The attraction to writing or drawing for me has always been it's temptation to slip into another world. As a teenager, creative escapism seemed like a wise way to dispose of my time. It still does. After all, the imagination is the best entertainer we have. We just have to use it properly.
Lately, I've been returning to some of the imagery and conceptual ideas that I visited in my earliest creative writing. The idea of nightmarishly strange fairy tales has come back to haunt my work. In my early twenties, I referred to this vision as Coloring Book Nightmares. But back then it was just a collection of imagery, a lot of which can be found in my novels.
Last week, I read Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book and in the acknowledgements he says that he didn't write the book until twenty years after the idea for the story first came to him. In a way one of the new books I'm working on feels to me like a story I first wanted to tell fifteen years ago. I had big ideas for books back then...just not the skills to execute them the way I wanted to. Thankfully, I'm confident enough these days to see it through.
And perhaps all creative people ultimately draw on their half-emembered childhood hopes and fears.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how different the story would have been if you wrote it years ago as oppose to now being more mature as a person and as a writer.
ReplyDeleteConnie, I'm certain it would have been much worse. Mostly it would've been more experimental, less refined, and much less defined. There's a raw energy to my earliest writings that I enjoy, but I can recognize their need to be reigned in.
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