“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”
– J.R.R. Tolkien
I was often criticized, as a youngster, for my reading habits. This was especially true when I was in my early to mid-teens. The truth is, outside of assigned reading for classes, about all I read was escapist fiction, science fiction in particular. I read some nonfiction on my own, of course, on matters to do with natural history and astronomy, but when you think about it, those interests – which were anything but mainstream in my small home town – were a sort of escape in their way. But when it came to reading fiction, science fiction (available fantasy having been limited to Tolkien’s work at that time) was literally all I read. And reread – books of my own being hard to come by, lacking any real income of my own. The town library was hardly well endowed with such fiction, and one of the librarians was among those who expressed “concerns” over my steady diet of escapism.
Pick a dearly held habit by any teenager, and a rationalization for it will be supplied – by that teenager. Or by the person that teenager grew up to be. It won’t always be simply self-serving, much less flat-out wrong. I had mine, being in general a misfit. Those less-than-mainstream interests cited above were shared by very few of my classmates (in the case of astronomy, by none at all), and in a small, conservative town, my corresponding lack of interest in sports and automobiles was viewed with suspicion. The things that interested me set me apart. Lacking much of a social life, as a result, I read books. The stories offered an escape from the often painful awkwardness of not fitting in, and at first, that was all that I needed. But they also fired my imagination, and awareness of the power of storytelling slowly grew. Looking back, it now seem inevitable that I would try to tell stories of my own.
And in the fullness of time, I did. It took a lot of time and practice (and life experience) to take me to the point of telling tales with any degree of ability, but I got there. And with the advent of modern self-publishing, I now have something of a readership. I still read a fair amount of fiction, mostly science fiction and fantasy, but without the feeling that I need to dive undercover and pull the lid over the top. (The recent exception to this being the so-called “Pandemic Year” of 2020, when I indulged heavily in “comfort reads.”) But where I most often find an escape from the real world these days is in the writing I do.
It’s every bit as possible to escape into an imaginary world of your own creation as a storyteller, as it is to become so involved with the tales of others that the real world fades away. To nonwriters, this sort of escape may seem to verge on the pathological, but if you’re a writer of fiction, you know to leave a trail of breadcrumbs to lead you back home. (And hope there are no mice following behind, of course.) I often get so wrapped up in my work that I lose track of time, and frequently walk around the house thinking out loud on some aspect of a current work in progress. When the work is done and published, it then has the potential to become an escape for anyone who comes along and reads what I’ve created. That’s an interesting feeling, and a pleasant one, to think that I might be giving some stressed-out soul, somewhere out there, a few hours of respite from whatever troubles them. It’s a motive to keep writing, all by itself. And why not? We’re all in this together. Every now and then we should get away from it all, and do so in good company.
Under Desert Stars 