Irene Smith

This is the beginning of the year of postings. I actually remembered. Starting today, I plan on posting one entry a week from now until next July.

I have this urge to run away from my life. There has been too much sorrow lately; so much that I don’t notice the good things that are surely happening as well. I want to hide, to be alone, and there isn’t time. I’m watching the movie Elizabethtown. It’s nearly over and Orlando Bloom is running around the flea market, looking for Kirsten Dunst. I’m certainly not looking for Kirsten Dunst, but I think I am looking for something. I just wish I knew what it was.

If I had the money to do it, I’d hop in the car and just drive away. I love my husband and my children and grandchildren, but this is a trip I’d take alone. Just me and a bunch of CDs with my favorite music.

I’d go looking for those places that people seldom notice and rarely visit. I’d visit museums and tourist traps. I would stop to eat when I felt like it and stop to sleep when I got tired. I’d check out big cities and small towns. I think it would be refreshing and invigorating, and when I came back, I’d be ready to go on. Of course few people get to do in real life what people get to do in movies.

Despite the fact that I have a really good job, I can’t afford to “run way” even for a few hours because there’s never any money left over. So I go on from day to day, building up a sleep deficit that I’ll never be able to pay back. Getting more and more emotionally exhausted by the day. I eat too much, I sleep too little, and I don’t know how to change it.

There is something very soothing about writing. I’m sitting here in the darkened living room (it’s daytime outside, but dark in here) with the television running the background (Elizabethtown has given way to The Truman Show) and the physical act of hitting the keys and seeing the words appear on the screen is soothing.

I’m trying to think of a cool way to close this off, but I can’t. So I’m just going to end it. Here.

See you next week…

If you haven’t seen Nights in Rodanthe, The Notebook or Message in a Bottle and you intend to do so, don’t read this post. There are definite spoilers here.

Let me start by telling you what I mean by “Writers who Cheat.” There is an implicit contract between writer and reader. At the beginning of the story, the writer sets up what kind of story he is telling. It might be a romance, a tragedy, or an adventure story. This set up is an implicit contract between the writer and reader. Some writers cheat. They trick you into believing that they are telling you one type of story, a romance for example, and then when you are totally involved in the romance, they break the contract by revealing that the story is actually a tragedy.

Warning! Here come the real spoilers. Stop now if you don’t want to know about the movies. If you continue, you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

I have written off movies made from the books of Nicholas Sparks for that very reason. More than once I have become totally involved in a Nicholas Sparks movie only to find out that what I thought was a beautiful romance is, in fact, a tragedy.

The 1999 movie Message in a Bottle seems like a perfect romance until Garret Blake is lost at sea. A few years later, in 2004, the movie version of The Notebook came along. This movie was more honest. You can tell from the beginning that this is not one of those “happily ever after” romances. When the movie comes to a bittersweet ending, it is not a surprise.

When Nights in Rodanthe came out last September, I couldn’t wait to see it. Every commercial I saw called it a romance.

From the beginning there are no hints that Nights in Rodanthe is not a romance. There is obvious attraction between Adrienne and Paul from the beginning. They each have their own problems but they complete each other. Adrienne makes it possible for Paul to stop trying to prove that it wasn’t his fault that the woman died on the operating table and to just say, “I’m sorry.” She makes it possible for him ro reconcile with his son and go back to being a doctor. Paul makes it possible for Adrienne to make a decision. Because of her love for him, she is able to stop drifting along and end her marriage once and for all.

At this point in the movie, I thought, “Wow, they’ve both banished their demons, he can reconcile with his son, she can get her divorce and they can live happily ever after.

You’d think so and, in a true romance, that would be the case. In the last ten minutes of the movie, you find out that, rather than coming home to Adrienne like he said he was going to, he was lost in a terrible storm. The supposed pay-off for all of this pain is that she gets to see the wild horses on the beach farther south than they have ever been before. Is this foreshadowed? Yes. Is there any clue that he won’t be there to see it with her? Not a one.

I am not so naive as to believe that every story must have a happy ending even though the romantic in me would like to have it that way. I do believe that there is a difference between a story that focuses on romance and a story that coincidentally has a romance in it. I further believe that the author should let you know in the beginning what type of story is being told and not cheat the audience of the foreshadowed ending just to get one last good tug on their heartstrings.