6 Comments
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Dane Benko's avatar

Perfect story. Got me right back in the headspace of the injustices of being a kid.

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Garrett Strong's avatar

This is so great! I can’t believe it only has 10 likes. I really enjoyed reading your story, so well written! Thank you for sharing

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Brian Bastress's avatar

Excellent story. It’s all there. It’s true as the evening it might have happened.

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Thomas De Moor's avatar

This was wonderful! It's really hard to properly write from the perspective of a child, but you've done so very well. Goes to show how small moments can take on big meaning for a young person.

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Kamela Hutzley's avatar

Thanks for noticing that! This has gone through a lot of revisions, and I think the biggest thing I had to really comb through is the voice. It's a close third, but from an older perspective, and the trick for me was to engage with the child voice directly and with compassion (i.e., make sure I wasn't making fun of her), but then also be able to zoom out and engage the adult voice, with its bigger words and broader understanding applied to the massive magnifying glass kids put on everything. I'm so glad you could feel the importance.

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Thomas De Moor's avatar

Well, you nailed it. Too often, stories from the perspective of a child are childish, not childlike, as if the author looks down on the child. This isn't the case at all here. It's like you say, you've written from her perspective with compassion, and that's really hard to do because it's hard to put yourself in the mind (the costume?) of a child, given how warped our own memories are of that time.

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