My boy is a genius--Moms can always brag
I just finished untangling a scene that Aidan imagined. Earlier, we spent almost an hour hashing out the details. He had a sense of what he wanted, but I didn’t see it. I was being too human. It is very important to him that elves should not just be tall humans—or that dwarves are not simply short, powerful humans. The different races must each have their own idiosyncrasies and separate philosophies. They need to be culturally different as a result of their physical makeup and different lifespans. (There are words for that: embodied cognition.)
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Two halves make a whole-a writing partnership
Nothing like a good math metaphor. Aidan is the plotter. I am the plodder. That’s how we started. It is how we continue. When he was 13, I thought it would be a good idea for him to write down the stories that he played with all the time. He didn’t build Lego for the sake of the structures—but to sustain the story in his head. He didn’t just play with his 47 stuffies, he had an entire world that they inhabited, where they moved around the city, using the sewers during the night, in a fantastical criminal underworld. Aidan imagines—and I poke holes in his ideas until he shores them up sufficiently that it all makes sense to me.
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