Markirah Shaw
Writing with Style
Final Draft
Castle Park
Castle Park is a little wooden playground in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey. It’s about a five minute drive from my house and has been there, according to the welcome sign, since “this 13th day of April 1993.” The park is made mostly of unpainted lumber. The only color is on the sign out front that shows a red castle with two tall towers and two red flags waving in the breeze. Big red letters say “Castle Park.” But that’s the extent of the color.
The inside of the park is just as plain. The flooring was once a thick layer of old, faded wood chips that, if you stepped on a piece in just the right way, it would jab into the bottom of your shoe. You had to stop and yank it out before resuming play or else it would embed itself deeper into the sole of your shoe or, even worse, your foot. I also remember falling down on these chips. They stabbed and scratched at my skin and stuck in my frizzy hair. It took several minutes to remove them all because the chips seemed to burrow deeper towards my scalp the more my father tried to pull them out.
Today the floor of the park is made of a layer of tiny white pebbles that make a scraping sound underfoot and don't hurt the skin as much as the wood chips had. At the end of the summer with a new school year fast approaching, bits of leaves get caught between the pebbles. The children, frantically squeezing out every last moment of summer, grind those leaves up into tiny flecks of yellow and brown, turning the ground into an artistic, abstract pattern.
Castle Park was created by volunteers brimming with community pride, but to foreign eyes, the park looks like a waste of money and time. A stranger would see a beat up swing set with seats that are permanently bowed downward from so many kids standing up on them to swing high and then leap off. A stranger would see a seesaw that balances parallel to the ground instead of favoring one side or the other like it should. He would also see a metal slide that, in the height of summer, gets so hot that a child's legs stick to it, bringing her to a dead stop and her legs start to burn like a steak on the grill.
Despite this seemingly unfortunate view, the tiny patrons of Castle Park enter and see hundreds of possibilities for an adventure. Right inside the entrance is an open air gazebo with a bench running along the octagonal sides. This is where the adults stay, keeping one ear on the conversation and the other listening out for their child. In a game of tag, this gazebo turns into the Safety House where nobody can touch you and you can catch your breath.
A little ways past the gazebo is the sagging swing set and slide. Children jump off the swings as Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, soaring towards the second star on the right. Kids who dare to play the pirates have two options: either be punished by way of the sizzling slide or escape back to Pirate’s Cove. The Cove is a large alcove marked with a black skull-and-bones flag and an anchor further past the swing set. There is a treasure map nailed to the wall so it can’t travel around. There's also half a wooden rowboat (to make easier entrances and exits), and a treasure chest with nothing in it except a mound of invisible gold coins and jewels.
The main attraction is of course the Castle, which takes up most of the park. There are two entrances into the Castle: a simple wooden ladder around the back side, the slide, and a treacherous bridge made of knotted and crisscrossing ropes, making it look more like a spider web than a bridge. The ladder is easy enough to climb. The rungs were built close together with short legs in mind. The trick of it is to be the first person to go up the ladder. That ensures that you are King or Queen and anyone who comes up after you are your knights and jesters, according to your whim.
The slide is a more advanced entry point because the metal requires a high tolerance for pain, something that children aren't prone to have. The other option is to climb it standing completely upright, but only the kids with gymnastics lessons could manage to pull that off because the slide is a curving, snaking thing with a steep incline. This method demands good balance.
The bridge is the most dangerous entry into the Castle. It requires similar strategies as the slide. Going across on hands and knees assures a better center of gravity, but the rope burn is torture on the exposed skin. The other option is to stand up and walk across the wobbling ropes, leaping over the large gaps. Many children twisted their ankles in those ropes, so most of us stayed clear of the Spider Web Bridge.
Most adults call this place the park, but for me it was the Castle. I always pestered my father to get there early so I could get up the ladder first. I saw myself as an Elizabeth-esque ruler, both warrior and queen. I would drag my sister and brothers into my imaginary adventures and rule over them with an iron will. My sister, Sarah, was always the Queen’s Advisor. I didn’t torture her in my stories. My brother, Dan’l, played static characters like the grumpy dwarf living in the Pirate’s Cove since he has cerebral palsy and can't climb with his leg braces. But my youngest brother, Jeff, always played the villain. He was (and still is) good at being annoying and spiteful. He played his parts very well.
One day it finally dawned on Jeff that the villain always dies at the end of every battle and he threatened to quit. After that, each trip to the park proved an interesting challenge for me as I had to create moments of suspense and twists in the storyline to make Jeff believe that he had a chance of beating me. Creating more intricate stories kept my siblings interested in playing with me.
For an example, one time I had Jeff play a dragon who wanted to be Lord of the Castle. He was on the ground, growling and slashing the air with his hooked fingers, and I was up in the tower, brandishing a stick that was my Excalibur. I taunted the dragon, “Come up here, fiend, if you dareth to come!” and once the ladder was clear of people, Jeff the Dragon climbed up, making a loud thumping sound with every slow-motion footstep he took. When he reached me, the battle was on. Jeff launched his “venom” all over the place and I made sizzling sounds for him when his spit landed to simulate a dangerous corroding liquid. But in the end I won the fight...somewhat. In my mind, I swung Excalibur through the air and decapitated a twenty-foot-tall, spiked, acid green dragon. What my father saw was me whack my little brother in the face with a stick. That day at Castle Park was cut short. We had to go back home to clean Jeff up and to put me in time-out. I still chalked it up as another victory for Queen Markie.
Several yards behind Castle Park is a large, well-kept baseball field. The sand is raked into a complicated grid pattern, the grass is a flat sea of light green, and the bullpen is a clean, snug little area with a long bench, a trashcan, and a large water cooler. The four-tiered bleachers wink in the sun. It seems a cheeky “Ha, Ha!” for the ancient park with its splintery wood, fraying ropes, and leafy pebbled floor. The crack of bat on ball and the excited cheering of young and old floats over from the baseball field. But the imagined sword falls and war cries inside the park drown out the sports noise. During school hours, I was jealous of the athletic kids for making me look inadequate. But while in the park, I said let them have their primitive stick game. There were adventures to be had, dangers to overcome, fair maidens or charming princes to be rescued or won. The magic of the park erased my insecurities and transformed me into something bigger and better.
Then one day, I literally became too big for the Castle. I don’t remember exactly what day it was when I went over to the ladder that led up to the tower and found that I could reach the very top rung while still standing on the ground. When did that happen? It really did seem like I magically woke up one morning too big to fit my behind in the swing. It seemed a comical farce that I was too big for the balance beam that I had always used during the more suspenseful parts of my battles with my brother.
I had been going to Castle Park since I could barely walk and I thought I would play there forever. I was afraid to let go of it because I thought it meant giving up my favorite part about being a child, which was having an unrestrained imagination. Now what was I supposed to do with all the people and creatures thrashing around in my head? Was I supposed to keep them locked up in my brain? My teachers and father thought it best that I did. I had to focus on more serious things now. I needed an outlet and the solution was sitting a few yards away from the entrance of Castle Park: the public library.
The people in my family weren’t big readers. It’s not that they were stupid, it’s just that they focused their energies on other things: my sister loved playing with and taking care of animals of all species, Dan’l loved to sing Disney songs, and Jeff loved to pretend that he was good at sports. Reading books didn’t have the same allure for them like it did for me. So I sat in the colorful children’s section of the library by myself and read every fantasy book they had. I came across Roald Dahl’s Matilda and thought it described my situation perfectly. All I needed was the telekinetic powers and I would be that little girl surrounded only by a pile of books and her imagination.
In school I was known as "that quiet girl that always carries a book around with her." It was a long but fitting name. In the hallways, I carried a book under one arm instead of putting it in my book bag. During class, I kept my book at the top right corner of my desk in case there were a few minutes I could steal to read. At lunch, I sat in the farthest corner of the cafeteria and blindly shoveled food in my mouth because my eyes were busy flying across the pages of another fantasy story. In gym, I would shove a small paperback book into my pockets and read a few paragraphs while waiting my turn to be pelted with a giant rubber ball. I even read on the bus, though my bus ride was only seven minutes long because my house is very close to the elementary, middle, and high schools. I think my books were a talisman against my peers' judgments. When my nose was buried in a story I couldn't see people laughing at my odd behavior.
The stories I read were excellent fuel for my imagination. I discovered more species of creatures than just the big scary dragons I used at the park. Now there were unicorns, sphinxes, goblins, griffins, fauns, fairies, elves, and the kraken. I also read stories where the hero doesn't always win every battle, even if he does win the final one. With this limitless supply of creativity from published authors, I began to see yet another outlet for my own fantasies, which was writing them down on paper. Writing was a less physically active way of storytelling than when I belonged in the Castle, but it was just as effective and even better because I could make copies of my stories and hand them out to my family. Over time, I lost the yearning to act out those adventures in the wooden park. It became more satisfying to bring my stories to a wider audience of people than just whoever happened to be in Castle Park on the same day that I was.
Even though I outgrew the park, its influence on me never left. The park was a gateway to honing what I was good at, which is telling stories. The park grew smaller, but the adventures I had inside it were so big that they compelled me to go to the library, which inspired me to be a writer and in turn, I am now a Writing Arts major at Rowan University. I knew when I was three years old that I could lure people in with my fantastical tales. Even after my brother got injured while playing a dragon, the next weekend he was more than happy to play a giant living under the Spider Bridge. Castle Park was a way to encourage my imagination and was the first step in the long road to me becoming a writer.
Along the way I have met countless adults who don't take the fantasy genre seriously. Some have gone so far as to tell me that since it's made up, it's not worth reading. I respond that, by that logic, the whole narrative form of Fiction is worthless. Though fantasy is fiction, I believe it has its merits. The well-written works involve multi-layered characters that are relevant to readers, even if the protagonist is the keeper of a talking pig with a literate arachnid friend. There's a reason why fantasy worlds are sometimes called "alternate realities." They are mirrors of ourselves, reflecting back our insecurities, successes, failures and emotions. When someone picks up a fantasy book they are like Alice who climbed up to the looking glass to see what was on the other side. I share Alice's sense of adventure, a sometimes distracting need to find curioser places and then bring a piece back with me to share with anyone who wishes to listen.
Once upon a time, there was a little wooden park….
Writing with Style
Final Draft
Castle Park
Castle Park is a little wooden playground in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey. It’s about a five minute drive from my house and has been there, according to the welcome sign, since “this 13th day of April 1993.” The park is made mostly of unpainted lumber. The only color is on the sign out front that shows a red castle with two tall towers and two red flags waving in the breeze. Big red letters say “Castle Park.” But that’s the extent of the color.
The inside of the park is just as plain. The flooring was once a thick layer of old, faded wood chips that, if you stepped on a piece in just the right way, it would jab into the bottom of your shoe. You had to stop and yank it out before resuming play or else it would embed itself deeper into the sole of your shoe or, even worse, your foot. I also remember falling down on these chips. They stabbed and scratched at my skin and stuck in my frizzy hair. It took several minutes to remove them all because the chips seemed to burrow deeper towards my scalp the more my father tried to pull them out.
Today the floor of the park is made of a layer of tiny white pebbles that make a scraping sound underfoot and don't hurt the skin as much as the wood chips had. At the end of the summer with a new school year fast approaching, bits of leaves get caught between the pebbles. The children, frantically squeezing out every last moment of summer, grind those leaves up into tiny flecks of yellow and brown, turning the ground into an artistic, abstract pattern.
Castle Park was created by volunteers brimming with community pride, but to foreign eyes, the park looks like a waste of money and time. A stranger would see a beat up swing set with seats that are permanently bowed downward from so many kids standing up on them to swing high and then leap off. A stranger would see a seesaw that balances parallel to the ground instead of favoring one side or the other like it should. He would also see a metal slide that, in the height of summer, gets so hot that a child's legs stick to it, bringing her to a dead stop and her legs start to burn like a steak on the grill.
Despite this seemingly unfortunate view, the tiny patrons of Castle Park enter and see hundreds of possibilities for an adventure. Right inside the entrance is an open air gazebo with a bench running along the octagonal sides. This is where the adults stay, keeping one ear on the conversation and the other listening out for their child. In a game of tag, this gazebo turns into the Safety House where nobody can touch you and you can catch your breath.
A little ways past the gazebo is the sagging swing set and slide. Children jump off the swings as Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, soaring towards the second star on the right. Kids who dare to play the pirates have two options: either be punished by way of the sizzling slide or escape back to Pirate’s Cove. The Cove is a large alcove marked with a black skull-and-bones flag and an anchor further past the swing set. There is a treasure map nailed to the wall so it can’t travel around. There's also half a wooden rowboat (to make easier entrances and exits), and a treasure chest with nothing in it except a mound of invisible gold coins and jewels.
The main attraction is of course the Castle, which takes up most of the park. There are two entrances into the Castle: a simple wooden ladder around the back side, the slide, and a treacherous bridge made of knotted and crisscrossing ropes, making it look more like a spider web than a bridge. The ladder is easy enough to climb. The rungs were built close together with short legs in mind. The trick of it is to be the first person to go up the ladder. That ensures that you are King or Queen and anyone who comes up after you are your knights and jesters, according to your whim.
The slide is a more advanced entry point because the metal requires a high tolerance for pain, something that children aren't prone to have. The other option is to climb it standing completely upright, but only the kids with gymnastics lessons could manage to pull that off because the slide is a curving, snaking thing with a steep incline. This method demands good balance.
The bridge is the most dangerous entry into the Castle. It requires similar strategies as the slide. Going across on hands and knees assures a better center of gravity, but the rope burn is torture on the exposed skin. The other option is to stand up and walk across the wobbling ropes, leaping over the large gaps. Many children twisted their ankles in those ropes, so most of us stayed clear of the Spider Web Bridge.
Most adults call this place the park, but for me it was the Castle. I always pestered my father to get there early so I could get up the ladder first. I saw myself as an Elizabeth-esque ruler, both warrior and queen. I would drag my sister and brothers into my imaginary adventures and rule over them with an iron will. My sister, Sarah, was always the Queen’s Advisor. I didn’t torture her in my stories. My brother, Dan’l, played static characters like the grumpy dwarf living in the Pirate’s Cove since he has cerebral palsy and can't climb with his leg braces. But my youngest brother, Jeff, always played the villain. He was (and still is) good at being annoying and spiteful. He played his parts very well.
One day it finally dawned on Jeff that the villain always dies at the end of every battle and he threatened to quit. After that, each trip to the park proved an interesting challenge for me as I had to create moments of suspense and twists in the storyline to make Jeff believe that he had a chance of beating me. Creating more intricate stories kept my siblings interested in playing with me.
For an example, one time I had Jeff play a dragon who wanted to be Lord of the Castle. He was on the ground, growling and slashing the air with his hooked fingers, and I was up in the tower, brandishing a stick that was my Excalibur. I taunted the dragon, “Come up here, fiend, if you dareth to come!” and once the ladder was clear of people, Jeff the Dragon climbed up, making a loud thumping sound with every slow-motion footstep he took. When he reached me, the battle was on. Jeff launched his “venom” all over the place and I made sizzling sounds for him when his spit landed to simulate a dangerous corroding liquid. But in the end I won the fight...somewhat. In my mind, I swung Excalibur through the air and decapitated a twenty-foot-tall, spiked, acid green dragon. What my father saw was me whack my little brother in the face with a stick. That day at Castle Park was cut short. We had to go back home to clean Jeff up and to put me in time-out. I still chalked it up as another victory for Queen Markie.
Several yards behind Castle Park is a large, well-kept baseball field. The sand is raked into a complicated grid pattern, the grass is a flat sea of light green, and the bullpen is a clean, snug little area with a long bench, a trashcan, and a large water cooler. The four-tiered bleachers wink in the sun. It seems a cheeky “Ha, Ha!” for the ancient park with its splintery wood, fraying ropes, and leafy pebbled floor. The crack of bat on ball and the excited cheering of young and old floats over from the baseball field. But the imagined sword falls and war cries inside the park drown out the sports noise. During school hours, I was jealous of the athletic kids for making me look inadequate. But while in the park, I said let them have their primitive stick game. There were adventures to be had, dangers to overcome, fair maidens or charming princes to be rescued or won. The magic of the park erased my insecurities and transformed me into something bigger and better.
Then one day, I literally became too big for the Castle. I don’t remember exactly what day it was when I went over to the ladder that led up to the tower and found that I could reach the very top rung while still standing on the ground. When did that happen? It really did seem like I magically woke up one morning too big to fit my behind in the swing. It seemed a comical farce that I was too big for the balance beam that I had always used during the more suspenseful parts of my battles with my brother.
I had been going to Castle Park since I could barely walk and I thought I would play there forever. I was afraid to let go of it because I thought it meant giving up my favorite part about being a child, which was having an unrestrained imagination. Now what was I supposed to do with all the people and creatures thrashing around in my head? Was I supposed to keep them locked up in my brain? My teachers and father thought it best that I did. I had to focus on more serious things now. I needed an outlet and the solution was sitting a few yards away from the entrance of Castle Park: the public library.
The people in my family weren’t big readers. It’s not that they were stupid, it’s just that they focused their energies on other things: my sister loved playing with and taking care of animals of all species, Dan’l loved to sing Disney songs, and Jeff loved to pretend that he was good at sports. Reading books didn’t have the same allure for them like it did for me. So I sat in the colorful children’s section of the library by myself and read every fantasy book they had. I came across Roald Dahl’s Matilda and thought it described my situation perfectly. All I needed was the telekinetic powers and I would be that little girl surrounded only by a pile of books and her imagination.
In school I was known as "that quiet girl that always carries a book around with her." It was a long but fitting name. In the hallways, I carried a book under one arm instead of putting it in my book bag. During class, I kept my book at the top right corner of my desk in case there were a few minutes I could steal to read. At lunch, I sat in the farthest corner of the cafeteria and blindly shoveled food in my mouth because my eyes were busy flying across the pages of another fantasy story. In gym, I would shove a small paperback book into my pockets and read a few paragraphs while waiting my turn to be pelted with a giant rubber ball. I even read on the bus, though my bus ride was only seven minutes long because my house is very close to the elementary, middle, and high schools. I think my books were a talisman against my peers' judgments. When my nose was buried in a story I couldn't see people laughing at my odd behavior.
The stories I read were excellent fuel for my imagination. I discovered more species of creatures than just the big scary dragons I used at the park. Now there were unicorns, sphinxes, goblins, griffins, fauns, fairies, elves, and the kraken. I also read stories where the hero doesn't always win every battle, even if he does win the final one. With this limitless supply of creativity from published authors, I began to see yet another outlet for my own fantasies, which was writing them down on paper. Writing was a less physically active way of storytelling than when I belonged in the Castle, but it was just as effective and even better because I could make copies of my stories and hand them out to my family. Over time, I lost the yearning to act out those adventures in the wooden park. It became more satisfying to bring my stories to a wider audience of people than just whoever happened to be in Castle Park on the same day that I was.
Even though I outgrew the park, its influence on me never left. The park was a gateway to honing what I was good at, which is telling stories. The park grew smaller, but the adventures I had inside it were so big that they compelled me to go to the library, which inspired me to be a writer and in turn, I am now a Writing Arts major at Rowan University. I knew when I was three years old that I could lure people in with my fantastical tales. Even after my brother got injured while playing a dragon, the next weekend he was more than happy to play a giant living under the Spider Bridge. Castle Park was a way to encourage my imagination and was the first step in the long road to me becoming a writer.
Along the way I have met countless adults who don't take the fantasy genre seriously. Some have gone so far as to tell me that since it's made up, it's not worth reading. I respond that, by that logic, the whole narrative form of Fiction is worthless. Though fantasy is fiction, I believe it has its merits. The well-written works involve multi-layered characters that are relevant to readers, even if the protagonist is the keeper of a talking pig with a literate arachnid friend. There's a reason why fantasy worlds are sometimes called "alternate realities." They are mirrors of ourselves, reflecting back our insecurities, successes, failures and emotions. When someone picks up a fantasy book they are like Alice who climbed up to the looking glass to see what was on the other side. I share Alice's sense of adventure, a sometimes distracting need to find curioser places and then bring a piece back with me to share with anyone who wishes to listen.
Once upon a time, there was a little wooden park….