When I was a little girl I wrote letters to fairies. Due to my personal connection with them and my incredibly sneaky parents, they always wrote back. I discovered the fairies, like many other creatures I am fond of, in a book. For a kid, that is good enough for you. For a kid, everything is real. I think that is one of the main reasons why I decided around the age of five that when I grew up I wanted to write and illustrate my own children’s books. If something does not exist, I want to bring it into reality. I want to paint pictures of it, write stories about it, and make it my own. I think that everything I have ever done was because I knew one way or another it would lead me to achieving that dream.
The amount of people who believe that what a child dreams about at five continues to be what they dream about is shockingly small. Because of this I am very well informed on how impractical it is to aspire to be a writer or an artist or even both. My parents never specifically pushed me to be an author or do something more practical; they simply said that whatever I ended up doing they wanted me to use my mind. If that is my only requirement, I do not think that I could have picked a more perfect occupation. The more people I talk to and the more time I spend in school I realize that there really is no one method to determine if someone is smart. Some people are brilliant but do not get good grades, others have all A’s but sad SAT scores. I would like to believe that the really intelligent people in this world are the creators, the ones who may even ignore the precision of the universe around them and completely immerse themselves into the depths of their own minds to make something new. If I were to do that and spend my days drawing creatures and telling their stories, my mind would never sleep.
I think the nightmare of my aspiration being impractical decreases every day older I get. Humans as a whole seem to struggle with the question of whether or not what they do in this life serves any real purpose. The other common problem I share with humanity is that I am a slave to my dreams. If only we all could come to the realization that our dreams can be practical. I think that igniting a child’s imagination through a story is a necessity in any time period or culture. If we want kids to grow up to be creators they need to be given the opportunity to create. Although there is not one specific benefit, I trust that if I wrote children’s books the indirect effects would be countless. Our society needs storytellers. Today everything has been done; everything has been discovered and experienced and challenged. Someone needs to create worlds for the children to explore.
My soul will forever be sold to fiction because if I am writing fiction then I am capable of anything. I can form a place in which my craziest dreams come true but somehow make perfect sense. By sharing such happenings with other people, specifically children, you enable them to do the same. Creating your own world is never simply for your own benefit, it is so that you can inspire others and in turn be inspired. The impossibility of what anyone, child or adult, can come up with only makes it more magical. The incredible thing is that the magic is completely dependent on what people allow it to be. Fairies long for someone to come along and speak for them. I know they do, we write to each other.
