Parenting & Family Quote by Helen Dunmore

Children force a writer to stop luxuriating in atmosphere and start earning every sentence. Dunmore’s line isn’t a cute endorsement of bedtime stories; it’s a craft note with teeth, especially coming from a poet whose medium is often associated with compression, ambiguity, and lyric drift. “Narrative drive” implies propulsion, the feeling that something must happen next. In children’s books, that urgency isn’t optional. Young readers are ruthless editors: they don’t politely “appreciate” a slow chapter, they abandon it.

The intent here is practical and slightly corrective. Dunmore is pointing to children’s literature as a training ground that sharpens plot instinct the way writing under strict meter sharpens a poet’s ear. The subtext: a lot of adult literary fiction can afford to meander because its audience has learned to treat difficulty as virtue. Kids haven’t. They demand clarity of stakes, clean cause-and-effect, and emotional momentum. That pressure creates a heightened awareness of structure: where suspense sits, how scenes turn, how quickly a character’s desire becomes legible.

Context matters. Dunmore moved between poetry, novels, and children’s work in a British literary culture that has long treated children’s writing as “lesser” labor. She flips that hierarchy. Children’s books, she suggests, don’t dilute artistry; they discipline it. The deeper claim is almost heretical in high-literary circles: narrative isn’t a compromise with entertainment, it’s the engine that makes language matter in the first place.