The Magic of Reading
I blame my parents. They insisted on reading in my presence every day. Of course, they read me children’s books, Dr. Seuss, the Wind in the Willows and the adventures of Curious George.
Yet even when they were not reading to me, they still read newspapers, magazines and big fat books full of mysterious words. My mother loved thrillers, books that usually had a rose, a gun, or a hammer and a sickle on the cover. My father’s books often had aliens, spaceships or mysterious grey-clad men in pointy hats and dragons on the cover. They didn’t share these books with me, so I knew they were keeping important magical secrets from me. If my parents could read those books for hours -- which to a three-year-old child is a significant fraction of forever -- then obviously there was something there I needed to discover.
I taught myself to read around the age of four. My grandmother asked me to read her a couple of sentences from the Bernstein Bears before my fourth birthday. One of my presents on that birthday was a copy of Where the Wild Things Are. I read it to my mother, only needing her help sounding out a few of the tougher words. Reading was a wonderful feeling, and I showed off my new skill at preschool. The other kids were not impressed by my nerdly aptitude.
I quickly grew tired of reading children’s books. My dad distracted me by buying comic books. I clearly remember sitting on his lap and reading an issue of Legion of Super-Heroes, wondering whether the heroes would ever escape from Asteroid X52.
I devoured comics while asking my parents for “grown-up” books to read. My mother relented when I was five, giving me her much-worn copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune. I didn’t understand most of the book even with her help, but I the experience enchanted me. I held this thick book, turned pages and struggled with small print and polysyllabic words which weren’t even in English. My father gave me J.R.R. Tolkein’s the Hobbit. I made it a bit further into this book on my own, but again the labyrinthine text defeated me. With dad’s help, I was able to make some more progress, once again discovering a world hidden within words and sentences. Once more, this was magic held in my hands.
Complexity is what drove me. I’ve always loved puzzles, and reading was the ultimate puzzle. How did these words work together to make the pictures I imagined? In my head, I saw the settings and characters in the four-color style from my comic books. The things they did played out in panels drawn by my imagination. The stories created new places through arcane means I had to decipher.
Through elementary school I took pride in being a reader. My teachers told me that my books were too difficult for my age, whatever age I happened to be. These adominitions only encouraged me. I broke up my attempts to unlock Dune with forays into the worlds of Madeleine L’Engle or Lloyd Alexander, I always had a copy of my two mysterious novels with me.
I read so much in school that I got in trouble for reading. The Reading class was structured around index cards, color-coded by difficulty of the material. I finished each section before the other students, moving to the next before my teacher gave me permission. When I handed in my reading quiz from the violet section while everyone else was still on green, my teacher asked for a conference with my parent. While waiting for my mother to show up for the meeting, I read about Bilbo tricking Gollum in a game of riddles.
Creating My Own Stories
Being a reader lead me to being a writer. I loved stories so much that I wanted to create them myself. Comics seemed to be the easiest, since they were just a series of pictures with the occasional word balloon. That meant I wouldn’t have to come up with as many words. My mother has a copy or two of my primitive issues of Invisible Lad fighting his nemesis Visible Kid.
When I was eight, I found a new way to create stories: role-playing games, RPGs, specifically Dungeons and Dragons. My grandmother didn’t really understand what she gave me for my birthday; she thought it was some kind of board game. Soon I was delving the deeps with my first-level Elf, Silverein, trying to avoid death by goblins.
RPGs are essentially just tools for creating collaborative stories. At their most unsophisticated form, the stories were simple. A character wants treasure and power and will face monstrous obstacles to get them. Eventually the basic premises became unsatisfying. We developed settings for the adventures, histories for our characters, and piecing together larger plots that explained why we went from dungeon to dungeon. While playing, we came up with dialogue for our characters extemporaneously and had to decide how “the character,” as opposed to the player, would react to danger.
In middle school, I was in class for the Extended Learning Program -- what we referred to as “study hall for smart kids.” A friend and I were writing a comic script based on a super-hero game we played in recently. The teacher encouraged us to instead write a short melodrama skit or two.
The entire class got involved. Other students told me what kind of characters they wanted to play and what they wanted to happen. I wrote it all down and added my own twists on the threadbare plots. It was exactly like playing RPGs, only this time girls were involved and no one was making fun of me. The skits were staged for the school at a talent show and to our great surprise, the other kids liked what we did.
I was the biggest nerd in the school by this point. I had earned my geek status by winning science and math competitions. I was mocked in general for my glasses, reading instead of talking to people -- especially girls -- and talking openly about comic books or games with my friends, even when other people -- especially girls -- might hear us.
When it came time to write short stories in English classes, I remembered how well people reacted to my skits. I worked harder on those stories than I did on any other homework. The result: once again fellow students -- especially girls, that one girl in particular -- told me they liked what I had written. My teacher asked if I minded whether she used one of my stories as an example for other classes.
That was one of the greatest moments of my childhood, even better than finally understanding my favorite novels. This was praise I had earned. It wasn’t given to me because I had a reputation as a smart kid, or because math was easy, or because I could memorize facts and recite them later. I had succeeded at telling stories, something I’d been wanting to do my entire life.
I’ve been telling stories ever since. In high school this not only included publishing short works in school publications and writing columns for the paper, but in trying to write books -- horrible awful awkward teenage books. In college I took several fiction writing and playwriting courses, and sent a fair number of stories to the rejection mill.
One Literacy to Rule Them All?
Perhaps because of my love of science fiction, I always wanted to have my own computer. My family pitched in to get me a Commodore 64, with a tape drive and the text games Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Zork. I taught myself a little bit of BASIC and how to make very ugly graphics, but there wasn’t a lot more I could do with that system.
My father purchased an Apple IIe for his business a couple of years later, and I helped him learn how to use the machine. He loved computers as much as I did, and he would challenge me to all kinds of games -- with real graphics! -- and encouraged me to learn to type and play around when he was done with work. In school they were trying to teach us the things I had already learned on my Commodore using TSR-80s. More than once, the teacher of the class mirrored my father and asked for help from the students who had been playing with these things for years.
Playing video games and talking about comics in specialty stores introduced me to the existence of bulletin board systems, BBSes, during high school. Each board would allow me to find a legion of fellow geeks who were happy to spend hours typing messages about why the Watchmen was the greatest comic ever or giving the details about our awesome fight against the red dragon last weekend. Soon I was playing games online through posts on Usenet forums in 1992. I tried to build my first web page in 1994. The page only had a section about me, a short story, and a pixelated picture of an RPG character. In 1996 I was using online services such as America Online to share stories on forums. I joined chat room games and was soon creating games for others.
In 1998, a good friend got me a job updating the Lawrence Journal-World website. This job required me to stop dabbling at the edges of the World Wide Web and learn real HTML coding, the basics of web design, and learn how to manipulate javascript and cascading style sheets.
I was responsible for not only posting stories from the newspaper but to add multimedia content. At first this meant processing photos from the paper and putting them into the online text, but soon it included grabbing audio clips from interviews, incorporating video segments from 6 News, and fleshing out stories with links and documentation. I became an advocate using the website as more than a mere digital copy of the newspaper. I was one of the voices pushing the idea that the website should be the primary source for news, with its own original content that would be cherry-picked and edited for print or television later.
This led to management of the website for KMBC Channel 9, where I had to teach reporters how to be part of the new media revolution. I spent most of my day looking at how content was being presented to audiences online.
There’s a massive cultural shift happening on the web. People have been using this medium to share stories that traditional publishers would not touch. Webcomics such as Penny Arcade or Sluggy Freelance have been around for more than a decade. Many blogs are presenting experimental stories that often would not be considered for publication. There are online video series such as the Guild or Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog which have gained serious attention in Hollywood. People are creating entire mythologies on forums which lead to modern urban fantasy in the best New Weird traditions, such as the creation of the Slender Man and the related Marble Hornets video series.
Through my internet literacy, I’ve seen these developments. My love of reading and writing, inculcated by my parents and reinforced by my experiences in school, shows me that this new medium is not only the future of storytelling but its present.
