2011-08-15

Watching Bad Films

Looking for inspiration as a writer can be a very tricky thing. If one takes in too much outside influence then your style is likely to be branded as ’Hemingway-ish’or ’Faulkner like’. All writers want to come across as having an original voice, so the best thing that you can do is find your own way of doing things. One thing that I have found to be useful recently is watching bad films.

If you are feeling inadequate as a writer, a bad film will demonstrate that writing does not need to be perfect in order to find an audience. This knowledge should liberate you to write the worst text that you can possibly come up with, and then write some more. Most new writers tend to rely on the autobiographical, and some authors will remain here for the duration of their writing career. This is not all bad. The trick is to delve deeply into psychological detail. The coming of age story is told over and over again, but the thing that makes a good coming of age story, and that makes it compelling is both the social and psychological detail that the writer incorporates.

Try this simple exercise. Take a scene from a coming of age film like Stand by Me or The Breakfast Club and rewrite them from your own unique context and viewpoint. I can absolutely assure you that if you rewrite The Breakfast Club for a English school, you will have a real winner on your hands. The trick as a writer is to get the detail correct:

• Hear the voices in your head of your friends and family. Sit in a quiet room and listen to the memory of them speaking. Do your best to get it down verbatim.
• Learn to appreciate small environmental details and be able to explain them accurately. My sister wore cheap silver jewellery when we were teenagers and she was forever trying to hide the green stains that it left around her neck. Look around the memories of your youth and find the details that stick out, I always get a laugh from my mother’s orange soda pop chicken, when she thought it was high cuisine to make chicken a la orange with fanta.

If you do this exercise, you will help strengthen your writing muscles. It takes away the edge of having to think of something new and creative and focuses on your skills.

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