They call St. Louis, Missouri the Gateway to the West. It
was the city settlers used to cross the Mississippi River and make their way
into the western states to make names for themselves. St. Louis was a gateway
to a new world, a different world than those people had been used to.
Anyone remember this movie? I have it on VHS, and would love
to find it on DVD. The film is all about journeys, transitions, traversing;
discovering. The manor in which the main character, Mary, lives in (which
belongs to an uncle she’s never met) through the bulk of the film has several
hidden doors. Mary finds a few of these doors and discovers her aunt’s old
bedroom and finds her ill cousin, Colin. On the grounds of the manor, is, as
the title states, a secret garden accessed by a hidden door. That door doesn’t
remain hidden for long as Mary quickly finds it. As Mary journeys through each
found door, she experiences, she learns something new. By the end of the film,
her uncle learns how to laugh and she learns that she is loved, she learns how
to love in return, she learns how to cry… But most importantly, she learns.
Doors and gateways are more than just openings between rooms
or separate us from the outside world. They take us from one place to another.
In the real world, they take us from the street into a warm coffeehouse in the
winter time, or simply from the hallways of our houses into our bedrooms where
we sleep off the events of the day. But in the world that is a writer’s
imagination, doorways are so much more. When a character walks through a door,
they can leave the chaos that is a busy downtown street and enter the calm that
is a homely coffeehouse, and that change in atmosphere can change the mood of
that character and change the way they think, change the way they feel about
what is going on in their life. Perhaps that coffeehouse is one of the few
places where they feel at ease and free to just relax and enjoy a cup of their
favourite flavoured coffee. Maybe it’s the place where everybody knows your
character’s name, where they’re not just one of a thousand employees, but they
are Jim, Bob, Evelyn or Tracy. Maybe it is the one place Bob can just be
himself, the place where Tracy doesn’t have to conform to everyone’s standards,
the sanctuary where Jim doesn’t have to follow the rules and the place where
Evelyn can unwind and do whatever the heck she wants to do. Maybe this is the
place where Jim, Bob, Evelyn and Tracy meet and relax. Perhaps they met each
other here and they meet at the same table in the same corner every weekend to
catch up on each other’s lives. And all of that happened because they walked
through that coffeehouse door.
Behind every door is a world different from the one outside it.
Your bedroom has a different feel than your kitchen or living room. It is
probably painted your favourite colour, or maybe there’s a theme going on.
Either way, your bedroom is your sanctuary, your private place where you can
sleep and perchance to dream. You cook in your kitchen, dine in your dining
room, watch TV in your living room and you sleep in your bedroom. Each room is
its own little world with its own purpose in your daily life. In writing, these
rooms have their own atmosphere, and can depict the tone of a scene.
In the realm of fantasy, gateways take us to far off places
and even distant times. The Sci-fi show, Stargate
SG-1 used a star gate to traverse from Earth to the planet of the week in
each episode. That gateway took the Stargate team to another world. Sometimes
that world was really not so different from their own. Doorways are special
tools in writing because so much can be done with them. All it takes is some
unsuspecting character to stumble upon a hidden door and for that character to
let curiosity take over, and boom; you’ve taken that character, and your
audience, into another world. Perhaps, that world is hundreds of thousands of
miles away. Maybe that world is their own world but 100 years in the past or 50
years in the future.
Gateways allow us to travel between this world and other,
and because of that, they are pretty special things. Without the rabbit hole
and this little bitty door, Alice would never have made it into Wonderland. Without
the wardrobe, the Pevenseys wouldn’t have fulfilled the prophecy in Narnia.
Those doorways were important to those stories because they led us into the
world of imagination. Imagination will take us anywhere and everywhere if we
let it. My imagination is pretty expansive and I wouldn’t want it any other
way. My imagination is my gateway into the places my stories are set in and it
is how I escape the chaos that is real life. I believe imagination allows us to
think about things differently; it gives us a new perspective on things.
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| I wonder what's behind this door... |
Imagination is both a place and our passage to that place.
Allow yourself a trip on the ship Imagination and let it take you to
Imagination Isle. It will be a wonderful trip, maybe the best you’ve ever been
on. It is a place that will always be there and, when you leave, will be
awaiting your return.
