Capturing Literature as it flows from the Author's Car-Seat

Daniel sometimes maintains his own soliloquy in his carseat while I'm driving, telling me stories that seem to pertain to superheroes, stories which I can hardly follow, partly because of his soft preschooler voice and distance in the mini-van, partly because of his monotone which might seem rambling to the casual by-passer, and partly because if you haven't followed the "narrative" from the beginning, it might seem that there's rather little "thread" to it. But recently I took the time to actually listen to him and write down what I could of one such delivery, and this is what I captured:

"...but the peanut butter - this is really peanut butter - the peanut butter landed on, umm... on the, the other, on the other bad guy's helper, and then a beetle and a cockroach went on his head, so Daddy, so he got them off by killing them with a killing thing..."

One question I had leading up to this transcription was whether he was merely telling me about some show he had seen, frame by frame, so to speak, or whether he was spinning entirely new yarns from his own fertile imagination.

I've decided that this is definitely a case of tremendous personal creativity at a very young age.

(January 13, 2010)