The road to Dictionopolis

Some critics have said that kids won't be able understand this book.

And kids don't understand a lot of it. I get letters from kids of about 8, asking about the story and indicating that there's stuff they don't understand. But quite often I'll get a letter from a kid who's 13, 14 or 15 years old, saying "I wrote you when I was 8, I reread it," and they'll talk completely differently about the book. That's wonderful. It means they're understanding it on a different level.

And you can reread the book as an adult because there are still new levels of understanding -- for example, the Terrible Trivium, who I think can only be apprehended in his full menace by an adult.

There were themes in there that I threw in because they amused me at the time. The whole conflict between words and numbers, that old thing that C.P. Snow wrote about many years ago. I didn't lay it out as a thesis or anything, but it was fun having it in there. And it doesn't get in the way of the story.

Do you think children's books are overly concerned with messages?

Almost any time you start with a message and write your book from that you're in big trouble. We convey many messages in the things that we write, but in many cases, especially with children, you don't want to end with "This is what you should think." You want to end with something that says, "Now, you think about it." To a child, and to an adult, too, what you discover by yourself, or what you think you discover by yourself, is what stays. Especially with children -- they're immediately suspicious of anything that they're told.

You had no idea when you started this book how it would turn out?

I had no idea. One of the first things I wrote was that scene where the Mathemagician, the ruler of Digitopolis, explains infinity to Milo. I'd had a conversation with a child who said to me, "What's the biggest number there is?" One of those wonderful children's questions you never know how to answer. I asked him a question: What do you think the biggest number is? He gave me one of these 80 skillion, 159 trillion numbers that went on and on, and so I said, "OK, add one to it." He thought that was enormously funny. I realized that we were talking about infinity as only two total mathematical illiterates could and having an absolutely wonderful time.

I started with that scene, because I loved it. I wrote the book from all different angles. It wasn't completely sequential, but just little bits and pieces. One thing that was extraordinarily useful to me was when I had a character or an idea for a scene, I'd write a lot of conversations between the characters, which was my way of getting to know how they sounded and what they might say. After you do this, and you're writing the scene, you sometimes get the feeling that you're sitting back and simply recording or eavesdropping on what the characters are saying. They're making the conversation and you're just there as a scribe. That's a wonderful feeling.

Were there particular scenes in "The Phantom Tollbooth" where that happened for you?

There's the scene at the royal banquet in Dictionopolis. I loved the whole idea of that; it was a constant game for me, when they all have to say what they want to eat [and the meal they name magically appears]. My favorite meal as a child -- the three things I loved most were hot dogs, corn on the cob and chocolate pudding, so of course I had to get that in there.

I confess that as a general rule I don't like puns, so I consider it a huge accomplishment of this book that I love the puns in it. My favorite pun is the cart without an engine or anything to pull it. To get somewhere in it you have to be very quiet because it goes without saying.

That's my favorite also! My father was a punster. I had the same reaction that you do; he'd say something and I'd groan. There's no way you can deal with that as a child. You're not that facile or quick. Years later I got to appreciate it. He'd sometimes walk in a room and say, "Ah ha! I see you're coming early since lately. You used to be behind before but now you're first at last ... "

I'm starting to see where this book came from.

It was interesting because my father dislikes fantasy, but he enjoyed this book. Ninety percent of that is because I, his son, wrote it, but I think he genuinely understood that a lot of the wordplay in there was inspired by him.

Next Page: Who sent Milo the tollbooth?

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