Writers and Play

[sartorias]

I played with dolls until I was twelve, at which time the 'rents began to think it was a tad weird, and the dolls had vanished when I came home from summer camp. I didn't see until years later that I was working out elaborate novel plots with those long games that involved our entire bedroom. (All the cardboard castles and stuff I also laboriously

Comments

[cakmpls]

That's what my doll-play was, too: storytelling.

ETA: When we were adults, the cousin with whom I had most often played paper dolls complained that I had always insisted on deciding the plot!

[sartorias]

LOL! I was generally regarded as the plot mistress, but one time I was invited to play Barbies with some upscale girls who had tons of real Barbie clothes--and those were the real ones, not the homemade ball gowns that I stitched out of scraps of scavenged cloth. I was already to get into a game, and the other two girls looked at me as if I'd grown antlers. Their idea of playing Barbies was a fashion show with all the clothes. Nothing more. (And they loathed the ball gowns I'd made for my Barbie, so very out of fashion during those perky Doris Day years.)

[agentmaly]

That's strange to me, because although I enjoyed planning and making outfits for my dolls (I sewed a lot of doll clothes as well), plot was a heavy component of almost all my games in that genre - playing with dolls, stuffed animals, Legos and other small figures, imagination games using just ourselves. And that was true whether I was playing by myself or with other children, with boys or girls, older or younger. Even a game that focussed mostly on dress-up would have to conform to certain pre-set character parametres: we were all dressing up this way because we were ancient Greeks, or because one of us was the maid and one was the princess.

[sartorias]

Oh yes. Plot and character both.

[klwilliams]

I still play with dolls when working on a story. I pulled out all my wooden Little People recently to help figure out where people needed to be when. (Each one has a name and a personality, so I "cast" my stories when doing this so I remember who's who.)

[sartorias]

That is awesome!

Rachel Brown and I also use the figurines she made to plot out who is where in complicated story scenarios.

[anonymous]

I really hate it when parents throw or give away the possessions of their kids without asking permission first. My parents never did that (and I probably would have killed them or at least had an epic temper tantrum, if they had tried), but I know that it was very common. An aunt and uncle of mine regularly threw away their kids' toys, which is a large part of the reason why I could never stand either of them. Depressingly enough, my cousins did the same thing to their own kids when they were adults

[sartorias]

Glad you still have them! (No one would have dared to have a temper tantrum around my dad!)

[ext_491365]

Something I've been thinking about lately: When I played with dolls and created elaborate plots as a kid, it was out of a need to escape into another reality. My doll heroines had all the critical thinking skills and magical powers that they needed to save themselves quickly and easily, because that's what I wanted for myself. Now that I'm writing books, I find myself snagging on this old tendency to go easy on my characters, to keep them from suffering too deeply. Yet when I look back on the books I loved to read as a young adult, they were always the ones that portrayed the bitterness and heartache that I felt very intensely, with the victories always hard-won. Any thoughts on this writing for self vs. writing for readers question?

[sartorias]

That is a very good question, and I don't think there is an easy answer. Sometimes I wonder if we're doing a bit of therapeutic venting when we go easy on characters--we want to relax. We don't want bad things. And sometimes venting can cause us to real whale on the characters! I do think we write for ourselves first, but maybe consider readers to a greater (or lesser) degree when we rewrite?

Processes differ sooooo much, I am afraid to generalize!

[cmcmck]

The damage parents do to us. They don't want us to grow up then insist we grow up.............

But then, I'm estranged from my own so what would I know? :o/

[sartorias]

Or they want us to grow up into who they want us to be, not who we want to be . . .