Today is my brother's birthday. It's twenty years since the little bugger was born.
After sitting through a romantic comedy with my mum and my brother, I went to the shops to buy some groceries. While I was waiting for my mum I went to read magazines. After skimming through all the women's interest magazines, I finally decided to pick up TIME. The feature article was about significant events that happened in 1989, and so I flicked to the page with interest.
The fall of the Berlin Wall. Tiananmen Square. 1989 was apparently a very important year for our global climate today, and most of the world's major events happened then. The Internet was born in 1989. So were The Simpsons. Funny to think that my brother was born in such a seminal year. Twenty years ago, Generation Y ended and Generation Z began. It seemed, by all tokens, to be
The other fascinating thing about that year is that it was the year I set my one and only
online published story.
I know this is a strange connection, but bear with me. After an entire semester of running around and throwing myself into characters on stage, I have found myself in the holidays in need of something to ground me. Thus I have returned to throwing myself into characters on the page. As usual my efforts have produced nothing of note, despite writing reams and reams of half-stories and thousands of words. It seems that it takes a deadline for me to actually write anything and I am pushing myself towards one despite me wanting to do everything but write to the actual topic. In any case all this writing round in circles has made me consider what actually makes me finish a story, and how and where it ends up going. Thus my retrospective analysis of my previous works' inspirations.
When writing that old story, I remember consciously needing some way for it to be placed in a bigger context, to raise it out of just being a personal story but one that allowed the characters to interact on a social level. At the time I always remember a friend's story about getting out of China during the Tiananmen Square massacre. Knowing vaguely that this occurred in 1989, and wanting to use the title 'The Summer of '89' purely because I liked the ring of it, I went on the internet and googled the important events that happened in that year. As noted, Tiananmen Square most certainly did happen in that year, as did all of the events I described above. As I read more and more about it I became convinced that the events of that year would be a fascinating background to my story. And of course, my brother was born in that year, so it had to be a pretty top one.
Therefore, for some strange reason, I've always had a very strong connection to that year, despite me not really knowing anything very much about Tiananmen Square, nor not really having much to do with it personally other than my brother being born. I suppose my own year of birth was pretty special as well - George Orwell wrote an entire novel about it - but I will always look upon 1989 as pretty unique. Not only was it a seminal year in the history of the modern world, and affected much of our political and cultural climate today, but it's played a massive role in the making of mine.
