Black Swan

I went to see the Black Swan in theaters yesterday. Since I used to be a dancer I will always watch movies dealing with theater, music, and ballet. I had seen the trailers and I wanted to see this movie very badly. I actually really liked the premise for it. 

A ballet dancer for the New York City Ballet wants to be the best. The company is doing Swan Lake for their fall show, but the catch was there would be two dancer, one for the black swan, and one for the white swan, so the director puts it to where the dancer has to be able to do both roles. Nina works hard to achieve her goal in becoming the Swan Queen and trying to get the role drives her to insanity.

I loved this movie. What I really liked was the film portraying how everything in the performing arts is about competition. In this art your friends are your competition because everyone is vying for the same spot. I didn't like some of Natalie Portman's roles as Nina but when it got to the scenes of her going crazy I felt like those really stuck it to her. The only thing I didn't like was her taking credit for becoming a dancer in two years. There was a stunt double used, and yes it's true you really can't become a professional dancer in two years.

Here's the trailer for the movie.

I Failed

I tried to do NaNoWriMo for the first time and frankly I just failed badly. I only got 10,000 words written. I think that might be because I kept going back and editing what I had wrote before. Maybe I could take what I have written so far and later on try making it into something much more longer. I guess I will have to see what happens.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows Part 1

Part one of the epic finale to an amazing series. I went to see it in the movies, and I was really impressed that the screenwriter kept every essence of the last book close to the page as possible. The action scenes are just phenomenal. These are my lifelong favorite books. When part two comes out next year I'll be even more sad.

Advice to Writers: Stephen King

Never Look at a Reference Book While Doing a First Draft

Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft. You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. You think you might have misspelled a word? O.K., so here is your choice: either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right - and breaking your train of thought and the writer's trance in the bargain - or just spell it phonetically and correct it later. Why not? Did you think it was going to go somewhere? And if you need to know the largest city in Brazil and you find you don't have it in your head, why not write in Miami, or Cleveland? You can check it ... but later. When you sit down to write, write. Don't do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.

-STEPHEN KING

This is very wise advice. Stephen King is the man to go to for writing advice. He knows how to put the words on a document into a full fledged novel for everyone to enjoy. I remember when I was writing my first short story, it always took me forever to write the whole draft because I was always flipping through reference books because I never knew if I was making the punctuation right, or the dialogue right. What I learned from this quote is that I just write the whole darn thing, even if it's horrible, then go back and revise until it's perfect.