Art & Creativity Quote by Margaret Mahy

Mahy sneaks a small rebellion into a perfectly polite craft note. She acknowledges the prestige economy of writing upfront: novels are longer, slower, and demand a sustained, trance-like concentration. That opening concedes what the literary world loves to reward - endurance, complexity, the appearance of “serious work.” Then she swivels. The real claim is that duration is not a proxy for difficulty or artistic payoff, and that the supposedly minor form - the picture book text - can deliver the same creative charge.

The subtext is a defense of compression as a high-wire act, not a shortcut. A “very short, simple story that works well” is quietly framed as a hard-won miracle: simple on the page, sophisticated in the making. In children’s literature especially, “simple” is often misread as simplistic, as if clarity were the absence of thought rather than the result of ruthless revision. Mahy’s phrasing resists that condescension without lecturing; she anchors the argument in excitement, not grievance. Pleasure becomes her credential.

Context matters: Mahy wrote across forms, in a field that has long been patronized by adult gatekeepers who confuse audience age with artistic stakes. Her line implicitly rejects the hierarchy that crowns the novel and treats picture books as training wheels. She’s also describing two different kinds of attention: the marathon focus of novels versus the precision engineering of short texts, where every word has to earn its place, often in conversation with illustrations. The punch is that “works well” is the real unit of value, and it’s brutally hard at any length.