I created my own soap opera to get through heartbreak and quarantine

Every day, I go to college. Walking along the campus of Centennial University, I hear the gurgling of the Leo Vanderpol Memorial Fountain, smell the cherry blossoms as I approach Layton Bell Tower and watch the family of rabbits that lives behind the Triumvirate—three neoclassical buildings that crown the hill on which this majestic institution was first built in 1876. This is my home, at least for an hour or two.

Of course, Centennial University does not exist. It is a figment of my imagination, part of the fictional town I first envisioned a decade ago. College Heights—a title derived from the nickname of my own alma mater, Western Kentucky University—is a working script about the lives and loves of the students, staff and faculty of a small liberal arts college. 

I initially created College Heights in 2010 because I love soap operas. The medium is a wonderful way of telling serialized, complex and important stories, but I was frustrated at the lack of LGBTQ2S+ representation in North American soaps. The characters of Shea Gates-Vanderpol and Leo Vanderpol—star-crossed lovers from two feuding families—became the basis around which I built an entire fictional world. When the relationship I was in at the time ended, I killed Leo in a dramatic fall, using Shea’s grief as a proxy for my own.

When the pandemic hit, I again used College Heights to work through my own neuroses; Arcadia, the town in which the soap takes place, became my safe space during lockdown. I used these characters to try to understand the effects this pandemic was having on real people. Doctor Lucretia Coombs became overwhelmed with the sheer magnitude of COVID-19 cases in her hospital, so I read countless first-person accounts of ER doctors and nurses struggling not only to keep up with the demands of their job but with the real toll constant sickness and death takes on their mental health. Belinda Salyers lost her restaurant, so I listened to the stories of real-life business owners who lost everything because of the shutdowns. 

This IRL research forced me to step outside my own pro-lockdown bubble, looking at a point of view other than my own. Though it didn’t change my mind about the efficacy or need of lockdowns, it certainly made me much more sympathetic to those who have suffered the economic ramifications. That is the wonderful thing about fiction: It allows you to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. 

While I am grateful to have an outlet to explore these weighty issues, this is far from simply pandemic fanfiction. I have an entire world living in my head, one chock-full of sudsy stories. Whether it’s Shea returning to town with his long-dead husband’s secret son or Marvin Salyers discovering on Thanksgiving Day that his daughter’s husband killed his son, there is always drama in College Heights. 

I’m a writer by trade, so I use the soap to stretch before a day’s work. Each morning, I sit down to write a 2,000-word recap in the most pedestrian of prose. Even so, it is like watching a TV show of my own creation, airing only in my mind and complete with an opening title sequence I created in PowerPoint. Slipping into this world is remarkably easy considering how long I have lived with these characters in my head. Arcadia is somewhere I know as intimately as my own college town. Consequently, every day feels like a homecoming of sorts. 

I don’t plan storylines except in the vaguest of senses, knowing one or two general points I want to hit. This leads to some interesting twists and turns as I write, and there is never a dull moment. It also means that if you read these “recaps” in earnest, they’d be rubbish. I have no doubt there are massive plot holes and inconsistencies, not to mention cringeworthy dialogue and prose. Polishing these to my own standard for public consumption would be a full-time job, but that was never the point of College Heights. 

If someone wants to give me that job, though, I would be thrilled. But I know that will likely never happen. I highly doubt anyone but me will ever know or care whether Lorelai Layton chooses Micah or JJ. I don’t know the first thing about pitching a television show, and even if I did, soap operas are a dying medium in North America—there simply isn’t a significant audience for something like this anymore.

I am okay with that. Arcadia is, for me, somewhere I can retreat when the world is too much. It is a place where I can make sense of the senseless, calm my anxieties and just have fun creating a deliciously melodramatic story. Having such a creative outlet has been a blessing during the past year, and I cannot imagine making it through this pandemic without being able to live an hour or two a day in a world of my own imagining.