Since my apprenticeship in university, I have discovered a passion for writing in a more naive and fresh style, as I started featuring a child as the main character. I enjoy immersing myself in nostalgia, spontaneity, and the unpredictability of a child's voice. However, it doesn't necessarily mean that the discourse is lighter. I mainly play with the dual perspective of the reader. I love using a child character in a text intended for adults, allowing the reader to dive back into their own childhood while maintaining an adult perspective that can grasp details that escape the character themselves.
I like to compare my writing to retro cartoons like Tom & Jerry : the audience follows the adventures of the animals, but the humans, often associated to reality and rationality, are never fully visible, keeping the cartoon candid and innocent.
We catch glimpses of legs, arms, sometimes a body, but we never see the adult entirely. This allows to disconnect Tom and Jerry from reality : their colorful and foolish perspective is intact to the human's realistic point of view. In the same vein, my main character is like a spectator with a limited point of view from the adult's world surrounding them. They perceive or interpret what they can, without fully understanding everything. Let's say a child and an adult are looking at the same view. Mountains, sunset and migratory birds. The adult will usually have all the knowledge about what they see, the solar system explaining the sunset, the mountains being formed 75 millions years ago, etc. Yet, lacking this knowledge, the child may find its own explanation on his own. Therefore, the sun is being sleepy, so it hides behind the mountains every night. The trees make a perfectly comfortable mattress for it to rest peacefully, and shine even brigther the next day.
It’s the parallel with the reader that I find interesting : the reader can capture both the child’s incomprehension and the reality of the adult that eludes them. The reader is forced to follow the irrational and irrealistic, sometimes naive point of view of the narrator. For the reader, both worlds collide : the reality and its possibility - the what if point of view. A blurry point of view, in which colors are brighter than they really are.
A double perspective
I love working with a naive perspective, especially in the duality of the relationship between the child and the mother. In many of my texts, the voice of the child guides the narrative, giving the impression that the spotlight is on the child, when in reality, it is the mother who is being addressed and narrated in the background, through the child's limited understanding. You can see this staging in my text "A Truck at the Sea", where the child witnesses the mother's psychological distress, without being able to fully grasp it due to their lack of understanding and disconnect from reality, as can be seen in the very first sentences.
I like to use the same naive approach in more fragmented or eccentric universes, featuring unusual characters, as seen in Once Upon a Pea, where an entire grocery store was brought to life. This project was a lot of fun for us to make, creating a different universe from one section to another, by transforming the snack aisles into a Hollywood-like neighborhood, up to the frozen products section into an arctic desert guarded by an Ice Cream Yeti.
This perspective brings a more spontaneous view of the world, its environment, and often complex human relationships, as we used to when we were children. I enjoy using it to establish an ironic duality between the simplicity of childhood and the complexity of modern society. Putting these two contrasting worlds seems at light, side by side seems to value them both as they compliment each other by their opposites.
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