friday update, on a monday

not a writer:

Just this week I remembered this really twisted and fascinating French film I saw years and years ago, Jeux D’Enfants (Love Me If You Dare). Trailer here.

Remembering this movie makes me want to add some of these kind of mischievous games to Danny and Lexi’s grown-up adventures, because they had a childhood friendship like that, always keeping secrets and getting into trouble together. Just because they grow up, doesn’t mean they have to stop having childish fun. Though I’m sure it wouldn’t be so twisted as this movie (because this movie is really twisted!).

I don’t know why I’m so fond of the childhood friendship to romance story. I certainly never had a childhood boyfriend of any kind. Maybe I’m recalling a past life or something 🙂

Question for my writer friends – if you’re already writing a novel, will you still participate in NaNoWriMo somehow, or just go at it as you have been? I was wondering if I might want to commit myself to a word count for November or something.

And then there is this I liked (stolen from scobberlotch)

Vonnegut’s 8 rules for writing fiction:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.