I can remember a time that I allowed the words ‘I don’t like reading’ to leave my mouth and was proud to have done so. I was five years old - possibly six - and I can remember where I was and to whom I was directing that sincere but misguided sentence. I wasn’t to know at the time, but it would only be a matter of days before events were set in motion to completely reverse my opinion on books. And how could I, or anyone, have guessed? After all, the catalyst for my love of reading - and by extension, my literacy - was not a book, but a film.
My cousin came to visit and clutched in his hand a VHS tape labelled ‘Jaws’, but which had been taped over with a film that I’d only vaguely heard of. My cousin was very excited for me to see it. What was it called again, I asked him with only mild interest. ‘Star Wars’, he said, ‘Return of the Jeddy [sic]’.
I was not prepared for the onslaught of excitement that accompanied every second of that movie. To my five year old brain, this was the world I should have been living in. Lasers, lightsabers, Star Destroyers and motherf**king CHICKEN WALKERS, dammit. We watched it from start to finish. Then we started again. I could only understand perhaps half of the words in the opening text crawl. It didn’t matter. We wanted to be transported to a galaxy far, far away, whatever the hell that meant.
A few months went by in which I became an obsessive geek. I consumed the first two films in reverse order and, once I realised this was what I’d done, watched them chronologically again. I made a Darth Vader costume. I acted out fantasy scenes from sequels I was inventing in my head. And then, one day, I went with my mother to K-Mart and saw something amazing.
It was a book, but there was something odd about it. It had ‘Star Wars’ written across the top, but it was called ‘The Last Command’. None of the movies were called that. I wasn’t to know it at the time, but I’d been sucked into the brilliant marketing machine of Lucasfilm. I was buying into their franchised-out spin-offs. The book was roughly 400 pages long and dense as any science fiction novel. Again, I was beginning at the final installment in a trilogy. I guess that didn’t really matter. I was at the most seven years old and it would take me a full year to stop selecting my favourite sections and re-reading the descriptions of space battles and lightsaber duels.
I bought more Star Wars books. I read more fight sequences and fantastical confrontations between superhuman badasses. It wouldn’t be long before I found the first book I could read from cover to cover, follow the story, and find myself coming back to the real world several days later hungry for more. Lucky for me I had a backlog of novels I hadn’t understood fully before waiting for me to consume and love. I bought more of them. I was approaching ten years old. I was a full on geek by this point.
It’s about then that something unexpected happened. I began to surpass my classmates (some of them, anyway) in the field of English. Where reading and writing were concerned, I was top of the pile. I won awards for knowing how to spell. I was correcting people when they said ‘could of’ instead of ‘could have’ (an insufferable trait I still can’t shake). I wrote stories. My vocabulary expanded daily. In précis, I knew language back-to-front. Some of it, I’m sure, came from the spelling sheets we did in primary school. Most of it was the result of being familiar with language and its use and reinforcing that by continually reading and writing.
I branched out in high school. Any science fiction book was automatically on the reading list. From there came fantasy. Then crime fiction. Then historical fiction. My interest in sci fi quickly translated to ‘real-sci’, for want of a better word, and I began reading the base-level books that allowed me to figure out my personal philosophies and opinions on any number of topics.
I’m 25 now. Muphry’s law dictates that, having sat here and talked about my literacy for paragraphs on end, I will have made many writing errors in this post. But the point of this isn’t to prove I can spell or to brag about an early grasp of reading.
It’s to say thank you to the thing most responsible for my ability to write at all. I don’t doubt that had I not encountered Star Wars as a kid I’d still have grown up able to read the newspaper and write an email. But I certainly would not have a love of reading, nor a passion for writing. I owe Star Wars a lot. In this case, the soulless marketing machine was a force for good. I try to remind myself of this when I’m cringing at George Lucas’ dialogue in the prequels.
There’s a message to take away from this. You never know what’s going to lead to what in your life, or the lives of your children. When a kid says they hate reading, that isn’t what they mean. What they mean is ‘I haven’t found anything that holds my interest’. Give them the freedom to find what does hold it and it can take them anywhere.
Failing that, just sit them down in front of Return of the Jedi. Worked for me.
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