Skewed points of view

I have been contemplating how my age, social and cultural backgrounds, and life experience, affect not only my point of view as I write a story, but the points of view that I inflict on my characters.

There have been occasions in writing group that some of us have attempted to write from a different pov than our natural position - different gender, for example, is a common prompt.  But there is also something I said to a friend some years ago about generation gaps.  I have really grown up in a different world to someone who is twenty or forty years younger than me.  When I am talking with someone of another generation, though we both say we are speaking English, the words have subtly changed their meanings from my time to theirs.  New words and phrases have been coined, old words have been put to new purposes, and some words have fallen from use altogether.

To some extent, I can understand my parents, because I grew up listening to them, and my children have the same experience with me - but even another half a generation later, the flow of language has swept onwards, leaving me stranded on the mud-banks of time.  Doctor Who does a remarkable job, all things considered, being able to talk to humans from so many periods of history (and pre-history, it seems)

The differences include the technology, but also significant cultural changes - my experience with the tension of the Cold War and its constant threat of nuclear war is different to the experiences of people born since 1970, but that may be changing as we speak, and another generation may be experiencing the subtle "valley of fear" effect that impacted  the lives, decisions and thought processes of so many people who grew up in the fifties and sixties.

Likewise, my parents and grandparents had direct experience of the Great Depression, and one or more of the World Wars.  My grandparents saw the great Flu Epidemic that slew so many of those who survived the First World War.  I lived in a world where vaccination, refrigeration, mains electricity, treated water on tap, and push-button sewage disposal seemed to have always existed - they knew what it was to walk to the well, or the water tank behind the house, and they knew of the need to boil the water, and they saw the children die of diseases - polio and measles - that were to my generation just a distant rumour.  The evidence of that passing world was still to be seen, in the maimed survivors of the recent World War who could be met on any suburban or city street,  in the newsreels at the cinema that discussed the final defeat of polio, or the visits to the rural relatives who still lived on dusty or muddy farms, getting their water from well or tank, and lighting their houses with kerosene lamps.

Of course, the discrepancy in viewpoints is not just caused by temporal differences - geography can have a say.  The charmed life that I and so many like me have taken for granted has never existed in many parts of the planet, including parts of Australia, and still does not exist in places where it should.  It is possible that it never will. In the seventies, we dared to hope that a Golden Age was dawning for all the world - in 2017 we wonder if the world will survive, and some of us believe that we may already lived through the best of times.  Is that why dystopian novels attract such a following?

Of course, many things don't fundamentally change, but simply adjust their clothes or hairstyles - bigotry, greed, anger, and fear still pervade society, and are still used by politicians seeking to gain power for themselves without having to present intelligent and positive policies.

Technological changes have effects beyond the obvious - someone like me, who has lived through many such changes (as well as launching into a Thoreau inspired "tree-change" for a couple of decades) is often stunned when a younger person reveals an assumption that certain services have "always been around"  Try explaining black and white television to an eight year old in the nineteen eighties, or the previous absence of mobile phones to someone born after 2005.  Technology that is now ubiquitous is considered to be something that "no one could live without"

For example, I recently heard an historian talking about the complaints made to the Council of the City of Sydney over the years.  I had never heard before that, when gas powered street lamps were introduced to Sydney, a policy designed to save money meant that the lamps were not lit on the night of the full moon, nor on several nights either side of it.  What seemed a logical cost saving measure  to an accountant who may never have been out in the streets after dark was a serious nuisance - even a danger - to the many people who needed to travel the city streets after sunset.

Did that happen in other cities of the world as the first street lamps were introduced?  If I were writing a novel set in that time, what other such quirks might affect my characters as they go about their business??  It is hard to realistically imagine a future world in a novel, but it can be quite tricky to write about the past if we take our 21st Century assumptions with us into the novel.

Habits

"In writing, habit seems to be a much stronger force than either willpower or inspiration. Consequently there must be some little quality of fierceness until the habit pattern of a certain number of words is established." - an excerpt from Working Days: The Journals of The Grapes of Wrath in which John Steinbeck recorded his daily struggles as he wrote his Pulitzer Prize winning novel.

Though Steinbeck intended to acheive the production of his Magnum Opus within a certain time-frame, and had declared his desire to write a certain number of words each day, he knew how difficult a task that would be.  He recorded honestly in his journal the successes and the failures - as well as the swings of mood, motivation, and confidence - that anybody, no matter what their creative field, goes through as they push towards their goal.  Maria Popova wrote a detailed and interesting article on Steinbeck's efforts here - https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/02/john-steinbeck-working-days/

How many of us have, at some time or another, tried to keep a journal?  Did you keep it for a specific purpose, like Steinbeck's?  Or perhaps like the journals maintained by so many modern politicians as they prepare to write their own version of history in the  desperate hope of countering the other political memoirs and commentaries that they know will be churned out by their political enemies?

Or, do you try to keep a true and faithful record of your life in all its ups and downs?  It is a risky business, of course - how honest can a person be when recording details of thoughts, actions, feelings, and longings that are otherwise unrevealed to the broader world?  What if your mother reads the journal, or your spouse?  What if your cousins or schoolmates find it, and publish it far and wide for the titillation of all and sundry?  Such abuse of privacy can have a shattering effect upon the creative impulse, whether it happens to a child or an adult.

There have been some remarkable journal-writers - Anais Nin, Virginia Woolf, and Henry David Thoreau come to mind - and some less so - which brings to mind the published efforts of some of our more recent Prime Ministers.

For a writer, the purpose can be to keep track of our thoughts, to shape them, and to seek some clarity in the muddle of ideas and impulses that can overwhelm us all to easily - fame and publication are a distant dream (or nightmare).  And, importantly, keeping a journal can be the first small habit of daily writing that will help us build and cement the habit of perservering at the larger creative tasks that we hope to perform.

There are days when the only writing I achieve is an entry in my journal.  Sometimes that can be quite a brief summary of events, or it can stretch out to a prolonged meditation, but it happens daily, and that is important. The keeping of a daily journal is something I have attempted during several periods of my life, beginning in my teens - but, for various reasons, I have only been consistent for the last decade and a half.

Yet, without that habit, that commitment, there could easily be days or even weeks when no writing would be done at all - the task of writing can become like the task of putting in order that pile of receipts and business papers that have been building from a week's postponement to a month, and then a year.  When mood or circumstance make the task of creatively writing seem too large to contemplate, let alone attempt, the smaller habit of the journal can save me from complete failure.

Once the pen is between my fingers, and the ink has begun to flow, the mind is given over to writing - and, even if that writing is mainly about failure, fear, distractions, and annoyances, there is only a tiny gap between the neurons telling that sad tale, and the ones that, yesterday, wrote a chapter that sparkled.

Those fears, or failures, may yet become the stuff of some future masterpiece - those distractions and annoyances could move beyond the pages of the journal to the broader stage of a poem, essay, or novel - or, at least, a Facebook post or blog entry.  Now that some of my own distractions have gathered up their surviving Easter eggs, toys, ipads, shoes, and sleeping bags, and have departed for warmer climes, I can consider whether there may yet be a place for them in some current or future literary endeavour - and what sort of place that might be.  Meanwhile, as Frodo said, the road goes ever on.......