At the kitchen table, among the fractured rainbow of strewn crayons and sticky notes, they sit together, talking. She has donned the mantle of teacher; he is the willing (for now) pupil, pencil poised and ready, even though words are still being slowly assembled in his written vocabulary.
‘Now, first,’ she says, confident in her authority, ‘I shall teach you about stories.’
He waits.
‘A story must always have some sort of problem that needs solving.’
He nods.
I look over from my seat, agog. She’s just condensed the first chapter of any number of creative writing books out there down into a single sentence.
*
But stories need creating before they can be told, whether it’s in the mind or by practice. Nowadays he’s taken to going outside, ‘to play Minecraft’.
Poised on the back step, I watched him breathe deeply and exhale. ‘It’s Minecraft … in real life,’ he says.
‘Isn’t it real life in real life?’ I say.
‘No, it’s real life, as I pretend to play Minecraft in a real life that is like Minecraft.’ He turns to argue, stable in conviction. ‘Don’t you understand?’
*
Am what am I doing, I wonder, on occasion, as my two children push through the draping veils of their years, hands outstretched, fingers searching to land upon the shapes that will withstand the pressure of probing.
Don’t we all brush up against such obstacles as we navigate our lives; sometimes we may even install them in our wake, to obfuscate the path, to keep others away.
Cairns of significance; symbols of presence.
How you choose to do it is up to you.
Edit, edit, edit.
Create, create, create.
You might need to be the problem that needs solving or the adventurer that steps out into a world of his choosing.
Think of the possibility. The potential.
Now, go.
Image source: Scoobymoo
