Writing Exercise: Channeling Nostalgia

 

“A little voice inside my head said:  ‘Don’t look back, you can never look back.’”

————Don Henley, “Boys of Summer”

 

This line comes from one of those great hits that define a moment of my youth:  1984.  The year that Orwellian catastrophe was supposed to rain down upon us.  The year I turned lucky number 13. I was to become a teenager and, oh, how I waited for it with my nose pressed up to the dark, plate glass of the future. Lucky 13

Becoming a teenager meant soon becoming an adult; becoming an adult meant that I could eat candy for breakfast and chocolate ice cream for lunch; becoming an adult meant that I could go to an R-rated movie, legally.  1984 arrived…and I still had to get through half of it—I was a July baby—before I could suddenly ascend to the status of teenager.

Orwell 1984

This song lyric returns as the caption to the snapshot in the yellowed newsprint of the tabloid where I am forever my own personal star.  There:  I see myself at the arcade that was torn down to build a mall.  There:  my bicycle—red as a dragon—zips through the gridlock of Westwood Boulevard.  It is a mighty time—a time when I feel both big and tiny—I am growing.  I am constantly hungry.  That song, I want to forever hold that moment of not looking back.  I want a voice to tell me: you can never look back. I know I will run away some day. I will be forgotten.  I will burn brightly and quickly.  I will never turn into a pillar of salt.

Picwood

So this never looking back is also about looking forward.  And every time I hear it, I look backward at me looking forward:  the endless reflection, my life—an Escher print.

escher

So here’s the task:  characters are always looking forward and we are trained to have them look forward—that is the point of a plot, pushing one and all forward.  But the best characters in fiction have always looked backward.  Think Proust.  Think Marquez.

Who can forget this line that opens up A Hundred Years of SolitudeMany years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.  Even if you don’t remember it, even if you’ve never read it before, you will remember it now.  It is the nostalgia—the looking backwards—that haunts and magnifies the big-ness that is in that little line.

Marquez

What does your character look back to?  What is the one memory that he holds dear?  What does he keep wrapped in the heart of his hearts like a rosebud?  Now, write out a little vignette of that memory, one that captures the loss, the grainy black and white quality, that that memory—a stuttering lightbulb—flashes before the mind’s eye.  I guarantee you:  this will get your story—a red bicycle zipping through lanes of traffic–going, going, gone.

8 thoughts on “Writing Exercise: Channeling Nostalgia

  1. Khanh – What an absolutely fascinating way of thinking about characters!!! There’s nostalgia, which can give one a great insight into characters’ histories. There’s also the opposite, which can give clues as to what characters, fear, remember with anguish, and so on.

    • Margot–what a great way to think through, to build upon, to expand such an exercise. Fear and anguish are powerful emotions. 1984 was a year in which I could not remember much fear, only anticipation. Few moments in your life you can say were empty of fear–empty of that riptide that keeps you struggling and looking over your shoulder.

  2. Ah, nostalgia. I look back at 1984 and see my ten year old self watching the Olympic runners pass by our house. My main character is already somewhat stuck in a past he resists examining. But I think your exercise will force him back there for a bit. It should be interesting to see what happens.

    • Oh, Thomas. I can feel little nostalgia for the Olympics, mainly because I was not allowed to go to any of the events–too congested. The Olympic village was right near my house. I could have gotten there by foot or bike. But everybody in LA was told to avoid the venue because of the congestion. I, too, witnessed the runners with that torch pass by the main avenue that passed by my house. I never got to see anything but television. So I feel little nostalgia.

  3. Those were some fabulous paragraphs Khanh — The red-bicylee zipping through, reminded me of William Carlos Williams’ “So much depends upon…”

    My 1984 has an Orwellian emptiness to it. It was the year my daughter was born and I was so bogged down being new mom to a constantly sick child, grad student with an intractable Ph.D. living in a slum on Exhibition, working 2 jobs , and trying to come to grips with my not yet 2 year old marriage to a totally alien Viet boat-person husband.

    I simply lost that year!!!!

    Thanks for the prompt though. It brought it all back, all nightmarishly real.

    I guess that’s why I didn’t use to be so fond of LA.

    • So, it sounds like you are a Bruin, just like me! There is a great Vietnamese Canadian book–Ru–which recounts the exquisite misery of the refugee experience. (Really a memoir, it’s marketed as a novel…written in a spare, poetic Quebecois French…) The writer, like your husband, was a boat person. I was not a boat person but I have known enough of them to know: it is a profoundly disturbing experience that defines your very being. The knowledge of death so close, the hard-scrabble life, the sudden disconnection–Ru captures these realities so well and also tells a story of triumph: the narrator is now a self-made woman, a lawyer, a renowned restauranteur. She now lives in a big house (many splendid rooms, opening into many splendid rooms) but she pines for the time when 14 people live in one apartment, all on top of each other, sharing their stories and privations.

  4. 1984 was the year before the year, that I would meet a past love, in Mexico City, in Tenochtitlán. It was the year I spent in Spain as a Rotary Scholar, dancing folklórico for libidinous Rotarians, I never would have liked to meet or remember. It was the year before the year I met love square in the neck. You shot the target in the target of my nostalgic anti-memories, I would have never weighed on the scale of positive nostalgia, but yet, they are, because I already lived them. Thank you Khanh Ho for helping me drink what I have already consumed……Gabriella

    • 1984 I had yet to have a first kiss. (Sure, a Peruvian girl named Cherie kissed me once in third grade but that was more of an ambush and embarrassing)…I love the idea of meeting a past love in such a beautiful place…Cherie once appeared on stage with her mother and did a dance in a beautiful pancho…it was a dance from Lake Titicaca…everybody snickered when they said Titicaca…Still to this day, it is a word that makes me remember her twirling on stage in a pancho.

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