A writer's perspective on the the movie, "The American."

Good afternoon all!

If you're in the upper portion of the US, you are enjoying some very fine winter weather.  Here in SE Wisconsin, everything is nicely glazed in ice. How many more months of winter?  :)

So last night Hubby and I curled up and watched a movie.  We both love movies and on Friday we picked up a basket of them at our local Family Video.  (If you're not familiar, Family Video rents all kinds of movies for super cheap.  No wonder Blockbuster can't compete!  We walked out of Family Video with five movies, two of which were blue-ray disks, all of which were new releases, all of which we got for 5 nights...and paid less than $14.  Good luck getting THAT at Blockbuster.)

The movie we selected was "The American" starring George Clooney.  I'd not heard much about the movie, but I like Clooney well enough, plus it was set in Italy, which I love, so I was all for it.  The basic plot is that Clooney is an American assassin who hides in Italy after a gig in Sweden doesn't go well.

I know this because in order to write this blog, I check with The Internet Movie Database and that's what was written as the synopsis.  Having just sat through the flick, I have to say, "They were in Sweden?  When was that?"

Let me save you 105 minutes of your life.

In the first fifteen minutes of the movie, the body county outnumbers the lines of dialogue.  By the end of the movie, it's an even score.  From what I gathered, and since I don't read Italian  (much of the plot is revealed in newspaper headlines that are not translated) and since I don't SPEAK Italian  (much of what little dialogue there is is in Italian....but the subtitles are in white letters, printed over a generally white background on the screen.  Almost impossible to read.)  Clooney is  a guy who steals a car from a guy who may or may not be his boss.  (Hubby and I actually got into an argument over whether or not he stole the car.)  Then Clooney frowns his way through some very pretty Italian scenery.  When he's not frowning, he's doing sit ups or having some very graphic relations with an Italian prostitute who pretty much looks like one of the soccer moms on my kids' team.  In the midst of it all, he has dinner with a priest...not sure why, and I'm definitely not sure why he then went to steal some automotive parts from a guy the priest liked.  Then Clooney frowns some more, shoots a bunch of people, builds a kickin' gun from the stolen automotive parts, fixes a guys' truck and has more sex.  Oh and there's a woman who changes her hair color in every scene she's in.  She's probably important to the plot, but since 1)  I didn't recognize her as the same person every time I saw her, and 2)  She mumbles the twelve words she says, so I'm not even sure what she was saying, I can only surmise that she wanted to buy a gun she that she could shoot a bunch of house shingles and one aluminum sunflower.

And that's the movie.

In my opinion, as a writer, the person who wrote the dialogue either got completely hosed because they cut out all the actual words  (what....we're doing TALKIES now?)  or they got completely overpaid because there is very little dialogue.   If I were to bet on it, I'm thinking Clooney wanted to vacation in Italy, but didn't want to pay for it, so he got some unwitting movie studio to pay for it.

If that's the case, well done, George.

But you won't mind if the rest of us don't watch your vacation slides, right?

Curse you Winona Ryder!

Good morning!


Those who know me know that I have to have the TV on when I fall asleep. All you sleep experts, go ahead and scold me, but my brain simply will not shut down without the white noise of the TV going on. Since I don't have a cable connection in my bedroom, I use DVD movies to lull me into some sort of sleep.


The movies I use to fall asleep to are very specific. They have to have low key speech, no music, and I have to have seen them many times.


I have a list I won't bore you with, but one that's found its way into my DVD player a lot lately has been the Winona Ryder version of "Little Women." Granted, there's a bit of music playing at the beginning, but by the time I'm seriously drifting off, there's no music, it's just talking.It's perfect.


Except for one very small thing. There's a scene in Little Women where Ryder's character, Jo March, is reading her latest story to her sisters. It's a wild fantasy complete with a cliffhanger. After she reads the chapter, her sisters applaud and Beth, played by Claire Danes, says, "I never know what to write." To which Jo responds, "The first rule of writing is never write what you know."

This is the quote that rolls around and around and around in my brain all night long.


Every writer has taken at least one creative writing course. And in that course, every write has been told, "Write what you know." And every single writer has obediently bowed their heads, and given up writing for a good long time because really...who wants to read a story about a suburban woman raising kids and working a job she hates?

(Actually, I have that very story in my brain right now, but the suburban mom turns into a mass murderer, blaming her online persona for the deaths of those around her who piss her off. It's a dark, dark comedy really. Well, it makes me laugh.)


The problem with what Jo March says, never write what you know, is that every writer wants to believe that. We all want to write about some fantastic fantasy place we've never been. The problem is, the story doesn't sound good then. My daughter who at 13 has written more than I had at twice her age, has never been to Italy, but that's not stopping her from writing a story set in Italy. The difference is that she's doing exhaustive research on the country, the language, everything.


Obviously, when it comes to fiction, there's a huge element of "making it up." Believe me, I've met enough romance authors to know that not a single one of them knows a rakish duke personally. Research is the key to fiction, always. The best authors can create their own reality based on research. The best historical romances are written by the authors who know their history and are willing to create a story within that history.
So it's the eternal question. Do you write what you know, or what you make up? My mother would tell you that my best writing is when I just talk about my own life. Well, that may be amusing on a certain level, but that's not that writing that tugs at my heart. The stories about my childhood, about my foibles as a mother, those can make you laugh. But as a writer, I want more than that for myself and for my readers. I have a world of stories in my brain!



If you read "Dream in Color," there's no mistaking my thumbprint on everything. The story is set in the Upper Midwest, a part of the country I've lived in my whole life. Yes, I worked in one of those offices like Ramona does. Yes, I've spent hours online with fan groups, ignoring my own real life in the process. But then there's the fiction. I've never, regardless of what my family might say, gone on the road in search of the love of an aging rock star! (I did drive to Nashville a couple of years ago to see Rick Springfield, but I brought hubby along, so I don't think that counts!)



So curse you Winona Ryder! Curse you for telling me to never write what I know! Curse you for reminding me that it's a balancing act we writers have to do, the one between writing something so vivid the reader can touch and see it and writing something that whisks the reader to a foreign place and time. Curse you for making me ache to break the "write what you know" mantra!

Maybe I need to get a cable hook up in my bedroom. I don't have this kind of reaction to late night episodes of "Friends."