The Amateur Slueth

Princes and princesses are fun to read about, but why read bedtime stories of damsels in distress when you can read about spooky attics and secrets in old clocks and about a girl who is literally saving the world every day?!

You may or may not have guessed that the girl I’m referring to is Nancy Drew. I was such a fan of Nancy Drew at an early age, that I was convinced she was a real person, and even more that I could be her. Dad began reading the popular sleuth series to me when I was 5 years old, to help me get to sleep. The problem was that I would keep asking him to read another chapter and I couldn’t sleep at all. It was more like I wouldn’t sleep, knowing that Nancy and Ned and Bess and George were still in danger.

My favorite book out of the entire series was the Moonstone Castle Mystery, involving a strange castle in a hidden forest. Nancy received a bizarre gift—a moonstone—that lead her to the “haunted” castle and to discover the missing granddaughter of the Bowens. The scary voice of the villain was chilling and the climax of the story had me in utter disbelief.

The author behind the pseudonym Carolyn Keene had an imaginative writing style that put me right into the haunted manor, or trapped in the closet with the black widow while my friends were being held at gunpoint. It was a thrilling bedtime experience and my dreams were full of alternate endings and stories involving Nancy that hadn’t been created by Carolyn Keen.

I began creating my own bedtime stories shortly after I ran out of Nancy Drews to read. They were mostly pictures—not very good ones at that—and a few misspelled words. But they were the seeds of flourishing ideas. In my books, Nancy had a different set of friends, ones that aligned more with my current time. Her adventures were more current also. I remember one bedtime story I wrote where I took Nancy to an abandoned island that was supposed to look much like the island in the original Jurassic Park movies. Ned had been stranded on that island for a long time, running from danger and growing a full beard. He was clearly a damsel in distress. Nancy saved Ned, after fighting off the sharks and sand scorpions and (you guessed it) angry dinosaurs. I remember that she took his hand, and they ran together onto Nancy’s mega yacht—I always thought Nancy deserved a yacht after all those cases she solved in previous books.

Nancy and Ned sailed off into the sunset, but it couldn’t end there. I was trying to be clever and make the reader only “think” the story was over. Nancy and Ned encountered many pirates who jumped onto their yacht. The two of them did their best to fight the pirates off but they (clearly) needed back up. So I brought Bess, who I renamed Ella, and George, who I renamed Dora in on their own yachts. They helped Nancy and Ned fight all of the pirates and then celebrated by drinking root beer floats. The picture I drew of the root beer floats was comical, because many years later as an adult I was convinced I had drawn them all drinking regular beer.

It is truly incredible how bedtime stories shape a young person’s mind. The brain activity that happened in my dreams and beyond after a bedtime story is what fueled me into becoming a creator and an open-minded inventor. When I have little ones of my own someday, I want them to know the gift of a good bedtime story. I want their minds to run wild, as young minds should. I want them reading stories that will make them feel like the knight in shining armor, just like I felt like the amateur sleuth. The world is, after all, anything they create it to be.