Hunting Big Foot: Why I Write Fantasy

by Carrie Jones

It’s all Bigfoot’s fault. I wanted to find him. Every day when I was a kid, I’d rush through my homework, breeze through a call to my mom at work, gobble up my snack, gulp down my apple juice, and head to the woods in my backyard.

Then I’d be incredibly quiet.

I was hunting, you see. Only I didn’t have a gun. (Not that I would have used it, anyway. I was one of those kids who read Charlotte’s Web and became a vegetarian because, well, what if all pigs were like Wilbur, and they could really talk and feel?)

Fortified by meat-free spaghetti leftovers, I’d head to the woods, glassy-eyed, breathing as inaudibly as I could. I tried to walk with quiet, rolling my feet inwards as I stepped in a straight line, moving like a fox. The wind whipped my hair. The maple leaves fell down. The cars on the highway zipped by, but I ignored them all. I was on a quest for Bigfoot.

Yes, Bigfoot, the man-beast of the Washington woods, that smelly recluse, subject of horror movies. I, Carrie Elizabeth, would find him in my backyard in Bedford, N.H. I would find him and … and … and …

Then what? I wondered.

That’s the question that still always gets me: Then what?

I hunted Bigfoot the same way I hunt after characters when I write fantasy or speculative fiction. I hunt because I want to dream and to imagine. I hunt because I want to create worlds with other possibilities. I hunt because I want to escape normal.

Our world is full of responsibilities. We pay bills. We do homework. We get sick. We argue with our relatives. We worry about war and the economy and finding someone to love. Fantasy offers hope. It shows us there are other potential Big-footed ways of living. There are possibilities of lives and worlds greater than our own and if those possibilities can be imagined, maybe our own lives can become grander things. Maybe we can be a boy wizard who defeats the ultimate evil. Maybe we can find an entire new world by leaping through a cupboard. Or even if we can’t be those characters, we can be our own heroes, pushing ourselves to our greatest limits by following their examples.

When I write fantasy I am stunned by my characters’ abilities to deal with their massive problems and it gives me hope that I can deal with my own. Compared to fighting off a pixie invasion, dealing with the fact that I forgot to pay my cell phone bill is a breeze. I like that. I like the fact that characters don’t give up even when their mentors die; even when they are facing the ultimate evil and they only have a .02 % chance of succeeding. I want to be more like that. So I write it.

That isn’t my only reason, however. Fantasy delves into the realm of universal truths. It can be about peace and justice without seeming like an after school special or problem novel. When we write it we remind ourselves about love and truth and good and we remind ourselves about hope and magic and dreams.

If you suck away the every-day complicating details like homework and parents, and make the dramas big you can really hit on those universal truths. You can build stories for kids that are about good and triumph and hope. Kids deserve those kinds of stories. They deserve characters who fight the trolls, who find Bigfoot. They deserve heroes like themselves. They deserve to believe in magic, in their dreams and in themselves. 

I think that as writers we deserve that, too.

There are people who spend their lives looking for Bigfoot. There are entire websites about it. There was a sighting once by an apple orchard in Bucksport, Maine. That’s right near where I live now, just twenty miles away. I can’t imagine twenty miles is much for Bigfoot. It isn’t much for anyone. We all travel much farther than that in our writing journeys.

 There are other people who spend their whole lives looking for some sort of truth. There are websites and churches devoted to that search too. Then there are those of us searching for the perfect story.

I am still looking. Maybe for Bigfoot. Maybe for truth. Maybe for other things. That’s why I write fantasy. I write it because I can’t stop looking for answers, can’t stop hoping for a better world and a better self, can’t stop dreaming and believing in things I don’t quite understand.

I think I glimpsed Bigfoot just once, shuffling into my woods, starting me on my adventure. That’s enough. Sometimes you just have to put your hands on a keyboard. Sometimes all it takes to write truth is just to believe.

 

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