Creative Writing Inspired by the British Museum

As an English major, I read a LOT. I read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Austen, Milton, all of the immortal authors, but in my spare time I have made a resolution: I will only read children's books. Not little picture books or anything, but young adult fiction, where there is no sex, no perversion, no truly heinous violence and the story always ends happily one way or another. In these books, I find worlds that don't have that sharp, poisonous edge found within the pages of the "great writers" or really any book meant for adults. Young adult books create worlds that are accessible, worlds that can take me away from reality for an hour or two, worlds I want to visit. The most recent book I've read is called "The Red Pyramid" by wildly popular young adult fantasy author Rick Riordan (of "Percy Jackson and the Olympians" fame). Riordan is a master at creating worlds I want to get lost in, and this latest of his books has a particularly interesting early setting: the British Museum.

In the first action-packed scene of the story, the young heroes find themselves in the room where the famed Rosetta Stone is kept, a room I have now visited three times. The dark forces of ancient evil are rising and the stone explodes, releasing five of the old Egyptian gods, including Set, who will be the ultimate villain in this tale. The two teenaged protagonists must now learn to master the ancient power they have just discovered exists right below the surface of the everyday world. This introduction into this book (the first in a series) is incredibly compelling. Riordan manages to link his story to two things that I find incredibly important: 1) a familiar place, and 2) a well-known and secretly magical artifact. There is something amazing about imagining that such a famous object as the Rosetta Stone, a feature in countless grade-school history books, as a magical catalyst. Young imagination instantly turns the stone into an object of wonder and mystery, and yet it is something that anyone visiting London can walk in front of and take pictures with for free. It suddenly can become so much more than just a rock with writing.

There seems to be something universally fascinating about fictional properties of objects in museums. When I was a child, one of my favorite movies was one where the dinosaurs in New York's Museum of Natural History come to life. The wonderful "Librarian" movies with Noah Wyle have many scenes that take place in museums. Later in "The Red Pyramid," the characters use the reassembled Egyptian temple in the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a magical object. In Riordan's "Percy Jackson" series, the first pivotal action scene takes place in the Greek artifact area of the Met. The films "A Night in the Museum" revolve completely around the concept of museum objects being rather livelier than would be expected of them.

I guess my point is, the things behind the glass don't just fascinate us for their historical or artistic value, but also for their imaginative value.