Breaking it down

Have you seen the movie Seven Pounds? It came out in 2008, stars Will Smith, Rosario Dawson, Woody Harrelson, and others. It's difficult to describe without spoiling things. Here is the description from IMDB: An IRS agent with a fateful secret embarks on an extraordinary journey of redemption by forever changing the lives of seven strangers. Will Smith's performance is extraordinary and heartbreaking, as is the story itself. It's a movie I learned from, both as a writer and a human being. It's the writer part I want to talk about right now.

The story is told in a very particular way, feeding the audience bits and pieces of information only as they become necessary, so that when the critical moment of the story comes, the audience has everything s/he needs to understand the full impact of what is happening and the reverberations back to everything that has happened before, while getting the maximum punch-to-the-gut, rending-the-heart emotional kapow.

In short: the movie is lean. There are (imo) no extraneous scenes, no wasted lines of dialogue--even the cinematography was what I would term as 'spare.' The story is stripped down to the absolute essentials--to its core--and then laid bare for the audience to see. Perfect.

Don't get me wrong. There is a lot of drama going on--outrageous, tragic, melodramatic circumstances, the sort Nicholas Sparks novels are made of. But the way the story is told is so dressed down, it all just works.

And I've been giving that a lot of thought. About how this would have been an easy movie to dress up in a lot of cinematic music and sweeping shots and minutes-long emotionally charged scenes laden with dialogue between Will Smith and his brother, Will Smith and his friend, Will Smith and everyone else in the movie.

And that movie would not have been perfect. It might have been okay, or even pretty good, because the story, itself, is compelling, no matter how many layers you smother it in. But definitely not perfect.

So I realized...I think maybe I do that--that smothering, that layering on--with my writing. I feel the emotion, the drama, the urgency of my stories so acutely that I wrap the story in words upon words upon words, just trying and trying to get my point across. (Probably like these godsdamned long blog posts.) (Shit, probably like that very sentence.) When sometimes, it's better to break it down, instead. To lay things bare. To leave them raw and exposed. Lean.

This has really been circling my brain lately. This idea, along with the importance of using the right words. And how, if I can combine those two ideas, well hot damn. That'd be something worth reading.