Verity's Book IV

2022 Visual Media

2022 was not an easy year for my writing, but it was somehow simultaneously one of the best.

"Writing? Ver, we were going to talk about movies."

I had achieved maximum disinterest in movies by mid-2021. Aside from certain traditional family choices that we elected to watch annually, I'd lost interest in the DVDs we owned, or the various Disney/Pixar available through my mom's Disney+, and didn't care about trying anything new. But from the time in December 2021 where I rewatched "War Horse" with my siblings and came home quivering with aliveness and story, I felt a kind of promise in visual media. Something that got past my guard in the way that books hadn't been able to for the last several years.

The story reminded me of why I loved writing in the first place.

Several months post "War Horse", a friend shared with me an article that gave voice to the revelation that I'd had an inkling of that night, and been struggling to articulate since. My writing over the last several years had become zeroed in on the how-to, the realism, the technical craft. I had forgotten the meaning of dramatic conceit: the daring to call the shots, the willingness to be in charge, the courage to decide when to play subtle, and when to pull out the stops. My vain, valiant struggles, that I often phrased as "I can't seem to feel the larger picture/organic whole/heart of the story", were simply a failure to recognize my role as creator. I approached my scenes more like a scribe, chronicling only what I witnessed in the moment, and it had stifled my writing to the point where I often spoke of "blindness", inability to see ahead, struggling to make sense of the story that I was supposed to know by heart.

And in that hour of comprehension, I understood why movies had been helping. Because while I still naturally loved to analyze their structure, I also wasn't being bogged down with a focus on prose style and narration, things on which I'd been hyper-focused in my own writing and which were never the problem. I was free to revel in the story, which was where my real problem lay. I hadn't somehow forgotten how to write; I hadn't lost my word-smithing. I'd lost my vision for how tell a story.

Beyond that, movies were full of visuals. An intensely visually-minded person, part of the joy for me in writing comes from putting into words whatever touches my heart deeply, especially things like:

- striking/panoramic landscapes or poses

- light

- vibrant color and contrast

- unspoken communication/little facial expressions that convey a world of meaning

- and so forth.

After that, I really embraced the willingness to explore. I didn't attempt to turn it into an educational objective ("Now, today we are going to Learn something and be Inspired") but my eyes and ears were consciously wide open. I was figuratively ten years old again, ready to sit down and absorb a story without the pressure of having an opinion afterwards -- and I was literally twenty-one, opinionated nonetheless, an appreciative critic at heart. I paused mid-scene recklessly to say, "That -- I like that. That's what I want to write about." I felt almost tangible kinships with filmwriters across the years. All year, avalanches  of work, pressures, and heartaches notwithstanding, I could feel my brain waking up.

By the grace of God, that article (which is STELLAR and I will be linking to this inline paragraph via comments) and that year of fearless story exploration is the reason that now, with an influx of free time on my hands, I can write with anything approaching 2018 output. (It's not even about the word counts, surprising and gratifying as those are. It's the fact that I can write with comfort and confidence. The reins are in my hands again. Just, wow.)