A boy asked me why there has to be a sad part

At a library on Saturday, a boy of about nine put up his hand, waited to be picked, and then asked me, quite seriously, why my books have to have a sad part in them. He said he liked everything else, the flying and the storms and the girl who would not give up, but he did not see why the sad bit had to be there, and could I not just leave it out next time. The room laughed, kindly, the way a room laughs at a child saying the thing the adults were too polite to. But it was not a joke. It was the best question I have been asked all year, and I gave him a rushed answer at the time, and I have been trying to give him a proper one ever since. So here it is, for that boy, wherever he is tonight.

You are right that the sad part is the hardest bit to read. It is also the hardest bit to write, and I promise you I do not put it there to be unkind, to you or to the characters, who I am very fond of and would protect from everything if the story would only let me. But the story will not let me, and here is why.

A book where nothing sad ever happens is not a happy book. It is a book you do not believe. You would feel it, even if you could not say it, the way you can always feel when a grown up is pretending everything is fine when it is not. Something in you would go quiet and stop trusting the story, and once you stop trusting a story it cannot do anything for you at all. The sad part is how a book earns the right to make you happy later. Without it, the happy ending is just a picture of an ending. With it, the happy ending is somewhere the characters, and you, actually walked all the way to.

And there is a second thing, which is harder to say and truer. Sad things are going to happen to you. Not soon, I hope, and not often, but they will, because they happen to everyone, and no book and no grown up can promise you otherwise, and any that try are the ones you should trust the least. What a story can do, the thing it is quietly for, is let you meet a sad thing while you are safe. You get to feel it in a chair, with the light on, with someone who loves you probably in the next room, and you get to watch a character you care about come out the other side of it still standing. That is not nothing. That is a kind of practice, done gently, for a thing everybody eventually has to do for real.

So I am sorry, but I am not going to leave the sad part out, not for you and not for the next reader, because leaving it out would be the one genuinely unkind thing I could do. What I can promise is this. I will never leave you there. I have never once written a sad part that was not already on its way to something better, and I never will, because I remember being nine and needing to know that the story was going somewhere I could bear. It always is. You can trust me that far, and you can turn the page.

Sad parts belong in The Girl Who Kept the Wind too, the story of a grieving girl on the floating islands who loses her wind and her speech on the same morning.