100 Things Blogging Challenge #2: Will Parker
My topic: 100 Literary Characters Who Have Affected Me
At this rate, I will be finishing my 100 things 8 to 10 years from now. As they say, slow and steady...ends up a pancake in the middle of the road.
Continuing for now along a chronological vein, I find myself confronted with a more obscure character:
I’m not sure Will Parker of John Christopher’s young adult science fiction trilogy, The Tripods, affected me as a character so much as he did as a narrator. I became acquainted with these books in sixth grade, when my teacher read them to the class. The books immediately captivated me from the opening page of the first volume, The White Mountains.
The planet had been taken over by massive three-legged machines or entities called Tripods. Humanity was essentially allowed to exist unmolested, aside from a coming-of-age type process where adolescents were temporarily taken away by Tripods and returned home with a brainwashing device fused onto their heads. Will Parker, along with three other boys, evaded this process, had cross-country adventures, and finally joined a group of rebels hidden in the mountains. Eventually they infiltrated the strongholds of the alien operators of the Tripods, discovered a terrible plan to kill off all life on earth, and ended up helping to save the world. All very exciting reading for a kid who despised obedience and conformity, who wanted to have adventures and meet strange creatures, and who wasn’t much younger than these heroic lads.
However, Will himself didn’t impress me so much as a couple of the other characters. Compared to his friends, who all either seemed smarter or more noble, Will was not the most interesting. But he did something for me that had resounding effects: he alerted me to the benefits of the first person narrator. His story so captivated me that when I made the fateful decision some months later (probably my twelfth birthday, give or take a month) to begin writing down one of the stories that lived in my head, I had no doubt that first person was the way to go. It’s still the narrative voice I feel most at home in almost twenty years later, and I’ve been told I write best that way.
It occurred to me when I decided to write about Will Parker for this entry that his name also must have unconsciously influenced that name of my first narrator/protagonist, Abel. Abel has a similar quality, short but descriptive, implying strength or capability. Certainly the setting of a technologically-devolved future influenced my first story.
So thanks for talking to me, Will. In a way, I began to write because I wanted to answer.
At this rate, I will be finishing my 100 things 8 to 10 years from now. As they say, slow and steady...ends up a pancake in the middle of the road.
Continuing for now along a chronological vein, I find myself confronted with a more obscure character:
I’m not sure Will Parker of John Christopher’s young adult science fiction trilogy, The Tripods, affected me as a character so much as he did as a narrator. I became acquainted with these books in sixth grade, when my teacher read them to the class. The books immediately captivated me from the opening page of the first volume, The White Mountains.
The planet had been taken over by massive three-legged machines or entities called Tripods. Humanity was essentially allowed to exist unmolested, aside from a coming-of-age type process where adolescents were temporarily taken away by Tripods and returned home with a brainwashing device fused onto their heads. Will Parker, along with three other boys, evaded this process, had cross-country adventures, and finally joined a group of rebels hidden in the mountains. Eventually they infiltrated the strongholds of the alien operators of the Tripods, discovered a terrible plan to kill off all life on earth, and ended up helping to save the world. All very exciting reading for a kid who despised obedience and conformity, who wanted to have adventures and meet strange creatures, and who wasn’t much younger than these heroic lads.
However, Will himself didn’t impress me so much as a couple of the other characters. Compared to his friends, who all either seemed smarter or more noble, Will was not the most interesting. But he did something for me that had resounding effects: he alerted me to the benefits of the first person narrator. His story so captivated me that when I made the fateful decision some months later (probably my twelfth birthday, give or take a month) to begin writing down one of the stories that lived in my head, I had no doubt that first person was the way to go. It’s still the narrative voice I feel most at home in almost twenty years later, and I’ve been told I write best that way.
It occurred to me when I decided to write about Will Parker for this entry that his name also must have unconsciously influenced that name of my first narrator/protagonist, Abel. Abel has a similar quality, short but descriptive, implying strength or capability. Certainly the setting of a technologically-devolved future influenced my first story.
So thanks for talking to me, Will. In a way, I began to write because I wanted to answer.