’80s nostalgia in my books: what’s that all about?
Find Your Inner Sorcerer
I love ‘80s stuff so much, it’s all over my books. As I’m finishing revisions of my novel set in 1982, Here Comes the Dog Parade, it’s no surprise that Stranger Things is on my mind.
Maybe you loved Will’s arc as much as I did. The confidence he found after coming out, so he could fight Vecna and realize his full sorcerer self. Maybe you wept, too, at the scene with all his friends.
How about the moment in the hospital room when Max finally broke out of Henry’s desert prison of memories, and reunited with Lucas?
Did you adore Karen Wheeler, mama bear with her wine bottle, when she screams at the Demigorgon coming for Holly?
STAY! AWAY! FROM! MY! DAUGHTER!
Who among us hasn’t felt like wielding a wine bottle lately?
Karen was a wine-swilling cougar in earlier seasons; now she’s a warrior goddess. Max once dodged everyone with her skateboard; now she’s full of I’ll-hug-you-forever love from her wheelchair. Will was a shivering wallflower in prior episodes; now he’s toe to toe with Vecna and ripping Demidogs apart. What happened? How did they find their inner sorcerer?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it takes to transform the self. To take a leap of faith and rebuild when things seem awful dark. Renovate the older building that is us.
When Nostalgia Is Future Forward
Sometimes it’s good to take stock of our history. We can honor what was beautiful and face what was awful about earlier times. And sometimes nostalgia can lead us to do bold things.
I started learning screenwriting last year for a lot of reasons, one of which was a fond memory of Duke Young Writers’ Camp in 1983. It was me and my big ol’ frizzy perm, tall and lanky and uncool because tall girls weren’t in yet, getting to write a spec script for the TV show Alice. I was 14, just playing. Experimenting. I was in my element. Thank you, Thomas Patterson, for telling me I had a knack for dialogue.
Girl, you had no idea it would take you 42 years to try screenwriting again, but the beautiful thing about last year was you felt 14 again. You had nothing to lose, bringing a fresh mind to the whole process. And you weren’t scared at all.
(I’m so tired of being scared. Aren’t you?)
I think the fearlessness and the playfulness together made it possible for my first TV pilot episode to make it to the Second Round of the Austin Film Festival for Drama Teleplay. (I’m sure 25+ years of writing books didn’t hurt either.) This girl below was in charge the whole time:
Some of us look back to teen years and childhood to find that inner gemstone, the unspoiled sapphire of self, that made us laugh and play and try things just because.
That Sticking Place
And maybe we stay fixated on the era because of the music that made us feel deep things for the first time, craving that fresh rush of sensation. There’s that guitar riff or lick, that lyric or beat, that made your heart stop and your skin tingle with a sense of “This is true, this is beauty, all’s right with the world” for just a minute.
Maybe a certain decade for some folks was the time when anything was possible. So it makes sense that sometimes we want to recall those tunes and toys and foods and TV commercials, seeking a wand that could send us right back to possibilities there.
I was 12 in 1980 and 22 by 1990. From sixth grade to senior year in college. From first sleepaway camp and basketball teams to first college diploma and serious boyfriend, all to the soundtrack of Earth, Wind & Fire, The Police, and Fine Young Cannibals.
When you transform that much in 10 years, well, that time kinda sticks in your mind.
When Nostalgia Keeps You Stuck: The ’80s, Not Always Cool
There’s an outtake from Here Comes the Dog Parade, sitting now on my cutting-room floor: a moment when Justine looks at a Doonesbury political cartoon in the newspaper (remember them print things?).
I’m sharing this outtake because it echoes a lot of other scenes where I’m trying to show 1982 in every 3-D way that I can: all its joys and highlights, its fun, as well as its evils, its wounds, its traumas. And in particular, patterns then that still echo today.
On a table near me were newsprint stacks for the Homecoming cause. I looked at a Doonesbury from February on the top page. Some guy with glasses and a Pinocchio nose slouched in a chair in front of a TV, listening to President Reagan’s “misstatements”—something about how unemployment numbers were actually going down, not up, during Carter’s term—and other inscrutable things about abortion and the Pope. Then the last panel said something about locating a “racist bone in Ron’s body.” Yet another joke I didn’t get; Doonesbury was never funny. Especially not now, and not these girls, not anyone around here.
I dropped the newsprint, rubbing smudges from my fingers, because Mrs. Rhodes was headed toward me with supplies.”
To worship a particular time–the way I believe that many white people worshipped the 1950s when we were living in the 1980s, for example–is to stay stuck. Sure, there are fun things to celebrate. Meanwhile, we cannot forget the politics, the power structures, the economics, the social dynamics, and the injustices.
Throughout his presidential terms, President Ronald Reagan was promoting the lie of “welfare queens” while gutting services for folks who most needed them.
Michael Donald was lynched in Mobile, Alabama in 1981.
In 1980 and 1984, the Greensboro, NC Massacre. Two different juries–North Carolina and federal–refused to convict six Klansmen and Nazis who killed five Communist Worker Party members. Three Mile Island. I could go on.
We must hold all these things in our heads while we don big shoulder pads and whip our locks into big-hair frenzies.
Today we have certain white people absolutely obsessed with the 1950s and for all the wrong reasons.
Stranger Things’s Nods to ’80s Kids
Recently I watched the documentary One Last Adventure: The Making of Stranger Things 5. There was cool VHS footage of the creators and directors, Matt and Ross Duffer, from times when they were kids making their first films. It’s clear that the joyful play of their first homemade flicks permeates every episode of this epic show.
Maybe the Duffer Brothers not only wanted to resurrect their ’80s childhoods via Stranger Things but also do as artists something else I think every human wants to do: be ever evolving, timely, and eternal. The Duffers wanted to echo the greats they saw on the big screen: E.T., The Thing, Poltergeist. They wanted to also make something never seen before. Oh, how they did.
We artists want our stories scrawled on a cave wall forever more. We locate something hyper-specifically in a certain time and place so that we can speak the language of forever.
Here Comes the Dog Parade
In my young adult-adult crossover novel I’m revising, Here Comes the Dog Parade, 1982 tunes like “Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield and video games like Ms. Pac-Man are the backdrop for characters struggling with desire and ambition.
[Check out my blog post, “Brand Obsessions: Definitely an ’80s Thing,” for more on the stuff of ’80s settings.]
Wendy in my How Wendy Redbird Dancing Survived the Dark Ages of Nought has a lot of issues with her 2009 time and rebels by going ’80s in her Michael Jackson couture; she’s an outcast archetype raging against the conformity machine. She seeks healing from sexual assault and justice in her world that’s always the Upside Down. When Michael Jackson dies, she has a chance to set things right.
Minerva in @nervesofsteel is obsessed with female journalists and aghast at the worship of Instagram and other social media on the rise in 2013. She loves donning her mom’s ratty old ’80s concert t-shirts. She is a nerd archetype wondering why in the world should we dumb things down. Why bullies always win. Why everyone worships the local good-lookin’ Vecna who just did evil things to her best friend.
I’d like to think that no matter how many decades pass, these girls will feel relatable. That no matter how nostalgic my characters get or I get, locked in a moment in time, something will still ring a bell inside readers’ minds.
When we travel through time in our memories, all of us seek timelessness. We all touch eternity for a second and live between the ages of our lives.
My sister says I write YA for Gen X. What she meant is that I write YA for all gens. If certain times and places and yes, historicity (nerd word alert!) are your cup of tea, then, why don’t you come along on a magic carpet ride with me…
I want to take “Do you remember when…?” to the next level of meaning for myself. I hope to take my reader there too. Give them space to grow themselves a wee bit wiser, tapped into an inner sorcerer of intuition, able to make connections in a single bound.
Connections like how history echoes. It calls and responds to former eras, it endeavors to repeat but never quite the same. And the question always is: Will we take up the very same steps of the dance? Or will we demand a new orchestra, a new band, a new venue, a new tune?
Or do we want to try something else entirely, besides a dance? Historical fiction says to us, Maybe if it went this other way…
That’s when I feel my most magical, when I rewrite history, choose my own adventure, and take you there.
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