The Hours

I rented The Hours from my apartment complex on my birthday, mostly because I wanted to indulge in seeing a movie in the middle of the day. However, I didn't finish watching it until last night. "The Hours" is a very quiet, subtle and nuanced movie, with seeming inaction. There's a lot of walking, for instance, and long silences as well. But still the movie fascinated me, mostly on the strength of the acting from the marvelous troika of Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman. Ed Harris was also spectacular in this movie as Richard.

What got me though, while watching this movie, was just how character-driven it was through all three time-lines and there are only a few 'big' moments in the movie, which I won't spoil here, but in general, we're not talking about an action-packed movie, or one with an obvious "boy meets girl" plot. Instead, three timelines are woven together and the editing is marvelous as the parallels between Kidman's Viriginia Wolf, Moore's Laura Brown, and Streep's Clarissa Vaughn are shown. Three very different women with three very different issues.

This movie had heart. I talk about 'heart' in writing a lot because it's an elusive, intangible quality to writing and it's not always there. There are some books/stories that are proficiently and technically good but when push comes to shove, there's no identification with the characters, no realization of who the characters are, and why the story was written.

I briefly mentioned 'walking' above and while I was teasing about DWS' comments about walking in stories, I know he's perfectly right. It's not enough to move a character from room to room, from scene to scene, and expect it to be a story. My definition of a story is when the character in the first paragraph has changed or has discovered something new about himself by the last paragraph. As my writing teacher once said, "If there's a gun over the mantel in act one, it'd better be fired by act three."

There's a scene in "The Hours" where Clarissa is breaking and separating eggs. This is a scene I remember clearly because it's so ordinary -- a woman breaking and separating eggs. But it's the way she does it, cracking the egg on the rim of a pottery bowl, of flipping the yolk from hand to hand while the whites drain between her fingers, and finally gently putting the yolks in a smaller orange bowl. Now that scene had a lot of heart. The action was ordinary, but the way the action was performed, you could see clearly what was going on in Clarissa's head; her agitation, her nervousness, her unhappiness -- all of that in an ordinary gesture.

Movies can show us this and skilled actors like the ones in "The Hours" have an uncanny ability to bring us into their lives. Moore's bright artificiality, for instance, or the way Kidman's Wolfe never quite met anyone's eye -- this tells us about character. The more we know, the more we identity and care for what's going on with the character. When you make a reader care, there is heart in a story, or more precisely, oomph.

So, write about breaking an egg. Talk about what it feels like in your hand. Is it cold? Is it slimy? How are the hands doing? Are they shaking or steady? What does the kitchen look like? Is it messy or clean? And after the character breaks her eggs, how does she feel? Satisfied because she's one step closer to finishing her cake or irritated because a sliver of egg shell made it into the yolk and now she has to fish it out?

There's no magical formula to inserting 'heart' or 'oomph' into a story. Many stories simply don't have that quality because it is so hard and there's really no clean-cut definition as how to get there. I now know that DWS is right and that walking simply pretends at character-action; what's important is what's below the surface, the little details, not the big ones. And more importantly, if one writes from the heart, the reader will surely notice. I noticed the heart about "The Hours" and hereby give it two thumbs up.