Jun 28 2008
Living the Fantasy
I have found, over the last few years, that I am entranced with fantasy. And I don’t mean dungeons and dragons, magic or wizards (though I like those things, too). I mean that I like to shade the world around me–the stark reality–with the fantastic. I want to believe unseen forces are around me, want to imagine myself to be a mythic player in a mythic world, however mundane my world may be in “real life.”
If I stick to the “real” world around me, I am little more than a wife/mother/dishwasher/cook/housekeeper/errand-runner/aspiring writer. Yet in my fantasy-shaded world, I am on an epic quest, guiding young lives, creating romance, working diligently on writings that will some day change the world. Every line I write is one soft step towards my own enlightenment, and my effect on the world, some day, will be incalculable. I will inspire others some day, and those who trod on me, or discounted my abilities, will be proven wrong.
Okay, so perhaps none of this will happen. Perhaps all my dreams will never come to fruition. But thinking believing I am that powerless–living in the “real world”–isn’t fun at all.
So I hide in my fantasy. And books help me do that. I tend to gravitate away from books based only on reality, biographies, histories, and the like. Even if someone’s life was truly extraordinary, it is rarely as interesting as fantasy (at least, not to me). So my book group is reading a book on great women in American history, and I don’t even want to read it. But I can’t wait until next month, when we are reading a book that is entirely fictional.
I read once (I cannot remember where) that children gravitate to fantasy–fables, fairy tales, etc.–because they use fantasy to illustrate the real world. Real fears of children cannot be expressed, but children are empowered to deal with their real problems when they see knights overcome dragons, princesses released from spells, and other such fantastical situations. Perhaps I am still in my adolescence, and fantasy is my way of dealing with real problems, without the pain of having to see those real problems as all my life is about.
“Perhaps I am still in my adolescence”–since when is that a bad thing?
I’ve always been of the opinion that people lose something necessary to their writing when they let themselves stop imagining new meaning into their lives, and that not imagining new meaning into a task is just asking for boredom. If you’re clever about it, you can even get a decent story idea from elevating your work to something above mundanity; one of my best short pieces was inspired by my trying to put a new purpose to reshelving and processing books at a library I worked for a summer at.
Keep living, keep dreaming, keep smiling, and don’t let the rest of the world tell you you haven’t grown up.