Playing Pretend

Earlier today, I wrote an article on teaching children to write short stories and posted it on Helium, and as I was writing it, it occurred to me that some of the methods I described to teach children to write stories can be used to help pull ourselves out of writing blocks or into a more interesting story.

Developing our abilities to tell or write good stories is all about imagination. Children are encouraged to fuel their imagination, but sometimes that encouragement can fade when we become adults. We are expected to be serious grownups, and we lose a lot of that spontaneity we had as kids. Where children once had to completely visualize stories out of books, this is now often done for them in movies, TV, and video games.

Nearly every parent of young children has bought their child a "cool" toy, only to find that the child has more fun with the box than the toy itself. Instinctively, we want to imagine. We want to create. We want to play pretend.

Somehow, we let the world put the idea into our heads that this is childish. But we must not confuse childishness with childlike. Childish is throwing a tantrum in the grocery store because you can't have the cookies. It is being egocentric, selfish.

Being childlike is a trait we should never lose, and one we as writers should revisit frequently. It's the ability to look at things at new ways, to ask questions even when we think we know the answers, and to never accept anything as impossible.