Telling yourself stories

When I was in high school (and into college, I think), I used to tell myself a story. In my head, in my journal, whatever. It was called "Betsy goes to meet the dragon" and it was kind of based on THE HERO AND THE CROWN by Robin McKinley (which you should read). Betsy was always going to meet the dragon, but she never got there. She walked down a barren valley, a valley of fear or a valley of death--anyway, it was barren--and it was the way to get to the dragon. She had to fight the dragon, but first she had to get through the valley. And I told myself this story because it was a way to translate difficult, stupid things in life (um, SATs? I was so naive about what was difficult) into something that meant something. cause if you're going to fight a dragon, what you're doing is meaningful. SATs on their own? Not so meaningful.

I do sometimes wonder why I never let myself get to the dragon.

Did anyone else do this? George Orwell did, apparently. His version was a little different, though: "...for fifteen years or more, I was carrying out a literary exercise of a quite different kind: this was the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. I believe this is a common habit of children and adolescents. As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my ‘story’ ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw. For minutes at a time this kind of thing would be running through my head: ‘He pushed the door open and entered the room. A yellow beam of sunlight, filtering through the muslin curtains, slanted on to the table, where a match-box, half-open, lay beside the inkpot. With his right hand in his pocket he moved across to the window. Down in the street a tortoiseshell cat was chasing a dead leaf’, etc. etc. This habit continued until I was about twenty-five, right through my non-literary years." (George Orwell, "Why I Write," 1946. There's a nifty new Penguin edition.)

(Secretly, I still do it, though I don't tell the "Betsy goes to meet the dragon" story anymore, and it's more like I compare what's going on in my life to a favorite scene or character in a book, straight up.)