What is that key 18-24 year-old demographic thinking about?
Well, I’ll tell you. Mostly they’re thinking they don’t want to be in 2021. And, well, who can blame them?
To vaccinate or not to vaccinate?
To mask, or not to mask?
These should not be the questions.
And why are those questions even up for debate?
Once we lived in a world where science ruled; where political leaders understood they needed to agree to disagree in order to govern; and where actual news footage of hundreds of rioters storming the Capitol building, destroying property and killing cops was at the very least seen as a…well…riot .
Yet today’s 2021 has become one big mass of illogical conclusions. A literal Alice In Wonderland where up IS down and down IS up.
That is if we could even agree on the definitions of DOWN and UP.
No wonder our young people want nothing to do with it, or us.
Every spring I teach a class for college writing majors called Thesis Writing For Screen Media. In it, graduating seniors develop and write either an original screenplay or TV series pilot and first season episode guide.
It’s not an exact science but what I have come to see annually after reading their work over the years is a cross-section of what’s going through the minds of those with far less experience but far more guile and energy than myself and those of my peers.
What I get is a brief but fleeting glance of what they see as…the future. And given their age and the fact that they will soon be taking over the reigns of this, ahem, Wonderland, their perceptions are far more relevant than mine. Or, likely, yours.
Some years the stories are mostly pure escapist and other times they veer towards the deadly depressing in a way you can only pull off when you’re in college. One year there were far too many scripts centered around technology (Note: At least for my tastes, which means more than three) and in another a decade back I wanted to shoot myself in the head when I had four or five (though it felt like ten) leaning heavily towards relentless versions of Lord of the Rings/Harry Potter sword and sorcery.
Of course, mixed into these are always, always, ALWAYS takes on love, injustice and outrageous coming of age, buddy, love stories in the contemporary world.
Not much like that this year.
Of the twelve scripts I read, only ONE took place in 2021. That means ELEVEN of them were set in the past, the future or, in one case, in an alternate animated universe that has never existed but you sure wish could exist. Particularly in these days.
I’ve got stories in the roaring twenties and depression era New York City. I’ve got one that takes place in 18th century West Asia, two others set in the intolerant post Civil War west of the 1800s, and another in a literal ghost town not of this earth.
There is one that takes place far in the future on various planets, a second set in ancient Greek mythology (Note: Gods and all) and a third set only five years ago in a pre-pandemic restaurant.
The sole story that takes place in our contemporary world is about three people, two of whom are on the spectrum, and all of whom pretty much live in their own worlds and mostly try to ignore ours.
It doesn’t take an analyst to understand what these writers are doing, and if you guessed taking the easy way out you would be incorrect.
We can intellectualize all we like – we baby boomers and we Gen Xers – but it seems clear that the reality we’ve rendered for the next generation has become pretty much incomprehensible to understand, that is with any real insight, without stepping out of our time period.
You can’t make sense of the illogical. You can’t write about a world where there are no basic truths or rules the vast majority can agree upon. If you want to answer real questions of faith or humanity you have to go back at least five years or more (Note: Preferably more) or move ahead some indeterminate amount of time (Note: Preferably A LOT more than five years).
Normally I tell young writers who are stumped or shy or reticent, if you merely look around your house or your neighborhood you will discover far more stories than you could possibly tell in a lifetime, much less a semester.
Choose what you can’t get off your mind, what fascinates you and go ALL IN. Use all of YOUR creativity, YOUR craft and YOUR mind to recount to us one of those and you have the best chance of hooking us. Not to mention, you’ll be amazed at how writing about what you care about in the here and now makes us exponentially care about it, too.
I gave that same min-speech this year but the result was like nothing in the past.
It’s not like there weren’t thematic personal truths to the stories they were telling. We still got the love stories, the tales of deep hurt (Note: Sometimes even peppered with wry comedy) and the rite of passage journeys. There were also those of war, of survival and even of government corruption that included people of all races, colors and sexual persuasions.
But in none of them, not a one, was there a literal evocation of 2021 as we know it.
In reflection, this was a wise decision.
How can these young people, or any of us, write about something with any meaning that we can’t, at present, even begin to understand?
notes from a chair 