A Boy Named Richard

A long time ago, in a far away town, lived a little boy named Richard. Who is this little boy named Richard and why is he important enough to be writing about? What happened to him? What is it? What did he do? Why are we even talking about him? Stories used to start that way all the time. Curiosity was raised with the mention of a far away place and time and a boy or girl, man or woman no one knew. Some how it helped. Putting yourself into another world, another time. Imagining yourself in another life. We still do this. We still play pretend. Novels are all about pretend. We learned from the old tales. Sometimes they taught a moral understanding. Sometimes they taught about courage and other times how sheer luck or magic might intervene at anytime and end all this suffering. It’s a kind of hope. Stories today tend to go more towards finding your own inner strengths and answers to life’s troubles. Life’s troubles haven’t really changed that much we just dress them up differently. We have guns today instead of swords. We have drugs instead of magic potions, which is all really the same thing except today people poison themselves instead of their unsuspecting victims. Very often the really special stories aren’t that far away and times not as long ago like ‘Little House on the Prairie’. Some times the story is about a mouse or a rabbit and the adventures from their point of view. Some times magical things happening takes one far away, although the story is in the present time. Writers found a way to take the reality of a child’s experience and turn it into something fantastical and far away, yet keep that closeness to it. ‘Stuart Little’ is such a story. Regular, though eccentric, people adopting a little mouse and treating him like a member of the family. Sometimes my daughter sets a tiny place at the table for an imaginary Stuart. He even gets a special spot to relax and watch a movie with her. Usually it’s much too close to the screen. I don’t really have a story about a little boy named Richard, but I might some day. Now that I’ve written that much down, I’d like to find out more about him. I’d like to find out where he lives and what period of time. What were they doing back then. How did they live and what is so interesting about him that we should be writing about it. Other writers have brought to us stories about children long ago, who dealt with monsters, and giants and mean step-mothers and hard work. The same things children today deal with. Well they don’t all have mean step-mothers. Sometimes it’s a mean teacher or a mean neighbor, or kid. Someone is mean and we’ve all got to find a way to deal with this stuff. We do all have some kind of monster, imaginary or not. And giant is just another word for challenge. Anyway little Richard from long ago had all of them. He had so many giants and monsters and mean people to deal with, but he was also very creative. He had a wonderful way of interpreting life and dealing with it. He had important decisions to make, like would he give in to the pressures or stand up tall and proud. Would he be what someone wanted him to be or would he be himself and be really good at it. Would he know what he wanted? Would he know who he was? There are a lot of serious questions woven into the tales told to children. Children love to consider serious questions and come up with really smart solutions. But they aren’t anything like the kind of questions we think they may have. That’s why it’s so difficult to mix adult with child. Really the adult needs to become a child again in order to mix with the child. In order to write for a child one needs to be a child. For example, I love to have the floors and table tops in my home, cleared off and accessible. My youngest daughter is a maker of worlds and uses up every possible square inch with buildings and lego’s, homes made of plastic, homes made of cardboard, rock city etc. I come to find out there are people living in those places. Am I the ogre who demands them all removed? Am I the evil step-mother who demands the floors to be cleaned again? The rock city was fabulous, it was however in the doorway to another useful room in the house and I was the giant who crushed the city with it’s big feet. I’m also the witch who picks up whole homes and moves them to other countries. Or perhaps I’m the cyclone which picked up the house. There is so much to know about all this. The more I investigate it the more I remember about my own childhood. I was the third oldest child in a family with ten children. My usual job in the family was to play with the children. I wasn’t capable enough to have a job in meal preparation. I was too slow at most important jobs which really required some amount of speed in order for a home of this size to function well. The most useful place for me was to play with the children. Later I went on to have children of my own. I have spent many hours as a mother, playing with my children. Building, researching, going on adventures and reading. Housework and the business of mealtimes was also a type of play for me although I had no training in actual usefulness I was able to invent my own methods and draw from memories of what I had observed as a child. I did have other chores sometimes, but can you imagine having the job of playing with the children when you are yet a child? Priceless.

Elizabeth Williams, daily writing exercise, 1,013 words.