In listening to the autobiography of Helen Keller, the famous deaf and blind woman, I was struck by a story from her childhood about a story she wrote in braille when she was 11 called The Frost King. She felt the story was quite good, and she sent to her friend the director of the Perkins school for the Blind as a present. He quite liked it, and published it in an alumni magazine, and it was subsequently also put in another publication. Well, it turned out the story was suspiciously like a story called The Frost Fairies, and certain passages of her story were word for word segments from The Frost Fairies. There was quite a scandal, and young Helen had to go to a hearing about it. Helen maintained at that time she had never heard of The Frost King, and her teacher Anne Sullivan never read it to her. Well, it turns out that it had been read to her when she was small.
I’ve often considered writing a book, but I’ve read so many books, (I’ve read about an hour a day since I was a teenager), that I would be concerned the ideas in any story I wrote would be something ingested over those 4 decades of reading, that I might not even realize were not original ideas to me.
The primary impact on me though was thinking about my dog training. I’ve read so much, and watched so many other excellent trainers, and been to so many workshops and seminars, that I am honestly not aware sometimes where my ideas and techniques leave off and the ideas of others begin. I usually assume that anything I do I learned somewhere else, whether I remember where I learned it or not. That doesn’t make what I do less effective or useful, but I think nearly all trainers and all training is an amalgam of what we have learned, and read, and observed over time. If I remember where I learned something I strive to point it out, but often I just assume I learned it somewhere but I can’t remember where…
