MY LITERARY HERITAGE

I learned to read when I was in grade 2 and I have not been able to put a book down since. In grade 3 I was already writing my own stories and reading books waaay above my supposed reading level. I had already polished off most of the Harry Potter series and The Hobbit. Looking back on the stories I used to write, the inspiration is painfully clear and the stories themselves are beyond awful but I was eight so I am going to cut myself some slack. My reading habits never really swayed and I used to read the same books over and over from the library, mostly because I was too enamoured with the Harry Potter world to care about much else, but there were two instances in my literary history where my reading and writing habits changed drastically.

When I was 10, my dad gave me a set of books that a friend of his lent to him, The Belgariad by David Eddings. This was the first High Fantasy series that I had ever read and it blew my tiny only-read-Harry-Potter-over-and-over mind. It opened me up to a whole new world of writing that I never thought possible. To have so much detail in a world that is completely and utterly a machination of a writer hopped up on coffee was nothing short of a miracle to me. Eleven years later I can tell you exactly what happened across the combined 10 book series of The Belgariad and its sequel The Mallorean and I can say that about very few books in my library. When I finished these books I tried desperately to find other fantasy novels that could take its place; Percy Jackson, Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, Gone and a host of others that I loved and that entertained me in their own ways but never scratched the itch that The Belgariad gave me. That is until I started reading Terry Pratchett at the end of my first year of university. I wish I could be as clever and as imaginative as the late Sir Terry Pratchett. The Discworld series was like the second coming of Christ to my literary Christianity and I absorbed as much as I could within a few months. Almost instantaneously my writing style began to emulate Pratchett’s. A tongue-and-cheek style mixed with jokes, a message and a great story? Now that was something I could get behind.

This is my literary heritage. This is the clan of writers I belong to; writers who find this world of ours too boring for our own good and decided to create another one that suits us. Escapism is a very real thing when it comes to writing anything, not just fantasy, but to me it was like a sacred torch that was passed down to me by the literary gods themselves. Tolkien himself wrote that he was very unhappy with the state of British mythos, more specifically its lack of existence. He said that Britain did not have an expansive mythology like the Greeks and Romans, so he created the lore of the Lord of the Rings to serve as the mythology of Britain. The absolute mad lad. He created one of, if not the most, well-loved and amazingly written worlds out there that totally changed fantasy as we knew it and still sixty-seven years after the first book was released it is still considered to be the pinnacle of fantasy writing, and he did it because he thought Britain’s cultural heritage was boring.

This is why I align with fantasy and not the other genres I have read in the thirteen years since grade 2. All our set-work books and assigned poems all had their own wonderful literary history behind them and I hated almost every single one because it wasn’t a part of my own self-made heritage. English in high school gave us the literature that makes any playwright or pompous hipster fangirl and English in university introduced me to African literature, which my intellectual soul was starved for. Did I enjoy them? Most of them, yes. Are they a part of my literary heritage? No they are not because I do not feel like they are mine or that I can identify with them and I feel like there are others out there who feel the same way. I doubt I can find a single person who can tell me what their English set-work books were throughout high school and what they were about, because it was not something that a lot of us saw ourselves in and that is the beauty of fantasy writing because we can create our own world to place ourselves in, a world where another ten-year-old would feel most at home and become another torch bearer.