Breeding and Writing: Why nobody cares about your relevant crap

 

–by Tracy Lucas

 

I pulled out a grey hair today. It’s not my first, but it made me think.

(And yes, “grey” with an E. I just like it better.)

I was sitting in the bathroom sink (I do that, I’m weird) when I happened to notice the aforementioned grey hair, and I suddenly found myself wondering whether to feel old.

At the moment I’m in my 30s, and not far into them at all. I had my first biological kid a couple of years ago, but in these days of fifteen-year-olds popping them out left and right, I suppose I’m an older mother. Blech.

Gained too much weight to be a MILF, even. Dammit.

But all that aside… let’s talk just about the numbers.

Like I said, I’m in my 30s. And now I’ve got grey hair. Now my stepkids think I’m too old to know any decent music (somehow Jackson Browne and Bon Jovi can’t compete with The Bieber) or to be worth listening to about clothing issues. They hate that I decorate the house in beige; they react to it the same way I did to my mother’s avocado fridge and orange countertops.

The rub? Ten years ago, I was in my 20s, and no one thought I was worth listening to because I was too young. I was just a kid who didn’t know shit and hadn’t experienced enough yet in life to have any advice that could be proven.

Ten years? That’s the span from “you don’t know anything because you’re too young” to “you don’t know anything because you’re too old”?

That’s practically nothing.

I mean, think about your grandmother. Within her lifetime, chances are, she saw the Berlin Wall go up, and the Berlin Wall come down. She might have seen the birth of movies, then TV, then cable channels, then VCRs, then the Internet. Even the Civil War was only two lifetimes ago, if you really think about it. That’s one generation removed from us, exactly. That was practically yesterday in the grand, ten-million-year scheme of things. That just happened.

Chances are equally good, regardless of whether your personal grandmother was alive for bits of the stuff mentioned above, that during the different stages of her life, no one understood her, either.

When she was fifteen, other people thought she was melodramatic. When she was twenty, they probably thought she was naive and idealistic. When she was forty or fifty, they may have thought she was a passed-up parent who wasn’t in touch with the times anymore. Now that she’s your grandmother, well, she’s a grandmother and all that the stereotype implies.

She probably likes music that was popular when she was a young adult. Probably picked the clothing she liked from some era or another and stuck with it, because she thought it worked for her. Probably doesn’t have the time to keep up with changing trends every decade, every two years, every season.

But aren’t we already on the same path, too?

As Thoreau said:

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

I have discs and downloads of the same songs I’ve loved since I was a teenager, and I play them loudly when I clean the house. I have a favorite shirt from my (albeit brief) college life that’s existed for ten or twelve years, and I still wear it occasionally—in public, without embarrassment.

I didn’t run out to see Twilight: Eclipse—and I probably won’t—but I watched The Blues Brothers for the millionth time the other day. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is next in the Netflix queue because my kids have never heard of it. I can’t believe they’ve never seen it. They can’t believe I’m going to make them watch it.

Thanks to an offhand comment from a teenage cousin, I just realized last week that boys’ shorts are supposed to be cotton, plaid, and below the knee now, and that I’ve been dressing my tyke in ’80s garb up till now. Oops. (Sorry, kiddo. I’ll hide the photos.)

I am already irrelevant.

We all are. We always have been. We always will be.

Know why?

It’s because, generally speaking, we’re naturally selfish creatures, and we only truly care about the people who are at our own exact level in life, be that age, social status, geographic location or whatever else we secretly measure people by.

It’s okay that Random Relative X doesn’t grok what I do for a living (or that reference.) She’s not a writer or much of a reader, so her opinion on publishing doesn’t matter to me.

Maybe some guy in Iowa disagrees strongly with what I wrote on a motherhood board the other day. He’s obviously not a mother, so his opinion doesn’t apply.

That random swoop-haired emo kid in the line behind me at Wal-Mart is an idiot. Why should I care if he hates my shirt?

However unfair and politically incorrect it may be, we only value the opinions of those we either see ourselves like or hope to become. Everyone else need not apply.

When you’re thirty, those younger than you don’t care because you’re not young. Those older than you don’t care because you’re not old. Those you are thirty with are your closest allies, your commiserators, your siblings through life.

The cruel reality of it is that when you’re seventy, then eighty, then ninety, there will be increasingly fewer of them left. The generational conspirators will die off and leave you in a swelling world of new children and younger-than-you adults who make no sense and don’t remember anything you do.

Right now, judging by the folks who usually comment here, I could say, “Hey, remember when moonwalking was such a big deal?”, and I could probably get a glowing, nostalgic response or three along the lines of, “Yeah, I know, right? I remember that! We used to practice it in gym and land on our asses because we had non-slip shoes on…”

I’d bet it’d be different if I wrote, “Weren’t sock-hops just fab?”

Nobody cares about sock-hops anymore. We didn’t have them, don’t remember them, and they don’t matter.

We’re past that.

But that’s the whole thing: everybody, at all times, is going to be past everything.

That sounds so weird and nonsensical, but really, it’s what I’m getting at.

You’re only living as the one person you’ve ever been, and it’s a new world every ten years or so anyway, not to mention a whole new “they” to contend with. So how do you write for a crowd of changing, aging, widely-varying people, who come from different backgrounds and don’t necessarily match a single characteristic or viewpoint you have?

You write truth.

It’s all about the underlying emotional truth.

You don’t have to like Bon Jovi or Jackson Browne to have read that sentence earlier, nodded to yourself and said, “Yeah, my kids hate Nirvana, I totally get that.”

The details don’t have to match. Sometimes it’s more fun if they don’t; I like borrowing an 18^th century head to run around in when I’m reading a novel, or browsing a yellowed textbook that’s missing a few countries. But the spirit has to be there; the guts have to go in, or it’s all empty and wasted.

We all age yearly, and we’re moving in tandem, so we’ll never catch up with each other. Even so, we all have some of the same experiences, feelings and inadequacies as we move through. Bits of our lives have all been lived from start to finish before—just by other people.

If you write flashy, pop-culture stuff or humor that only one set of humans will find funny, more power to you, but it’s over as soon as that culture is, and it lasts for mere seconds.

But if you write The Great Gatsby, even despite all the highly-specific jazz age flavor, you’re writing the hard truth that sometimes the one you love wriggles permanently out of your grasp—and we’ve all been there, done that. That’s timeless.

It’s cotton candy versus steak.

Regardless of how cool of a parent I try to be or how many crazy “this one time” stories I can add up while I’m here, my kids are destined to think I’m a loser. Because they’re my kids. That’s what they do.

Right now, I am God to my son because I control the Cheerios and the Disney Channel. That’s a very limited gig, and I know it. Any day now, he’ll resent and/or be embarrassed of me for a good fifteen-year chunk, and sometime thereafter he’ll have a couple children or a grey hair of his own and realize the real scoop.

Does that mean I’ve changed in all the meantime?

Most likely, no. It’s only his perspective that’s changed—not the world itself. I’ve been sitting here happily listening to Sky Blue and Black and Bed of Roses in my beige room all along. After all, he’s just a twenty-something kid, what does he know?

So here’s my question:

How do you write to and for a world of readers who are not you, haven’t lived your life, and eventually will find you totally outdated? How do you matter when it’s all so impermanent?

I have my thoughts.

What are yours?