On Writing Child/Foal characters · 7:46pm Mar 30th, 2014
This is sort of personal, but not really. I don't know, I guess. Just read on, if you're curious.
So, I was at the family farm yesterday helping my brother mark out a plot of land with stakes. Now, I'm not much of an outdoorsperson, but I did enjoy it, even if it was windy and still plenty cold for this time of year. As I was leaving, I drove by the site of my grandparent's house, and had to stop and get out of my car to look around.
To give you an idea of what it's like, there's a span of field between the road and the property line, maybe about a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet wide. I remember playing out there as a kid, and it just didn't look right when I drove by yesterday. It looked too, well, small. And then I thought... Wait. What if it's not smaller. And obviously it's not, but this is a perspective thing, and when writing a character, perspective matters. It shows in your word choice, the way they react to the world.
The world didn't get smaller as I got bigger. The world stayed the same. It was normal sized when I was a child of 8 or 9, and running through that hundred and fifty feet felt like a mile long stretch would have today. The world wasn't bigger then, and it's not smaller now. My perspective shifted, and that made all the difference.
This insight is helping me to write my latest. The world isn't bigger when you're a kid, that's only hindsight. The world is always normal sized, but the way you experience the world changes drastically over the years - not that you really ever notice because on the scale of a human lifetime, it's... well, it's still a pretty fast shift, but there's so much else going on that it doesn't seem to matter as much.
Beautiful and true, what you said.
The world and all of its concerns change. They become broader, not bigger. The focus of the lens expands, sometimes. And the whole thing shifts a few degrees or more, but we're always stuck with that same gravity, even when we can't see where it is. Even when we don't rightly understand it.
Sorry I'm just rambling nonsense now. You made me feel poetic.
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I'm glad I could inspire poetry. I was feeling very nostalgic at the time as well. It was... It's been a while since I've been to the farm. There are a lot of memories out there.