The Big Friendly Giant and Seed of Creativity

Steven Spielberg is making a movie of The Big Friendly Giant. (squee)

Steven Spielberg is making a movie of The Big Friendly Giant. (squee)

The BFG was one of my favorite books when I was a kid. It is hard to explain how much this book means to me.

I grew fast. I was almost always the tallest kid in my class. When I read this book for the first time, I found two characters I could identify with, but so much more than that, I found a world that I wanted to spend more time in. I pretended I was the giant, and acted out not only scenes from the book, but I invented new ones.

When I was in the third grade, I volunteered to write our class play, and of course, I based it on The BFG. It was the first thing I ever wrote. I even starred as the BFG, and I directed the play. I even set up a foley artist (though I didn’t know that word at the time) to do sound effects off stage.

This is one of those books that had such an effect on my life that I can say I would be who I am or doing what I do without it.

Igniting your child’s imagination

Books like this one have a special power over our imaginations. They are important for children, but in many ways, they are even more important for adults.

Somewhere along the way, many of us are taught to stop playing, stop using our imagination. We are all lessened by this. Imagination and play are tools to not only help us relax, but also to grapple with abstract concepts and work over problems in different ways. Play is important.

I plan to see The BFG when it comes out, and I hope it awakens parts of me that went dormant long ago. What reawakens your sense of childlike wonder and play? If you can’t think of something, what are you going to do to try to bring it back?

Originally published at www.projectshadow.com on December 10, 2015.