It's funny, the word zeitgeist came to me about 2/3 of the way through your typecast, and then your wife took the word out of my mouth. I guess we inhabit the same zeitgeist ...
A friend of mine wrote a novel about office life, narrated in the first person plural. Shortly before it was printed, another novel came out. It was about office life, narrated in the first person plural.
I've always thought that I invented the third brake light one very dark night when I was riding in the back of my family's car down a narrow, scary road. I had a small flashlight and a red plastic toy car in hand; next thing I knew I was kneeling on the back seat, facing to the rear, flashing the light through the plastic toy to make sure the other cars behind us knew we were there...
... that happened in the late 1970s, way before third brake lights became mandatory in cars. Speaking of deja-vus.
Get it written, and follow it through. I once blew a perfectly god script idea with a Melbourne playwrite. They were stoned when I talked to them, and I have always wondered if they used my idea in a film script intentionally, or unintentionally.
Writers are a secretive and suspicious bunch. Always worried about somebody taking their ideas. Or maybe that's just me. I usually talk in broad terms about what I'm writing. "What's your movie about, Teeritz?" "It's about one and a half hours", is my normal response. I knew one guy who lifted a scene out of that Harrison Ford/Brad Pitt movie, "The Devil's Own" and reworked it slightly for a writing class project he was working on. His lecturer said that scene was brilliant...but it wasn't his own. It always reminded me of that line out of "The Red Shoes" (Michael Powell, 1948) where Lermontov says; "It is worth remembering, that it is much more disheartening to have to steal than to be stolen from, hmmm?" For me, that line has always been a mantra when it comes to writing. Whenever I write something and then later realise that my subconscious has pilfered it from the recesses of my movie memory, I swear, then sigh, then rewrite. It's aggravating, but it's the right thing to do. Of course, these days, you need to remember that it's pretty much all been done before. The real trick is in the delivery, in putting a different spin on a story and presenting it fresh without it looking like a rehash of something else.
It's funny, the word zeitgeist came to me about 2/3 of the way through your typecast, and then your wife took the word out of my mouth. I guess we inhabit the same zeitgeist ...
ReplyDeleteA friend of mine wrote a novel about office life, narrated in the first person plural. Shortly before it was printed, another novel came out. It was about office life, narrated in the first person plural.
Spot on. Keep writing Teeritz
ReplyDeleteI've always thought that I invented the third brake light one very dark night when I was riding in the back of my family's car down a narrow, scary road. I had a small flashlight and a red plastic toy car in hand; next thing I knew I was kneeling on the back seat, facing to the rear, flashing the light through the plastic toy to make sure the other cars behind us knew we were there...
ReplyDelete... that happened in the late 1970s, way before third brake lights became mandatory in cars. Speaking of deja-vus.
This is exactly what I was trying to get at with my comment at Rino's blog. Get it written, but keep your ear to the ground.
ReplyDeleteGet it written, and follow it through. I once blew a perfectly god script idea with a Melbourne playwrite. They were stoned when I talked to them, and I have always wondered if they used my idea in a film script intentionally, or unintentionally.
ReplyDeleteWriters are a secretive and suspicious bunch. Always worried about somebody taking their ideas. Or maybe that's just me. I usually talk in broad terms about what I'm writing. "What's your movie about, Teeritz?"
Delete"It's about one and a half hours", is my normal response.
I knew one guy who lifted a scene out of that Harrison Ford/Brad Pitt movie, "The Devil's Own" and reworked it slightly for a writing class project he was working on. His lecturer said that scene was brilliant...but it wasn't his own.
It always reminded me of that line out of "The Red Shoes" (Michael Powell, 1948) where Lermontov says; "It is worth remembering, that it is much more disheartening to have to steal than to be stolen from, hmmm?"
For me, that line has always been a mantra when it comes to writing. Whenever I write something and then later realise that my subconscious has pilfered it from the recesses of my movie memory, I swear, then sigh, then rewrite.
It's aggravating, but it's the right thing to do. Of course, these days, you need to remember that it's pretty much all been done before. The real trick is in the delivery, in putting a different spin on a story and presenting it fresh without it looking like a rehash of something else.