What have I done? Ugh!
Something happened tonight that made me just get into a dark mood. I'm not in a "bad" mood but in a very emotionally-charged mood. I'm not "unhappy," but I'm feeling things very deeply.
This is excellent for writing, but it can also be very depressing.
I have had this story in my head since high school that continuously writes itself. It is a generational story about a group of families that all live in a small town in Indiana. On the surface, they don't seem that different, but the things that make them tick are very diverse, as are the situations and difficulties they face in life.
I have tried to write this story and struggled with it endlessly for years, and it continues to develop in my mind. It is just much too involved and layered and complicated to be able to figure out how to put on paper. I could write about one family at a time, one generation at a time. I could start at the beginning and follow a timeline, even if it requires several chapters to set up the background in the beginning. I could tell it with flashbacks -- which I hate and I really don't want to do. Anyway, it is frustrating. Maybe, vignettes?
There was another development in the plot this week. And I was forced to think about actually attempting to write this story again.
So tonight, in my "mood," I started smack in the middle of the timeline and typed away.
Now, at some point in time I figured out the historical context of this story, so that my characters were all at the right ages in the right eras. And it just so happened that when I jumped in smack in the middle of this history, we ended up at the end of 1968 and the beginning of 1969. The second generation was just beginning college and a promising new life and developments were happening that would change their whole future. But the first generation, and the woman who started the whole story back in 1948 when she became a mother, found herself in a very dismal and depressing place where the world offered no promise of good except what she managed to dream of in her mind.
So, it didn't exactly improve my mood. Which I don't really mind, because I like to feel things -- especially things that I wouldn't feel otherwise.
And tonight I feel the weight of the late 60s and the significance of what was happening in the world during that time. I wish I could just sit down with someone who actively "lived" the late 60s and early 70s and pick their brains and explore their feelings about it all. I don't mean someone who watched the world on the news and reacted. I mean someone who saw it all first hand. Someone who was "there" physically, emotionally, spiritually, and participated.
My uncle was in Vietnam. If you know anyone that was over there back then, you understand exactly why I don't have anything more to say about that fact. I feel very lucky, however, that though I don't understand what those veterans experienced and no one ever will, our society as a whole (and especially my generation) has learned enough about the situation since then to offer them some compassion and support rather than blaming them. And in great part thanks to those veterans, despite the conflicting feelings that people in our country currently have about our conflicts overseas, we stand up for our soldiers, and my brother was welcomed home from Iraq with respect.
In my mind, the story I'm writing has developed far beyond what I wrote tonight. Alice (the mother) is a happy grandmother facing the challenges of growing old and having to adapt to her physical limitations. Sadly, tonight I left her alone in her empty house in the dark, inaugural hours of 1969. It is the first time she has ever been alone, and not only has her life changed in such a way that she's practically having an identity crisis, but also the world itself isn't encouraging her very much.
I identify deeply with Alice. I cried shortly after 2010 rolled around, and I admit it. It was the first time I had ever experienced a New Year that didn't feel like a fresh start, but a reminder of what had not come to pass and the bad things that happened the year before.
So try as I might to be happy for Alice's daughter -- the character that takes most prominence in my mind -- who has just moved to the big city and is successfully pursuing her dreams in a world that seems full of civil change and promise for the future generations; I can't help but sit in that big empty farmhouse with Alice, listening to the voice of a loved one who isn't physically there anymore. It is so sad!
Ugh!
Tomorrow, church.
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