In creating a new trailer, one for Moon Dust, I thought about the basics behind romance novels and one of the complaints many have about them. They are about emotion, and they are about pathos. If a couple's relationship works out from the get-go, it's not a romance. If it shows the ecstasy and agony of the passion in love relationships, then many feel it's maudlin. Where's the balance or is it even possible? Does most romance (exceptions being romantic comedies) have pathos at its core whether a small or large part of it?
I remember a humorous segment of Romancing the Stone where the Kathleen Turner character is finishing one of her romantic novels and sobbing the whole time as she declared how good it was.
Aristotle declared there are three ways to appeal to people in any argument-- ethos, pathos and logos. Pathos is used a lot both in advertising and political arguments-- appeal to the emotions. Sometimes ethos is used as in this person is honorable and their argument must likewise be honorable. But logos, that's less frequently used and not sure how much it works in literature as that sounds more like nonfiction than fiction of any sort.
Pathos is often ridiculed especially in romances as being silly; but it's not. It's an appeal to the common emotions we all experience unless we suppress them. All great fictional literature has it even if it is not of the romantic sort. In a romantic novel, there is going to be pathos if it's not going to be a-- and then she did this, followed by him doing that, and this is what happened-- kind of writing.
Still when I read some of my own stories and feel the emotions surging in the characters, I do wonder how far I should have gone with it, and when will I have lost the readers by trying to push more emotion than the situation actually merits. You cannot tell the reader they should feel sorrow or pity for a situation. It is either there or it's a fraud.
Some of my books have more pathos than others. When I wrote Moon Dust about a man who had been molested as a child and as an adult was refusing to deal with the ramifications of that, when his wife had left him over the ways this kind of abuse had impacted their relationship, when he was wrestling with not only that divorce but also, as a high school principal, situations where he felt he was losing students due to the problems in the system, problems he couldn't overcome, when his wife with a new haircut, wardrobe, apartment, and productive life seemed to be moving on while he could not, when he faced a dangerous, life threatening enemy, when he came to a point of nearly losing it all or winning the ultimate victory, can that be written without pathos? Does that very emotional climax though turn off as many readers as it might win over?
Well it's not like I have answers, but it's the kind of thing with which I think writers all wrestle. How far do I take this? When does it become farce and not feel real?
Creating this trailer pleased and surprised me as I didn't think I could do one for this particular book. When I began gathering images, creating ones that I would need, I found the repetition in shapes and motifs played together the way the story's elements did. The music worked with it and yes, enhanced the pathos.
