Over the weekend, Amazon was selling the original soundtrack to The Wizard of Oz for $3.99 and I downloaded a copy. While I was at the Evil Day Job (EDJ) this week, I started listening to it and my iPod went from the opening sequence to Somewhere Over the Rainbow. It sent a shiver down my spine in a really positive way.
I was overcome by the magic of this movie. Who didn't see this on television as a kid and lose themselves in this world? And then I thought, wow, I tell stories, too, and the idea was overwhelmingly huge at that moment.
It never really hit me before, maybe because I've always had characters and stories in my head. They've been my constant companions from my earliest memories. When my parents dragged me somewhere boring when I was a kid, I'd find a corner and daydream my stories. When I played dolls, I had elaborate stories for Barbie and Ken to play out. When I went to bed at night as a child, I told myself stories to fall asleep because having my mom read one book wasn't enough.
Whatever the reason, it suddenly dawned on me that I'm a storyteller, too. That I create something that would never exist without me. There would be other stories by other writers, but there wouldn't be the stories that only I could tell. How incredible.
Every day I'm creating magic similarly to the way the makers of The Wizard of Oz created magic. Granted, it isn't exactly the same. Movies and books are two different media and my stories are aimed at an older audience than the movie was, but it's close enough. I'm actually having trouble finding words to describe how awed this left me when I realized it.
Stories = magic. A story world is one a reader can immerse herself in and forget about normal life for a short while. Story worlds (at least in genre fiction) have a rhyme and reason to them, things happen for reasons we can see and understand as opposed to real life where things happen for no apparent cause. The world can be as fantastic as The Wizard of Oz or as ordinary as in Friends, but it's still a different world, a chance to escape.
And a chance to experience a kind of magic. Wow.
