Sacred Escape
I honestly love my day job. I’m blessed by the team I work with, the students I serve, and the diverse and enlightening experiences I am fortunate enough to have. More recently, I’ve told co-workers that I’ve authored a book, and many have responded by asking, “how do you find the time or energy to do that?”
I think this empathetic question is misguided, as it symbolizes an innocent misconception about what it means to write comedic fantasy fiction – at least for me. Yes, writing itself would appear, from the outside, to be work. Yet, from where the enthusiastic storyteller sits, in my opinion, it’s an escape.
The world can be a crooked, scary, and sometimes unhappy place. In response, many of us seek escape in one form or another. Some of us watch the big game, some of us like to grind at the gym, and some like to get out and shop for new shoes. Beyond these, there are many more preferences for escape. One of mine is playing tabletop roleplaying games with my wife, my brother, and my other friends. Alternatively, I love playing video games, and watching British murder mysteries on BritBox (like Shetland or Endeavor).
Beyond these activities, however, I find my primary escape is entering the vast, potential-rich world that my characters are walking around in. Characters themselves are worlds within that larger setting – each of them a unique, make-believe machine that processes events and interactions unexpectedly. I move between these dreamed-up people like an invisible ether, attempting to puppet them in accordance to set personalities and histories I’m engineering on the fly. It’s exhilarating to imagine what they’re thinking, and I love to be surprised, appalled, intrigued, or delighted alongside them.
To me, writing fantasy is a world apart from writing a letter to the IRS or an email telling my boss the building needs more paper. At times, I’ll write to the edge of oblivion, muddling into my characters’ hopes and fears — accompanying them as they stumble alongside their destinies. I’ll feel the wild danger of their struggle, as well as the joy and catharsis of their heroic victory over it.
For me, this comradery with imaginary people is reckless and naïve – like when you were a kid, and you weren’t entirely sure there wasn’t a drooling monster living under your bed or glowing fairies floating just outside your summer window. For a child, more is possible, both in fear and in delight. Reality is flexible for them, and fantastical experiences, like slaying mythical Fangbeasts or arguing with offended gnomish entrepreneurs, are entirely plausible.
When you’re the storyteller, you have the power to suspend adult-based logic and rationale. After all, you’re a sorcerer that weaves this unreality out of vocabulary and magic dust. If you’re skilled or you’re growing in your craft (and I commonly strive to be) you can teleport the reader to this dream world.
Furthermore, the structure, substance, and desire you feed this illusory realm, much like the glowing orb of an Angler Fish, draws your reader in to consume them. Like a Lionsguardian Herosword, this is the awesome power a writer can wield.
Rather than a burden or an exhausting burden of typed keys, a writer’s words are an incredible force of creation, a blazing path into the childlike imagination, and a much-desired escape from the bonds of mundane reality.
