Posts in the "How children’s fantasy influences adult fantasy." Category

• Child’s Play

  How children's fantasy influences adult fantasy.

  I’ve always loved walking. When I was in high school, my friends and I used to walk for miles. Sometimes, this was just aimless drunken walkabouts that often ended in trouble and hooliganism. Other times, especially at night, it was simply just a way to pass the time that didn’t cost money and afforded us a chance to talk at length, as we were wont to do.

  I remember one summer night, staying over at my buddy Jason’s house, we went out for a 10-mile hike to a neighboring town. Both being comic book lovers and a touch delusional, we spent that trek talking about wanting to be vigilantes. And not the Bernhard Goetz kind, because that was sort of pedestrian, but more along the lines of Batman or Rorshach. Masked, disturbed individuals willing to fight crime at great cost to ourselves.

  And it wasn’t just a laugh-off—we treated the topic as serious as a heart attack, discussing the very real considerations. What kind of costumes we would wear, and how could we fix them if they got shredded in combat or stinky falling three stories into a dumpster. What kind of weapons we could construct that would somehow be emblematic and strike fear into the hearts of criminals, and still perfectly functional (which was tricky, since neither of us took shop class or were especially handy with tools). What kind of communications systems we’d need to be able to get the heads up on crimes in progress and still beat police to the scene. Ten miles, we hashed questions like these out, which, given that we were middle-class and had no wealthy relatives about to croak and leave us the dough to finance our vigilante careers, required some nimble thinking. (more…)

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• Let’s Keep It This Way!

  How children's fantasy influences adult fantasy.
  

  Carol Wolf continues her quest to explore the imaginative bounds of story

  The first way in which children’s fantasy influences adult fantasy is that it acts as a gateway drug for readers, who as they grow up desire more sophisticated fantasy to read. At the same time children’s fantasy causes little story-telling fantasy readers to grow up telling fantasy stories which develop from children’s to adult fantasy.

  One of the worst influences on modern literature is the academic study of it. Whole departments of PhDs and PhD candidates, poring over stuff that writers were hacking out to amuse their friends, or support themselves and their families, excavating for the deepest meanings, lauding and deifying the writers, has changed our culture’s view of fiction. From Aphra Behn to Mrs. Gaskell, fiction was railed at from the pulpits and condemned in the parlor as a form of entertainment that could rot your brain or subvert your moral tone (and where do we hear this nowadays? Gods help us, in fifty more years I’ll bet there will be academics studying video games). Now, because of academia, fiction is taken very seriously indeed.

  Children’s fantasy, on the other hand, still enjoys its status of being overlooked. Fairy tales, magical adventures, encounters with talking ducks and flying trains, are obviously not to be taken seriously. This gives the story-teller a world where nothing she writes is held to any special account, where she can try anything, and if it doesn’t quite work, well, it’s just a fairy tale, it’s just a fantasy, you know, for children. The talking duck is dumb, and trains can fly. Amidst this benign neglect, where there’s no place to fall, (I mean really, a talking duck?) the writer is given scope and depth to explore wonders without fear or hesitation.

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• From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)

  How children's fantasy influences adult fantasy.

  Music connoisseurs will recognize the title of this post from a Dave Edmunds song.  Very much a high school thing for me–back when WNEW-FM in New York was a rock station, Edmunds was a staple with tunes like ‘Girls Talk’, ‘Crawlin’ From The Wreckage’ and, of course, ‘From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)’.  That song is about a small town girl who dreams of big things, and achieves them through a combination of good looks, wildness and bold action.  Kind of like the influence of children’s fantasy on adult fantasy, if you think about it: small, pretty ideas that grow and, through exposure to life and the wide, wide world, become fully realized things.

  See, I think children’s fantasy and adult fantasy have a relationship to each other that’s inverse to the real world: children’s fantasy gives birth to adult fantasy.  I don’t think fantasy is necessarily inspired by fantasy stories (although, as a kid, my reading included Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle books and the first few Chronicles of Narnia).  I think fantasy is a distillation of ideas and experiences from reading, movies and life, and the dreams that come from figuring out how to escape these influences or how to better them.  It starts early in life and becomes more refined as we get older, in the way some of us developed a taste for whiskey or scotch. (more…)

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• It’s okay for kids’ books to be fantasy – why not adults?

  How children's fantasy influences adult fantasy.

  One of my first Saturday jobs was in the local library, and the best days were those on which new books arrived and would need to be opened and labelled and put out on the shelves. Unashamedly, I loved reading all the children’s picture books. Not only were they beautiful objects in themselves, but the illustrations conjured up such marvellous worlds, be it of the ocean (Rainbow Fish), small night-thief cats (Slinky Malinki, one of literature’s most excellent cats) or bigger cats (The Tiger Who Came To Tea). Those pictures are still ingrained on my mind. Of course, the wonderful thing about reading is that as you progress through the library shelves, the fonts grow smaller but the illustrations don’t disappear, they just move to inside your head.

  Growing up I was a voracious reader. 25 Summer Book Challenge? Check, and the rest. (Now if I manage 25 books in a year, it’s an achievement, and the tottering to-read pile grows ever more precarious.) There was the era of adventure stories, the Secret Sevens and the Nancy Drews; of fantastical stories, Ethel the Worst Witch and Narnia (though I was disappointed when I discovered Aslan was more-than-a-lion) and later there were brilliant young adult writers to discover: David Almond, Malorie Blackman, Garth Nix and Eoin Colfer. David Almond’s Skellig is a wonderful example of finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. The alternative reality of Malorie Blackman’s Noughts and Crosses is blisteringly heartbreaking. I love the Artemis Fowl books for their criminal mastermind antihero; the perfect antidote to Harry Potter (I read all of those too). And I’ve previously spent an entire post talking about my admiration of Philip Pullman.

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• Child Wonder vs. Adult Realization: FIST FIGHT!

  How children's fantasy influences adult fantasy.
  

  Paul Tobin

  Having once been a child myself, and happily suffering through continual relapses, it’s obvious that my adult writings are influenced by the children’s fantasy stories that I once read, and that I continue to read. That said, I’ve never been a big believer in the saying of the “child’s sense of wonder.” I won’t deny that children have a sense of wonder regarding their world and the possibilities it contains, but the saying seems to deny adults our own sense of wonder, as if I and other adults were supposed to pack up our sense of wonder as soon as we grew hair on our genitalia or crashed our first car and realized we could not, sadly, fix it either by leaping back in time or by using nothing more than the exquisite power of our minds.

  Well… I refuse to pack up my sense of wonder. I won’t do that. I will hold my breath and pass out unless I’m told that it’s okay to be an adult and still make up stories in my mind. The stories that I make up might have a good deal more adult themes (my rescued alien princesses would be disappointed with a mere kiss) but the template for other worlds, for greater powers, for noble warriors and witches and so forth, it all stems from the scribblings I was doing way back when I was supposed to be studying geography, or when I was at the library, wondering what to read next, what world to explore. And children’s literature has so many worlds… so many universes where we can walk through wardrobes or land our spaceships or drink a shrinking potion and suddenly we get to play an array of new games with fantastical creatures.

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