Bloganuary day 4! Today’s prompt is:

What was your favorite toy as a child?

I hope this isn’t a trend that the prompts are going to get more and more difficult for me to find a way to relate them to writing! But not only was I struggling to figure out how to connect this prompt to writing, I found that I was stuck completely on what my childhood favorite toy was. Now in fairness, that was more than a few years ago, but still. Somehow I suspect that more people are able to instantly call to mind that one toy that stayed with them for years, maybe they’ve never gotten rid of it.

There’s of course my stuffed animal collection, which I still have most of. But they weren’t toys, I didn’t play with them, they were a thing I collected and could never bring myself to get rid of them.

I’m also old enough to know better, yet still to young to care… wait… no, wrong train of thought… I’m old enough that when I was a kid, electronics weren’t much of a thing. Sure we had toys and we played card or board games, but that’s when it hit me – and it all came together about how this relates to writing.

Imagination. The majority of my childhood was spent outdoors. Playing pretend games with friends. Building snow forts. Going on mini-adventures. And when that wasn’t possible (you’ve probably already guessed), I was reading. What made these hours of worthy endeavor was imagination. One might argue that all kids of my generation would be subjected to the same environment of outdoor play and reading, but I can assure you, they were not. I have an older brother, who had scores of friends, and they were all sports-minded. So their time was spent playing all manner of sports and my brother loathed reading.

But me? And my smaller posse of misfits? We were creating grand adventures. Playing out Dukes of Hazard in our small cul-de-sac. Fashioning scenarios of cops and robbers. And all sorts of games with names that are no longer deemed appropriate.

So my favorite “toy” if you will, as a child was my imagination and it’s a toy that I have never let go of and hope that I never will. And with that said, it’s really not a big leap to figure out how that ties in to writing. While I wasn’t much of a writer in my younger days, I do believe that a young mind nurtured in imagination and creativity has the potential to bloom into an aspiring writer at any age.

Over to you 🙂 What was your favorite toy as a child?

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