I don't know how much sense this makes. I'm a bit tired, but I've got an idea on the brain, and I wanted to fiddle with it a little here before I went to bed, sort of cement things. Anyway, without further ado...
I need to write. It's been a while since that's happened.
It happens that I'm away from my computer (I can't write properly on other computers) for the rest of the week, but I think when I get home I'm going to fire up the old word processor.
It's actually come from re-reading the LM Boston Green Knowe books again. Well, I only have two of them. My father picked them up in a library sale a very long time ago, and I never bothered to read them until I was in high school. I liked to read books with titles I'd heard someplace else. I still do, but now I'm more likely to pick up old obscure kid's books than adult fiction.
Anyway, if you happen to be familiar with these books, LM Boston was in her sixties before she wrote them. They're for children, but there's something very mature about them as well, there's an understanding in them that's very outside of "children's books."
One of my favourite quotes ever is from F. Scott Fitzgerald that a writer should "write for the youth of today, the critics of tomorrow, and the schoolmasters of ever afterwards." This was up on the wall in my tenth and eleventh grade English teacher's classroom, and I saw it just about every morning for two years. There were other quotes, Emily Dickinson's about when she knows something's a poem, that sort of thing, but that one's the one that sticks with me.
I think the youth of today are getting shortchanged and underestimated. There are some wonderful books out there, Flotsam springs instantly to miind, that are full of imagination and ideas and magic, but there don't seem to be many. Harry Potter has single handedly managed to make magic into a homework assignment. It's a very Latinate methodical sort of magic, and that's just not what magic is, at least not for me.
I refer to The Secret Garden Magic, with the capital M. I refer to Wonderland. Is there a more modern version of these sorts of magic and I've missed the boat, or is it missing?
So, that's kind of what I want to write. I thought Neil Gaiman was going to do it when he wrote Coraline, but that book went someplace a bit more prosaic. I loved the book, though I don't know if I would've were I 12, but it didn't go where I thought it could go.
You know how when you read Peter Pan, everything is presented as a matter of course? Of course your mother goes through your head each night and tidies things up. Certainly you've seen the Redskin camp and the flamingo pools. There's a sort of familiarity there. I am never certain whether I am expected to be familiar with all of this, or if the book making that assumption to include me, "of course you know that, you're not stupid, we don't need to dwell on that further."
I guess I want to do all of that, but modern. I'm getting to tired to really explain myself. I just remember Nephews 1 and 2 watching Yellow Submarine and being totally unable to roll with the punches. It's not just them, either, I've noticed it in other kids, it's this inability to accept things when they get too strange. I know when I was a kid, I had a very strong desire that things be versimillitudic, things that were normal were normal, but I also allowed the abnormal in.
I'm still this way; as long as the abnormal accounts for itself, that's just fine. I'm three years older than my brother and I used to try to make him play things with me. I don't know if you've seen that Calvin and Hobbes strip where Susie and Calvin play house, the one that starts out drawn in the style of Rex Morgan or other soap opera strips, but that was pretty much the outcome. I would generally have a "script" in mind, and it would be my brother's job to be the walking talking prop and follow my script.
He wouldn't. Ever. This resulted in such situations as the cook throwing the dishes out of the kitchen and the father riding a dinosaur to work. Those situations generally resulted in fisticuffs and tears. I could not cope. However, we were also big fans of Calvinball (we're huge Bill Watterson fans, if you can't tell). We excelled at this game, one of the few in which we never argued with each other because we knew it was totally rediculous. There wasn't supposed to be a plan, therefore, nothing had to follow one.
I have a feeling that'd be a little too freeform for most of the kids I know. I know kids need structure, and all that, but, dude, a little surrealism never hurt. That's what I want to write, a realistic, surreal fantasy.