The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. Hemingway famously wrote (in Death in the Afternoon): From both, there will be no going back.īoth moments represent the culmination of dozens of prior scenes, if not the entire narrative of the drama. In both, he comes to a life-altering decision.īoth moments are point-of-no-return. In both moments, the character changes radically. Ryan O’Neal as Moses Pray realizes in his Private Moment that he truly has come to care for, and even love, the orphaned girl-Addie Loggins, played by his real-life daughter Tatum O’Neal-with whom he has shared adventures on the road over the preceding several weeks. If he doesn’t change, he will lose his soul. Ryan O’Neal as Moses Pray has his private moment in “Paper Moon”ĭeNiro as Monsignor Desmond Spellacy realizes that the course of life he has followed-that of being the wheeler-dealer right-hand man of his diocese’s powerful cardinal-is ultimately empty and even corrupt. The answer, I suspect, is that Deep Change (in our real lives as well as in fiction) happens not in clamorous, action-filled moments but in quiet, pensive beats when the human heart, at the finish of a protracted, often unconscious, process of evolution concludes and cements its transformation.Ĭonsider the Private Moments we’ve examined in the past two posts-one with Robert DeNiro in True Confessions, the other with Ryan O’Neal in Paper Moon. We’re moved, often, more than by any other scene in the book or movie. Yet somehow we, as readers or audience, are moved by these scenes. Nothing really changes on the screen or the page.

It shouldn’t be, right? There’s no dialogue. Why is a Private Moment so powerful in a book or movie?

Gates of fire pressfield