When my 2.5 year old daughter experiences something confusing or frightening, she recreates the experience almost immediately with her Lego people and animals, acting it out over and over, casting herself in different roles including sole audience member, until she is comfortable with it.

Meanwhile, it takes me years to distill an experience into some germ, approaching it from different angles, writing about characters both human and animal, and hoping — much later — to end up with a story worth telling and an audience willing to read it.

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