Nostalgia & Writing

Today, I saw the Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris, starring Owen Wilson and an extremely talented cast. Let me just begin by saying, WHAT A GOOD MOVIE! I mean, it was a little slow at times. For instance, it showed every shot imaginable of Paris and played the same music throughout the entire film. But, get over it, I guess? In fact, this film was so on point that it creeped me out. For those of you who know me well, you know that I am nostalgic for a time long past. And this nostalgia often makes the present seem less than satisfactory. I'm always watching old movies and pining for the Carey Grants of the world. Constant comparisons, constant disappointments. But! Midnight seems to be completely anti-nostalgic. The contemporary man's idea of the Golden Age is the roaring twenties gal's boring reality. The Parisian artists of the fin-de-siecle dream of the Renaissance...
Classic grass-is-greener syndrome. Denial of the present.

Still, the film was magical enough that I can forget these lessons and keep dreaming.

"These are hard times for dreamers." - Amelie (Righttttttttttt?)

This film pointed out another theme that also seems to be a life theme: Writing is hard! It's especially terrible when you are just plain no good at it, amirite, fellas? So, please step into my fancy time traveling mobile and let me chauffeur you to the past where all the writers were giving very solid advice! Buckle up!

Writing Advice from the Pros:

1. "The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others." - Mark Twain

2. "Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." - Anton Chekhov

3. "Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative." - Oscar Wilde

4. "I try to leave out the parts that people skip." - Elmore Leonard

5. "Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia." - Kurt Vonnegut

6. "If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word." - Margaret Atwood

7. "Don’t get it right, just get it written." - James Thurber

8. "Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind." - Rudyard Kipling

9. "The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment – to put things down without deliberation – without worrying about their style – without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote – wrote, wrote…By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught." - Walt Whitman

10. On the universal appeal of her books: "I’ve been asked that question a lot. I’ve always found it very difficult to answer. I feel there’s an expectation that I should know what the magical formula was, but in truth I wrote what I liked reading."
- J.K. Rowling ;)

In sum, just fucking do it.

You, making that "gahhhfuckkwriting" face.