Those that know me, know that I’ve always been a storyteller. My dream was to be a screenwriter and to work with the likes of Steven Spielberg. My path deviated from my initial goal, but I don’t think I would trade it in. That being said, as a senior in high school I started thinking “what if”? What if the Nazis had been successful had the Allies were defeated. What would like be like today?
…and a plot was developed. I even had the opportunity that summer as my high school graduation gift to go to France a week after the 60th anniversary of D-Day. Walking the rows and rows of soldiers that gave their lives so that their loved ones and those that came after would have a better life.
In the story, Sophie, is a seventeen year old with optimism that life could be better outside of what the Nazi Party tells her and the rest of the Reich. She was fashioned after the version of myself at that age…because I wrote most of her story at eighteen or nineteen, over twenty years ago. The other character, Grace, has a different view on life. She has been THROUGH it. Life. She has had nearly everything thrown at her and she feels as if she is caged in the life that she has found herself in. In part, there are some aspects of Grace that I relate to at this age.
I feel like the main character is actually the story itself.
Twenty years the idea of such radical beliefs and a society where many of its citizens are having right or their voices suppressed was never something I imagined for our future. The fictitious version of life that I had imagined for this story has unfortunately begun to parallel real life in many ways. It has been a surreal process to finish The Choices We Made realizing it may be hard to navigate fact from fiction for the reader. Sophie and Grace’s journey, especially the latter are things that I think give hope to a time that is pretty bleak in our history.
Hope ensures we keep fighting.
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