Gaining Perspective

Sunday, Father's Day, I had a chance to sit and talk with a gentleman who has outlived his wife of 63 years, all of his children, and several of his grandchildren. He parachuted into Normandy on D-Day, and spent most his life working in fields and on cars in rural Alabama.


You know what he remembers about D-Day? Apple trees.

Odd, but there you have it. He was dropped into an apple orchard and got lost because his compass slipped out of his pocket on the way out of the plane.

I didn't know there were apple orchards near the fighting. It's not something I would have picked up in a text book, or even from my relatives who survived the wars because they were too young to remember the details.

This older man offers a valuable change in perspective. A welcome change even.

How often in our writing do we remember to change perspective for age?

It's easy to forget that when write. We tend to give our characters a blanket view of history and politics because, after all, we are only one person and there is only so much we can think of.



HOMEWORK: Go find someone well out of your age bracket and get them to talk. Pick any subject, wars, the cost of gasoline, brands of candy, schoolwork... and see if they can't give you some ideas on how to give your writing some added depth.



P.S. The little girl in the black and white photo is the old woman in the second photo. That's my DH's Grandma Dusty: mother of two, grandmother of three, great-grandmother to three when she died two years ago.

She was a navy wife, a member of the Royal Order of the Gecko, and a survivor. She survived the death of her brother in his teens, her parents when she was a young parent, and a few wars and deployments to odd places while she was at it.