All Fiction* begins with the question, "What IF?"
What if the girl falls in love with a vampire? What if the magician's trick goes horribly wrong? What if there was life in outer space? What if the princess turned into a frog instead of the other way around? What if the most unlikely person saved the world?
Eavesdrop on children pretending and you'll see where this develops.
"Let's play Princess**!"
"Okay. I'll be the princess and you be the witch."
"But I don't waaaant to be the witch."
"Okay, we'll both be princesses."
"Yeah. And Caleb can be the prince and he can rescue me from the dragon.***"
"And what if the the witch**** puts a spell on the prince to make him fall in love with her?"
"Oh! Oh! And what if she turns the dragon into a fairy*****?"
And so it goes.
Does that mean writers are just children who never grew up and got real jobs?
Probably.
As an exercise today, pick a "what if" and let your imagination run with it. If writing isn't your thing, chose a favorite novel and see if you can identify the "what if" the author developed.
*Some non-fiction probably falls into this category too, but we're not going to talk about that, are we?
**Absolutely no one plays house anymore.
***The dog is always the dragon.
****Somehow there's still a witch in this story.
*****Poor Kirby.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
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Growing up, my sister always played the role of inanimate objects. Always. We pretended to have a wedding once and had to summon our neighbor to be the bride because neither of us was going to marry our brother. So, young neighbor was the bride, willing brother was the groom, bossy older sister was the priest (ahem...) and quiet younger sister was the . . . c'mon, she made a great cross! ;-)
ReplyDeleteWhat if Kirby headed for the pet door? (I love your sense of humor.)
Before you even gave the assignment, I was figuring out the 'what if' of the book I'm currently devouring-but-trying-to-savor. Interesting - I'll have to think on that more :-)
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