“If I start with a two-headed animal,” said Dr. Seuss, “I must never waver from that concept. There must be two hats in the closet, two toothbrushes in the bathroom and two sets of spectacles on the night table. Then my readers will accept the poor fellow without hesitation.”

First, Dr. Seuss is a master wordsman. He wasn’t just some guy smoking a crack pipe and then writing children’s books. He was extremely purposeful.

This is one of the things that I think I have always known, but it’s hard to do… And that is that the moral of the story doesn’t… and shouldn’t be… so obvious. People see “the point” coming a mile away. We are all keen on the predictable. And we all gag at it.

I think the best story-telling, writing, speaking leaves a part for the listener or reader to discover. “The point” or the moral should just be left out there. Everything else should develop and lead up to it, but in the end, it’s the listener’s choice.

And it should end in one of those “ah-ha” kind of moments, when you’re like, “so that’s what that old man was trying to get at.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 3:25 pm and is filed under What's In My Head. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.