What Gets Me Writing; Or, I Am Easily Distract...
This is my Thanet Creative Writers Competition entry. The theme is:
What gets me writing
I write because it’s a good way to deal with the thoughts that zoom around my head. Meanwhile as I go about my daily life I keep myself interested by looking for ideas to write about.
Recently my three year old nephew came to stay and introduced me to Planes 2: Fire and Rescue, a fairly straightforward animated film with an excellent scene that is a parody of 80s TV show CHiPs. One of the more notable things about the Cars/Planes films is that not only are there no humans amongst the sentient vehicles, but that there is no animal life at all; tractors replacing cattle and deer, tiny planes for birds, and winged VW beetles in the place of flies.
This ties into my current warm-up exercise, the couple of hundred words I write when I’m not writing something else and I’m editing or need to research or plan the next part. It’s a set of silly science fiction stories starring Lieutenant Commander Tommy “Ray” Gunn of the Deep Patrol, who has crazy adventures in a dark, grim, post-apocalyptic, post-human-singularity future. The all-animals-replaced-by-machines planet/habitat/ecology notes now cover half a page of my notebook.
Including a note on The Transformers: The Movie (the 80s cartoon with the final voice-work of Orson Welles, not the later Michael Bay helmed film) in which every planet except Earth is not only inhabited by robots, but by transforming robots. There are actually reasons for this in the film (don’t ask) yet logically it is a problem. If everything is a robot in disguise then surely it wouldn’t work as a disguise. Better to just be a machine that’s good at what it does rather than a compromised design that does two (or three) (or more) things poorly.
I’m probably not going to write the machine-animal planet episode as it doesn’t seem to generate an interesting story (it may get mentioned in conversation or appear in flashback).
Meanwhile according to my plan I’m supposed to be working on a crime story. Is all this over-analysis of kid’s cartoons a distraction? Well yes. It’s also what gets me writing.
(CHiPs theme tune for no very good reason)
What gets me writing
I write because it’s a good way to deal with the thoughts that zoom around my head. Meanwhile as I go about my daily life I keep myself interested by looking for ideas to write about.
Recently my three year old nephew came to stay and introduced me to Planes 2: Fire and Rescue, a fairly straightforward animated film with an excellent scene that is a parody of 80s TV show CHiPs. One of the more notable things about the Cars/Planes films is that not only are there no humans amongst the sentient vehicles, but that there is no animal life at all; tractors replacing cattle and deer, tiny planes for birds, and winged VW beetles in the place of flies.
This ties into my current warm-up exercise, the couple of hundred words I write when I’m not writing something else and I’m editing or need to research or plan the next part. It’s a set of silly science fiction stories starring Lieutenant Commander Tommy “Ray” Gunn of the Deep Patrol, who has crazy adventures in a dark, grim, post-apocalyptic, post-human-singularity future. The all-animals-replaced-by-machines planet/habitat/ecology notes now cover half a page of my notebook.
Including a note on The Transformers: The Movie (the 80s cartoon with the final voice-work of Orson Welles, not the later Michael Bay helmed film) in which every planet except Earth is not only inhabited by robots, but by transforming robots. There are actually reasons for this in the film (don’t ask) yet logically it is a problem. If everything is a robot in disguise then surely it wouldn’t work as a disguise. Better to just be a machine that’s good at what it does rather than a compromised design that does two (or three) (or more) things poorly.
I’m probably not going to write the machine-animal planet episode as it doesn’t seem to generate an interesting story (it may get mentioned in conversation or appear in flashback).
Meanwhile according to my plan I’m supposed to be working on a crime story. Is all this over-analysis of kid’s cartoons a distraction? Well yes. It’s also what gets me writing.
(CHiPs theme tune for no very good reason)
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