Sunday, June 28, 2009

stocking the idea soup in my brain...

I told my SO what I'd last posted on my blog and he asked what it had to do with writing. Apart from the fact that blogging is another form of writing itself, I explained how reading the newspaper and watching televised news is one of the ways I keep the idea soup in my brain stocked up. Even if the news doesn't provide me with a particular idea or spark, everything mixes in together and sends my brain off in all sorts of different cognitive directions as I wonder about stuff and mull things over. Somewhere inside that mysterious grey matter unpredictable connections are made which then contribute to the content of my stories, the makeup of my characters and the convolutions of my plots. Its a hard-to-explain alchemy and I like to keep it well fed.

I went to see the movie Transformers 2 yesterday with the famdamily. I can't say I didn't like it but a lot of my favourite things from the first one were missing. Especially the peppy dialogue and brilliant story line. There was a tonne of action and some fun transformer robots, big and small. But the individual parts didn't add up so well. And why did Megan Fox need her hand held everytime she ran anywhere - are women incapable of running to safety on their own? My children who enjoyed the movie thoroughly got the pip with me when I began analysing the plot and couldn't understand why the shortcomings of the story were so important to me - they just were alright? Sheesh! I'm a writer - its my job. Ultimately I wondered about the director and whether he'd understood why the first movie had worked so well. Were all those good bits the first time round a lucky accident? Or was he in too much of a rush to get No. 2 out to capitalise on the success of No. 1.

I thought in my next post I might tell you a few more things about myself so you can add some facts and info to the pictures. If you want to know anything in particular (not already covered by my bios at the Book Council, Scholastic, Storylines and Christchurch City Libraries websites) leave a question for me in the comments section.

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