All The World's A Stage

I've always been creating stories.  Even before I could write, I made stories up in my head, or more often dramatised the lives of my Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles* action figures, or seen heroes rise and fall in the rankings of a company of pro-wrestling toys.  My Star Wars Micro Machines smuggled spice and broke the record for the Kessel Run in the midst of a bedroom-engulfing civil war, and my Enterprise discovered strange, new worlds in the bathroom.  That imagination never really went away, it was just honed and focused into what one might call more adult pursuits.  Instead of going "pew pew" as tiny TIE fighters chase X-Wings across my duvet, I roll a dice as tiny TIE fighters chase X-Wings across a gaming board.  The "pew pew" is silent.

In short, I'm a gamer and a geek, always looking for an outlet to play games, but through these games I am given the opportunity to do what has long been my passion - tell stories, create characters, and see what they get up to in their own world with their own rules.  That is where writing is such a gift - it is the power to create your own world and its players, and trot them across the stage and manipulate them like a child playing with their dolls.  To be able to build a reality and hopefully share it with someone else is a remarkable capability that humanity possesses, and one I feel tremendously lucky to be modestly skilled at (if I do say so myself).

 Are you a writer?  Is creating a story something you can't seem to help, something that you just love to do?  Feel free to leave your story about creating stories.  Until next time, here it is for your quiet reflection on how awesome the power to create stories is, your moment of zen:

*Yes, in the UK they were called Hero Turtles, not Ninja Turtles, because the word 'ninja' was considered too violent for British children. But that's ok, because on International Talk Like A Pirate Day, I'd just like to point out that ninjas suck, matey.