SPECIAL FEATURES

In addition to my general posts about "writing while I'm not writing," I'll periodically add special features to this blog, weekly, biweekly, or monthly “columns” on the subjects that feed my imagination while I’m between books.

Here's the first one:

July 2010

MOVIES--A WRITER’S POV

I’ve been going to movies ever since I was old enough to walk from my house to the neighborhood theater three blocks away. My mother used to give my sister and me each a quarter on Saturdays and again on Sundays to get us out of her hair for the afternoon.

We’d happily sit through the current double bill that changed on Wednesdays and on Saturday evenings. We saw everything, cartoons, adventure stories, adult dramas that we didn't get at all.

To this day, whenever I want to have some fun, the first thing I do is check my local film listings.

I shy away from big Hollywood productions and tend toward smaller movies about characters I might want to know, because they’re warm; weird; or possibly dark, dangerous, and downright unlikable, but fascinating all the same. I think about how they talk to one another and what they say, what their appearance and body language tell me about them; how their stories fit into the narrative as a whole and whether that narrative moves forward to a conclusion that satisfies me.

In this regular weekly feature, I’ll discuss how whatever movie (old or new) I happen to see, during the seven days between posts, strikes me as a writer.

Who can tell when or where what’s on-screen might turn up in one of my novels, stories, or poems?

Every Thursday (provided I can find a movie worth talking about)...