Author Will Ludwigsen earns his “Explain Your Latest Work” badge with this Big Idea about A Scout is Brave. Come find out how scouting and chthonic horror join forces to… well, you’ll find out.
WILL LUDWIGSEN:
How (and more importantly why) does a person come to write a novella about a boy moving to Lovecraft’s Innsmouth in 1963 and starting a Scout troop with a very peculiar new friend?
Well, mostly because I, like Bud Castillo in the story, really had a thing for handbooks when I was young.
Even before my mercurial father gave me a copy of the 1963 Boy Scout one when I was nine, I was already in love with the idea that calm, stable, and reliable experts had written down exactly how to do things.
I read handbooks on making movies (though I didn’t have a camera), building soap box derby cars (though soap hadn’t been sold in wooden boxes for thirty years), running a model railroad (though we had no room), and surviving in majestic forests (though we’d moved to the palmetto swamps of Florida).
I was a kid in the Eighties learning skills from the Fifties.
When I was finally old enough to join the Boy Scouts, I was the living embodiment of the breathless, “gee whiz!” writing style of their handbook, ready to draw the sweet scent of the pines into my lungs and walk elderly ladies across the street.
Then I met actual Scouts.
Like Bud in A Scout is Brave, I discovered that no one – boy or adult – took the handbook as seriously as I did. They wanted to chop down trees and light things on fire and chase each other through the woods in the dark as though their handbook was Lord of the Flies…
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Source: The Big Idea: Will Ludwigsen
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