Tell the Emotional Truth

So I’m far from home, in Israel. Long day. I have a lot of work to do and I’m thankful I can work remotely. I turn on the TV and turn the volume down low so I can half-watch it while answering 1001 emails. It’s some sappy made-for-tv movie about a woman who is dying of cancer. No, no, it gets better – she’s got this cute little baby named Emmy who is six months old when she gets her terminal diagnosis. Oh lord. I keep answering emails. I glance up now and again and think HOW did this get MADE? It’s totally, 100% predictable, there is no sophistication or landscape to the story – she gets the diagnosis and she slowly dies. Scene after predictable scene. It’s like being on the receiving end of a parent holding a plastic spoonful of peas and saying “Heeerre comes the choo-choo! Open wide!”

But lo and behold, inch by grudging inch, the story sucked me in. She’s dying! And – the baby won’t have a mommy! I left an email in an ellipses…SOB! Yes. A movie of the week about a mom dying of cancer got more than a tear out of me. ME! The super smart lady who runs three businesses and loves The Great Gatsby.  Ridiculous! How did it happen? I protest!

Because sweet emotion, that hot wire that runs straight from your heart to your brain is so primal that the smartest and most ironic among us cannot resist it. It’s that lump you get in your throat during the sad part. It’s the pounding heart you get during the scary part. It’s the swelling heart you feel in the happy ending. As sophisticated as we humans have become, we really haven’t changed a bit. We want to feel. We need to feel. And if you, as a writer, can evoke emotional truth using 26 paltry characters and your imagination alone,  you are acting the part of Merlin.

Oh the movie? The one scene of emotional truth was the high point, as it turns out.  But that’s okay, we still got a lesson from it, didn’t we?

Now go weave some dreams.