Parenting & Family Quote by Mark Haddon

Haddon isn’t offering a tender plea for attention spans; he’s laying down a craft law with the impatience of someone who’s watched a thousand promising stories die in the first paragraph. “Bore children, and they stop reading” is blunt because the audience is blunt. Kids don’t politely push through your literary foreplay. They close the book. The line works as a rebuke to adult vanity: the writer’s desire to be admired, to “show off,” to luxuriate in atmosphere. Haddon frames that desire as self-indulgence, not artistry.

The subtext is almost moral. Writing for children becomes a kind of honesty test: if your narrative is propped up by throat-clearing and decorative mood-setting, a young reader will expose it fast. Adults are trained to endure slow starts as a sign of “seriousness”; children are trained by nothing but curiosity. Haddon’s standard is ruthless, but it’s also democratic. It suggests that clarity and momentum aren’t lesser virtues - they’re the point.

Contextually, this sits neatly beside Haddon's own work, especially The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which prizes forward motion, concrete detail, and a voice that refuses ornamental fog. His warning isn’t anti-style; it’s anti-posturing. “Setting the scene” isn’t banned, but it has to earn its keep by creating stakes, friction, a question the reader needs answered. If it doesn’t, it’s not scene-setting. It’s the author admiring themselves in the mirror while the child walks out of the room.