The Dragon Experience

On stories that take you away.

Hi friends.

I started physical therapy yesterday (for minor, boring reasons that no one needs to worry about), and, for the first time, I had dry needling done. I spent the entire session feeling both deeply uncomfortable and yet absolutely certain that it was helping in some weird and unknown way. Reminds me of the editing process, I thought.

Afterward I sat in the workout room, quietly high from the needling, doing my little stretches with one of those cursed bands. I chatted with the woman exercising next to me about her reading habits, which were mostly fantasy novels. She said she had tried reading a climate fiction novel with her book club but there were too many hurricanes in it, and the story felt too close to home. She wanted to be taken away from it all. Dragons were what she wanted, she said. You and everyone else, I thought.

But also I was thinking in general about the reading experience she was describing, which was one that would remove her from the present tense of her life. She read so she could shut off one part of her brain and just be one with the book. I wondered for a while about how to create a fun reading experience where people would be captivated enough to give themselves over to a book entirely for a while. It’s about the writing itself as much as it is the subject matter, but it is still definitely about the subject matter.

For some of us (me, anyway), it’s hard not to write about right now, hard to not write about the moment. (Or a metaphor that matches to the moment.) But what a gift if I could give them a dragon for a while.

Could I even write a dragon story though?