Saw a couple of wonderful films this weekend and that got me thinking about the original reason I started writing. When I was very young, I was intrigued and inspired by all sorts of movies (I still am). My love of writing originally came from my love of movies and inventing fake worlds that I could pretend to live in. I didn’t get into screenwriting until I was in middle school, but holing myself up and writing on endless sheets of computer paper had always been a hobby of mine when I was a kid.

Most of them were just blatant rip offs of whatever I thought was cool at the time. I think I rewrote a few Goosebumps books and my own version of Harriet the Spy. I wrote a novelization of the cheesy 90s movie Volcano. Sometimes I think inspiration through film still greatly inspires my writing and what I’m planning out next. If I love a scene or image in a film, it stays with me and inevitably ends up in my next project. I wonder if a lot of other writers experience something like this and I think about where they get their inspiration from.

Obviously filmmaking is just a visual form of storytelling, but books are usually much more in depth than movies. Movies are more likely to “cut to the chase” and delete all the extra stuff available in books. After thinking about this, I realized that my writing has much more of a film quality to it because I write what I’d like to see in a movie. I write what I’d want to see filmed. A lot of times I find this habit horribly annoying and I spend a lot of time editing it out, but sometimes I think it works. It helps me create nice, steady action sequences that are easy to follow because I have the ability to cut out all the “nonsense”.

What inspires your writing?