Some books spawn incredible things. Take, for instance, the Lord of the Rings movies which broughtfhat epic to life and created real-world locations that can still be seen today. Fun t-shirts and other fandom paraphernalia is an easy way to show off your obsession. Even debit cards were predicted through science fiction!
While there are potentially numberless creations stemming from words on a page, one of my favorite real-world adaptations has to be Harry Potter’s quidditch.
And I am on a team.
I still chuckle every time I talk about it. Quidditch tryouts, quidditch practice…I even have a quidditch tournament this weekend with teams from not just Utah, but a few other states as well! I had dabbled in it a few years ago, but I never actually thought I’d ever play on a real quidditch team. Dreams do come true!
When I told my coworkers on Friday that I had quidditch practice in the morning, they just laughed. That is, until I kept talking about it and they realized it was a real thing.
I mentioned quidditch practice briefly to a teammate during Friday’s ultimate Frisbee game, and he looked at me as if he knew the burdens of Saturday morning responsibilities and added that he had Dark Arts in the morning as well, so he understood. Again, he was joking. I was not.
I won’t go into details of how the game is played (I’m still a bit hazy on a lot of the rules myself), but I can tell you that as far as adapting a sport with flying brooms and balls for Muggles (myself not included in that category) to play, this turned out rather well. In fact, during practice on Saturday, I had the time of my life. There’s even tackling! For a former rugby player, that’s probably the best part.
While I would certainly love to talk about quidditch ad nauseam, I did have a different purpose for this post.
J.K. Rowling could never have known how popular her books would be (especially considering she was rejected somewhere along the lines of 80 times before she found a publisher), much less that anything from those books would make their way into the real world. But that’s the power of imagination. She found something that she found fun and entertaining, and thought, “Hey, maybe more people would also find this fun and entertaining.”
So she wrote us books and changed our lives.
Fans will take what they love and make it as close to reality as they can. While I have yet to construct my own Death Star, I won’t say that I haven’t tried (Minecraft counts, right?). As a writer, I don’t necessarily think people will take my stories and recreate parts of them just for fun. I just write what I find fun and entertaining and hope that, hey, maybe more people would also find it fun and entertaining. If people never go out of their way to recreate moments from my stories, that’s okay. If they do, then great! But I don’t sit around trying to come up with the next real-world adaptation that I can insert in my book. I write because I love it. And, like J.K. Rowling, I don’t plan on opening up my own fantasy kingdom at Universal Studios while I’m writing.
I’m just here to tell stories.
What are your favorite fiction-inspired realities?