Frozen

In the mid-eighties, I sometimes worked with university researchers. At the time, I had a very ancient Bedford CF camper van and if the weather looked fair, I would plan an escape on Friday afternoon to get up to the Yorkshire Dales or the Lakes. A weekend hiking over the tops always did me a power of good. Colleagues on Monday morning tended to find I had little useful recollection of anything which had taken place at work the week before. 

Big as my weekends may have been, however, they paled into insignificance compared with those taken by one of the research students. A mad climber, or perhaps, more accurately, adventurist, he would be trying as hard as I to sneak away early on POETS day (P**s Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday). But no tame fair-weather rambling for him, he would get into his beat-up old car which made my old camper look respectable and reliable, and shoot up to the Highlands. There, he would climb three Munroes (Scottish mountains of over three thousand feet). He’d sleep in the car and be back more or less in time for work on Monday. The weather didn’t seem to matter: come rain, shine, fog or snow, if he had the weekend free, he’d be off.

“What about the view?” I’d ask. “Surely if you climb to the top of a mountain, you want to see the view.” It was clear he didn’t understand the question. One day, he sat down to explain it to me. “We,” he said, meaning the group of climbers he hung out with, “look for adventure. The greater the risk, the harder it all is, the better. We’re not there for the beauty of the mountains.” Sometimes they went protesting for environmental groups instead, climbing aboard oil tankers or rigs. Again, it was the adventure which mattered, not the cause. 

So when he told me that there was to be a showing of a film, a preview, at the University,  featuring one of his friends, I went along to see it. The film told of how disaster had befallen his friend high in the Andes mountain range. Joe had been tethered to a buddy in a ferocious storm, and had slipped, going over a snow ledge. His buddy, unable to hold him any longer, cut the rope and let him drop. He fell a long way, and went through the roof of an ice tunnel, breaking both legs. The film was the story of his escape, alone, from the bleakest of situations, a truly extraordinary death-defying effort as he crawled many miles without food or water, back to base camp. He got there only to find the camp had moved on hours before, believing him dead and destroying all his belongings, clothing and cooking kit included. He had to crawl many more miles.

Watching the film, I felt frozen, I felt despair, I felt as though I was there in those terrible conditions. I experienced huge relief when the film ended and the lights went up. It took me a little while to return to my own life.

It was a similar experience a little later when I watched The Titanic. I’d been glad to bag a front row seat in a very good cinema, only to wish I hadn’t, to wish that I had the distraction of people in front of me eating popcorn and sweets, in order to be less sucked into that cold, cold sea. So effective were the two films that I’ve never watched anything more serious than Crocodile Dundee since. I jest, but there’s an element of truth there.

As writers, we seek to take our victims, sorry, readers, into a different world, and subject them to an emotional journey we have crafted for them. Film-makers do the same, but their techniques are different. Beyond the script and the acting, they paint with light, sound, colour, angles and depth of view. Focus, timing, back-lighting, reverb, wind-machines, lens filters.

We have words, and only words.

It is always illuminating to see the same task from a different point of view, so consider, next time you settle down to watch a film or a TV drama, how the film-makers take you on their journey, and how it contrasts and compares with word-painting. How would you handle leaving the safety and apparent security of the luxury liner to plunge into the freezing sea and see the ship go down, hundreds of miles from the nearest assistance? How would you handle the obviously-hopeless escape down a frozen mountain range with both legs broken, only to find your goal, base camp, deserted and burnt-out, and need to find the will to continue? How would you do that, in fact, with almost no dialogue, as the protagonist has no-one to speak to, and in that cold, in that thirst, speaking is impossible anyway.

Write a scene in which you tell the story as dramatically as you can. If you can do it without dialogue, so much the better.

The corrollary is to look at your crafted scenes and consider how the film-maker may approach them. What would he think was important, what may he find he needs to add to get the message across? And if, for instance, you see that the film-maker may think the dialogue alone barely carries the message and that adding a bit of bad weather might help, should you do the same?

Choose a dramatic scene from your work-in-progress and re-imagine it as instructions for a cinematographer. Focus on the visual rather than on dialogue.