The Idea of an Essay, Volume 2

27 Finally, I began to write my own stories. These were the first writings I had ever done outside of school. As I wrote, of course, I tried to write well. Not just with good grammar or syntax, not simply ‘well’ in the sense of following the rules. I tried to write in a way that I thought people would want to read. Because I was a storyteller; I wanted to tell stories. I knew the basic structure of a good story from the stories I had heard as a little preschooler in Sunday School class. I loved to read, and now to write, simply for the sake of a good story, because my mom had taught me to love stories all those years ago. I knew how to make my words come to life so that the reader would hear funny voices, sound effects, dramatic pauses, and changes in volume because of the time I had spent reading to my brother. Also through my mom reading to me, I had developed a rich imagination. As I wrote, I imagined every scene, every minute, and every move each character made. I played these scenes over and over again in my head, studying them, considering them, viewing them from every angle. I did not write a story until I had lived it. That is what being a storyteller is all about. That is what being a reader is all about. When it comes to stories, reading and writing is about more than simply relaying information or even entertaining. It is about getting out of our own heads and living in a different world. Through stories, we can live the lives of a knight in shining armor, a princess in a tower, a slave on a cotton plantation, a misunderstood evil villain, a great explorer, and a skillful magician all in one day. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe , by C.S. Lewis, the main characters, the Pevensie children, travel through a magical wardrobe to anotherworld. Specifically, they travel to a country called Narnia, which they save from an evil witch, and are subsequently crowned kings and queens of Narnia. They proceed to grow up until one day, they rediscover the wardrobe and emerge back into our world at the exact moment at which they left it, children once again. The book is full of allegorical language and general life lessons; but overall, it teaches that books allow us to live entire lives in other worlds without ever leaving ours. And this is what I find so enchanting about reading and writing stories. In this life, they are the closest we will ever come to immortality.