Dead.

Okay, so this column was supposed to be the one I promised a few weeks back about what to do between the second and third drafts of a feature script, but my mother died yesterday and that news has diverted me somewhat into writing about something entirely different. This probably isn’t terrible news – I can’t imagine many of you were staring fixedly at your monitors eagerly awaiting eight-hundred words on ‘what to do between the second and third drafts of a feature script’ and those of you who were probably need to get out more.

So, this column is about feelings; not in a wimpy ‘I’m a needy fucker who wants to use this column as therapy’ way, but in a ‘how can we use our feelings to our advantage as writers?’ I’ll do the other thing next time, I promise. Maybe...

I hadn’t spoken to my mother in around six years – she lived in Spain and I lived in England and we weren’t close, either geographically or emotionally – so when she died I was able to react to the news much more analytically than one might expect upon hearing of the surprising death of a parent. Although this process only actually started twenty-four hours ago, it has been very useful in allowing me to assess what is appropriate and reasonable and what is conditioned as being somehow ‘normal’. Of course, grief is a subjective concept – especially with regard to how one displays it, although perhaps not quite to the degree that one might expect. I’ll give you an example; Michael Jackson just died, as I’m sure you noticed, and that led to a kind of grief which is neither realistic nor contextually appropriate. What happened there was that rather than reacting in what might be regarded as a proportionate and environmentally suitable manner, people started to react in the way they thought they were supposed to - and because they were unsure of degree, they overcooked it

This is what I didn’t do, yesterday, when I got the call.

I think that our reaction to crisis, bad news or disaster is actually often more about how we think we are supposed to feel than how we actually feel. Of course, sometimes our response is emotionally hard-wired into us – I hear about people who really do collapse when terrible news is received, although it has never happened to me and I have never seen it. What generally happens is that the bad news is imparted and the recipient then thinks for a nanosecond; this is news of such magnitude, after all, that the response needs to be appropriate, but without any idea of what is a reasonable pattern of behaviour it is difficult to work out the correct reaction. With such a challenge and enthusiastic immediacy being key to the process, I think the natural tendency is to ‘go large’; to ensure that the reaction to the news is extreme enough to encompass all reasonable expectations of that reaction. Ergo; a pop singer that virtually no-one under discussion has ever met dies and many, many people are to be found weeping, wailing and ululating in an outpouring of grief that is as inappropriate as it is embarrassing.

How does any of this apply to writing? (I imagine you wondering.) Well, it is all to do with honesty, and the absolute responsibility you have, as a writer, to the characters that you have given creative birth to. I spent a little time this morning on the internet looking at video of Michael Jackson’s grieving fans and Princess Diana’s bereft and sobbing supporters and – unrepresentative though it may be – my comprehensive survey clearly shows that even though the people who appear to be enthusiastically grieving obviously genuinely feel that they have suffered some loss, it isn’t convincing in the slightest; there is a disconnect behind their eyes which shows us that they know that it just ain’t gonna wash. Although their gut tells them that they have suffered a grievous loss, their brain tells them that they never knew the deceased, either in a physical or an emotional sense. They know they’re cheating, but they still want to be able to touch and to feel...

So, which is weirder – my not be able to grieve properly about the death of the person who brought me into the world or millions of fools weeping about the demise of someone they never even met? Well, they are both strange, of course – and neither works in dramatic terms unless the inappropriate level of feeling is in some way relevant and important to the story that you are trying to tell. Generally speaking, people should always behave in an apposite fashion in your tale because otherwise you are betraying your characters. Your audience will be uncomfortable with anyone who doesn’t react in a suitable way to the problems that present themselves, because that means that the conventions have been bent and anything can then happen. They don’t want anything to be able to happen – they want to see people reacting and responding to seismic challenges in an entertaining and yet believable manner, within realistic parameters. To labour the point – the question can be extraordinary and the setting extreme, but the answer must always be found by the application of reality, truth and authenticity.

In drama, we like our behaviour to be proportionate because it allows us to quickly involve ourselves in, and thus react to, the conflict that we see on the screen or the page. It is only in real life that we are allowed to get away with behaving in an entirely inappropriate manner without any logic, rhyme or reason – we are not machines, after all. In the world of fiction, unless it is somehow essential to the story, people must remain true to their character, consistent to themselves and appropriate within the conventions of the society to which they belong.

Truth, after all, will always be stranger than fiction...