Guest Post by Cynthia Hawkins

Funny Farm

In Funny Farm, Chevy Chase plays a writer who moves to the middle of nowhere in order to jumpstart work on his manuscript in solitude.  When he’s finally done, he rents a hotel room, chills champagne, hands his wife his manuscript, and sits with his hands folded together in anticipation—watching intently, reading her facial expressions as the pages turn, leaning to check whether or not her laughter erupts in just the right places.  Lesson?  Don’t do that.

Henry Fool

In Henry Fool, Simon the garbage collector and accidental poet finds a writing mentor in Henry, who teaches him that you “can’t put a fence around a man’s soul” and there are three kinds of there/their/they’re.  The bigger lesson here, however, might be that the same poem that prompts a publisher to issue a rejection “as violent as the effect your words have had upon us” can also make a mute clerk sing.

The Croupier

Mike Hodges’ film The Croupier features Clive Owen as Jack, a struggling writer by day and (eventually) croupier by night who finally makes it big … as an anonymous author of a tell-all book about (what else?) being a croupier by night.  Lesson: fame isn’t half as important as a cool hat.

Romancing the Stone

In the opening scenes of Romancing the Stone, Kathleen Turner’s Joan Wilder sobs as she yanks the last page of her manuscript out of the typewriter.  She should be crying because she’s just written three-hundred-or-so pages of overwrought genre drivel, but she’s not.  She’s crying because she’s moved by the story.  She feels for the characters.  It’s a good lesson:  if your work doesn’t move you, it’s not even worth the airline-variety teeny tiny bottle of booze Wilder favors for her post-novel celebration.

The Shining

In The Shining, Jack Nicholson plays a writer who moves to the middle of nowhere in order to jumpstart work on his manuscript in solitude.  Lesson?  Don’t do that.

Betty Blue

So many lessons to be gleaned from Betty Blue.  Write naked.  Read your rejection letters in French.  (It makes things like “your style is unbearable – you deliberately wrote a non-book” sound like sweet, sweet music.)  Compose your manuscript in a set of (at least) twenty black-bound sketchbooks kept in random order.  Suffocate your muse.  With a pillow.  Because your manuscript will be accepted by a major publisher the second said muse is no longer around to see it all come together for you.   But there will be a cat that kind of reminds you of her as you begin novel number two, so it’s all good.

Bridget Jones’s Diary

If you write a book about a woman with a crush on Colin Firth, a woman who happens to be writing a journal and pining after a character who is based on a character played by Colin Firth, Colin Firth will play that character in the movie adaptation of that book.  Better yet, here’s a flowchart illustrating the lesson inherent in Bridget Jones’ Diary:

Colin Firth –> Colin Firth –> Colin Firth

 
How to Kill Your Neighbor’s Dog

Now and then a movie about writing comes along that isn’t in any way about writer’s block.  How to Kill Your Neighbor’s Dog isn’t one of them.  And though there may be a subtle lesson or two about how to scale the wall you’ve hit (like, hang out with a child so you can write a convincing child character), Kenneth Branagh’s Peter McGowan offers an even greater lesson in how to handle an interview (like, steal the interviewers note cards and mock the questions scribbled on them).

Martian Child

John Cusack plays a sci-fi writer in the process of adopting a troubled boy, and the big lesson here comes from the kid: whatever you’re working on, there’s always time for a Martian dance to Guster’s “Satellite.”

The Outsiders

Probably no book or film had meant as much to me as a little kid aspiring to be a writer than The Outsiders.  Ponyboy writes, I’d once reasoned.  I write!  Ponyboy has hair.  I have hair!  Ponyboy gets beat up by rich kids, witnesses a murder, and hides out in an abandoned church.  I have hair!  I am Ponyboy!  I connected, you see.  I paid attention.  And before I ever heard anyone advise me to “write what you know,” I knew Ponyboy’s lesson:  Write about your crappy life.  That’s what it’s there for.

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Cynthia Hawkins is an Associate Editor of Arts and Culture at The Nervous Breakdown, Managing Fiction Editor of Prick of the Spindle, and editor of the e-book anthology Writing Off Script: Writers on the Influence of Cinema.