WWI
My father didn't like my writing - too much purple prose, too many words, not straight up and factual enough. (He'd been a journalist, understandably he'd prefer that style of writing.) Then I wrote one story set in WWI. It was a ridiculous story - I'd written it to fulfil ten or more gothic prompts. It was meant to be silly. But for some reason, the only way my brain wanted to do it was very seriously via a WWI soldier with terrible shell shock. Which meant I had to describe the trenches and Going Over The Top.
I hate WWI with a passion and despair I cannot describe. Mostly because if I write about it I start to have vivid PTSD flashbacks to places I have never been to, and situations I have never been in... but it feels like I have. I don't know whether past lives are real or not. But if they are, I was in the trenches, my friends died violently, I was wounded, then shipped home as a neurasthenic. Because all of that is in my fucking head. I don't want it there, but it is. There have been worse atrocities in the world. There was WWII for a start. But it doesn't register in the same way - I don't have dreams where I'm convulsing with terror and a doctor calmly tells a nurse to bind my hands whilst he scribes 'N' on my chart.
Aaaannnyways....
My father read that overly gothic story, and then he said he understood it because it brought things close to the fore. I suppose no one who was alive at the time had been able to articulate such things - I know growing up he had talked to WWI soldiers. He alwawys said he'd wanted to know their stories, I think I gave him a small view into their hellscspe instead - and he approved of that. Because I said something they never could.