Friday Forays in Fiction: Music Videos as Storytelling

Amanda Palmer wrote the lyrics and sings this song.  Based on thoughts shared by her husband Neil Gaiman

I learned this after posting so am updating with the info and links.

I have loved music videos since the first time I encountered them in the 1980s.  I found a deep affinity with them. I loved to turn the sound off and watch them without the music and lyrics and take in the story only in the images.   I liked this so much because it was so close to the way my own mind worked.  All of my own stories originate as images in motion like silent films.  Most of my night dreams as well.  In fact most of my thinking in general.  Instead of soundtracks they have emotional tracks.

I seem to have an affinity for words as well but for some reason it has seemed like the two affinities existed in two separate compartments in my mind and it has always been difficult for me to translate the images (visions) into words and even more difficult to convey the emotion.  Most difficult of all is the social subtext in character interaction.

The video heading this post has affected me quite strongly this week but only partly in light of the thoughts above. It's story is too close to my own and it has brought to my consciousness yet again the issues I have with communication and the misery mishandled communication brings down on a relationship.

My musing on these issues in the past week has spawned two new poems which I posted on Monday and Thursday.  The story behind them which I do not want to reiterate here is outlined in my ROW80 check-in.

It occurs to me that music videos have a lot in common with poetry.  I wonder if I've missed my calling by insisting I'm a novelist.  Maybe my natural bent is for poems that tell stories....

Nah. There should be no reason I can't do both.  But maybe I should take into consideration the fact that I've never completed a novel but have completed many short stories and called them chapters for an intended novel one of those nearing the length of a novella.  Could I be trying to stretch something out of its natural length just to make it fit someone else's idea of what it should be?   I don't know.  I'm starting to ramble.