Write from Your Fear

Yesterday I watched the movie Finding Nemo for the Nth time. I was a college graduate student when it first came out, and now my second child likes it. Interestingly, new things still pop up. It suddenly occurs to me that not all great movies have to do with large-scale disasters---a country threatened by evil forces, human race being wiped out by asteroids or broken climate. It could simply be a tinny tiny fish trying to find his son.

But the fear is real. The feeling of vulnerability and helplessness as a parent is so true, so common, that it can be shared with every audience. It's not that the larger the scale of a disaster, the stronger the effect. If your emotion resonates with the audience's experience and stirs the fear hidden in their mind, they will care.

"Ideas are cheap." If we ask people to write a story about a witch boy fighting a dark lord, how many may end up with Harry Potter? Now with so many books out there, accumulating over thousands of years, can we find an idea that is truly "new"? In fact, think about our own life, how unique is it? Yet it is powerful enough to make us laugh and cry, to drive us mad. That's what we need to bring to the audience. If we can make up a story, ordinary or absurd, in our town or in the outer space, and if we can provide them with such a experience that they almost feel they have lived a double life, then they'll laugh and cry with us.

But How? This is what Steven Brust said, “You connect yourself to the viewer by sharing something that is inside of you that connects with something inside of him. All you have as your guide is that you know what moves you.” First, don't feel shame for being ourselves. It would be nice if we were saints, but there is no need to pretend either. Those indecent thoughts, cowardice, unreasonable fears and unquenchable desires are, in fact, what other people could recognize in an most authentic way. Faked spirits fool nobody.

Second, for the same piece of experience, we have to dig more than a regular person does. If we intend to touch them, we can't stop where they have stopped. Look deeper. Find what they have missed, tell them what could have been an alternative explanation, so that when they look back their own experience, they too find something new, and when they deal with similar situations in the future, they may surprise themselves. This way, they'll never forget our story.