Writing Silence

In a grasping attempt for get a little blog writing inspiration flowing, I did what I usually do when I am just not the mood to think: I found a way to make myself feel like I was being productive without actually tackling the task at hand. In other words, I went searching online for quotes about silence. I found many quotes, both witty and insightful but when I came across an Italian proverb, I thought, “Ok, this could get me going.” The proverb: is Silence was never written down. Hmmm, I thought, “What would Elmaz have to say about this?” My guess is that she would probably say that this is BS. Ok, maybe we can’t actually “write silence” in a literal sense but we can create it with words and we can fill the silence with so much emotion that expression that silence has the potential to say much more than words can. In the movie Frida, the moments where nothing was being said but so much was being SHOWN were particularly powerful. When Frida is on the trolley car and get in an accident and she is lying broken among the wreckage with the gold leaf fluttering around his body like a spirit and then when she is lying in bed in a full-body cast, no words are spoken by her or any of the other characters yet so much is expressed in the angles of her body, the expressions on her face, the colors and the space (in the wreckage of the trolley can she is practically buried in the rubble and in the cast she is in a big, dark room but her body is completely confined.) If had she been speaking during these “scenes”, I think it would have taken away from the power of the images. This reminds me that, in my work writing, I have so many tools at my disposal and the more that I layer them, the more depth I can potentially bring to my work. Of course dialogue can be a wonderful way to express what a character is feeling or thinking but, if we take that away, we also have many other elements at our disposal: space/atmosphere, facial expression, body language/gestures, color, light vs. dark (and everything in between), etc. One moment in the movie that I thought expressed so much using some of these tools was when Frida is a girl and she is spying on Diego painting and then putting the moves on his model. She yells at him, “Just keeping you honest Panson!” Diego says nothing in return but his face and body language say it all: he likes this firecracker of a girl. Finally he has met his match. Even if you don’t know the story of Diego Rivera and Frida Khalo, you get the idea that this simple interaction is going to be the beginning of a very feisty relationship of equals who also give each other a very hard time. It’s amazing that you can say so much with only five words and the perfect expression. It’s so condensed. Which brings me to my second revelation about how to apply what I saw in the movie: you don’t always have to write/describe/explain/show/tell a lot because sometimes less is more.