Heart of the Great Alone by Lynda Waterhouse

As writers how much attention should we pay to the emotional journey we taking our readers on? Do we have a moral obligation to care about our reader's feelings? Or is the telling of the story paramount and hang the consequences.

I was brought up knowing the story of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his ill fated journey to the South Pole. He was one of the star turns in my Grandpa’s book of heroes and heroines. On TV I watched the 1948 black and white movie ‘Scott of the Antarctic’ starring John Mills.Years later it was the adventures of another explorer, Ernest Shackleton that stirred my imagination as I watched the silent film 'South' accompanied by Neil Brand’s haunting music.

At the moment at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, there is an exhibition of Scott, Shackleton and Antarctic photography. I find this collection of black and white photographs taken in the first part of the 20^th century incredibly moving and inspiring but will 21^st century children feel the same?

Fellow author Bridget Crowley and I are currently leading creative writing sessions in the gallery for children between the ages of 7-11years. The children respond to selected photographs and we set them a series of writing tasks.

Then we move on to Captain Scott and The British Antarctic Expedition 1910 -1913. Most of the children have not heard about him and there is an awful moment as they gaze at the final photograph and they realise that this group of weary men ‘were destined never to return from the heart of the great alone’

Some children are upset.We move back into the education room and ask them to express their feelings in a letter to Captain Scott. Some children go back in time and rewrite history rescuing him. Others tell him about what is happening in the Antarctic now and thank him for the scientific samples that he sent back. Some just tell him they feel sad.

It just doesn’t feel right to end the session at this point so we tell them about the fate of one of the dogs that was washed overboard and then immediately washed back again!

( Spoiler Alert – if you a bringing a school group PLEASE don’t give any of this away)

These sessions have been a stark reminder to me to pay attention to the emotional journey in my own writing and that strong emotions need to be handled with care and discharged appropriately before the story ends.

http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/default.asp?action=article&ID=56

http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/media/pdf/hotga-schools-for-web.pdf

Nosferatau - A Copyright Nightmare by Lynda Waterhouse

On Halloween Frugal Husband was to be found lurking in the grounds of Kirkstall Abbey in Leeds. He was there for the screening of the 1922 German classic silent film Nosferatau with live accompaniment from  Neil Brand and fellow musicians Gunter Buchwald and Jeff Davenport. It was by all accounts an amazing experience with the heavens opening up in an amazing rainstorm just as the film ended.

I find this film both terrifying and touching. It was directed by F.W Murnau who had fought in the First World War and whose lover had been killed in battle. Albin Grau, one of the producers of the film, claimed to have met a Serbian farmer in 1916 who had told him about his father who was one of the undead.

  Nosferatau has influenced vampire iconography and film directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Francis Ford Coppola. Count Orlok is a vile creature completely devoid of the sexual allure of Count Dracula but at times, due to Murnau’s masterly direction, you feel for him. It can be a lonely existence bringing plague and death everywhere you go. He is a slave to his passion for Mina. She too nobly sacrifices herself in order to distract him. This is the first film, I believe, to suggest that Vampire’s can be destroyed by sunlight.

And yet in 1925 this film was ruled to be in breech of copyright and every copy was ordered to be destroyed.

The widow of Bram Stoker, Florence Anne Lemon Stoker with the support of The Society of Authors successfully took Prana Films to court and won. She was struggling financially at the time to support herself and her son and her only financial means was the copyright to Dracula. She was right to win as the plot was a shameless and deliberate steal from the novel. Yet in true vampire fashion the film did not die as it was supposed to. One copy remained. I'm glad it did.