This week I have been attempting to immerse myself in the early ’90s to aid a writing project. My goal is to somehow meld my experience, the world’s experience, and someone from halfway around the world’s experience from that time period into an entertaining and enlightening novel for girls. I know what I want to say but am struggling with how to say it.
The easiest part has been getting the research necessary to write the story of the person from halfway around the world. All it is taking are some visits with a good friend, holding her adorable baby and eating delicious lunches. We just chat, I let a voice recorder run and take some notes. I feel a little guilty even saying I am working–which is not so unusual because I believe most, if not all, non-writers feel we writers do not perform “real work” anyway.
Researching the world’s experience from the early ’90s with regard to my particular halfway-around-the-world’s subject’s home country has not been as easy as I thought it would have when I first embarked on this project. Her country seems almost like the forgotten step-child of world media. There are few books on the subject relative to her country’s history and their writing makes it clear the perspective is one-sided. I have skimmed through several months of local newspapers on microfilm at the library from 1990 where mentions of this country’s experience are presented as an aside or an afterthought. Our media was so preoccupied with the fall of the Berlin wall, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and later the Gulf War (all worthy stories), it seemed to have barely noticed the explosion of another, albeit geographically smaller, communist country.
Researching my own experiences of the early ’90s has not been as easy as one would think either. I do have a wonderful resource in the journals I’ve written in prolifically since 1985 but as much as I wrote, unfortunately, it would’ve been more helpful if I wrote more than I actually did. At that time, I was preoccupied with my own teenaged life to take real notice of even the more prominent world-news stories. I was impressed I even mentioned the declaration of the Gulf War in my journal. My life was focused on surviving what I now know was depression triggered by the loss of some very important loved ones from my life.
In late 1990 to the beginning of 1991, I had just realized life was going on following the death of my cousin in September, 1989, and I decided I could choose to spend the rest of my life miserable or I could choose not to. So for the ensuing couple of years I focused on playing the role of the carefree teenager by dating, going out and having fun as well as realizing my dream of going away to college, a goal I foolishly believed would erase everything wrong with my life (which maybe in a way it eventually did but that musing is for another day).
My ventures in the dating world at that time were grossly inadequate. I had three “boyfriends” during that time period. I designate the word boyfriend as fictional by enclosing it in quotes because I don’t think there was one of them that was what I think of as a traditional boyfriend — i.e. the boy asks you out, you go somewhere like the movies, he kisses you goodnight at the end of the evening, calls you later, asks you out again, etc., etc. My dates with the first one consisted almost exclusively of going for evening walks and talking on the telephone. The second one most resembled a boyfriend but I asked him out first to a turnaround dance (where girls take the boys). My third “boyfriend” was essentially a lesson that the notion of a “friend with benefits” just does not work. I scarred all three of these boys so badly they left the state and/or country without contacting me again; and only the third left without promising me he WOULD keep in contact with me. So that was my life in the early ’90s along with many of the other typical experiences of girls in their last three years of high school.
My work thus far and this project has consisted much more of reading and musing than actually putting words down. And most of those words’ fate was met with the delete key on my keyboard or colored-ink cross-outs. Writing IS hard but I am not giving up. I will keep plugging away, researching, reading and musing, putting it down then taking it away and somehow, someway, some day the how to accomplish my what will materialize.
