All writers come to a point when doubts arise about how good they are. For the longest time, only their eyes will judge what they write. Sometimes the writer is amazed by something s/he wrote at any given time. Nevertheless, most writings are forgotten, without readers to appraise them, or end up in the bottom of a wastepaper basket. Writers’ baskets are filled with the waste of their work, with words that didn’t get to articulate quite what their minds perceived so clearly.
The writer is always playing in his/her mind with images s/he could express. That moment is critical: either paper and pen (or PC or typewriter), or oblivion. The terrible thing about forgotten images is the fact that writers never retrieve them back and will forever chase ghosts.
In part that’s the reason for the title of this entry. Not because it is just work, but it also becomes a task. Add in that writers always feel the desire/need to write, and disaster is served.
When you spend years agonizing about a novel and finding excuses not to sit down to write it while you obsessively explore it to the last detail, you need a trigger to start writing. I haven’t found mine yet.
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Two writers find their motivation in this movie: a young writer in the making, with some ideas and not too much life experience, and an older writer, who has already earned his readers’ recognition, embittered, who hasn’t written for the past 20 years and is afraid of doing so, but whose mind is still overwhelmed by images he might express at any time.
If you throw in the histrionics of Italians and the sun in the Tuscany, with its life in slow motion and its faded, charming houses, it will be a sure success.
It’s billed as a romantic comedy because “boy meets girl”, of course, but the older writer’s advice is quite good, actually: using a manual typewriter instead of a PC since the writing process is much slower and you have some time to think what you are writing.
Anyway, an enjoyable movie.
P.
PS: Whenever I start a short story, I always handwrite in a specific notebook I have for this purpose. After a while, my fingers require my keyboard because ideas start flowing faster. If I stop writing at this point, the short story will remain unfinished.
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