Wednesday
Picking Ava up from school, walking to the car…
Ava: “Daddy, I have to tell you about something that happened today”.
Me: “Oh lord, what now… which of your besties are no longer taking to each other”?
Ava: “It’s not that, I wrote a story for Haylie and she got mad about what I wrote”.
Me: “OK, what kind of story”?
Ava then proceeds to tell me that the kids in school have been asking her to write stories using themselves as characters. This is news to me, I know she likes to write but I wasn’t aware that she was doing this for her friends.
It turns out Haylie asked for a story where she was a superhero. Ava wrote one…you can see the scan of her story just below…
As some of you may have guessed, the problem Hailey had with the story was that her father had been murdered by a criminal. No question, that’s an upsetting thing to read and think about and had I been Hailey, I too would have been upset and angry at Ava for writing it.
In any case I was quite worried about it and told her that when we got home we would read the story and it would help me understand what was going on.
So I read it. I realized almost immediately what Ava had done and I have to say it made be intensely proud because it showed a much more mature understanding of superheroes and the tropes that define them in 25 lines than I have seen in entire essays written on the genre.
Ava understood that one thing that most heroes have in common in almost all writing and most obviously in fiction, science fiction and comics is that a hero is not born from having “nothing to do on a Friday night” but rather from an intense and painful experience that more often than not comes from a parent dying.
Now this isn’t limited by any means to the genres I mention above, think about Disney movies and Pixar, Star Wars, traditional literature and so often in children stories in which the unifying note seems to be the passage of a character thru a horrible event and into the next phase of their lives…
Snow White’s parents
Nemo’s mother
Spiderman's Uncle Ben
Spiderman's Uncle Ben
Hiro’s brother and parents
Luke and Leia’s parents
So we sat together and I asked her why she had written what she did. And once agin she surprised me. She pointed out that so many heroes lose a parent or parents, she said:
“Batman’s parents are murdered, Superman loses his parents and his whole world, The Flash lost his Mom and his Dad goes to jail”.
I pointed out that it was a big deal that she recognized this basic point that is inherent to almost all superhero origin stories and that what she wrote was entirely appropriate for her story.
However I also said she should apologize to Haylie for hurting her feelings but that she should also explain why she wrote what she did and maybe that would help her understand that she was not writing a mean story but simply following the pattern of superhero stories in general.
And that is what she did and Haylie is no longer mad at her. Crisis averted.
The defining book on this was written by Joseph Conrad in The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Well worth the read to see where so many storylines come from.
So, just to recap. Ava’s story has many if not all the beats of a hero’s origin:
An ordinary person comes into contact with extraordinary circumstances and is forever changed.
A powerful agency captures the person to perhaps exploit their powers.
The hero escapes and returns home only to find a tragedy has befallen their family. A tragedy that could have been prevented had the hero been there.
The trauma gives the hero their raison d’etre and he or she goes out to right the wrong.
The criminal pays the price.
The hero begins their true path into a larger world.
All from the pencil of an 8-year old…pretty cool, huh?
