Life & Wisdom Quote by Margaret Mahy

Every writer knows the small terror tucked inside that mild phrase: “in a way.” Mahy is admitting, with characteristic gentleness, that the work has its own weather. “The characters often do take over” isn’t mystical so much as practical craft-talk: once you’ve given a character coherent desires, fears, and a voice that can surprise you, the plot stops being a set of instructions and starts behaving like an ecosystem. Push it too hard and the story feels false; follow it and it feels inevitable.

Mahy, a giant of children’s and young adult literature, is also quietly defending imagination as a form of ethics. For young readers especially, characters aren’t chess pieces moved to deliver a lesson. They have to live. Her best books trust oddness, appetite, and contradiction; letting characters “take over” becomes a refusal to flatten them into role models or moral warnings. The subtext is a jab at didactic fiction: the adult impulse to control meaning, to domesticate the unruly parts of a child’s inner life.

The line also nods to the cultural suspicion that writing for children is simple. Mahy suggests the opposite: it requires surrender. The author sets the conditions, but the characters demand fidelity. That’s why the phrase lands. It romanticizes creativity just enough to feel true, while smuggling in a professional standard: if your characters can’t hijack your plan, they probably aren’t real yet.