Category: writing

Can you make a bad movie better?

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn writing

Gigliposter.jpgWriting coaches and writers’ magazines often provide writing prompts to help people practice their craft. A writing teacher of mine had a different approach. Whenever he saw a “bad” movie, he had fun figuring out how make it better. While the probably stayed within the realm of the plot and the dialogue, my Radio/TV undergraduate major causes me to include acting and production values.

According to FilmDaft, “The key ingredients that make a movie ‘good’ are when the acting, directing, writing, cinematography, and overall production value all come together to tell one cohesive, entertaining, and impactful story. In essence, a good movie uses all these tools of filmmaking to tell a compelling story that makes you feel.”

True, but that’s a bit general, so when I consider what would make a bad movie better, I usually stick to the writer’s part of it.

Here I think we can say that if the premise and plot structure are flawed, the movie probably will also be flawed even though everyone and his/her brother probably had a hand in the rewrites before the film was finished.

To make this excercise work, we need to stay away from reviewers and critics and the flaws they see and use the flaws we see. Of course, even good movies may have flaws. For example, “Ladyhawke” is one of my favorite films, but I think the music chosen for it is an abomination and that Matthew Broderick’s character was too flip for the time when the film was set.

When a movie is bad, it’s often because it’s predictable, has unlikely plot twists, is based on a faulty premise, or is jokingly unrealistic within the time and place and subject area in which it was set. Doing this exercise as a writer, I think about:

  • How can I make it less predictable?
  • What are the worst plot twists?
  • Can the premise be altered without throwing out the film altogether?

Did you see the 2003 film “Gigli”? It was considered a failure, often due to general disorganization and a clumsy plot. Okay, these are problems a writer can work with while ignoring critics’ complaints that Affleck and Lopez lacked chemistry. So here the excerise becomes fixing the plot.

Never fear, if you play around with this exercise, you don’t have to re-write the script or even come up with a new treatment for the story. Nailing down what you might do to make it better will, I think, help you see how any story can be made workable.

—Malcolm

Good electricity or bad electricity?

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn issues, writing2 Comments

When a bricks-and-mortar (“real life”) friend or an online friend buys an electric car and leans on me to go and do likewise because that’s good for the environment, I tend to skip the usual questions such as how far can you drive, how fast can you drive, and do you have to map out the locations of charging stations before you go anywhere?

Mustang Mach-E

Since I’m “supposed to buy” an electric car to “do my part” in reducing climate change, my first question is “are you charging up what car with good electicity or bad electricity?”

“But electricity is neutral,” they say. “It has no agenda.”

“Okay,” I respond, “but if I’m to help fight climate change with my electric car, I’m not making much of a dent in the problem if my–let’s call it ‘bad’–electricity comes from fossil fuels, right?”

Some people look like deer in the headlights. “I hope that’s not where my power comes from?”

“Odds are, it is. Look at these statistics: 60% of our electricity comes from fossil fuels, that is, petroleum, coal, and natural gas.”

“I thought we were going better,” they say.

“We are, but not better enough. Do you have solar panels on the roof of your house?”

“No.”

“They might help reduce the amount of bad electricity,” I say.

“They would. Maybe I’ll do that some day.”

–

I have these conversations all the time when new owners of electric cars suddenly become disciples even though they were driving a gas-hog car the day they saw the light and went all electric, car-wise.  Maybe we need cars with solar panels. Until then, I’m going to want to know where that electricity is coming from.

—Malcolm

Lena (Florida Folk Magic Stories Book 3) by [Malcolm R. Campbell]Malcolm R. Campbell writes fantasies, magical realism, satire, and realism though he’s never sure which is which.

Rainy day mix

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Potpourri, writing
  • Bergman

    Obituary Blues: My Facebook authors page contains a mix of arts and writing news and reviews. Today there are three obits on it and that’s enough to make one feel the blues strong and steady. Michael Lang, 77, Woodstock co-creator; Director Peter Bogdanovich, 82, “The Last Picture show” and other films; Marilyn Bergman, 93, Oscar-winning lyricist of “The Way We were”; and then, too, on my main news feed, Sidney Portier (“They call me Mr. Tibbs.”)

  • Book cover for WildKristin Hannah:  While the subject of Wild was compelling for anyone interested in psychology, I was disappointed in this early novel, believing that Hannah hadn’t really come into her own in nailing down her style and voice. The feel-good ending falls into the characters’ laps without insufficient foundation and the author discounted her own childhood disabilties specialist by having her look up autism on the Internet. As I said in my Depot Cafe Blog, I think Hannah did this as a means of telling her readers about autism without thinking about the fact that a specialist wouldn’t be looking for onfo online that she would already know.
  • Our 2006 Buick: Ever since the glovebox latch broke off, our challenge has been finding ways to keep the door closed tightly enough to keep the small light inside from draining the battery.  Apparently, one must take the glovebox door off to get the lightbulb out. Had the car on the trickle charger most of yesterday and last night to re-charge the battery. This is becoming a hassle.
  • 711 Ocean Drive Poster.jpg711 Ocean Drive: My wife and I watch a lot of noir movies on TV and this one fit the bill last night. I liked the big shoot-out ending at Hoover Dam (still called Boulder Dam in the film) because I visited the dam when I was young and the scenes in the movie matched my memories of the tour. Apparently, when the film came out, Columbia Pictures said that gangsters were so angry about the film giving away their secrets that the production company had to take out special insurance politices on the primary stars (Edmond O’Brien and Joanne Dru) to keep them safe. The Turner Classic Movies (TCM) host said that notion was probably a PR stunt.
  • 2022: I’m not yet convinced this is going to be a good year. The COVID arguments continue and more and more people are saying the U.S. is on the verge of another civil war. That’s rather unsettling. I feel sorry for today’s kids growing up with that idea hanging over their heads along with worrying about whether the schools are going to be open this week.

–-Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbel is the author of the mystery/thriller “Conjure Woman’s Cat,” in which a conjure woman fights the KKK in a small Florida town.

it all began when the glove box latch busted off

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn cars, writing

In case you hadn’t noticed, when the latch to your car’s glove comparment breaks, the door won’t close. When that happens, the microscopic light inside the compartment drains the battery over night. I don’t see how that’s possible, but then I’m a writer and make stuff up and have no clue why cars think what they think.

Tape won’t hold the glove box door shut. Neither still twine. It takes high-quality wire out of the miscellaneous wire chaos box in the garage.

However, by now the battery has been jumped so many times it must be about shot because this morning the car wouldn’t start and the glove box door was closed tighter than the lid to a vampire’s casket. My trickle charge indicate the battery was too dead to accept a charge-another one of those things that kind of defeats the reason for having a trickle charge.

This all brings up a sad fact. I’m the only guy in the county who doesn’t know how to fix a car. Everyone else does, though they started having more trouble when all the computer stuff got added. But most of them know how to start a Buick even if they’re Ford people. It’s a good skill to have because you can’t run a farm if you can’t maintain your tractor, riding mower, bob cat, backhoe, air compressor, and anything else with a motor in it.

Growing up, I had a car with a stick shift and knew that as long as I parked it on a hill, I could get it running. Later, when I had a Jeep for a few years and then a Saturn for a few years, they could always get under way on a hill or with a brief push.

I like cars the way they were than the way they are now where it costs $1,000 to get somebody out to your house and start your car when the glove box latch breaks off and the light inside drains your battery. (By the way, that light is in such a small space, I can’t squeeze my fingers in there to get it out.)

Thinking back, I’ve had a negative reaction to most changes to cars: automatic transmission, power steering, power brakes, power windows, and a hundred dashboard ikons that are harder to decypher than hieroglyphics. I’d rather see the words up there than silly little pictures. (“Check engine”? Give me a break, check it for what?)

Okay, well just maybe I like the backup camera that shows you whether your rolling over your child’s favorite toy. Otherwise, all the new stuff costs a lot of money to buy and a lot to fix when it breaks. And it will break. Nobody will know that’s broken because all they’ll see on the dashboard display is something that looks like it came out of an old alien invaders game.

It may be time for a new car which will have to be an SUV because the sedans have gone away. At least an SUV has enough room in the back for a generator to start the thing when the light in the glove box drains the battery.

—Malcolm

An assortment of news, &c.

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn writing
  • The audiobook edition of Conjure Woman’s Cat continues to be my top selling novel right now. Thanks to those of you who have listened to it and/or read the paperback or Kindle editions which seem to be in second place, saleswise. Naturally, I hope people who love this story will discover the three that follow it in the Florida Folk Magic Series.
  • There might be light snow in NW Georgia tonight. What’s odd about that is that it follows last night’s heavy thunderstorms and tornado warnings.  I hope this strange weather sequence isn’t an oment about the kind of year 2022 will be.
  • I have been enjoying Alix E. Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches and consider it one of the best fantasies I’ve read in a long time. The plot is compelling, featuring three witches trying to lead a normal life in New Salem. Well, what are the odds of that happening. The witches find magical spells hidden in nursery rhymes and listen to old stories which are included in the book. Harrow writes well and has, I believe, created a masterpiece here that will remain on nightstands for a long time. Perhaps until the cows come home.
  • Even though I’m a Winter person, I have to face facts: we’re heading toward Spring. So now you see a spring flowers picture as the header for my blog.
  • I continue to work on Weeping Wall, my novel in progress, set in Glacier National Park as a sequel to The Sun Singer and Sarabande. I am working slowly because the main character knows more magic than I do and it’s kind of hard to fake that. The Weeping Wall, as shown in the picture, is a feature on the park’s Going to the Sun highway. Yes, it’s a good place to get wet or wash your car.
  • Buick LaCrosse III facelift 01 China 2019-04-04.jpgSince our 2006 Buick LaCrosse is, shall we say, getting a big old, my wife and I have been looking at newer sedans. As it turns out, the car companies have gotten rid of almost all of their sedans. I looked on line and found out that one of the reasons is that Americans have gotten too fat to get in and out of them. Now it’s all pickups and SUVs, making me remember how not long ago people stopped buying those because they’re gas hogs. As it turns out, the people are the hogs. Apparently the Chinese continue to love the LaCrosse. No, our car doesn’t look like the one in the photograph.
  • May be an image of text that says 'WELL, WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT LANG AN OLD LANG SIGN'Okay, this isn’t my Facebook meme. Nonetheless, I apologize for showing it to you. I hope you enjoyed New Year’s Eve. We got into a movie and forgot about it other than hearing fireworks out there somewhere. We were watching “Being the Ricardos” which was especially fun for those of us who watched “I Love Lucy” like it was gospel between 1951 and 1957. 

—Malcolm

 

2022 as an adventure rather than a prospective purgatory

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn happy new year, writing

Tilly’s morning: following the trail into a new year full of myth, magic, and adventure. We wish you a gentle transition from the old year to the new, with plenty of enchanted pathways to mosey along…. – Terri Windling in Myth and Moor. (Tilly is Terri’s dog, running along a trail.)

After 2020 and 2021, it’s not surprising to see that New Year’s Eve brought out a caterwauling of cynics. Understandably, they echo the sentiments of people who’ve been punched, kicked, or slapped so often they cannot see the world as anything other than more of the same.

Sylvia Lindsteadt has written that “Humans are storytelling creatures. We need story, we need deep mythic happenings, as much as we need food and sun: to set us in our place in the family of things, in a world that lives and breathes and throws us wild tests, to show us the wildernesses and the lakes, the transforming swans, of our own minds.”

I believe her and I hope that as we mosey along through 2022, we’ll be drawn more to more stories of hope and success than the noir rales that are now in vogue. It’s hard to switch from noir to hope because there’s been so much darkness that hope somes across as impractical and naïve.

My view of the world often matches that of Marianne Williamson–her spiritual writings more than her politics. But it’s dangerous, so to speak, to quote her sentiments today because, well, then people look at you funny–and we don’t need that!

Much better to tone down one’s words to “stay well and be safe” even though they fall short of helping hands what are really needed for a wondefully enchanted 2022.

Be safe,

Malcolm

Listen to the story that started it all (the Florida Folk Magic Series), and and AudioFile Magazine Earphones Award winner.

Can we start next year a day early?

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn happy new year, writing

Are we fed up or what?

Somehow it feels like both 2020 and 2021 had a few extra days snuck into the mix about August when nobody was paying attention to anything other than the circus of bad news.

Perhaps, if we think real hard, we can make tonight New Year’s Eve and just get started in 2022 with a clean slate before anything else happens.

Here in Northwest Georgia we had thunderstorms and a tornado watch last night. In December? Well, isn’t that just typical! And it’s not over as the rain continues and flood warnings begin to appear in the weather forecasts.

So, why wait another 24 hours for the fireworks and parties and getting drunk in the wrong beds and tacking up a factory fresh calendars on the walls filled with promise and magic?

If we start 2022 right now, we don’t have to worry another 24 hours about getting stuck in 2021. It could happen in a year when just about everything else has happened, including word that a doomsday glacier might break off any second and push the oceans up into the middle of the country.

Rolling Stone headlined the story: ‘The Fuse Has Been Blown,’ and the Doomsday Glacier Is Coming for Us All

Maybe a fresh new year will turn things around. Maybe we’ll get some global freezing to “even things out,” climatewise and possibly kill of COVID and bad movies and bad politicians. We can always hope.

—Malcolm

Waking Plain by [Malcolm R. Campbell]

I know this insane mixed up re-telling of Sleeping Beauty probably sounds like something that could only have been written during 2020-2021. Nope, it came out in 2016. Gosh, I hope it didn’t cause the current interesting times.

An act of kindness

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn writing

A text message from an unknownn number asked if I lost a wallet. I had. He had found it in a ditch, the place where wallets often end up when somebody steals them, pulls out the cash, and throws the remains out the car window.

We met at a well-known store a block from his house. He was scruffy, unshaven, riding an old bike like so many people I see along the highway. But he had my wallet. I looked through it and saw that everything was ther except for the cash.

They didn’t touch the credit cards, I said. Too much hassle, he said, lighting one of the cigarettes that probably helped keep im as thin as a rail. I told him I cancelled the cards within an hour of losing the wallet. Smart, he said. I said, well, as you can see, they cleaned out my cash, but can I give you something for your trouble. No need he said, but after hemming and hawing took the $20 and rode off down the highway after we shook hands.

When I wished him a happy new year, he indicated he’d be drinking. I said that worked for me as long as it was quality. We agreed that neither of us could afford quality but allowed as how we tried to avoid the swill.

We’re kindred spirits on that matter.

—Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of the satire “Special Investigative Reporter.” It’s definitely good for a few laughs.

‘What a pity she’s quoted more than she’s read’

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn authors, writing

The headline writer for the 2015 article “From literary heavyweight to lifestyle brand: exploring the cult of Joan Didion” added the following subhead: “The pioneer of New Journalism is used to sell biker jackets and clutch bags. What a pity she’s quoted more than she’s read.”

The White Album: Essays by [Joan Didion]I  hope the subhead for her December 23rd obituary in The Guardian more accurately describes how she will be remembered: “Detached observer of American society and political life through her collections of journalism, novels and screenwriting.”

Yet, the fact that the proponent of the New Jounalism wrote more “I-was-there” nonfiction than fiction may be the reason I seldom saw any gushing statements on the social media from her fans about reading her latest article or book, or breathlessly waiting for her next one.

Even those who simply scanned her work and then quoted from it thought her prose–and the no-nonsence focus behind it–was the best in the business.

If you have neither read her nor quoted her, I hardly know where to start in recommending a place to start learning who she was. Perhaps, the novel A Book of Common Prayer and perhaps the collection of essays Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

If you truly get this quote from A Book of Common Prayer, then you understand (a fraction, perhaps) of herself and her focus: “You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.”

But then I’m biased. I’ve followed her work from the day she started. If a cult surrounds her, I’m a member. And when I think of prose and want to show others examples of what prose can do, I turn to her books before all others.

—Malcolm

Florida Folk Magic Stories: Novels 1-4 by [Malcolm R. Campbell]Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of the four-book Florida Folk Magic Series, available in one Kindle, money-saving volume. It’s about the place I don’t walk away from.

Old Poems, Old Lines, Old Memories

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn poetry, writing

In high school and college, our English/Literature professors included a lot of poetry. When I come across some of the best poems in the canon–The Waste Land, Leaves of Grass–I admire them today even though my favorite lines come from a smattering of other work.

Sara Teasdale | Walk of FameI’m aware that Pulitzer Prize winning poet Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) was once popular and now appears unknown or ignored. Nonetheless, I’ve never forgotten “The Coin”:

Into my heart’s treasury
I slipped a coin
That time cannot take
Nor a thief purloin,
Oh better than the minting
Of a gold-crowned king
Is the safe-kept memory
Of a lovely thing.

I’m not sure how the powers that be rate Poe’s poetry today. Yet the first stanza of his “To Helen” sticks in my mind as one of the best stanzas I’ve read, especially the last two lines:

Helen, thy beauty is to me
   Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
   The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
   To his own native shore.
 
New Directions Publishing | Dylan ThomasMy favorite poem is “Fern Hill” written by Dylan Thomas in 1945:
 
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
     The night above the dingle starry,
          Time let me hail and climb
     Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
          Trail with daisies and barley
     Down the rivers of the windfall light.
 
This and the following verses are wonders and, perhaps a cautionary commentary on the paths our lives take. I identify quite strongly with this poem. Perhaps more peolple are familiar with his “Do not go gentle into that good night.” My generation more or less memorized it and saw it as dogma as age approached. Here are the first two verses:
 
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
 
Like many who were in high school and college in the 1960s, I liked RodMcKuen’s bestselling poems. They seem dated now, but there was a time when everyone knew every word. As  we said then, his poem’s were a happening, fresh and new, as in “Listen to the Warm”:
 
I was rich in those days, for a week I had everything.
I wish I’d known you then.”
 
Joy Harjo | Poetry FoundationNow, I think, my tastes run more toward the work of poet and sax player Joy Harjo, as in “She Had Some Horses”:
 
She had some horses.
She had horses who were bodies of sand.
She had horses who were maps drawn of blood.
She had horses who were skins of ocean water.
She had horses who were the blue air of sky.
She had horses who were fur and teeth.
She had horses who were clay and would break
 
What about you? Do you find yourself thinking–seemingly without foundation–of bits and pieces of poems you studied in school” They bring comfort to me like old songs.
 
 
Some have said that bits and pieces of my work are somewhat lyrical. Yes they are. Poetry’s influence is always in the background.