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I think this must be relevant to our writing, at least for many of us, this realm of our childhood fantasies. In another thread someone said (roughly paraphrasing) that we probably didn't play fight-the-Nazis as kids, and yet that is pretty close to one of the games I remember best (maybe because I'm one of the oldest on the board... 54). We weren't quite fighting them, it was more a a border-running spy type thing we played, partly inspired by a broke-down panel truck one of the neighborhood dads had that he let the kids play in. Talk about a natural for running-the-boarder games! Man, we had more fun in that old truck than any playground in the neighborhood! And it was always German/Nazi lines/borders we were trying to run. We weren't quite old enough to remember the war, but many of our dads were in it.
My other big thing, at an even younger age, was the western cowgirl/cowboy (and sometimes Indians) thing. My family was BIG on westerns. For a year or two, around the time I was five, I made everyone call me Dale Evans, and they had to call my little brother Roy Rogers! I had a little fringed western skirt and vest, with a cap-shooter 6-gun to go with it and wore it all as constantly as I could get away with. I liked pioneer stuff, too. I used to make elaborate lists of what we would need to pack on the flatboat or in the covered wagon and then we'd lay out furniture, blankets, etc. some representational way in the living room and play away.
Actually, by the time I was seven or eight, I had become so enamored of reading that I didn't do that much imaginative playing anymore. Mostly I just read. I woke up at least an hour before the rest of the family, so I could have at least one hour without Mom nagging me about reading too much. But the two things I remember most from back when I did that kind of play are specifically running Nazi lines and western or pioneer/frontier stuff.
So what were some of your favorite fantasy plays as a child? Do you think there's a tie-in with what you want to write now? (A lot of my stories in various genres also carry at least a slight country/western/frontier flavor, for example.) Anwyay, I'm still away on a visit, without much time to check in here, but maye this would be an interesting topic for folks to pursue that I thought of from reading that other thread.
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As I recall, I used to personify various artifacts around me and act out little plays. The ones I chiefly remember involved the adventures of a deck of cards, with the hero being the Five of Spades. (Why that card, and not one of the others? I don't know.)
This persisted well into my reading-of-SF period, where I acted things out with my then-meager supply of paperbacks. The heroes were my favorite Heinlein novels and the villains were these two faux-hardcover Charles Dickens novels...other novels were more ambivalent.
I guess it died out when I took up writing in a serious way.
(Other guys played with dolls...er, action figures...I worked with what I had.)
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We played elaborate space-opera/fantasy games. They never ended on the day they started. We made spaceships out of cardboard boxes, swords out of broken broom- or mop handles with bicycle grips, and exploration adventures. We ran all over the woods and up the mountains. A vacant ski resort can be a world of wonder to a youngin'.
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I was an only child in a semirural area. No kids for a mile or so. Very little play acting. I scoured my grandfather's acre of woods for Bigfoot. Unfortuntely, I wasn't playing. I also dug in hopes of finding an underground cave. I mapped and remapped that acre of woods and when I did have a playmate visit, I'd give them a piece of it. Giving away land I didn't own--wasn't that generous of me?
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Kid games I played were based on shooting -- cops & robbers, cowboys & Indians and GIs versus the ubiquitous Nazis. I’m older than dirt, and back then Saturday Matinees were cowboy double features. It was there we learned anger management as it was acted out in saloon fistfights where the good guy always won. We emulated what we saw and once in a while a fistfight broke out on the school ground, or after school, and there were consequences for that; a black eye, bloody nose, bruises and tears and a reprimand by the principal.
Today, anger is strongly influenced by video games where killing is practiced and even encouraged without thought to consequences. We read about it everyday -- some kid got mad at another and killed him, shot him to death, without thought of a long prison sentence where he will live with deviant brutes the rest of his life. Posts: 147 | Registered: Mar 2007
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I used to play with cars, to my mother's chagrin (I was such a tomboy, and I think she wanted a girly-girl). I've even been to race car driving school - I was the only female in the class - and had a ton of fun. I haven't applied any of that to my writing, though. Hm, there's an idea....
I did read a lot of horror stories and watch a lot of horror movies when I was a kid. I loved Stephen King, and I'd watch anything with monsters and aliens and vampires, even when it meant I was scared to death! I remember being 12-ish and watching Aliens at a friend's house. I asked my mom to wait for me at the end of the driveway (it was long and spooky and dark) with a flashlight, but did she? Nooo!! I hauled butt down the driveway when my friend's dad dropped me off, terrified I would be jumped by a slimey alien and loving it. Yes, I'm a masochist. So, although I write hard and soft SF, fantasy, and horror, I probably excel at horror above all else. I love being terrified and scaring other people, too!
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Another thing I did (which I thought I'd mention in a separate post) was doodle. Usually (but not invariably) while I was bored in school. I'd scribble something down, erase it, scribble something else to move the plot along, erase it, and keep on going, working out whole adventures. Like comic strips but with constant erasing.
Subjects? Maps and wars for territory...adventures, usually in space...a lot of space stuff, actually, real and imaginary (and lifted from the imaginings of others)...things blowing up...the usuall thing that could bored but imaginative kids like me in thrall. I probably expended more pencil and eraser on this than I did on my schoolwork. [Well, that explains a lot, like my grades and my present occupation.]
I kept this up through my college days, well past the beginning of my writing phase. I stopped because, well, I no longer had boring classes to sit through...but some of the imagery remains with me, part of the icons of my personal style, I guess.
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I'm young enough to remember what I did and didn't do. I was about 7 when Power Rangers first came on TV, so I pretended to be the Red Ranger with all my toys and I'd fight them and duke them out, lol. Then came Beast Wars: Transformers (still a huge fan of any and all transformers franchises and currently awaiting the movie in July!!!!) and well, I thought I was one of them, then I slowly got into Pokemon and other anime... So to say I still do play act when I'm alone, lol.
And I still don't put it into my writing, maybe I should.
(mostly kidding while I set the way way back machine on the problem, can't quite recall what I played. There were dolls and play doh and trees to climb and mean 'ol Mrs. Grundy next door...Hmm...)
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I remember the last time I played hide-and-seek. It's been awhile, and I'm starting to get pretty bored waiting for them to find me...
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I'm probably one of the younger(ish) people on this board at 24 (although I'm really just guessing at that?) and can I just say that I did actually play fight-the-Nazi's?! We had a very close friend when we were small who was always very into the military and war-games, and we would pretend to be running from and fighting the Nazi's. Didn't have much of an idea what/who Nazi's were when I was young, but we still had fun with it!
Other than that, I always liked pretend-you're-running-away-from-something games and manhunt, and after seeing Star Wars for the first time we played a great deal of Jedi vs. Stormtroopers and such. I used to come up with scenarios in my head that involved me and the characters from a book (or Star Wars, lol) that I'd read, and had a grand old time playing through these scenes in my head (isn't this the Mary-Sue story syndrome? lol). We (my brother and I) attended a Waldorf school until 8th grade, so make-believe play when we were small involved a lot of gnomes/fairies/magic and the like. Somehow I always knew I would never find actual gnome treasure by digging around in the moss, but we had so much fun pretending! I never lost hope :P
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Imaginary games? My friends and I did nothing else during recess in elementary school. Perhaps they were the reason why my teachers thought I was a little strange. . . We would sit on the swings and spin tales about our perspective characters, adding new ones as needed. We called it 'the game'. The name wasn't anything special, but we played either super spies or aliens, usually in a bizarre combination of each other. My favorite character in those games is now one of the main characters in one of the books I am writing now.
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I was the 'moderator' for all of the makebelive games among my elementary school friends. Every year we'd come up with a new "game" and characters, spending our entire recess as different people! My favorite was the year we changed the playground into a sailing ship and tried to reach the end of the world. There were a bunch of Drama Queens (And a few kings as well) so by the year's end our crew consisted of two mermaids, a boy with a pet monkey, a sea witch and my personal favorite, the boy who was allergic to beer. Every time he got drunk we had to chain him to the mast, as he would turn into a dragon! ;D
I love hide and seek! Next time you play, try counting in roman numerals. Let me tell you, getting to fifty is an adventure!
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There's something to consider...yeah, I played "games of imagination" with other kids, up to a point...but by a certain time, 'round the time I first discovered science fiction in a big way, I retreated inside my shell and worked out solitary games...then the next time I shared the products of my imagination was when I started submitting stories to the magazines. (Not that long a time---I'm talking maybe four or five years, tops.)
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My paper dolls had wide bases for their feet, resulting in a fish-tail shape, so of course they were mermaids. They swam all over the living room. The couch was a boat for all my stuffed animals, until Mom wanted to nap.
My little plastic horses ran in wild herds, with stallions fighting for leadership rights. (I was a huge fan of the Black Stallion series.) A few of their Indian friends rode (I had no use for the cowboys). Oh, and I painted them all different colors. My dad groused about my toys being right where he had to walk, on the only open patch of hardwood floor where they’d stand up. They all fell down when he stomped by.
I played constantly with my menagerie of toy and decorative animals. I made paper wings and a twisted unicorn horn for my favorite wild-mustang horse. Also I made wings for my little Dawn doll (half-pint version of Barbie). Dawn was in charge of all the talking animals. When I discovered karate, I thought I was too old for all that stuff. I did keep Dawn's fantasy stories alive in my daydreams, even into high school.
My friends liked to act out social settings with Barbie and Ken; boyfriend/girlfriend relationships, etc. Boring! Hide-n-seek was my favorite, but we called it Ring Up; there was a base, with a lot of chasing, but I specialized in being sneaky while other kids did the running. It was the basis for one of my poems.
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At the risk of revealing my age, when I was a kid I'd play 'Bomb Saddam' we'd park a shooping cart at the bottom of the stairs call it Saddam's bunker and throw stuffed animals at it. (I also loved the first season of Power rangers, I was the black ranger. And Beast Wars was one of the nicer transformers incarnations, I can still remember Dinobot's soliloquy right before he died.)
Also I played a game that ran through my entire life, It became my baby (Otherwise known as my CWIP, continual work in progress.)
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I'm in my late fifties, and I played cowboys (no Indians because we're part-Indian and I had divided loyalties as a result!). I also pretended to be a horse a lot when I was little, jumping bushes and so on. And I played "Superman" with a pink plastic curtain safety-pinned to my shirt. I considered jumping off the porch roof for a while to try to fly, but fortunately, I never tried it (I was sensible enough to have a fear of broken legs, although that kind of fear never kept me from riding real horses once I got one - and I still ride nearly every day). I also had very elegant tea parties and played with paper dolls when I was little, as well as playing with dolls and my pets. By the time I was in the fourth grade, I was writing stories off and on. In middle school (7th-8th grade), I was writing "the great American novel" which involved a lot of hand-holding and initials carved on trees, LOL! I was always making things too (I'm a professional artist now - I suppose the creativity started way back when. . .). I read a lot too, enough to get yelled at about it from time to time. HUGE Black Stallion fan here - and one of my sculptures won "Best in Show" when the Farley family had a 50th anniversary celebration of the Black Stallion series a few years ago, where they showed all the original cover art (this was in Florida) and invited artists to submit art showing black horses. I'm still a huge Superman fan too, although I don't run around in a "cape" anymore, LOL! "Smallville" is my favorite TV show, simply because it's Superman - and Tom Welling's the best "young Superman" ever.
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I'm 28... When I was 11 or 12 we had the Persian Gulf war, so on occaision we fought the Iraqis... Which might give some credibility to the current Iraq war portion of my novel... But I think more credibility comes from one of my best friends, who actually fought in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
But my family was kind of under the influence of a tyranical church institution, so that sort of play happened when no one was looking... We also got hold of pocket knives and carved swords, and had sword fights, super soaker fights... One time I split someones face open with a plastic lightsaber. I learned how to make small ships out of clay and modified Starfleet Battles into the TNG era and played that a lot. And I played with legos till I was 22. I built this huge, four foot long starship with nacelles and EVA pods and a shuttlebay and bridge and engine room and everything... When I moved to California I hid it in a closet, but my brother got a hold of it and destroyed it. It was really cool, I wish I'd have taken a picture of it.
Anyway. Yeah, a lot of that ended up in my book. I haven't figured out how to include the religious persecution into the story yet. (I know, odd huh) Even odder is that somehow I have the feeling that religion is going to find redemption before my series is over. I guess I'm just forgiving about stuff like that.
Except my starship though. I'm gonna have to remember to kick the crap out of my brother again the next time I see him.
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