“A very long time ago, there lived a beautiful princess in a mystical land…”
~ A Little Princess
Why are stories so important? Are they important? I think so. Maybe because it's easier to observe and analyze someone else's story than it is to observe our own. Maybe because we look for meaning, purpose, and understanding in stories. Maybe because we want to distract ourselves from what's happening around us.
“Everything's a story - You are a story - I am a story.”
There's a story about a little girl who gets uprooted from her home and placed in a boarding school while her father goes off to war. A number of bad things happen, but she always finds a way to keep her spirits up through fairytales and her imagination. That's how she deals with the horrors of reality. Not by pretending they don't exist, but by meeting the challenges with fortitude, compassion, resilience, and imagination.
“If I go on talking and talking...and telling you things about pretending, I shall bear it better. You don’t forget, but you bear it better.”
A scene in this story that has always stuck out to me is when the girl is at her most vulnerable. Her world has collapsed and she is left with nothing. Remembering one of her stories, she draws a circle on the floor with chalk. “This is a magic circle. So long as you stay inside it, no harm can come to you.” Inside the circle, she sits and cries and calls out for her missing father. The circle isn’t really magic, it's just a line drawn with chalk. But in that moment, she needed to feel protected. She did what she could to provide a sense of safety for herself when no one else could. I woke up from a nightmare with that scene playing in my head. Two years after my father passed and I still have nightmares.
“What you have to do with your mind, when your body is miserable, is to make it think of something else.”
Do fairytales have a place in the real world? Does imagination?
~ Stories help us see through someone else's eyes - Go read a book written by someone from a different background, religion, ethnicity, or country from yours and tell me what you learned.
~ Stories help us preserve history - Read the stories of survivors and witnesses of the holocaust, 9/11, or even the current wars and tell me you can still look at the world the same.
~ Stories help us understand - how many times has someone tried explaining a concept to you over and over again and it didn’t click until the concept was shared in the form of a story?
~ Stories help form our core beliefs - good, bad, right, wrong, parables, fables. So many lessons of what is praiseworthy or vile behavior are taught through stories and we decide which ones are true and worth keeping.
~ Stories keep people alive - in both senses. Stories help people keep going and persevere through life’s trials. But stories also preserve the memory of those we have lost.
~ Stories give us hope, courage, faith, and empathy.
“‘If Sara had been a boy and lived a few centuries ago,’ her father used to say, 'she would have gone about the country with her sword drawn, rescuing and defending everyone in distress. She always wants to fight when she sees people in trouble.’”
I remember random details in stories. Ehud was left-handed. Shammah defended a field of beans. John was the only one to tell us it was Peter who cut off Malchus' ear (seriously, John? You tattletale. Even Luke didn't bother with those details and Luke loves attention to detail. And Peter, it's a miracle in itself you didn't hit any vital organs. What would your wife say?). Why is it important that I know those details? I don’t know why. I just know they're important. Are my stories that important? Not in the grand scheme of things, absolutely not. But they’re still important to me. I don’t know why. I’m not sure if I’m trying to preserve something old or reveal something new. Maybe both. Maybe I’m trying to recreate a time when the world to me was predictable.
I was hoping to have Ice Sword Chronicles: Book One's editing finished by the anniversary (May 5th of all days), but I don't think that's going to happen. I'm aiming for June at the earliest. It is still a priority. The clock is still ticking. I know I'm running out of second chances to wrap this up and get it out there. But it's also been a very long two years and I needed the time away for a bit after November. I know I should have started/finished this process years ago. I know I'm too late. 15 years later and this story has gone nowhere. Didn't help I went radio silent 7 of those years.
Like returning to the town of Spectre in the movie Big Fish (don’t ask me why that bizarre story has stuck with me. I haven’t watched it in years). Too late. But better late than never, right? I don't know if I'll actually achieve my dream of seeing ISC complete and published. I know I'm not a great writer. I put words on a page and hope they make sense. I don't know if anyone will even read it. But I cannot give up on it. I’ve tried letting it die and it keeps coming back like EDJ. By the way, the next batch of chapters covers a big, epic fight scene so get ready. They're gonna drop all at once when I finish them.
So here’s to pretending. Here’s to all the characters we created and brought to life and to all the stories we’ve lived and all the memories that have stuck with us, real or imagined.
I may not be of royal blood, but I’m still a daughter of the One True King.
“’It’s true,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I do pretend I am a princess. I pretend I am a princess, so that I can try and behave like one.’”
~ Frances Hodgson Burnett, A Little Princess (All quotes taken from either the 1995 movie or book).
