Storytellersunplugged

Gerard Houarner

A recent wave of media coverage about the “Beloit College Mindset List” hit on a couple of troublesome notes for me. Here’s the link in case you missed the buzz (slow news day, I guess):
http://www.beloit.edu/~pubaff/mindset/

The list is a rough estimation of what an 18 year-old heading off to college understands of the world. It presents a frame of reference. There are lists for the last ten years, and comparisons even between those lists are interesting, though basically they cover the children of the 80’s and 90’s (for some of us, these are our kids). College admission offices use them, as well as the government, to help bridge the generation gap (to use antique terminology).

Well, no matter what you may think of the list – it’s an instant cliche or stereotype, for example, or perhaps a depressing snapshot of the state of education in this culture, or even a nasty piece of condescension based on a very narrow profile of class, religion, race, ethnicity, and even immigration status – it does provide a baseline with which to approach defining a character’s base of experience.

Or not.

I can easily think of a number of teenagers whose frame of reference is completely alien to the assumptions presented on this list.

For example, kids raised with anime and online computer games and blogs can have a surprisingly sophisticated world view because they’ve interacted with kids from all over the world and have a lot of time to explore a great many topics on the internet – they’re not necessarily brainwashed television drones mindlessly accepting what cable channels and advertisers are pushing at them.

Unfortunately, I can also easily fall prey to the belief that the list is accurate for roughly half the incoming freshman, especially after watching any MTV “reality” show.

The lists are simplistic and over-generalized, in my opinion. But they weren’t generated as deep, sociological commentary, but merely as a way to “get a handle” on a cohort of young people marching, or stumbling, or perhaps even crawling (as we did in our time) toward adulthood. How much of handle they’ll allow their target audience to get is open to debate, and perhaps the springboard for a comedy series or movie (cable Disney or network Disney? Straight-to-video or online? Saturday morning cartoon or Adult Swim? Ah, the choices – more on that topic later….)

Still, the list is a tool that is apparently taken at least semi-seriously by a number of people who control our lives, so it’s worth looking at from a writer’s point of view.
They can be a window to the perspective of a character, quick and easy, like those birthday cards presenting a collage of images and information from the year in which you were born. What’s useful is that knowing what a “normal” person is “supposed” to know and not know from any generation at any given time forces us as writers to either limit the references, choices and awareness of possibilities a character can have, or come up with damn good and interesting reasons why or characters would know about things people of the time/generation would not commonly be aware of.

These kinds of “snapshots” are a baseline, a cardboard “human figure” cutout of character, the basic point-of-view – the sound track of lives, the media influences, the cultural touchstones, the historical contexts (that’s before we even get to the usual character flaws and family traumas).

My view of space was shaped by the residue of 50’s “sci-fi” and pulp exuberance, by Sputnik and Mercury, by Analog and Galaxy and The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Star Trek (OS) was a revelation. A miracle.

Later generations can look on this heritage in any number of ways, from a joke to quaint to perhaps even respectful and empathic awe.

But that era belongs to a set of people. It was very quickly replaced by other events, new and even more miraculous and disastrous events. The generation of the Challenger disaster looks at space a little differently.

The same can be said of the WWII, Korean War and Vietnam War generations – I grew up in a family which survived the Occupation, hearing stories about work camps, Resistance, bullets zipping into the ground as kids watched dogfights overhead oblivious to the danger all around them, identity checks, massacres. I also grew up with some WWI stories passed down around the family table, and stories of wayward country priests and elves waiting in the night by bridges and stars dancing in pools of water on dead-of-night country paths.

I had teachers who were WWII and Korean vets, and before I was 21 had worked with Korean and Vietnam vets.

But I never went to war, and that’s a bit of a cultural divide both in my generation and between generations.

I’m a city kid who hung out with other first generation immigrant kids from all over the world, so I saw the homes of people from China, Puerto Rico, Africa, and half of Europe.

Even for all of that experience, and lack of it, by the time I was ready to enter college, TV was black and white for most of my young life. Radio was huge. Records were vinyl. Newspapers were relevant.

I would have been surprised to see myself fit on anyone’s list of typical assumptions about a college class. I might even have been grateful at the time, seeing myself fit in somewhere, anywhere.

But my point here is there are a great many of us who share the same “knowledge base” from that mid-fifties generation. And I look at the card for my birth year and I’m amazed by the stuff I don’t know, about sports, or history, or popular songs, ads, etc. I was immersed in my own little world, a great deal of which was rooted in the “real” world of that time, but that viewpoint probably didn’t connect me to a great many other folks because the “real” world was very big, and young people didn’t necessarily see it from the same perspective.

And this is from the time when there were only a few channels on TV, and school curricula were perhaps more consistent within big regions of the country, and cultural expectations and restraints were more powerful. Yes, this was the hippie era, another time of revolutions and terrorists (another thing that amazes me is listening to the news reports about some terrible event as if nothing like it had ever happened before – each generation gets to own its own atrocity, and …..yeah, I guess that is my point).

And this is also my point – it’s one thing to look at a list of common reference points for a generation, and it’s quite another to actually apply it to that generation.

It’s a 20th century thing which has slid with heart-stopping speed into the 21st century. There is more information available, as well as more choices for people to consider. Granted, the global percentage of people with access to that information and with resources to make choices remains small. But that percentage is growing. Just look at India and China (alas, Africa is still recovering from the choices that were made for its people).

The number of special interest sub-groups boggles the mind. What binds countries, anymore? What makes a culture? In Europe, the older generation grouses about young people cross borders freely, using a single currency, all the old rivalries and animosities forgotten, as well as cultural heritages. Kids going to college may be video or role playing gamers who are jocks as much as nerds (or geeks).

Religion, while obviously still a foundation stone, is not quite as consistent or prevalent a tribal marker across all economic classes as it once was in this country. Neither is race. Baseball is no longer the national pass time. The old WWII movies used to show soldiers asking approaching figures in the night who won the last World Series – if that kind of thing actually happened and isn’t just Hollywood hokum, then I’m sure soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t using the same assumptions to check on who’s an enemy and who’s a friend.

In this fragmented world, what is the expected cultural knowledge base? How many people tune into the same things going at the same time? Despite all the hype and hoopla, five or twenty million people watching whatever television show of the moment is hot is hardly a consensus in a country of over 300 million people. A million records, a few million downloads, isn’t enough to make you a pop legend to the vast majority of people. Books that sell tens of thousands of copies are still not spread widely enough even among the “intelligentsia” (does anyone even use that, anymore?) to generate a consistent and reliable dialogue.

Even a district by district breakdown of “red” and “blue” states reveals a startling degree of fragmentation – it just isn’t that simple.

Sorry about the grandiosity.

Let me just get back to the original slant on this topic and say that lists, birthday cards, articles on the “lost” generation or generation “Z,” “Y,” “Z” (uh oh, we’ve run out of letters, are we going back to “A?” Will this lead to a false sense of entitlement among our children and grand children and – there I go again….) can offer a valuable and even necessary starting point for developing a character and seeing what choices they might make given the situations you’re going to put them in.

It’s 2007 and your female character is a 35 year old mother (and you the writer are 20 or 50), maybe touching base with one of those lists might inform the character’s background in terms of cultural and economic influences. It’s not all about family traumas and positions in the sibling hierarchy and economic status (though character is a lot about those things, too).

And here’s something just as important: these lists are a window to readers, our “Harry Potter” generation or working mothers or returning vets or cult movie fans.

As storytellers, we naturally refer back to the “canon” with which we were raised, the music we heard and were exposed to when we were young, the historical and scientific “facts” we learned in school.

Yes, as storytellers, it’s important to reference the past, the valued traditions and treasures that need to be carried forward, and to put these references in an emotional context so it has meaning for readers who did not grow up with them.

Write what you know.

But it’s also important to reference what is immediate and relevant to current readers who grew up on these lists, or who raised children going off to college.

Keep learning. Know more.

When I was in college, writers and poets were sometimes rated in various snarky ways – for instance, a 3rd rate poet at least preserved the language (which a poet friend of mine always repeated, as if chewing over the final judgement of his present profs as well as all future critics and readers – “well, his work was boring, but at least he used words correctly”).

Maybe a storyteller’s role is in part to preserve the past in meaningful way for new generations, to pass on old culture to what amounts to a brand new culture growing in our homes and in our midst, separated from us by technology and experiences and choices we may not have or even understand. To pass on through headphones and virtual reality plug-ins the Bronte sisters and Dickens and Shakespeare and Sophocles; Revolution and Civil War here and elsewhere; Vivaldi and Leadbelly and the Beatles.

And more, the storytellers role is also to integrate that past and all the unpleasant truths it holds, like slavery and slaughter and exploitation, as well as all the glories it contains, like Michelangelo and Bach and Philip K. Dick (yes, I know, and I don’t care – I could have said H.P. Lovecraft, so be grateful), with hip hop and 9/11 and Stephen King and Harry Potter and Samurai Jack and WMD’s and internet gaming.

To make the past relevant in this moment, and for the future.

To be relevant as storytellers in this moment (yeah, for the sales, to get readers, yes, yes, but also for the sake of what we grew up with, what was and is important to us, what can be passed on, even if it’s only the correct usage of language).

Because I still think the kids on those lists have a lot more to offer, and the “people in charge” are making some assumptions that will wind up biting them in the butt (good for them), and I’d be happy to contribute what knowledge and perspectives I hold so folks growing into the future will have a bit of the past to help them in their merry biting.

Just some late night perspectives on storytelling……