The Freedom Writers,

Sometimes, you have to be really careful what you wish for...

After turning the TV off in aid of getting some writing done for the first time in God only bloody knows how long, I realised that I can be just as easily, if not more so, distracted by other things on the internet. The obvious thought is to wish there was a way in which to disable the internet to all other websites except Blogspot, to give me the way to make myself focus. Well, seconds later the internet went down completely, for no apparent reason. Obviously, if I have posted this then normal service has resumed, but for now, let's work offline.

After quitting my full time job, I suddenly have all this time to play with – it's kind of scary. The preference would be to get another part time job alongside my current one, and get some writing done in between, but what has actually happened has been:

*I took up running, and now go every second morning, or every morning when I can convince myself to get out of bed,

*I've rekindled my love for knitting – sad I know, but it's actually pretty calming and stops me biting my nails,

and *I've been watching far too many films, and a lot of them I have seen before. The thing is, I'm not a fan of uncertainty. If I don't know much about a film, ypu can bet your ass you'll have a hard time convincing me to watch it, as most of my friends already know.

After the failure of the blog/novel thing, which failed mainly because I write in fits and starts as opposed to short well timed bursts, the intention going forward is just to get into the habit of sitting down with Craptop and getting something written. Admittedly, film reviews aren't the most creative thing, but it's about the discipline of sitting and putting pen to paper or hands to keys.

Anyway, I'm going to start with Freedom Writers.

Freedom Writers is a documentary film about a young teacher and her first group of students. It's set in a place called Long Beach in America and follows the troubles an problems caused by America introducing integration into their schools. Looking back on it from now, we see all the reasons why it was done, but seeing this film and the way the pupils interact with each other at first, it's easy to understand why many were resistant to the idea, even after it had been enforced.

I admit that I am always going to have a bias towards this film, because it shows how the teacher uses writing as a way to get the kids to open up, to her and to each other. Using novels such as Anne Frank's Diary she brings them together and shows them what is happening in their lives within a wider context. At the beginning, most of these kids had never heard about the Holocaust, they are members of gangs, and almost every member of the class has been shot at, and has lost a friend because of gang violence.

Within a broader field, Freedom Writers can be used to help us question our education system, because of the purpose which it is meant to serve and the way I'm which it works. It questions whether we really force people to stay in school for the sake of them getting an education, or if it just becomes a holding room for them until they reach an age where we can do something else with them, such as put them into a job or throw them into jail. It asks what we are teaching people – are we actually giving people anything which helps them in their lives. Personally, I can't remember the last time I analysed a poem or used Pythagoras' Theorem, and when it comes to things like loans and bills and such, I only have a vague idea of what APR is and what it means for me, and I can't budget to save my life. Surely, even from a young age, these are the skills we ought to be instilling into people, not necessarily in place of the theories currently being taught, but maybe alongside of?

I will admit though, my favourite line of the whole film comes from a discussion between the teacher and two pupils. One student is explaining to the other how impressed he was by Anne Frank's Diary, so much so that he got a few more books from the library, about the lady who hid the Frank family. Of course, this provokes the question - “You used your library card?” a bright smile on the teacher's face until the student answers … “Nah.”

The diaries of the Freedom Writers were published as one book in 1999, and they helped to change the education system in America, after spending 4 years with the teacher who brought them together. She also moved to a new position within a college where some of them chose to attend.

The film shows one woman's heart felt determination to make a difference, and how much of a change she really caused in the lives of the teenagers. It's inspiring, because it can be seen as such a small drop in the ocean – it was one class, in one school, in one city in America, and it didn't change the situation these teens were living, not really – but they knew someone cared, and they knew they had a voice. The Freedom Writers class was a start, and it moved onto something bigger. Kids that wouldn't have graduated became the first in their family to finish high school, and as I mentioned, some even went to college. That's massive.

The fact that it's a true story – okay, maybe parts of it have been changed for dramatic/cinematic effect or whatever – but the fact that it came from a true story of what one person actually did makes me happy every time I watch it, because nothing could stand in her way.

Also, having Doctor Dreamy from Grey's Anatomy kind of helps. Every film needs some eye candy...

On Tone of Voice,

One of the things which people always comment on about my writing is that I apparently have a strong narrative voice. I do have a list of habits as long as my arm, including (my very favourite) a tendency to describe the mundane, but here's the reason. You know all that time we spent talking about how English teachers make too much of what an author  meant by something? This sort of idea: 

 I've found that they can, to a certain extent anyway, be right. 

If you ever decided, for what reason I don't know :P, to read Insanity Breaks then you'd see that throughout the book the character explains different things to do with her smoking habit. The same is true of Iris' (the main character from the soon to be released novel Yours, - more details coming soon) love of drinking tea, but here's the thing - when I write, I'm writing what is pretty much a dramatic monologue of a characters life, so the things which have importance in their lives will be included, and the things which don't will be left out. Pretty simple, right? If I've put it on the page, there is generally a reason, and granted that reason is sometimes just a vast description which some might call unnecessary, but mostly there is a reason. 

I will just point out that until midnight on 10/2/13 PST (8am 11/2/13 GMT) Insanity Breaks is available to be downloaded completely FREE onto Kindle or any Kindle app compatible device. For those who don't know what it is, it's the first novel I ever finish (Fairies was just the first I had the balls guts to self publish) and from start to finish it took me about 9 months. Fairies was written in one month and Yours, was written in 20 days. Those three, plus a monstrosity named As Yet Untitled (which went straight into my computer's recycle bin!) which took a month to finish, represent my four NaNoWriMo years. :D Useless piece of trivia...

Back to what I was saying about voice: I write what I know, from the perspective I know. All my characters are different, they do have different attitudes, different beliefs, different experiences, but their fundamental nature, THEIR VERY EXISTENCE, comes from the noise in my head. I would agree that my characters often speak from a very similar perspective - they tend to be lower middle class, reasonably well educate women who are either on their way to university or have been to university, they're normally some form of creative and they pretty much always believe in love. Now, I don't see this as a bad thing, because the fact is that most authors do it. Nicholas Sparks makes millions from writing pretty much the same novel over and over with different characters, in a different city and with a slightly different ending. His lead male tends to be a poor boy, with intelligence, but the girl's parents always see him as a whim, because he's sexy and from the wrong side of the tracks. The women are always beautiful and unobtainable creatures, but they have a young summer romance anyway -Yeah, this is the trash I read in the bath :) - and then they get separated. John Green (maybe I'm just a reflection of a teen cliche but I do love his writing at the moment) tends to write from the perspective of a fringe dwelling, witty teenage male (except A Fault in Our Stars, which pretty much made me cry all through it, but then the difference is only that the character is female...) My point is simply, if you like one of the novels, you're likely to like all by the same author, because it's from a perspective you can understand or relate to. Is that so bad? 

I will say one thing, author's voices develop and change over time. Our narrative voices are shaped by our experiences just the same way that we are. Things which seem of an immense amount of importance in what we write when we are sixteen (Insanity Breaks) will look quite different from the things we write at nearly twenty (Yours,) and everything that comes after will be different because every day that we open up our senses to the world, we see a little something we never saw before, or we hear something, or we feel or understand something in a different way and it's important for that to happen, because otherwise, we're not learning anything and if we're not learning anything, what do we really have left to say?