Just Thinking

I once heard an interview with Tim O'Brien, veteran of the Vietnam War and author of The Things They Carried.  He was at My Lai the year after the massacre in 1968. He said they did not know what had happened there and wondered why it was such a hostile place.
 

Anyway, the interviewer asked what I think was a question she had not given much thought to. "Why do you always write about the past?" O'Brien said, politely, "Because that's where the stories are." He didn't then say, "Duh." But he could have. 

Or he could have said, "Because I don't write science fiction," which is what I think you do when you write about the future. Certainly fiction. But even so, I insist that any writer--that's any writer--draws upon what he knows from the past, whether it's his own experience or something he knows very well. We can make up stories, but we always draw from the bank of memory. (Is that a cliche?) 

And how about writing the present? 

Can't be done, strictly speaking, because as soon a thing happens, it's past; you can't get it on paper before it's the past. So there.