"I start drawing, and eventually the characters involve themselves in a situation. Then in the end, I go back and try to cut out most of the preachments"
About this Quote
Creativity, for Dr. Seuss, isn’t a sermon delivered from a podium; it’s a creature that wanders onto the page and starts causing trouble. The line begins with process, not message: “I start drawing” frames storytelling as play, as doodle-driven discovery. That’s a quietly radical stance for a writer who became synonymous with moral clarity. He’s insisting that the moral comes after the mischief, not before it.
The key verb is “involve.” His characters don’t get placed into a “lesson,” they “involve themselves,” as if they have agency and momentum. That phrasing lets Seuss smuggle in his real method: he builds a world with its own internal physics (rhythm, rhyme, visual surprise), then lets consequence emerge. It’s why his best books feel less like instruction and more like inevitability. The Cat doesn’t teach responsibility by lecturing; he teaches it by detonating the living room and forcing the kids to reckon with chaos.
“Preachments” is the tell: Seuss knows the danger of adult intention. He’s admitting that his first drafts probably contain the author’s heavy hand, the urge to underline the point, to make sure the child “gets it.” The revision process becomes an ethical act: remove the scolding, keep the structure that makes the insight land. Context matters here: Seuss wrote propaganda and political cartoons during World War II; he understood persuasion intimately. This quote reads like a late-career corrective: the most effective moral argument in children’s literature is the one that doesn’t sound like an argument at all.
The key verb is “involve.” His characters don’t get placed into a “lesson,” they “involve themselves,” as if they have agency and momentum. That phrasing lets Seuss smuggle in his real method: he builds a world with its own internal physics (rhythm, rhyme, visual surprise), then lets consequence emerge. It’s why his best books feel less like instruction and more like inevitability. The Cat doesn’t teach responsibility by lecturing; he teaches it by detonating the living room and forcing the kids to reckon with chaos.
“Preachments” is the tell: Seuss knows the danger of adult intention. He’s admitting that his first drafts probably contain the author’s heavy hand, the urge to underline the point, to make sure the child “gets it.” The revision process becomes an ethical act: remove the scolding, keep the structure that makes the insight land. Context matters here: Seuss wrote propaganda and political cartoons during World War II; he understood persuasion intimately. This quote reads like a late-career corrective: the most effective moral argument in children’s literature is the one that doesn’t sound like an argument at all.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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