I know that this novel will be about magic, but I want it to be about the magic that I experience. I want it to be fantastical real. I don't mean warm fuzzy feelings or falling in love. Those have magic elements certainly, but I mean the way I watch children shape-shift. I have seen many little humans try with all of their non-formed biceps to cram their foots into Barbie cars or put a head in (always eye first) into a doll-house. I still have the cutout of a John Deer tractor add that my son spent hour after hour gently touching expecting to feel the cold of the green metal and I remember thinking that I could smell the gasoline exhaust when he focused hard enough.
A foundational premise that exists in all of this telling is that children have a pure wisdom, and like a dreamwalker, they are just able to see things the way they really are in a way the rest of us have lost. If children are certain that they can shape-shift to become the size of items that they hold in their hand, I believe it. But if I believed it more completely I could do it too.
From Patricia McKillip, "I write fantasy because it's there. I have no other excuse for sitting down for several hours a day indulging my imagination. Daydreaming. Thinking up imaginary people, impossible places. Imagination is the golden-eyed monster that never sleeps. It must be fed; it cannot be ignored. Making it tell the same tale over and over again makes it thin and whining; its scales begin to fall off; its fiery breath becomes a trickle of smoke. It is best fed by reality, an odd diet for something nonexistent; there are few details of daily life and its broad range of emotional context that can't be transformed into food for the imagination. It must be visited constantly, or else it begins to become restless and emit strange bellows at embarrassing moments; ignoring it only makes it grow larger and noisier. Content, it dreams awake, and spins the fabric of tales. There is really nothing to be done with such imagery except to use it: in writing, in art. Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those of us who do have no choice."
A foundational premise that exists in all of this telling is that children have a pure wisdom, and like a dreamwalker, they are just able to see things the way they really are in a way the rest of us have lost. If children are certain that they can shape-shift to become the size of items that they hold in their hand, I believe it. But if I believed it more completely I could do it too.
From Patricia McKillip, "I write fantasy because it's there. I have no other excuse for sitting down for several hours a day indulging my imagination. Daydreaming. Thinking up imaginary people, impossible places. Imagination is the golden-eyed monster that never sleeps. It must be fed; it cannot be ignored. Making it tell the same tale over and over again makes it thin and whining; its scales begin to fall off; its fiery breath becomes a trickle of smoke. It is best fed by reality, an odd diet for something nonexistent; there are few details of daily life and its broad range of emotional context that can't be transformed into food for the imagination. It must be visited constantly, or else it begins to become restless and emit strange bellows at embarrassing moments; ignoring it only makes it grow larger and noisier. Content, it dreams awake, and spins the fabric of tales. There is really nothing to be done with such imagery except to use it: in writing, in art. Those who fear the imagination condemn it: something childish, they say, something monsterish, misbegotten. Not all of us dream awake. But those of us who do have no choice."
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