Vicky vs Cristina

I had a lot of topics I wanted to post on today, including why the word count on my current WIP didn't inflate as grandly as I'd hoped over the weekend (oh, I wrote more than 800 words this weekend. many, many more. unfortunately the majority of them became casualties of my delete button. more on this in a future post), but Friday evening I happened to watch Vicky Cristina Barcelona and there were aspects of it that reminded me of a particular pet peeve regarding writing, or more generally, creativity. And then I discovered that very day Mary Kole over at KidLit.com posted on the very topic that was on my mind. Ms. Kole entitled her post "Business vs Art," but after viewing the movie, I see this debate as Vicky vs Cristina.

Both characters fall victim to the annoying traits of their stereotypes (this is intentional, so I'm not criticizing the movie here. Just using these stereotypes to illustrate my point). Vicky is the more play-it-safe gal where every aspect of her life has to be perfectly planned out and fit into this grand vision of what she believes to be ideal. This by itself isn't so terrible--what's annoying is the fact she seems so judgmental of people who choose a different lifestyle than the one she values.

But even she didn't completely annoy the crap out of me like Cristina (Scarlett Johansson's character). The self-described yet ultimately ungifted "artiste," Cristina turns her nose up at convention and the typical lifestyle to the point where her life becomes its own cliche.

This kind of sh8t drives me nuts.

The snobbery, I mean. People who see the publishing world as "literary" vs "selling out." People who criticize authors like Justin Cronin because The Passage turned him from English professor to household name. Jealous of that 3.75 mil advance, much?

I read books. Some of those books are literary, some are mainstream. Some are adult, others are not. (Lately I've been reading a ton of YA because I really want to know the market I'm writing in, although the book currently on my nightstand is The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.) But they're all just words on pages, and the genre they are dumped into just comes down to what kinds of words are used, the way they are grouped, the manner in which they are wielded. But when judging whether a book was good or not, it all comes down to the same questions for me, no matter what genre it fell into. Did it make me feel something? Did it inspire me? Did it make me want to tell everyone about it?

Hubby is kind of a book snob. He has his MA in literature (vs my BA) and our apartment is lined with bookshelves, as we are both avid readers. When I first moved in with him, the idea of tainting his pristine shelves of literary works with some of my plebeian ones was something he had trouble getting past.  BIG trouble. Now the J.K. Rowlings, the Suzanne Collinses, the Scott Westerfields all feature prominently at the top of some of those shelves. When Mockingjay became available for preorder on Amazon, he had ordered it for me before I could even say...well...mockingjay.

I don't think it has to be one or the other. I don't think there's anything weird about the fact I minored in Philosophy but watch shows like The Vampire Diaries with all the giddiness of a 15-year-old. I think it's ego-maniacal to take oneself too seriously. In fact, the point in Vicky Cristina Barcelona where I stopped hating the character of Cristina was the moment her confidence faltered, where she doubted if she had any real talent. Because that's human, and human is interesting. And flawed. And sympathetic. And we all have a different story, or as authors go, a different story to tell. And different ways to tell it.

In sum: nobody likes a hater.

As far as The Passage, I fully intend on reading it and will let you know what I think!

Some Flowers Thrive on Walls

I've always been shy. Painfully so. I had trouble making friends when I was younger b/c the idea of making conversation with someone I didn't know well made my stomach go all wonky.

Not much has changed in that aspect. I've gotten better at hiding it, making myself appear sociable when the occasion calls for it. But inside--still wonky.

This handicap has probably held me back in many ways. I mean, it took me a few years to make the leap from being an editor to copywriting even though I'd been considering it for some time. The one thing stopping me was the fact that, as a copywriter, client interaction is necessary. As an editor, I could just sit at my desk and happily read all day without fear of a dreaded client call churning my stomach.

Except I wasn't happy. So with a lot of encouragement from some very supportive people, I finally got the guts to make the change. And I'm so glad I did.

Recently I realized that my little "problem" extends to my fiction writing aspirations. As in I haven't been putting myself out there in the writing community. I mean, I started this blog but I pretty much assume nobody is reading it so that's pretty low-pressure. So yesterday I made myself critique a writing sample on Nathan Bransford's blog. Usually I avoid this b/c who am I to be critiquing someone else's work? (Also I suffer from another malady closely linked to my shyness called "why would anybody care about anything I have to say?" Yes, I recognize the full irony of the fact I am trying to build a career on people PAYING to hear what I have to say. But really, it's my characters saying it, and they're so much cooler than me. Trust me.)

But guess what? Not only did I manage to say something that (I hope) was insightful to the writer, it was insightful to me. Picking out the flaws and coming up with solutions for someone else's work made me incredibly self-aware of the flaws in my own.

Anyway so now I'm hooked. Helping out your fellow writers by critiquing their work is officially an awesome, win-win situation. And from now on I plan to do much more of it, including here on this blog. So stay tuned!