Legos

Many days, the outdoors captivated my attention: sweet smells of pine, maple and wet earth in the darker seasons; sunlight, hills, and fields of green in the sunny seasons. But, of course, some days were too cold, wintry and with a bone-chilling wind that sliced through any jacket. "Cat in the Hat" days, these were, though the insides of houses contain their own expeditions and adventures: building extravagant blanket forts or racing cars with epic gear-shifting noises, multi-floor golf with ping-pong balls and duplos goals, spider soccer, cards, and, of course, legos.

Downstairs, in a crotchety closet, board games are stacked from floor to ceiling, and, even better, building toys. Linkin logs, duplos, knex, legos, all labelled in their respective bins, bulging with colorful happiness awaiting design. Phil and I would clear space, a great, empty expanse in the floor, and lug out the giant plastic bin of legos, grunting with the effort. Then, all gleeful smiles and excitement, rain pattering at the windows and glupping from the eaves and gutters, we tipped over the bin, dumping all the legos into the clear. Phil would start constructing a racecar, all giant wheels and aerodynamic prospect. I'd daydream a castle, a spaceship, an underwater cavern, or a raid on a dragon's lair - a short story captured in a still of legos, beginning in the heat of battle before broiling to a swift, possibly bloody, resolution.

Today, I would think to myself, I'll build a spaceship. Oh, it would be magnificent! Sharp wings angling backwards like a fly, giving a sleek and speedy design, countless lasers arrayed in a deadly composition, a chaotic design making it difficult to disable all these neon weapons. It would have a glassy pilots den, a steering wheel driving system with several strange joysticks nearby, four giant, metallic engines in the rear, like an x-wing, only closer together, escape pods along the side, dangerous looking pirate-astronauts piloting the ship like true rebels, scoundrels each one.

Then, scarcely as I'd begun imagining, I'd dive into the pile, picking out every piece matching some ideal struct in my spaceship daydream.  This silver triangle might make a magnificent wing or this underwater piece might serve as an excellent escape-pod front-cover, and on and on. The problem was, this didn't stop. I'd find another piece that made the wing design more fantastic, a sleek-black piece more acutely angled and ideal for the shape of my wings, or a different color scheme of lasers that might make an excellent addition to the ship's underbelly, or 5 more possible designs for the escape pods, some with magnets or spinning parts, so the pirate-astronauts might man an escape pod and shoot lasers to ward off enemy fighters, or launch the escape pods as short-term ships in a small dog-fight. And, wow, this piece allows me to swivel my cockpit open in case I want a parachute-escape in space, or in an atmosphere - totally useful! I definitely want that piece. 

This continued until I'd developed quite a stockpile of pieces, all intrinsic portions of a tree of daydreams, branching out into the most epic of spaceships. So what if I built it it would have 10 wings, 50 lasers, a command center, two cockpits, seven engines, and a small fleet of escape pods. It was magnificent. Once I'd gathered all my prospective pieces, I'd glance over them with pride, a happy creator of the greatest spaceship of all time. Magnificent.

Then, I'd calmly place all my pieces back into the pile and be finished, having never built, nor even started, the spaceship at all. Often I might build a racecar with Phil and race away, never once looking back or considering my time wasted or my endeavor a failure. Why would I? I'd constructed the greatest spaceship of all time, even if it only existed within my head.

It was a long time until I discovered I've the same process with writing.  When I was a child, I read everything I could. When we were not playing games as a family, I was holing myself up in a corner under some blankets, listening to the rain and journeying into the worlds of imagination.  As a child, whenever I could, I constructed my own little worlds created from words, and invented phrases different characters might say, or clever plot twists. While every other child wanted to be a sports legend, an astronaut, a mad scientist, I wanted to be an author, right from the beginning. 

My greatest obstacle, which I found out later, was my legos mentality. I imagined all these great worlds, these deep, clever personas, fantastic settings of all types and colors, and even some crazy, unique stories, but I never wrote them down. I didn't have to, right? I knew what the story was, full of surprises and twists and witty repartee. Wrong.

Throughout high school, I wrote almost nothing of creative merit. I wrote my essays, lousy though they were, and never even bothered listening to teacher's criticism on my work. I got A's, didn't I? What could be wrong with my homework if I was still managing A's? It is a common mistake of teachers not granting the grades deserved, or marking down more for consistent errors not fixed, perhaps, but really it was my fault for not trying to improve. I disliked high school, because my preppy, tiny school contained cliques of friendships where I never felt I belonged. I had a few friends, but none I felt strongly attached to on leaving home for college. In fact, I maintained contact with almost none of them save through the barest of technological means. That's a rabbit hole.

So when I got to college, I received a rude awakening: I didn't know how to write. I had a magnificent vocabulary and enough credit from my SAT scores and AP scores to cover all of my general education classes, so I dove right into upper level courses. And got slaughtered on my first essays. "Where is your thesis?" "What is this paragraph structure?" "Where is the constancy in this philosophical assay?"  I had to start from scratch. Fortunately, I had a wealth of knowledge built up, so I wasn't dead in the water, but I was far behind expectations, and already suffering a brutal series of essay grades (B's - grades in this world are ridiculous.. do some professors feel bad about failing students?)

It took some time, but I harnessed my competitive nature and started collecting knowledge. I read every essay I could find, from celebrated authors like Orwell and Twain, or Swift and Nietzche, or Lewis and Thoreau. I read essays from my fellow students, asking them to share with me if they'd received stellar grades, and learning from their styles and patterns of thoughts. I consumed knowledge, and, before long, it paid off. All my essays began receiving exquisite marks, no longer suffering from significant grammar mistakes or syntactic and semantic holes.
Once again, I returned into my legos mentality, this time with a wealth of production knowledge backing it up - now it was useful. Not only could I imagine all the fantastic conceptions I might place into a story, but I could nurture my ideas into fruition. A seed of thought blossomed into a flowering essay, simple and effective. I've a lot of learning to go; I didn't learn everything there was to know in that short period, but at least I was no longer producing literary failures. I still have a long way to go, but I'm learning so many fantastic ways of arranging lego tiles that every new day is enlightening.

Time to invent some spaceships.