Small Moves

I’ve started writing a story that begins in 1979, and it’s asking me to remember how I felt about politics, social conventions and popular culture back then.  That’s what writing does, because even the most outlandish fiction requires a strong underpinning of truth.  In the same way that actors must recall their feelings, painful and otherwise, in order to feel what their character is feeling, we, as writers, must pull from deep within to find the motivations of the people who populate our stories.

So, in short, I woke up on this Sunday morning thinking about the ‘60s in America.  More particularly, that decade in the suburbs of Los Angeles and San Francisco, where I spent most of my formative years.  I wasn’t overtly politically active, but I did run for Girl’s League President in high school on the basis of asking for more variety in the cafeteria, and, on a platform that will cause wide eyes from anyone under fifty, the right for girls to wear denim jeans to school, even if they did have a few holes in them.

Not really “changing the world” sort of stuff.  And I suppose most of the people you ask from that generation would say that we were disappointed in the results of “The Summer of Love” and the hippie culture.  We were co-opted by a lot of young people who simply wanted to get high and drop out, and so, hippies are now remembered by many as dirty, lazy, and drug-addled, which, in truth, is what lots of them were.

At seventeen, that was my first experience of disappointment in the ability, even of a large movement of people, to change the world in big ways.  But seventeen is an idealistic age, and we wanted massive change, so we were bound to be disappointed, weren’t we?

Now, I’m more a believer in “small moves,” in the way I saw Ellie in the film “Contact” scan the outer reaches of the universe for signs of life.  If you go too fast, you might miss something. 

I now know that nothing ever stays the same.  By being here on this planet, each of us changes things in small ways.  And as writers, we have the opportunity to make people think about things they never might have thought of otherwise, and that most certainly effects change.  It ripples outward in ways we can’t even begin to imagine.

Small moves.

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