Robert A. Sloan, 46, author of Raven Dance is an entrepreneur and success thinker who's overcome poverty, homelessness, disability and early depression to become one of the more prolific writers on the Internet. Editor of the Launchpad Anthology Project's Launchpad #1: Love and Death, he's determined to open a gateway for new writers in Horror, Fantasy and SF to the professional trade association SFWA. Editor of self help site www.SelfHelpForWriters.com he also with the assistance of young Feline Editor Aristophenes MRC Sloan provides a daily Inspirational column along with many other articles and features. Much of his short writing can be found at www.WrittenByMe.com where he is Horror Subtopic Specialist and other horror writings can be found at www.ArtofHorror.com. Over thirty finished high fantasy Sloan novels await word from Tor on Chazho, first of the series. "When my literary credits are longer than the rest of my life story, I think you can tell where my focus is."

Aaward winning "Why Children Need To Read" previously published at www.thebookreviewersite.com

Why is reading important to our children?

by

Robert A. Sloan, author of Raven Dance

This topic is a classic. It's a light, warm, feel-good topic, a perennial for librarians, teachers, parents and anyone who likes quoting platitudes. My answer to it may not win this contest or please the preachers.

Reading is important to our children so that they can escape.

Reading might mean children's survival. They don't do it because in adult life their reading skills and writing skills give them better resumes, higher grades and better jobs. Reading is a barrier against suicide for the loneliest group of human beings on this planet: bullied children.

When I was nine or ten I foxed the corner of a page on a paperback Edgar Rice Burroughs thriller about Martian four-armed swordsmen. My father chewed me out about it.

"Your books are your friends. No matter how lonely it gets and no matter how hard life is, they'll never let you down. You don't want to treat your best friends that way."

I felt awful. I never did it again. To this day I still bother to use bookmarks even if they're just torn matchbook covers or scrap paper. Some of my favorite old friends get so ratty they resemble coverstrips even if I got them new. Now that I'm an adult author, I make friends the way Geppetto does.

To answer this question I couldn't respond as a responsible adult. I had to remember what it was like in the worst year of my life when John Carter, Terran immigrant to a Mars that never could be, was the best friend I had. Ray Bradbury's imaginary Jim Nightshade was a boy just like me who was good even if most of the people in town didn't think much of him. He was good enough to be Will's best friend, the boy every one of the other kids liked more than the creep who read Poe.

Kids learn from books and it's not always what adults think they ought to learn. It's how to deal with angry mobs, how to find allies, how to stand down a bully and watch him break to the coward he really is. I don't even remember which of my fictional friends first taught me that all bullies are cowards. What I do know is that it worked when I stood up to a bully the summer I was twelve and he cried. When I didn't push it past the point he cried Uncle, he got up and five minutes later he was my friend. He had a lot of comic books.

Unlike the pedants, I do not sneer at comic books. X-Men has a lot to say about how to handle being different and treat people who are different. For some reason even now comics only get approved if they're preachy nonfiction. But comic book writers do increase a kid's vocabulary no end. They zap the reader with an occasional scintillating multisyllabic adjective just to establish that some brainiac villain really is a genius. Then the kid who knows that word feels like a genius, heads for the dictionary to write his own X-Men fan story and does a thousand words without stopping.

You didn't ask how to encourage children to read. You asked why and the why is a heartbreaking reality. Children live in a world of sudden violence and violent unfairness. They are denied even the most basic human rights of self defense, free expression and fair trial for their wrongdoings. In this age, some go to violent extremes that would've been science fiction back in my youth. They go to schools where the bullies aren't just pounding with fists or showing off a forbidden knife. In my time just owning a knife made a boy the worst, nastiest villain of the school and he never had to use it. Now to reach that exalted criminal state he needs a gun and he might need an automatic weapon to win the arms race. That's what children are up against in real life.

When kids open a book they get a few hours free of real fear. They get a silent trust between reader and author that 'Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense.' Fiction not only makes sense causally. It makes sense morally because no author alive can help expressing a point of view on what's right and wrong. Even in tragedy where evil wins, there's little doubt about what's evil. Children get a break when someone else's troubles are a lot worse than their own and many times learn something that helps them solve theirs in all the times you can't help them.

I'm just lucky that I never have to grow up, I guess. Peter Pan has nothing on authors for that. I might never have written a juvenile but I expect to get young readers now and then. I know I've still got young friends. Among them I've got a twelve year old informant who seems to be living out the plot of 'Karate Kid' at his school. He's slowly winning over the administration to institute an anti-bullying policy in the school. The bullies have gotten to the point where they ambush him in packs and he resists nonviolently with all the courage of anyone that ever followed Martin Luther King.

He only feels safe when he's alone, reading or writing. Those two things go together. He feels free to write to me and his last email bordered on prose poetry about loneliness and courage. Reading is important to him because it gives him the heart to get through the next day's trouble when summer is years away on childhood's calendar. He's why reading is important to children.