Due to the large number of public holidays we’ve had in recent weeks, I ended up with more afternoons and evenings off than I usually have. So in true Indiana Jones style, I’ve been raiding my own lost ark... Sorry, archive of DVDs.

There’s nothing quite like settling down on the couch with a large bowl of popcorn, a litre of iced tea and a good movie. I like my popcorn mixed with Jelly Tots, and I drink my iced tea from a dark blue goblet that catches the light and makes me feel extra special. Some of you probably think that’s a bit sad, but let’s remember that this is MY way of indulging and you’re welcome to mock me, imitate me or follow your own paths of quirkiness.

So what’s been on my DVD menu? Obviously the first three Indiana Jones movies – I’ve always been a huge fan of watching a youthful, toned and sexy Harrison Ford win the day against all odds. Watched on three separate nights with all the bonus materials on the nights in between, that was a feast which kept me going for a week and provided a lot more nourishment for the soul than the courses dished up to Kate Capshaw’s poor character at the banquet in the second movie.

Other nights saw me enjoying A Fish Called Wanda, A Good Year, A Room With A View, Becoming Jane, Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice. Yes, my favourite movies are stored in alphabetical order right after the box sets, and the shelf with A and B just happens to be at eye level. Isn’t that how all obsessive compulsives store their movies?

Anyway, by last weekend I had worked my way through to the shelf with H so I watched How To Steal A Million. This was good timing because the 4th of May would have been Audrey Hepburn’s birthday.

As a writer I feel the need to justify any indulgent time-wasting by passing it off as a writing exercise. Every time I watch a movie I hope that something about the story structure or characters will strike a chord. So what was my Eureka moment in this recent burst of movie-watching? It happened while browsing the Internet reading titbits about the movies I’d enjoyed. I found a quote on IMDb by Hepburn’s How To Steal A Million co-star, Peter O’Toole, in which he talks about the best roles to act: “The good parts are the people who don’t make do. They’re the interesting people. Lear doesn’t make do.”

I’ve often thought that writing a character involves the same process as acting one. Both require research into what makes that character tick; an exploration of the motivations behind his or her actions and reactions; and an understanding of why the conflicts in the plot cause that character’s goals to evolve in that particular way between the start and finish. O’Toole is right – Lear doesn’t make do, and neither does Indiana Jones. Or Wanda and Otto, or Lucy Honeychurch, or the British girls who play football, or any of the heroes and heroines who make our movie-viewing special.

When I look at the single biggest reason why my first two trunk novels have remained in the trunk, it’s because all the characters in them made do. They settled for less. In fact, it now looks as if they shrugged at me when I wrote them, and said: “Okay, the trunk is where we’ll stay because that’s all we’re good for.” If those characters are ever to get out of that trunk, they need to be re-invented and become driven, three dimensional people who refuse to make do with what life (and their author) throws at them.

This in turn means that the author – er, that would be me – needs to rework those plots in order to give the characters as much conflict to overcome as possible, so that you – the reader – can get more enjoyment and entertainment from characters who refuse to make do with something just because it made the writer comfortable.

This could take a while but – as I always say – watch this space...

Last weekend I finished the sixth draft of my current novel and increased a whole dress size at the same time, without even leaving my laptop. How did I do this, you may ask? I ate my way through my novel. No, not like those horrid termites that ate their way through a shelf of my books back in February (Will she never stop going on
about that? – Ed), but by eating with gusto the entire way through the writing process.

The way I look at it, we have to be as healthy as we can and this depends on food, doesn’t it? What you put into your body fuels it. Ergo, what you feed your body while writing your novel fuels your novel as surely as it does your body.

With many writers there is a danger that, while they are so busy writing, they will forget to eat. Not in my case. In fact, sometimes I am so busy eating that I omit to write. I have, however, developed a rather canny knack of typing with my right hand while my left paw keeps up the conveyance of crisps into dip, and from thence into mouth. Crisps and dip can be a notoriously messy snack, but if you can manage to do it with one hand, then the other is free to write. All day. And all the way through the dip. And the next packet of crisps.

Of course, there are motor problems here with the finger co-ordination. My right index finger, for example, tends to get a little muddled and I often end up with the odd “t”in place of a “y” unless I concentrate very hard. And then comes the time to write a “y” and I end up with a “t” but these are small problems and can easily be edited out in the next draft, possibly while sucking some juice through a straw, because that doesn’t require
hands.

Some writers might eat the kind of food that their characters eat, or the national dishes of the country they are writing about, but I don’t really discriminate. I’m happy to eat whatever’s in my cupboard, or in my biscuit tin. What I like about crisps and dip, though, is that the crisp crumbs tend to land in the dip and not on the keyboard, which is a bonus because you don’t have to stop to turn the laptop upside down; you can just collect the fallen crumbs from the inside of the dip tub with the next crisp and nothing is
wasted on the keyboard.

(Pizza is particularly messy, and I prefer to leave this until I am watching TV. This is usually followed by microwave popcorn with Jelly Tots. Did I mention that I like Jelly Tots in my popcorn? You really should try it – it works especially well in a darkened movie house, and it’s much better for you than all that salt, which I hate on my popcorn, particularly that hideous, artificially-flavoured powder that they leave on the counter for you to poison your popcorn with. Yuk! Seriously, the best part about eating it in the dark is that your fingers can’t distinguish between the rough curved surface of the popcorn and the rough sugared surface of the Jelly Tot, so every mouthful is a surprise. Fun, huh? Trust me on this!)

Anyway, back to the novel. This weekend I managed to consume five pots of English breakfast tea, three and a half litres of iced tea, two packets of biscuits (mostly dipped in tea for the same reason as crisps and dip – see above), one and a half maxi-size bags of crisps, a tub of dip, a pizza while watching TV between editing sessions, two medium tubs of yoghurt, and a six-pack of hot cross buns. I know these last are supposed to be seasonal, but my garage shop stocks them year-round. They’re good writing food but sticky rules apply. Sticky rules? Always have a damp kitchen cloth on a saucer close at hand – it beats running to the kitchen every time you need a mop-up. Yoghurt is good writing food, but you need the big tubs, not those poxy little ones that fall over as they get emptier because the spoon suddenly becomes too heavy.

Strangely, cheese and chocolate – two of my favourite leisure foods – are not favourites when it comes to writing. This is because they usually have fiddly wrappings that need two hands to undo them, and that really takes you right out of the novel – usually at a time you can ill afford the interruption, and even I am not such a pig as to consume the waxy rind or the silver paper of these respective products. I still have old metal fillings in my mouth...

Soup, pasta dishes and those nifty little cocktail sticks with chunks of tasty things on them are okay, but the preparation time is the big downfall here. Fine if someone else has prepared them, but food that comes in a packet, ready to eat (or to microwave) takes the first prize in my house every time.

So what is my novel about, you ask? Can’t remember exactly, but the characters do eat several pizzas and drink a lot of Australian wine. Watch this space!

I love well-made movies. Some pedantic part of me gets a kick out of seeing someone else’s work properly acted and directed, lit well, cleverly filmed and edited, then overlaid with a gloriously unforgettable soundtrack. It’s like one step further than reading a well-thought-out book, built around a plot that has enough twists to keep you guessing, cliff-hangers to keep you reading and the right amount of downtime to allow you to fall in love with memorable characters you can root for.

I guess I’m not really into blockbuster sci-fi (probably because I don’t understand the scientific part of it) and I prefer the special effects to be of a more subtle persuasion. Hey, don’t get me wrong – I loved the spaceships, light-sabres, the jump into hyperspace and that amazing one-take shot of Alderaan being blown up by the Death Star in the original Star Wars movie, but all of those things appealed to me because the story itself had heart and was more fantasy than actual sci-fi. The idea of one all-powerful force controlling everything, and good triumphing over evil... Well, that’s the ultimate fantasy, isn’t it?

But what I really want to talk about here is the company that was created to do the special effects for that movie: Industrial Light and Magic. Once upon a time I had a dream to run away from high school, stow away on a ship to America, hitchhike to California and throw myself at the feet of George Lucas, show him my art portfolio and beg him to give me a job building models and creating galaxies at ILM.

I didn’t, of course, but several years later – when I had been a working girl for some years – I bought a beautiful book on the first ten years of ILM, with glossy, double-page fold out photos of some of their most memorable creations. What a feast it was! Unfortunately it turned into a feast of another kind when a colony of termites ate their way up through the floor in my subterranean cottage and gobbled up two thirds of the bottom shelf of one of my bookcases, but that’s another story...

Perhaps one of the most fascinatingly subtle things I ever saw, with regard to ILM, was a documentary on the making of Robert Zemeckis’ 1988 movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Among many other subjects touched on in the doccie were the before and after shots of the first time we see Jessica Rabbit singing in the nightclub.

Like the rest of that movie, the scene was animation mixed with live action. The first shot showed the animated Jessica in her sexy dress, as she moved about the stage, captivating her audience – in particular the Toon-hating character played by actor Bob Hoskins. That original scene was fine as it was, but what captivated me the most was the same shot after ILM had done their stuff on her. Subtle as the wave of a fairy godmother’s wand, Jessica’s skin gained the lustre of live flesh, just as her dress and hair acquired a gleam and a sparkling sheen that had been absent before. Suddenly she was a fully-rounded, fleshed-out character who dazzled the eyes of all who watched her, to the exclusion of all else.

Now that’s what I want in my writing – a dusting of light and magic!

Someone once said that it takes hard writing to create easy reading, and I am certainly finding that to be true. Like the unseen heroes of ILM, it can take a writer months of industry to build up an effect that is over in a moment, but hopefully remains forever etched in the memory.

In Stephen King’s book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft he mentions two desirable concepts that all writers should strive for in their work: page-turn-ability and resonance. The first keeps the reader involved while they’re actually reading, but the other stays in their memory after the book is finished, and encourages them to buy the next book by that author.

Not since the invention of Guttenberg’s printing press has it been this easy for just anyone to write and publish a book. In this day of easily downloadable e-books, anyone can get their first book read by someone. The real test is whether that someone comes back to buy the second one.

Ah well, back to the writing. Now where can I find that magic ILM wand?