David Walliams: ‘Children have a billion things they would rather be looking at than a book’

I was once a reluctant reader. It wasn’t that I hated books, it was that I loved watching television. My parents made the mistake of letting me have a tiny black-and-white portable television in my bedroom, and I spent many a happy afternoon up there on my own, watching the wrestling: Big Daddy versus Giant Haystacks.

My mum and dad read to me when I was little. One of my favourite memories of my late father is of him reading Dr Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham to me as I drifted off to sleep. But I found the transition to reading books on my own was slow.

Fortunately, there was The Beano, which celebrated its 85th birthday last year. Dennis the Menace and Gnasher, Minnie the Minx and the Bash Street Kids all became firm favourites. The Beano got me reading, and I still remember the thrill of opening the latest edition as soon as I got it home.

Throughout my childhood, my mum and dad took me and my sister to our local library every fortnight. Despite the brutal local government cuts that have led to thousands of libraries being closed across Britain, Banstead Library is still standing.

I mainly chose non-fiction books about space travel or dinosaurs or volcanoes.

Anything with lots of pictures and not too many words. But one day in a corner of a library I discovered a book that changed my life. A book that stays in the mind forever. A book that I have read over and over again. It was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. You are lucky if a book has one great idea in it. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has a hundred. It’s a world of pure imagination: Willy Wonka, Golden Tickets, Oompa-Loompas. An everlasting gobstopper. Like millions of children, this book made me fall in love with reading.

For me, it’s a book you would never need to force a child to read. What child doesn’t want to read a book about chocolate? Where a boy falls into a chocolate river and is sucked up a pipe? Or where Charlie shoots off into the sky in a great, glass elevator?

I don’t see children’s books as poor relations to books for grown-ups. Children’s books are often much more imaginative. Think of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; The Hobbit; Harry Potter; His Dark Materials; Coraline; Skandar and the Unicorn Thief; Impossible Creatures. All create their own worlds, which is one of the hardest things an author can do.

For me, a book that a child wants to read for themselves is worth a hundred books they are forced to read. But, as we all know, it’s becoming harder and harder to encourage children to read. The only technology I had to distract me as a child was that old black-and-white TV. Children today have a billion things they would rather be looking at than a book: the iPhone, the iPad, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, Twitch, Netflix.

Thanks to streaming services, children never have to wait until their favourite television programme comes on. Instead, there are millions of hours of entertainment, just a click away. As I found out when my son discovered The Simpsons on Disney+ and began making his way through all 767 episodes.

I have nothing against TV or films. I love them. But being glued to screens is passive. There is no need to use your imagination.

Children live between the real world and the imaginary one. When they play at being a robot or an astronaut or a dinosaur, they believe (or at least half-believe) they are a robot or an astronaut or a dinosaur. They are immersed.

And just like playing, books are immersive too. But books couldn’t be more different from screens.

So, how do we encourage children to read for pleasure? As a father to an 11-year-old boy, I know this is no easy task. First, you need to read to your child from an early age, even as a baby.

So many picture books have become classics: The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Where the Wild Things Are, Lost and Found, The Gruffalo, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, Julian Is a Mermaid. I miss them now my son Alfred is older. Just find a time, if you can the same time each day, for you to share a book. You need a routine, otherwise, it just won’t happen. You’ve just got home from work. You’re tired. You’re stressed. But for those 15, ten or even just five minutes, your troubles will be gone.

Alf and I graduated from me reading every page to him, to us reading pages to each other, before eventually he read alone. Sometimes Alf and I like to read our own books as we cuddle up together. He might express interest in what I am reading, which can lead to some thought-provoking conversations too. “Daddy, who is Kim Jong-Un? And why do you look like him?”

A regular trip to your local library or bookshop can be a treat for a child. They get to choose! I never disapprove of Alf’s book choices. A fact book about killer sharks. Great. A child-friendly biography of a footballer. Brilliant. A Batman graphic novel. Fantastic.

Why be snobby? Children’s books that are there purely to entertain like Wimpy Kid or Horrid Henry or The 13-Story Treehouse or Dog Man or Bunny vs Monkey or Mr Gum or Tom Gates are often undervalued. These books are not just brilliant entertainment, they are gateways for children to explore more complex works. I have met eight-year-olds who have read all the Harry Potters ten times over, and 12-year-olds who have never read a book in their lives.

And there’s time for children to develop their tastes. To move on to authors who don’t just write books, they write “literature”: Michael Morpurgo, Malorie Blackman, David Almond, Jacqueline Wilson, Katherine Rundell, Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman, Patrick Ness, Mark Haddon, Benjamin Zephaniah.

We must remember that children develop at different rates. And we all know that boys are much more reluctant readers than girls. That’s because girls are smarter than boys.

When I visit schools to share my love of reading, I always ask the kids in the room, “Who hates reading? Who thinks books are boring?” A few morose boys sitting at the back always put their hands up. They are the ones I want to reach. They are the ones we all must try and reach, otherwise they will be left behind. Childhood is short. You don’t have long to turn a child into a reader. I was visiting a school in a deprived part of Glasgow and I asked one of those morose boys, “Why don’t you like books?” And he replied: “Books are boring! Not enough killings!”

A child who never reads just hasn’t found the right book yet. I came away from that school event determined to write a book for that boy. I wrote The World’s Worst Children. A collection of short stories. Lots of pictures. Surreal humour. Halfway between The Beano and a novel. I sent boxes of the book to the school, and I received a lovely letter back from the headteacher. There were now some boys in the school who were reading on their own for the first time in their lives.

So why is it so important that every child reads? It’s important for children to read for pleasure as a child, or chances are they will never read as an adult. Around one in four adults in Britain never ever pick up a book. And that’s sad, as they are missing out on a whole universe. Reading develops children’s minds and enhances their lives in more ways than we might imagine.

As a writer you don’t have to write what you know; you should write what you feel. You can’t possibly have experienced everything you write about. Especially if your story is set in Narnia or Oz or Hogwarts. Empathy is key to stories. If children don’t care about a character in the book, it soon becomes boring, and they give up. I am proud when my son does well in his lessons at school, but I am proudest when the teacher tells me he is kind and caring to the other children.

Empathy is a feeling, and of course feelings can inform ideas. In a history lesson at school, we separate ideas from feelings. We learn that six million Jews died in World War II. It’s hard to know what to feel. Other than numb.

But when we read Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, we weep. It didn’t just become the first graphic novel to win the Pulitzer Prize, it’s emotionally devastating to anyone who reads it. And what a brilliantly simple idea to depict the Holocaust with Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. One that any child will understand.

In a story you never end up exactly where you began. Things change. And we all want change of some sort. End war. Find love. Create a fairer society. But change doesn’t come easily. It’s hard.

Stories encourage children to believe in change. It might be for them to change, progress, grow. Or for the world to change. And young people are now setting the agenda.

The first sentence of my first book, The Boy in the Dress is “Dennis was different”. The last is “The world felt different”. Through Dennis’s brave celebration of his individuality by wearing a dress to school, the world changed, or at least his world did. His father and brother finally understand him. His teammates on the school football team wear dresses in the final in solidarity with him. Often strangers come up to me in the street to tell me how The Boy in the Dress helped them find their true self. That means infinitely more than sales figures or good reviews.

Entertainment can be educational, and the best way to educate is to be entertaining. I had an inspirational English teacher at school, Mr Carpmael. He would end a lesson by telling us a thrilling story. One was about a brave warrior, who murdered the king and descended into madness. Only when he finished the story, did he tell us what we had been listening to: Shakespeare’s Macbeth. If he had told us that at the start, most of us would have zoned out. But he made it entertaining and turned some of us on to Shakespeare forever.

This is a huge responsibility for us children’s authors. If our books don’t capture children’s imaginations, they will stop reading, never read as an adult, and books will eventually die out. And everyone will be glued to their screens.

Scrolling. Scrolling. Scrolling. Not knowing what they are looking for and never ever finding it.

I have long forgotten most of what I learned at school. But I will never forget the books that I loved. The books that changed the way I thought and felt about the world. The books I read for pleasure. Pure perfect pleasure, The Famous Five, George’s Marvellous Medicine, Fungus the Bogeyman, Stig of the Dump, The Day of the Triffids, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The importance of reading for pleasure is not just something I want to pass on to my son. But to all children.

Astrochimp is published on May 23, illustrated by Adam Stower (HarperCollins Children’s Books HB, £14.99)

© David Walliams 2024