My Strange Inspiration by Willow

My Strange Inspiration by Willow - February 2016 Scholarship Essay

In our lifetime, we always look up to a historical figure that inspires us to be like them and do the amazing things that they did. We might consistently learn about this person in school, or be assigned this random person that we don’t know who changes our views forever. This person to me was Lewis Carroll. He wrote this insane poetry that nobody could even come close to replicating; he was unique, and this is hard to find. Many people try to be something that they aren’t, and can’t pull things out of their imaginations like he did. He took the thoughts and creativity from this little girl that happened to be by and turned it into something we all still admire today. Who wouldn’t want to have dinner with him?
Everything about Lewis Carroll would be interesting to me; what he decides to eat, what he sits like, how he speaks, but I would ask him how the guts he had to write about the strange things that he wrote about. This would take courage, and not a lot of people would exactly like how he came about writing it. He was supposed to fit in with people’s mundane views, and be like the average writer, but he wasn’t. I will always wonder why he stood outside the crowd, and why he never gave in to the pressure of it. I admire him because he didn’t care what others thought; he had the guts to be unique in a world that requires perfection.
Next, I would ask him about what the, “Alice”, was like that he based the character off of. All anyone really knows about her is that she was around 10 years old and thought up all the characters in her wild imagination, but people wonder….What was she like? Were there things that she thought of that you never added to your books? Was she a good child? I wonder these kinds of things because there are so many versions of Alice in Wonderland that nobody would ever know what she was actually like. Even reading the original doesn’t tell you anything about her, so who was this Alice?
What twists did he add to these characters that the little girl didn’t give him? There are always things left out that could have changed the story entirely. Were there other characters? Were there other places then Wonderland? Would you have written different poems? Questions like these pop into my head when I think about the small, left-out details. This could change the way I look at the story and poetry, but I would still want to know. What made him pick certain things to put in and what to keep out? The littlest difference makes the biggest changes.
For the amount of questions I would ask, dinner would not be a long enough time because I know he’d ask questions as well. Those questions would be my biggest curiosities, but I’d have many more to back them up. Just having this opportunity would be something unforgettable. Just meeting him would be fulfilling, even if he’s deceased. To find out everything behind the scenes about a person’s writing is just something that can’t be replaced. This would be one of the best dinners that I’d ever had, regardless of the food and environment. His answers would put my suspicions to rest.