Our lives as movies 2.0

Writing, for me, is like this.

An image forms in my mind -- in this case of a couple together in a movie theatre and the front seat of a car one spring night. As I either relive the series of events that occurred, or as I imagine them to have happened, depending on whether this is fact or fiction, it is very much like sequencing a film. The characters are established; the characters begin to act according to their essential natures, creating a moral dilemma; finally some sort of crisis or plot pivot provides the opportunity for closure.

It's an organic process, creating a story for film. Everything builds to an inevitable climax. There is also the seduction of the audience, the silent watchers, witnessing this clash of emotions between the main characters.

One of my favorite parts of screenwriting was creating the "backstories" for our characters. It is not enough to simply start a film with fully-grown adults, you understand. The writer needs to know every salient detail of these characters' pasts, even if none of that material will be explicitly present in the film.

Whenever I write anything, including the entries at this, my most public blog, I must confront the challenge of what to make explicit, what may be allowed to remain implicit, and what will not be revealed at all.

Every writer is familiar with these problems.

Here, I must pause to discuss why I love writing as much as I do, and why this blog will ultimately prove to be about my struggle to establish a new voice for myself as a writer in the last third (let's be optimistic) of my life. When I was ill as a boy, I began writing, only for myself. Unfortunately, I destroyed all or almost all of that writing, as a teenager.

Looking back, I see how writing helped me survive, emotionally, a very difficult experience.

The next time I fell seriously ill I was 24, in India. My wife and I were traveling throughout South Asia on our winter vacation as Peace Corps school teachers in Afghanistan. We had become careless in what we ate and drank; rather, we had become culturally sensitive to how insulting it is to local people in that part of the world to refuse the food and drink they offer travelers when they appear in their villages.

My wife had a stronger constitution than I, and she remained healthy. I acquired Typhoid Fever, Salmonella, or both (doctors differed about this afterward), and shed pounds faster than a baseball used to leave the bat of Barry Bonds.

Let's not linger on this scene; suffice it to say the nurses who cared for me as I recovered from a long delirium nicknamed me "Ghandi," which was appropriate, since although I am six feet tall, I weighed 97 pounds at that point, dehydrated to very near (two hours) the point of death.

I had to learn how to walk again.

The point of telling you this is I again turned to writing in my hospital bed in India, and even more so later that year once we returned to my beloved Ann Arbor, probably the town that will always be my favorite on this planet.

Two writers who might not otherwise have inspired me did so in this period, with specific works: Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and Kipling's collected short stories from India. Hemingway is not my sort of writer in content; he's way too macho, but I love that particular book, its imagery and its essential tragedy, with the ultimate triumph imbedded in an ultimate defeat.

Kipling, much-maligned as a racist, is often overlooked in literature classes, which is sad because he captured the detail and feel of a tropical night better than anyone except possibly Conrad, among all of the Western authors whose books about Asia I have read to date.

So, to be explicit, this is why writing matters so much to me. Writing is my survival skill. I used to joke that back in the caveman days, when we hunted big animals for dinner, the big, hairy guys and athletes brought down the prey. Others of us, perhaps with poorer eyesight, earned our keep by bringing back the story of the hunt, and embellishing it somewhat, around the campfire as our community squatted and tore the cooked meat from the bones of the creatures our hunters had murdered on our collective behalf.

There has always been blood on our hands.

So, despite this long digression, I have not forgotten that this post tonight is about my image of one night in a movie theatre. There are two characters: a man and a woman. They seem to love each other very much. The movie turns out to be rather boring to both of them. (They have similar tastes.) But there is one difference between them. He thinks this is just one night among many for them. She, however, has already decided to break up with him.

These two characters finally exit the movie theatre and walk to a small car, where they sit in its front seat, kissing for a long time, mindless of passing traffic. Like two people hopelessly in love, very romantic.

The tragi-comic aspect of this story, is that three days later, when she tells him she has to break up with him, he, naively, blurts out, "But what about the other night, at the movie and in the car?"

What this sorry excuse for a male lead obviously did not grasp was that life is nothing but a movie. (Life, the Movie, By Neal Gabler.) Act your part, make it seem real, collect your rewards, and then move on to the next opportunity.

A fool makes out because his heart is engaged.

The cool people, like our actress in this film, know it's only a charade. There always is another willing male lead to take the last one's place, and in fact she had done the same scene with a stand-in not long before.

This is why I have to write so much.

It's all in the backstory.