The Calvin Influence

Tonight I realized one of my most consistent influences as a middle grade writer has been Calvin and Hobbes. I never noticed it before, but after watching the documentary "Dear Mr. Watterson" it's hard to ignore. I remember reading one of the rare interviews Bill Watterson gave when he was still writing the strip, explaining that Calvin's mother and father had always gone unnamed because their names weren't important. Everything in the strip was filtered through Calvin's perspective, and he only ever saw them as Mom and Dad.

In FOLLOWING INFINITY, the manuscript I'm pushing these days, Molly's parents are never mentioned by name, which was done by design. The same thing can be said for the one before it, THE GHOST OF LAKE EMILY, because all of the action is about what happens to the kids. The parents went nameless because they were, to a certain degree, peripheral. That's a thread I see in almost everything I've written in the past ten years, with only a handful of exceptions when the parents have been directly involved in the story.

Like a lot of people could claim, much of my childhood helped me relate to Calvin. I grew up in a house filled with stuffed animals. I had a wild imagination that my sisters had very little interest in trying to keep up with. One of my favorite playgrounds, when the seasons allowed, was the woods behind our house, complete with enough mucky streams, fallen trees, and briar thickets to give me more settings for afternoon adventures than I could ever exhaust.

I find it interesting that I've identified this influence right now. I'm at kind of a writing crossroads, and I feel a little bit of Calvin pulling at me. I've got three works-in-progress that I would consider possibly viable manuscripts, and I'm trying to decide which of them deserves my main writing focus. The one that feels it would be the most fun is something of a contemporary fantasy about a little boy with a big imagination. I finished a draft of it a few years ago and it was a bit of a misfire, but I've never been able to shake the concept and I'm kind of itching to take another crack at it. And now with my actual summer vacation only months away, I'm thinking that if I dug out my old Calvin and Hobbes books, revisiting those characters and that unique childhood perspective would likely help me make my decision.

But even if it didn't, it'd still be great fun to check in with those snow goons again.