Why We Write

http://whywewriteseries.wordpress.com/

The site hasn’t been updated in nearly two years, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still inspirational.

So why do I write?

Who knows, I’m not very good at it, but I enjoy doing it and once in a while a few decent words get strung together that make for a moderately entertaining piece. It’s not like I have to compensate for having a shitty childhood, I had a perfectly fine childhood in fact. I write because my mom did it, I write because I like reading (not my own stuff) and emulating those writers that I admire. I write because there’s really nothing else I want to do. I’ve tried my hand at computer tech support and frankly I’d rather just slap anyone who owns a computer (no offense) these days. I’d like to say that I will follow in my father’s footsteps, but I’m not a plumber, and while I can clean I’d prefer not to make it my job (I really appreciate those who’s job it is, it’s a thankless job). I tried my hand at electrical work, I’d end up electrocuting myself lets just face it. I’m not talented enough to be a musician (though I fake it well). Fast food/retail work really just makes me hate the human race. Writing is mostly a solo job, sure you can collaborate but in the end there are thoughts that are yours and thoughts that are the other persons, if they match then awesome, if not, well you better hope that your ideas are better. Why do I write? Because I can’t play video games for a living, because I can’t listen to music and just chat about it with my friends for a living, because I can’t watch movies and television shows and chat about them with my friends and get paid for it (I’m not Jon Favreau). I don’t exactly get paid for my writing right now, but I write because I one day want to inspire someone else the way that JJ Abrams, Joss Whedon, Damon Lindelof, Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Geoff Johns and so many others inspired me. I want to write because I don’t know of any other way to meet Robert Rodriguez, I write because one day I’d like to meet and hang out with Taylor Swift (we’ll work towards marriage). Will this all happen? Probably not, but that’s what writing is about, dreaming. I like to make stupid stories up, I like to tell stories in extremely wordy ways. I write because everyone should know what I’m thinking about (why do you think I tweet so much?). I write because I lack self confidence most days and one day I’ll show all those kids that I went to high school with (show them what? I dunno, that I wrote a short story? oooo impressive). I write for so many different reasons that it’s not even funny. But I write mostly because I really love it. And shouldn’t that be the reason why we do anything?

**edit – i need an editor…

twitter and scriptwriting

For those of you who are not on twitter it’s become one of those things, trying to write something in 140 characters or less and make it somewhat interesting. Sounds like an Ernest Hemingway challenge. What’s cool about it is the amount of “celebrities” that are on there, I currently follow most of the actors from Joss Whedon’s stuff (Felicia Day, Tom Lenk, Alyson Hannigan-Denisof, Eliza Dushku, Maurissa Tancharoen, Nathan Fillion, Dichen Lachman, and Miracle Laurie) they’re pretty fun to read, especially as they all still talk and interact with each other even when not working with each other anymore, such is the case of Aly and Tom Lenk (Williow and Andrew [from Buffy] respectively). The reason I really bring this up is more about filmmakers that are starting to use twitter to communicate to fans what they’re doing. Jon Faverau tweets (it’s not twitters or twats or whatever, the supposed official plural is “tweets”) about working on Iron Man 2, people who follow him on twitter tend to get a little glimpse at things (set photo’s and such) before the press does sometimes. It’s a cool way to keep in touch with fans and I think it allows us to feel apart of the filmmaking process a little bit more.

The person that’s new to twitter (like within the last week or so) is Jason Reitman, aka Ivan Reitman’s son aka the guy who beautifully directed “Thank You for Smoking” and “Juno”.  Jason is in the middle of editing a new movie he shot with George Clooney called “Up In The Air”. He talks about certain scene changes and adding music and how it’s working and what not. While for some that sounds boring, it’s a very neat insight to the editing process which, yes is a very tedius process but I think the true test of the process Reitman is going for will be when the film finally releases. We’ll (hopefully) understand how he chose what he did and why he did it. Why did he choose that song to play over this scene and so forth. It’s extremely cool, I think Kevin Smith is doing something similar but his tweets are annoying and he tweets a little too much (I’m also looking at you John Mayer). Reitman isn’t pretentious in his tweets or anything, he’s just relying information about what he’s doing. His coolest comment the other day was talking about showing a cut of the movie to his dad. Now Ivan Reitman is a hugely succesfull director in his own right, with films like Ghostbusters and Stripes and many more. So I can’t begin to imagine showing your third feature film ever to your dad let alone when your dad is widely popular director as well. Speaking of Jason’s films, he did a bunch of short movies before he did “Thank You for Smoking” and while I can’t find most of them I was able to find his last one “Consent” on Atom Film, it’s a short, fourteen minute flick but it’s pretty funny, it starts off cheesy but that’s very much the idea and you get that once you see the film. Here’s a link: http://www.atom.com/funny_videos/consent/

From reading Jason’s tweets it’s just inspired me to go back and start writing again, scriptwriting was why I became an English major to begin with (honestly being in that specific major doesn’t mean we have better grammar or spelling or punctuation than anyone else it just means we’ll make fun of other people for not having good grammar, spelling or punctuation). I have a few ideas that I’m kicking around for short films. I’ve been wanting to make a horror film for a while now, at least write one and I wrote a psuedo horror flick back in my screenwriting class that I liked but it was very “Sci-Fi movie of the week” type of deal, okay dialogue but lacking in any real scares. So I sat down the other night while on a dead, boring shift at work and thought, what do I want to make, what would scare the shit out of me? Well death scares the crap out of me, so let me write about that, well being alone scares other people, let me add that in, and that’s how it went for a while, and then I got the very minimal and basic plot to a horror movie. How I am going to work this altogether I don’t know yet, but that’s half of the fun in the writing process, see where things go. The other one I started writing at like 1:30 am this morning and it was supposed to a completely different script idea but started writing what came out instead, as the other idea seemed to “Kevin Smith” and while that’s okay I’ll let Kevin Smith be Kevin Smith. I’m trying to come up with a backlog of some projects to work on next semester, while I don’t have any film classes that doesn’t mean I can’t make some.

In the meantime finally I remembered to share this video I made at the end of the semester for a class I had. Teacher let me have free reign as I was the only one who ventured to make a film. This is different than what he saw and what I showed the class, that was fifteen minutes of interviews stuck together. This time I edited the footage, tried to make it flow a little better, paired similar speeches up and such. Snuck a psuedo trailer in for my other future project (Robert Frost: Zombie Hunter – a documentary). So here it is “Zombies and You – The Directors Cut”: http://vimeo.com/4716870

*note* I could only use Vimeo as YouTube said the video was too long at like twelve minutes.