Emotional Rescue

To paraphrase the ‘Rolling Stones’.  Great album.  One of their best, in my view.  ‘Tattoo You’ and ‘Exile on Main Street’ were, also, up there in the clouds.  So many to choose from.  So much to enjoy.

We do, most of us, have fairly catholic (small ‘c’, please note!) tastes in our pleasures.  We like, by and large, a wide selection of music.  Few of us are fixed to one particular genre unless we are teenagers, perhaps.

I must confess a liking for most A.O.R. (Adult Oriented Rock) that would include ‘Aerosmith’, ‘Queen’, ‘Heart’, ‘Meatloaf’ amongst many others – in no particular order.

There are also odd bands that crop up from time to time with amusing little songs that resist the passage of time but the band itself fades into obscurity.  ‘Georgia Satellites’ is one such band.  ‘Springfield Buffalo’?  OK.  You’ve probably heard them but didn’t know it—they supplied the theme to ‘Lord of War’ starring Nicolas Cage.  An emotional film.  Very moving.

Films.  Films are just the same.  We watch endless films, most of them generated and adulterated by Hollywood who presume to tell us what we should watch and what is ‘marketable’ where, in truth, they do not know.  They are, more often than not, surprised by what sells and what does not.

Do we watch the same genre of film all the time?  No.  We do not.  ‘Ice Age’ mingles with ‘Serenity’ and ‘The Book of Eli’.  We veer happily from a dystopian (oh, dear—sorry!) future to a happy display of lunacy created by animators and voiced by brilliant artistes.

There are few, successful, groups or singers that dish out the same fare with each song.  ‘RAP’, for me, would be an example of a successful genre where one ‘song’ sounds exactly like the previous one.  My apologies to fans of ‘Eminem’ and the like but, to my ears, they are just an interminable string of sameness that blend into one homogenous whole.

Who produces the same film endlessly?  Apart from Bollywood, of course.  The ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Star Trek’ films were similar but each had a different story to tell based on the same characters; nobody makes films that are the same in spite of the success of the original.

We have discussed this in a previous ‘Blog’ so I will move on.

Books, we said in that ‘Blog’ are superior to films—unless, of course, you can’t read.  That would always be a stumbling block on visits to the library.

Except!

Songs and films—especially songs, really, are based on emotion.  The release of emotion.  Love is the one that springs immediately to mind unless you are a Country singer when your girl/boy friend leaving you and your dog dying provides moments of grief.

They say that if you play a country song backwards your blanket folds itself up, your boy/girl friend returns to you and your dog comes back to life.

Humour aside, songs depend on emotion.  A singer who cannot convey emotion tends to wither in the early stages of their career.

Rarely are films devoid of emotion.  I remember a film starring Kurt Russell called ‘Soldier’ in which Kurt Russell hardly spoke, if at all, and showed absolutely no emotion—yet it was a brilliant portrayal of that army Sergeant.  Then there are those films that are meant to be emotional—Joan Chen and Rutger Hauer starred in ‘Blood of Heroes’ (also released as ‘Salute of the Jugger’) that died shortly after the opening titles and never drew breath again until the closing credits.

Sorry, Joan and Rutger—you were both far too good for this rubbish.

Because there was no emotion in the film it failed to inspire any interest.  I know nobody who enjoyed it.

Emotion is vital to a story.  If there is no emotion the story has no soul.

We writers are faced with a monumental task.  Singers have a voice that can be inflected to produce the desired effect; films have visuals where even moderately accomplished actors can tell a gamut of emotions readily.

We have words.

That’s it.

We have to convey emotions through black and white words...

Wow!  A damn great stork has just glided down the river outside my window—how cool is that!  So exciting!

Sorry.  I digress.

Where was I?  Oh, yes.  We have limitations imposed upon us by the words we can use.  We could, perhaps, use foul or profane language to express extreme emotions but a lot of readers don’t like it; this is something that can only be used in specific circumstances in your narrative.

We are, often, advised by various experts that adverbs are the death knell of any story and yet they can be useful tools in conveying emotion:

“She ran into the compound and gasped, “They are coming.”

cf

“She ran erratically into the compound gasping, “They are coming!”

The second example would, hopefully, convey the idea that she was exhausted—reinforced by the fact that she was ‘gasping’.

We do what we can, when we can.  Emotion is a personal thing so I will say, again, what I have said before, try to feel the emotion that you are writing about so that it appears in your words.  The words then become a mirror into which you reflect your feelings.

Now, where did that stork go...