A Window of Irony

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Just after my last post, a friend (who doesn’t read the blog) gave me a copy of the movie Secret Window. She wasn’t even trying to feed my current obsession. She just thought it was a movie I’d enjoy.

It’s about a writer. Who spends WAY too much time shut up in his cabin alone.

It’s based on a Stephen King novella, and I’m not a big fan of Mr. King. I’ve read a few, and I love his characters, just not most of his plots. But this is definitely a character-driven story, and I truly enjoyed the movie. I didn’t get the full impact of the tension, which is, of course, the danger of watching such a film at home with the phone, the kid, and the broken furniture (that last one is another story for another day…).

If you do rent or buy it (which I do recommend), be sure you watch the behind-the-scenes interview with the writer/director David Koepp. He has a couple of intriguing comments on the nature of writers and our lives. That the one essential part of us, the heart of our livelihood, our soul, that which makes us what we are–our imagination–is also the very thing that can bring us our deepest torments. That it’s something that we can’t turn off, merely control at times, and our thoughts are always busily creating some world or other. One of the dramatic points in the film is that Mr. Depp’s character, Mort Rainey, was so often “gone” into his writing that his wife felt abandoned and lonely.

Terry Brooks, in Sometimes the Magic Works, makes a similar point, even noting that his kids have learned to make sure they have his full attention before speaking. “Earth to Dad!”

One comment from Mr. Koepp really caught my attention: Writers can be plagued with “too many thoughts,” uncontrolled, which can bring about a serious block in production because of the unfocused, untamable nature of them. He speaks as if this is a characteristic of creative folks alone. Until recently, it never occurred to me that other people might be different. Don’t all of us have internal lives that are driven by dreams and imagination? One of my friends says, Yes. Another says, No.

Maybe yes, maybe no.

I, for one, can’t imagine life without it.

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