So, this is why we are here...

Welcome to my first ever blog. I've been gently nudged (/bullied) by a friend in this direction in the hope that lurking around this corner of cyber space is a fabulously wealthy publisher who is going to take one look at this and realise I'm the next Slyvia Plath/William Golding/Enid Blyton (though probably not Slyvia Plath because she was batshit crazy. Or William Golding because there was a rumour going around my Year 13 English Lit class that he was a paedophile. Or Enid Blyton because I hate children. In fact, I hate children so much I think I'd just prefer to be the next Slvia Plath and be batshit crazy). Either way, I want to be a writer and this is about as close as I'm going to get to it at the moment.

People that say they prefer movies to books make me so angry. I'm talking really, really angry. But it also puts me in a really patronising frame of mind which, coupled with me being really angry, is never going to end well. When someone tells me they 'find reading really boring', I immediately assume they are the most mindless, unimaginative thickos to walk the planet. Reading a book and watching a film just aren't on the same level and they never can be. It's utterly impossible. 

In reading a book the author is creating the framework of the story but it is up to you to really flesh it out in your mind. A writer can tell you that the main protagonist has curly hair, but it gives you leeway to imagine just how curly that hair is. Does it twist around the shell of his ear? If you pull it does it spring back into place? Does he wash it every day? A book gives you the story but leaves you with enough space to create your own meaning to it, something that film just cannot achieve. Everything within film is chosen for you - you don't have the choice of deciding just what kind of curly hair the guy has because it's been chosen for you in some casting office in the centre of sunny Hollywood. And when the guy with just the right type of curly hair has been chosen, he probably went and got a coffee or maybe he met up with his girlfriend or did his laundry. You don't have that in books, your own personal character is immortalised. He'll never get drunk and throw up and gets caught by the paparazzi with little chunks of puke in his hair, because the author hasn't told you that happens and you don't want it to. You get to decide.

I think that's the reason so many book-lovers (myself included) always come away saying from a film saying, 'it was good but the book was better'. You create a character that only exists in your head and as soon as they've been turned into someone elses take of the character, that's it, the illusion is shattered and your character is dead. I recently went to the cinema to see a film adaptation of my favourite book, 'We Need To Talk About Kevin'. Tilda Swinton plays Eva and the reviews said she did it well. And I suppose, on an acting level, she did play her well. But she wasn't my Eva. She wasn't the character that I had grown to love, the character I'd go on to wonder what had happened to, everything from the colour of her eyes to the way she moved was wrong for me. I'd let my imagination run wild and then the film was released and everything was reeled back in. Cinema narrows the imagination and pushes it into someone else's box, reading causes the imagination to explode and take flight, and if I can do that for even one person, I've achieved everything I could ever hope for.