Hey there,
I was just down at the Portland Art Museum, aka PAM…
There’s a show up now about the making of the most recent interpretation of Pinocchio, this one by Guillermo del Toro.
You all know the story, right? It’s been around for 150 years—an origins story, kind of an immaculate conception, a little akin to some Greek mythology, a character born fully formed, not a baby at all… It’s the story of one man’s, um…“enchanted wood”…
The man makes a marionette, the puppet-son comes to life, berates and diminishes his father, kills a talking cricket, takes off, runs wild, falls in with the wrong crowd…dark and trippy!
It’s actually an amazing book
Apparently there have been something like 34 feature films based on Pinocchio, and more loosely drawing from the work. Three versions came out in just the past year and a half…we’re in a Pinocchio renaissance!
The show down at PAM is pretty cool, full of props and characters, but what I want to look at is this:
It’s the emotional character arc of Pinocchio.
So much of art is about evoking/conveying emotions. A reader’s or viewer’s emotional engagement might be aligned with the character’s emotions, or in contrast, directly opposite, provoked by a character’s foolishness or faults…
Sometimes it all just comes down to the emotional arc, and how to get that on the page in a cohesive, narrative way.
Right?
I love this board as an illustration of clusters of emotions and how those are manifest in the character’s path.
Hope you’re well, and keep going, keep writing if you’re writing, reading if you’re up for reading. Don’t let this world steal your creative life, your internal world.
M
ps—This starts tomorrow! Not too late to jump in!
I'm making a poster of this: "Don’t let this world steal your creative life, your internal world." I love this advice, the character arc, those qualities under "life after death". Thanks for supporting us with your work, Monica. I felt inspired to take another stab at some writing today after reading this.
Thank you for the post Monica.