book relate to your argument (notice that a thesis is an argument; it's a claim that something very specific it being suggested by the book). You can/should go back through the book and note passages that you will want to quote as you develop your paper on this one key idea. I hope you take good notes when you read the works :)

There are several sections in the novel which show the ugliness of the now-polluted cities versus the simple (and sometimes sublime) loveliness of nature. Nature is seen as a restorative; technology (Toad's boat, cars, etc.) are seen as trouble. After you build up a healthy list of examples, you'll craft your essay using the observation-quotation-explanation method; in essence, you will make some statements (your observations), back them up with examples (documented quotations from the text), and discuss how they develop your thesis (explain them in relation to the point of the paragraph or to the point of your essay as a whole). Here's an example of a very small section of this paper:

In the "Badger" chapter, the characters come across elaborate ruins of some earlier human civilization. Badger comments, "'People come--they stay for a while, they flourish, they build--and they go. It is their way. But we remain. There were badgers here, I've been told, long before the same city ever came to be. And now there are badgers here again. We are an enduring lot, and we may move out for a time, but we wait, and are patient, and back we come. And so it will ever be"' (Grahame 129). Here the permanence of nature is shown in sharp contrast to the rise and decay of human civilization, development, technology.

Mainly, you want to stay away from simple biography and plot summary. You are trying to look for ideas and issues in the works you read. The days of book reports are long past.

For further details on how to write these papers, you might want to review How to Write a Literary Analysis (it is also on our Online Anthology page).

Following are links (one a Word document, the other a Rich-Text format document, in case you cannot open the Word document) to an excerpt from a student paper in the B+/A- range. It is not technically perfect, but it is a clear. focused analysis of a single idea in a novel, and it is supported with lots of documented quotations from the novel Cirque du Freak (this was for Writing Assignment 2). Take a look so that you have another idea of what analysis is all about:

And if you need help getting started or with a rough draft, please feel free to see me or e-mail me.