Friday, July 25, 2008

Red, horned heroes and freeing my imagination

Seriously, how do you follow up Maureen’s post on dark heroes as throrougly explained by examples using Mad Men?

You don’t.

So instead of discussing writing, I’m going to talk about why I loved Hellboy 2. It works on a lot of levels, and fails on some as well. But like a lot of Del Toro’s movies, it has this tremendous dark visual style that seems be uniquely him.
And it had some lovely little touches that were really imaginative. For example, a canary can terrify a scary troll. The hellboy character is wonderful, has some lovely quirks, is far from perfect, and as prophesied in both hellboy movies may someday destroy the world.

What I really took away from this movie was the sheer imagination involved. It got me thinking, how much of what I use in my books is influenced by what I’ve read before and what I expect to find in the genre. And I keep trying to think of ways to break my imagination free and really think of original ideas, original details, original characters.

And I think we start by forgetting everything we’ve ever read in the romance genre.

But when I try this, I just think of one eyed weird looking witches, straight out of the last Del Toro movie, so I figure I need to forget Hellboy 2 as well.

And back to our weekly obsession with SYTYCD.. Will? I’m so sad, but I’m not sure there is a guy left it wouldn’t have hurt me to see leave. And I have to admit, I love Twitch, as much for his personality as his dancing. The girls.. meh! Take ‘em or leave ‘em.
Let’s have a four guy finale…

4 comments:

Maureen McGowan said...

Great post, Sinead.

I know what you mean... It seems like every idea I think of is based on something I've read... Or I think I've come up with an original idea and then I read something similar in someone else's book... All we can do is try to keep our imaginations open, I guess

Anonymous said...

Me too, and I really worry about becoming too derivative either in my ideas or the terms I use..

Molly O'Keefe said...

I swear I am going to post...any moment now, a great idea is going to come to the vast wasteland that is my brain and it will be amazing. Until then, I have to totally agree with you Sinead -- we're copy cats. Total vision/imagination copycats.

I love Del Toro, for the same reason I love Micheal Chabon -- brilliant people who love genre storytelling and elevate it to something sublime. Something so unseen before that the whole writing world has to throw thier hands in the air and go "well...crap."

Will. Granted someone had to go - but not that guy. And, I don't think that night. Not after those performances.

Anonymous said...

Great job Mary! I must say I was confused b/c I'm a romance writer and my real name is Mary Sullivan! (I saw your message on the Golden Pen list serve). Is that your pen name? How funny! Well, from a Mary Sullivan to a Mary Sullivan, good job!

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