I love Intervention. I love how it exposes humanity at its rawest. Love, anger, forgiveness, and, usually, relapse. But this post isn't a love letter to Intervention, it's about writing and the power of action compared to words.
During an intervention, it doesn't matter how many times the family members tell the addict that they love them and how much they would miss them if they died. Most of the time, the addict doesn't agree to go to rehab because people love them, they go because if they don't they won't have a place to live or any support system, so rehab is basically their only option.
Many times, the addiction has been brought on by abuse, a traumatic event, or genetics. In a recent episode, the mother of the addict was also an addict. The mother told her daughter she was leaving to get treatment that night, asking if her daughter would get treatment as well. An immediate answer of yes. I've seen this more than a few times on the show. Even if a relative just agrees to go to therapy, it's usually enough to make the addict readily agree to go into treatment without all the ultimatums. Action is more powerful than I Love You.
Human beings respond to action. Words can mean nothing, which is sometimes hard to grasp when we're creating a story by writing words. It's good to take a page from the humanity exposed on Intervention: a page of dialogue might be replaced with a single action that gets the strong reaction we're hoping to evoke from our characters and our readers.
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