"The only other thing which I think is important is: Don't write a book or start a book with the expectation of communicating a message in a very important way"
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Juster’s warning lands like an architect’s note scribbled in the margin: stop trying to build a monument and start designing a place people can actually enter. “Communicating a message in a very important way” is his gently barbed phrase for the most common rookie mistake in art-making: treating a book as a megaphone instead of an experience. The subtext is practical, not anti-meaning. He’s not arguing that stories shouldn’t say anything; he’s arguing that messages don’t survive being forced.
Coming from an architect-turned-author (and the mind behind The Phantom Tollbooth), the line carries a designer’s bias toward structure, play, and use. Architecture that begins with a grand pronouncement often produces cold, authoritarian spaces; writing that begins with a thesis often produces characters who behave like puppets. Juster’s intent is to protect the organic intelligence of a story: its discoveries, its contradictions, the way readers arrive at significance by moving through it rather than being lectured at from the doorway.
There’s also an ethical edge. “Important” messaging can become self-congratulation, a bid for moral authority that flattens complexity. Juster is pointing to a more durable kind of seriousness: the kind that emerges when a book is attentive to its own internal logic, when it trusts readers to do their share of the work. A message that’s earned feels like insight. A message that’s announced feels like homework.
Coming from an architect-turned-author (and the mind behind The Phantom Tollbooth), the line carries a designer’s bias toward structure, play, and use. Architecture that begins with a grand pronouncement often produces cold, authoritarian spaces; writing that begins with a thesis often produces characters who behave like puppets. Juster’s intent is to protect the organic intelligence of a story: its discoveries, its contradictions, the way readers arrive at significance by moving through it rather than being lectured at from the doorway.
There’s also an ethical edge. “Important” messaging can become self-congratulation, a bid for moral authority that flattens complexity. Juster is pointing to a more durable kind of seriousness: the kind that emerges when a book is attentive to its own internal logic, when it trusts readers to do their share of the work. A message that’s earned feels like insight. A message that’s announced feels like homework.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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