Homage to Hitchcock

In my last post I was talking about how important it is to match the style of your writing to what you are describing and usually this is a basic requirement of good prose.  If your narrative is told appropriately, your readers will feel confident in your authority as a writer and will trust you to take them anywhere.

There are occasions when this rule does not apply.  Sometimes it can add a bit of tension to your work if style and content seemed to be pulling in opposite directions. This is especially true in poetry, when it can be particularly effective to write about a sad, heartbreaking subject, but using a light rhythm and a bright and breezy rhyme scheme - WH Auden was a master of this (Miss Gee, Stop the Clocks etc)

I think it can be helpful to borrow a thought from Alfred Hitchcock (although he was talking about filmmaking, it can work just as well for creative writing).  Hitchcock said that he used to shoot every love scene as if it were a murder and every murder as if it were a love scene, perhaps tapping into the sexual tension that can be present in both. If you think about it, writing a love scene as though you were dealing with a murder gives you plenty of scope for exploring the power dynamics between two people, their wariness, the intensity of their non-verbal communication, not to mention the physicality of what they are doing.

In a similar vein, if you're describing a murder as though it were a love scene, it can be an excellent way of creatively disconcerting your reader and making them a little more susceptible to what you were doing.  It's a way of replacing brutality with something little more oblique, so that the murder is portrayed in sensual, rather than violent terms. In my head, I picture Hitchcock's camera moving languorously, stealing into close-up, so  perhaps it's as much to do with pace, as with style...

I'm getting into deep water here, but I thought it might be helpful  to think about approaching major scenes in a way that is less immediately obvious. It's not just what you write, but how you write it, which will make you stand out from the crowd