the ultimate adventure

[adelaidesean]

When not making LOLzillas for the infamous Rob Hood, I do try to get some work done. Below is the text of a speech I gave last week, immediately before handing a bunch of Premier's Reading Challenge awards to over a hundred primary students at my old school.

The idea was to encourage the kids to remain excited about reading--a very worthy goal indeed. I don't know if I achieved it, or if there's much in this speech for regular readers of this journal, but here 'tis anyway...with apologies for the lack of formatting and the occasional typo that might have slipped through...

I reckon I have the best job in the world.

I get to sleep in all day, if I want to. I don't have a boss telling me what I can and can't do. I can sit around in tracky-dacks or pyjamas as long as I feel like it, and never shave again.

Best of all, I'm doing something I love. Writing. Telling stories. Entertaining people. Life couldn't be sweeter.

I guess I've always been a bit of a story-teller. In a box somewhere I still have my old grade 5 creative writing exercise book. That book contains my earliest stories, complete with pictures. The stories are pretty bad, but the pictures are a lot worse. Looking them, it's easy to see why I didn't become an artist.

The stories are full of ghosts and spaceships and aliens and things blowing up. I don't know what my teachers thought of them. Well, I know what one of them thought, because in grade five she read one of my stories to the whole class, something I was both embarrassed and excited about. That was my very first audience.

This small encouragement led me to write stories for my fellow students in high school, right here in Pulteney. I wrote a story once that featured these buildings and all my teachers--sort of like Lord of the Rings but funnier--and my friends loved it. Not sure about the teachers, though. Their depictions weren't terribly flattering.

Why spaceships and ghosts and all that stuff? Well, it reflected what I was reading.

This year I celebrated my 40th birthday, which means I was 10 in 1977. A movie came out that year, one a few of you might have heard of, that changed my life. Star Wars: A New Hope was the most exciting thing I'd ever seen on the big screen. It was perfect for a 10 year-old, and could have been written especially for me. I saw it dozens of times, read the books, and dreamed of writing my own Star Wars novels.

Of course, that particular dream came true many years later, when I was asked to write for the New Jedi Order series. Having written lines now for Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia, I can tell you that it still feels a bit like a dream.

And it keeps on coming. There's a computer game being launched next year called The Force Unleashed. I've written the book based on it, and I had more fun with that than just about anything else. If you like things that blow up as much as I did (and do) at your age, you're going to love this game. And there's even some romance in it, for the girls.

But that wasn't all I enjoyed as a kid, so it's not all I work on now.

If you take how I feel about Star Wars and multiply it by about a million, you get my feelings for Doctor Who. You've all heard of Doctor Who, right? I loved Doctor Who long before Star Wars came along. I read the books, and still have them in my collection. It's a complete obsession.

So when I had the chance to write something in that universe, I knew I had to go for it. I could pick any Doctor from the first eight, and I chose my favourite, the third, the one with the frizzy white hair and the old-fashioned, yellow car. He may not be as cool or as sexy as the latest couple, but I've always like him the best.

So, Doctor Who and Star Wars. Two of my great loves from 30 years ago, part of my job now. No wonder I love it so much!

But they weren't my only favourites. I didn't just like books based on TV and the ovies--although a couple of my favourite books have been made into movies since then. On the whole not terribly well, I should say. You might know one called The Dark Is Rising. I've read the book twenty times if I've read it once,and it's infinitely better than the film. If you saw the movie and thought it was okay, do yourself a favour and pick this one up. It'll blow your mind.

Another was The Wizard of Earthsea. I read this novel every year. Studio Ghibli--the animators who made "Spirited Away" and other wonderful stories--made a movie out of this series, and it kinda comes close.

But nothing on the big screen matches a book for depth and spectacle, and that's because Hollywood and even Japan is limited by money and actors and directors and special effects.

When you're reading a book, there are no limits, except for what's on the page.

Your imagination can do anything. It can create whole new worlds filled with thousands of incredible things. It can tell stories that reach right down into the depths of a person's heart, and capture lives making and breaking in a moment.

There's no way a movie can capture such things--not fully, not so spectacularly.

When you close your eyes, the only thing setting the scene is your imagination. When you open a book, you are letting an author set the scene for you. The rest is up to you.

I'm very excited to be a writer. I'm honoured that readers let me and my stories into their lives. I wish I could peek into their heads and see what their versions of my worlds look like. As well as Star Wars and Doctor Who, I've written numerous books, some of my stories are set a million years from now, some set right next door, among people just like you and me.

Reading books can take you to amazing places. I dreamed of being a writer, and here I stand, being one, just because I read a lot when I was a kid.

I'm glad that all you bright kids are here today, encouraged to read and loving what you're reading. If you also dream of being a writer, I'm an example of what might happen, if you pursue your dream hard enough. If you don't want to be a writer, then I advise you to follow whatever dream you do have wherever it will take you.

Books teach you about life, but life is the ultimate adventure.

Enjoy it, and write your own story as you go.

Comments

[ladnews.livejournal.com]

:-)

And :-( for the lack of cool factor. I wonder if it was called the Teenage Mutant Giant Robot Word Championship or something it might have more of an appear, at least to boys!

[gloripebbles.livejournal.com]

Example - my Bionicle Nut Son aka BNS (he rivals that other Dr Who freak I live with) thinks the fact a Bionicle he thinks is way cool (released in US this week) has just became Waaaaaaaaaay Cool as it is described as a Mad Scientist..... I think you'd be onto something!

As long as - world domination, anti-adult, unintelligble title meaning is included you'd be on a winner. Oh & keep anything like 'politician' out ;)

Did yours have an open choice of matter? I've known some that have defined author &/or title lists etc - really takes the edge off it.

[ladnews.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure what restrictions they had to work under, but I suspect there would have been some guidelines. Really should know, if I'm giving them awards for it. Will hastily backfill some research... :-)