There I am in a rainbow-coloured floor-length gown. While I have not worn a dress since the mid nineties, I think the rainbow motif shows some intuition. I'm wearing a dress in about 75% of the portraits. That includes one in which I sport a cute skirt, while wearing my hockey skates. I am wearing my skates in a few--my friend, Jean, spilled the beans about my being a hockey player in a desperate attempt to hold the interest of a couple of--um, what's the word--chauvinists? (Can you be chauvinistic at nine?) She was trying to hold the interest of a couple of skeptics. One of the skeptic artists managed to allow me a hockey helmet but felt behooved to make it bright pink. Ces't la vie.
My head (with or without hockey helmet) is humungous in most of the pictures. I choose to see this as an accurate representation of my intellect rather than a reflection of the developmental stage of their drawing skills. I wear glasses in about half of them, my hair tends to be on the longish side and my paper wardrobe is far more colourful than my real one. In one of them, I'm wearing a lumberjack shirt, knit cap and seem to have a five o'clock shadow. I love them all and I can't help notice that in almost every single one, I look undeniably happy. Excellent intuition.
Our time together included a talk about where writing ideas come from. I told them about hearing a line I liked, writing it down and then, "What If"-ing it into a story. The skeptics looked dubious.
"Give me any ordinary object," says I.
"The school," says they.
"What if the front doors were magic and if you turned around and walked through them backwards, it gave you a Super Power?"
And that was it. They were gone. The Super Power was Invisibiltiy! Yes! Three of them started clapping and bouncing spontaneously - that's our favourite Super Power!
What if the school was made of cake and the kids ate it all and then there was no more school? (Even the skeptics were rolling now.) What if the cake grew back no matter how much you ate? (parlayed the school-lovers). What if everyone tasted their favourite kind of cake? What if you had to turn backwards at the end of the day to go through the doors to undo your Super Power and what if you forgot and what if you were invisible forever and what if . . . .
Big eyes, bums bouncing around on the carpet, talking over top of one another, various branches of the story taking off in little side conversations. Trickle to waterfall in less than a minute. Literally.
What if you could find that creativity again?
Don't tell me you have none. Creativity comes standard on all models. It may be buried, shoved to a back corner in the storage room, but it's still there.
Whether you use your imagination to What If a story to life, or to create a great new way to introduce an old idea to your class, or to sit in your cubicle and daydream about your favourite Super Power--exercise that imagination. Honour your creativity, in whatever way makes you happy. Jean's little artists were right about me - nothing puts a face-covering smile on my face like the excitement of writing.
Except maybe sharing that excitement with children.
Monica is the author of "Thanks for chucking that at the wall instead of me."
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