I love the movie You’ve Got Mail. Goodness, what a terrible stereotype I am, am I not? Yes, it’s a love story. Ugh. And they wear muggy clothes that were popular in the 1990’s. Gross. It quasi- copies from Pride and Prejudice and is also a remake of the 1940 film Shop Around the Corner. Scoff. I often get it mixed up with Sleepless in Seattle because both of the main characters are the same actors. (Not that this is no good; let’s be honest, they work well together.) Still: frustration.
However, this movie intrigues me: mostly because it was well written, and essentially is about two writers. Writers who would, if not for the invention of the internet, a quirky chat-room encounter, and riches enough to purchase a then-very-expensive laptop on which to type, not be writing. Writers who would not have known that they were authors if it were not for circumstance.
My favorite thing about this movie is that it makes me want to write more. A great portion of the script narrates the couple’s latest emails over screen action, and these emails consist of the character’s thoughts as they move about the day. Their observations, their likes and dislikes, insignificant questions and personality struggles. As the heroine Kathleen Kelly says “…mostly we talk about nothing, but all of this ‘nothing’ has meant so much more to me than so many other ‘somethings.’”
I am always taken aback when reading a great book at how little truths about life, society, and the physical universe can make a story instantly relatable – it makes the scenario visible in one’s head. It’s like sympathy.
“Don’t you just love New York in the Fall? It makes me want to buy school supplies.”
Perhaps this is just me: but I immediately associate the briskness of Fall with the old responsibility of stocking up on paper and pencils. I can smell the Trapper-Keepers, and see the Lisa Frank zebras in front of my eyes. Before I even knew I did this, Joe Fox put it into words. He verbalized my subconscious through his random life observations.
Sometimes, when I'm traveling mostly, I "write" in my head, with my thoughts. It's as if someone could hear my thoughts or they are being recorded by a little leprechaun scribe as I think. Occasionally, these thoughts are actually recorded and turn out to be something akin to quality writing, and sometimes that is not the case. (I.e. I go back and read it and HATE it, or I forget the genius entirely and it remains eternally lost to the abyss of brainwaves.) However, the surge of inspiration is usally based on things that I have seen before and about which I have come to some in/significant conclusion.
Isn’t that what stories eventually become, the world from the point of view of the author, delivered in small doses of seemingly insignificant detail? Kathleen saw the caviar as a detail for beauty; Joe saw it as something to be used – but those two differences magnify the identity of the characters and what they value in life and thus for what they choose to live.
So, I like You’ve Got Mail because it inspires me to write random thoughts, and to notice tiny truths because in the end, these are the things that convey truth in stories.
What are your tiny truths? What sort of things inspire you to write or create?
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