Thursday, March 27, 2014

Finding Inspiration: What Has Inspired Your Writing?



My children’s book that I am working on publishing, The Clumsy Princess, is really a story about my friend’s little girl, who we’ll call “L.” L is a sweet, stubborn, adorably fierce and fearless 2 year old. After L spent another afternoon in the Emergency Room, this time for taking a header off of an older sibling’s top bunk (nothing had to be casted that day, thankfully!), I referred to her as an “accident-prone princess.”

                                           The face of fearlessness!

I thought about how Disney princesses appear so perfect: graceful, beautiful, well-dressed, and well-spoken. Their whole goal in life is to find their true love and live happily (and richly) ever after.

What if, instead of presenting our girls with an impossible standard to achieve, we created princesses who were more like real people?  What if we stopped subtly telling them that their goal should be to find a man to "rescue" them, but instead encouraged them to celebrate their differences and embrace life?

What if there were stories about clumsy princesses, and shy princesses, and bossy princesses, and tomboy princesses? 

Those are the kind of princesses I want my daughters (should I have any) to enjoy; princesses who are flawed, and wonderful because of it. The idea for a book series was born!

Please share! I want to know, where do you get your inspiration? 

 

3 comments:

  1. Wonderful Amy! Yes, human, imperfect, amazing Princesses!

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  2. I LOVE this idea of all kinds of princesses!! Yes, yes, yes!! Back in the day, I would have fit into the feisty "Tomboy" category! Love it!! Rhonda Paglia "Grammy Pags Stories"

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  3. I would have been a tomboy princess too! With scraped knees and dirty fingernails and a snake I caught, I was the very essence of tomboy... We need to tell more girls that its ok to prefer climbing tree to tea parties (or not, if tea parties is what they prefer!).

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