Blog post 3 on this creative stuff…I think??

In the midst of finishing up my last week of school for this Semester I have been writing a ton recently about what I am always trying to write about: trying to understand life. More specifically, has been the idea of pregnancy for teens and a few people that I personally have met in my life that have been in this situation at to young an age. To Chey and Gina, I care for you both a ton!

Watching Teen Mom and The Secret Life Of The American Teenanger have both brought a few extra ouches to my mainframe. Let me back up a few steps.

Pain is fuel. What I mean is that pain and being human, as I talked about last time, become our lens. Our storytelling lens is how we see the world and whom we choose to look through. Characters then embody what we are trying to communicate.

George Clooney in Up In The Air, a man who is constantly running away and discrediting himself. His reality has become the airplanes he flies in and the firing of people’s jobs. A very startling relevant story for 2008 and even now.

Rachel Getting Married is a brutal downhill spiral of facing personal addiction and one’s selfish acting family.

Lars And The Real Girl deals heavily with lonliness and isolation and selfishness. This is one of my favorite films of all time. Its so well done, I feel like its not a movie.

The two shows I have been watching deal heavily with adolescence, a very misunderstood time in life. And adding the element of having babies in your teens, that really adds a ton of deadweights to the lives in these shows. Brenda Hampton seems to be mastering a slightly cleaner version of the crappy Dawnson’s Creek through Amy Jurgens.

I don’t know how much more of these shows I can take, probably not to much longer. But it has provoked me to reflect, as I do when I am watching everything.

Pain is fuel. Pain is what everyone deals with. Pain eventually becomes suffering and suffering becomes an addiction. A incurable wound that one will waste their entire existence on getting the remedy. The cure for the pain-to quote Jon Foreman, is essentially the driving force behind the story.

If someone was to ask me what needs to be in a story I wouldn’t hesitate and say: conflict. Conflict is the practical application of pain. Without conflict we would have very bland and boring stories. If there is no resolve inside of characters to move forward in the midst of their pain then the story would not move forward.

In Sunshine Cleaning, the line that cuts me deep, was when Amy Adams got told by Emily Blunts character, “you are pathetic!” The way it was timed in the scene was very on edge and dreary that you really took that one personally.

Pain is the fuel for the story as well as allowing yourself to be a human. Now, I must clarify this. I am always operating under the onus that we are Godless. Most stories are not about Christ or anything heavenly. Most stories are about humans being humans and us succeeding. I think we can still learn from these stories even though they become Godless very fast.

Pain still needs an education. Abuse and betrayal and disappointment still need to be talked about. I think we need to get creative with how this takes place. I just finished reading The Lonely American the other night, its a real easy read about the lonely elements to our present over techno world. Its very fascinating. But what if we took that very real human pain and turned that into characters?

What would happen if we dealt with the issues that people don’t want to talk much about. Dealing with the elephant in the room could turn into potent material for storytelling.

Life is certainly full of times of misunderstandings and heart ache that does not bring the cure for the pain but if we can find new ways to be creative about it then I think we could find much success.

I found a new wave of revelation about Mat Kearney’s life in his new album Young Love, its been blaring pretty loud in my car recently. In the song Rochester he really explains his father wounds, as I have tweeted before, and you really relate to it in a new way. Abuse, drugs and running away put you in his position, which I believe is running with your back turned to what happened. Escape isn’t always the answer but seems to be when you are abused. Tyler Perry certainly has made 350 million talking about his own personal abuse in his plays.

I had found out one of the writer’s in this recent film I watched was her own story. She certainly took her own story and made it make sense inside fiction.

As Hemingway said ” A Man can be destroyed but not defeated.” Perhaps, we are not yet defeated but are trying to make sense of how life can destroy us sometimes. Like Confessions Of  A Shopoholic when she realizes that shopping and material possessions are not as important as the people she loves. Or how Heroes ends with the ultimate message: love.

SO, in conclusion. Let us write about our pain with redemption in mind. Next up: how to move from pain, human to a place of redemption. A new idea, I feel.