"Read a book the whole world adores, and surely something huge will hit you."
That's what I expected when I opened Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
It's the very first book in my project, 100 Debuts. The flagship read. I was pumped. Bring it on, I thought.
And here's the reaction I walked away with.
Uh… what is this?
I was so sleepy.
Alice grows big, shrinks small, meets strange creatures, then wakes from a dream. Boil it down, and that's pretty much the story.
I'm not doubting it's a masterpiece. The fun of it just didn't land for me. And the strongest feeling I was left with, oddly enough, was sadness.
A masterpiece that makes you sad. What's that about?
This is the story of how digging into that sadness led me straight to the reason I couldn't finish a novel for over ten years.
I'd lost the ability to enjoy a story like a child
Reason one: I'd lost the ability to enjoy a story the way a kid does.
I'm 39 now. Just a middle-aged guy.
Children can surely love this book purely. That's exactly why it's been read for over a century. No argument there.
I felt the same thing reading Pippi Longstocking. Both heroines are free-spirited, unpredictable kids. Watching that wildness is probably the whole charm.
But I catch myself thinking, "A kid like that nearby would be exhausting."
I'm looking at children entirely through adult eyes now. I used to be a child too. That view is gone, and it won't come back. It made me a little lonely.
The clever tricks didn't grab me either
"Then enjoy it with your grown-up brain."
Right? That's what I figured too.
Lewis Carroll was a mathematician. The book is stuffed with wordplay and mathematical puzzles. So I read a stack of guides. Ah, there's a trick hidden here, and there.
And my takeaway? "So what?"
Hmm. Maybe I lack the cultural grounding. Maybe the sensitivity. Probably both. As a child and as an adult, I couldn't fully taste it. That was the second sadness.
But the most interesting part wasn't the story
Here's the turn.
There was exactly one spot that pulled me in hard. Not the contents of the story, but the background: why this book was written.
Alice was written for a single little girl.
A young Carroll was rowing with the daughter of an acquaintance when she begged, "Tell me a story." The tale he improvised on the spot became this book.
By the way, Lewis Carroll is a pen name. His real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. I'd always assumed Carroll was a woman. He was a man, an Oxford academic.
Alice was a real girl too, Alice Liddell, around ten when they met. There are uncomfortable parts of this history by modern standards, and I'll leave that discomfort sitting there honestly rather than smoothing it over.
Still, the one thing that gripped me was that this book was born from a single urge: to delight one person.
That's the joy of reading a debut. Not a polished masterwork by an established giant, but an improvised story spoken by someone who was still nobody, for one person right in front of him. That was the origin.
The moment I learned that, I thought: maybe this is the very thing I was missing.
Why do people write?
I'd always believed people write for themselves.
That comes from Yoshida Shoin, who wrote that he made his book to deepen his own understanding. Writing teaches you more than reading; teaching teaches you most of all.
I've wanted to write a novel since my twenties. Over ten years now. And I still haven't finished one.
I thought there were two reasons: the seeds of a story hadn't grown, and I didn't know the craft.
For the craft, I built a daily writing habit, nearly 1,700 days on blog, sharing story theory as I learned it. And still, nothing. That's when I suspected a deeper root cause.
The answer was "write for one person"
The answer Alice gave me was this: write for one person.
Not for yourself. To delight someone.
The first face that came to mind was my wife. I used to make her handmade picture books for her birthday. She loves picture books, especially nonsense ones, so they didn't need a tidy plot, and back then I had no money for a real gift.
Maybe I should start that again. Not a picture book, but a novel. First, a story that delights one person.
Why "one person" matters
I still haven't published a single book. So what I need now isn't grand vision, it's the first step.
That's why I started this journey through the masters' debuts. And my first piece, I'll write for my wife.
Alice was written for one little girl. Maybe the stories that truly reach many people aren't the ones aimed at a crowd from the start.
First, delight one person. You probably have that one person too. That's where my novel begins.