THE FOREVER CHILD
By Sharon Sala

 

 

I’m always being asked how do I come up with ideas, and doesn’t it get difficult to find something new to write about after 80 plus books?  I have a pat answer for that question – that ideas are always in my head and that I will get too old to remember how to form sentences before I run out.  And while that is a fact, I rarely, if ever, think why.  How does my mind work in such a convoluted fashion?

The basic truth is that I came this way.  Every child is born with the ability to imagine, because for them, the world is an amazing place of possibilities.  We don’t see roadblocks, or put the word ‘impossible’ into our vocabularies until we’re older.

I have come to realize that people who write fiction are simply people who did not lose their childhood ability to pretend.  As a child, I could frighten myself far worse by imagining what was in the dark, rather than what was really there.  When I was small, I didn’t play with dolls.  That was too passive for me.  I played cowboys and Indians, and rode a stick horse and wore my Roy Rogers gun and holster all day, every day with the rationale that you never know when you might need to shoot a bad guy.

I used to play dress-up with my younger sister, but even then I had to be all about the drama.  If someone was going to be kidnapped or lost, it had to be me, because if I didn’t fight my way out of my disaster, the play just wasn’t fun.

When we were little, we ran barefoot in the hot sand between the rows and rows of grapes in my grandfather’s fruit orchard.  And when the sand was too hot on the bottoms of our feet, we would slip under the low-hanging vines and stand in their shade, picking sweet purple grapes from the ripening bunches and popping them in our mouths.  I can still remember the scent of hot sand, the burst of flavor in my mouth from the dark, sweet grapes, and the rough edges of the grape leaves brushing against my skin.

As a writer, imagery is everything.  If you can’t put the reader in the story and make them care about the characters, they won’t care about the book.  For an adult, still having that ability to impart heart-stopping fear, overwhelming joy, and the feel of hot sand on the bottoms of your feet, or the feel of being caught in a downpour and trying to run for dear life, only to have the deep, sticky mud pull the shoes right off your feet is a priceless gift.

It’s been said that writers are often a queer lot.  We work in solitude, never knowing how something we spent months, even years producing will be received, and yet we persevere because even if we’re the only one to read it, it is enough.

We are blessed because we didn’t lose the sense of wonder we had as children.  We didn’t forget how to play ‘pretend’.  We are never bored with our own company.  And yet the best part about being a writer is that our greatest joy multiplies a thousand-fold when shared with people who love to read.