Just the other day I was thinking about all of the crazy games of pretend my little sister and I and all of our friends used to play together. They were all extreme melodramas; castaways stranded together on some tropical island jungle, orphans trying to escape the asylum (we loved that word and never seemed to put it together with insane asylum, even sister detectives up against the greatest crime ring ever gathered. All the stories we made up involved sets of sisters, since our friends were also sisters. We were either all related, or we'd trade sisters and become two sets of siblings again only this time there would be one blond and one brunette apiece. (It's funny but Erin and I used to be mistaken for twins and so would our two friends, which I why I think we liked to switch sisters, it made each of us unique in our little unit.) We'd run around the yard in all sorts of crazy get ups, since both families had trunks of dress up clothes and old hats. A deck would become a cabin or a boat, the railing could be a horse or a tree, we made up our worlds as we went along and to this day I swear I could almost see each and every setting we created clearly in my mind. That was how powerful our imaginations felt.
This thought came up because I was writing a paper about how the internet might have shortened attention spans, leading to writers possibly changing how they structure longer pieces of prose. I observed in one of my literature classes this semester that a lot of modern authors have stopped following one character throughout an entire novel and have started to write about a large cast of characters, hopping among them like a frog from a cat. Novels have become, as my old friend put it, "choppy". At first I only equated this to the shortening attention span,but then my friend said something else that might have redirected my blame a little. She called modern novels, "scene-cutting fiction". And she is exactly right, modern novels do seem to pattern themselves more after movies than literature. The leaping from character to character is very much like a movie jumping from scene to scene. Even the long flashbacks feel more like movie scripts.
So, does that mean that movies are having a drastic effect on literature? And, if that is the case, what is it doing to the generations growing up with scenes and characters handed to them instead of having to envision for themselves what they hear or read? At first I placed movies in a sort of modern remake of the oral storytelling tradition, but then I realized that even back then the listener had to see with their imagination everything that was being told to them. Even watching a play takes a little imagination for the viewer to step outside of him or herself to really watch the play as if it were happening in some kind of real world setting. Movies and television take that need completely out of the equation. What is that doing to imagination?!
Could reading be declining simply because children don't have to use their imagination anymore? Think about it! A child is placed in front of the television at an very early age. They hear and see everything they need to in order to keep up with the story being told to them, so there is no room for personal interpretation. Unless you actually turn off the TV for large amounts of time and make sure to read to your child, preferably from a book without pictures, where does this child ever learn to actually USE their imagination? If they have video games they don't even have to use their imagination during playtime! They can see their characters and the environment they want their character in right there on the screen, no filler needed. As a child I used to spend a LOT of timing playing with my toys and pretending they were all over the world, but that was because I had to. I didn't have elaborate play-sets with backgrounds and accessories. I had a fist full of "Pretty Ponies" and the couch! Sometimes in play those ponies weren't even ponies! We weren't allowed any sort of violent toy, so sometimes a pretty pony had to substitute for a slingshot. (They worked really well too, if you twirled them by their little tails and let them fly. Mums never really found out why so many ponies seemed to lose their tales. "I don't know how this happens, Mummles! Oh, Erin's eye? I think she bumped it.")
So what does all of this mean? This means that I fear for my nephew's play time. Will he be able to experience all of the crazy pretend adventures that I did and still do cherish from my childhood? The whole reason I'm a writer is because of the free range I had with my imagination growing up. I LOVED pretend and as I grew older and pretend for teenagers becomes less accepted I started writing down all of the stories I used to act out as a child. Those were the years my stories were really cultivated. I think my writing is still running on old games of pretend, the stories are just a little less melodramatic and peopled with more realistic characters. (The characters I used to pretend to be were all insanely emotional. Granted, I was insanely emotional at the time, one of the few blessings of growing older is the development of better self control.)
What are we missing out on by destroying imagination at such earlier stages of child development?! Maybe the novel isn't dying out but murdered by encroaching technology that preys on our more lazy tendencies? Yes, reading a book takes more work than watching a television show, but it is so much more rewarding.
