Tag: imagination

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Highlight Reel

My generation grew up with black and white movies, and went through eras of westerns, gangsters, slapstick comedy and the like that defined the movie industry for years to come.

I was privileged to view films that were revolutionary, like Star Wars, E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, etc. that changed the entire landscape of visual entertainment and ushered in sci-fi on a whole new level.

Many of the things once cartoonish, became human dramas, and vice versa.

All of these movies were fuel for my imagination, and influenced much of my writing and drawing in my early years.

I would have liked to have made movies myself, you know, the big dream of writing and directing and producing your own vision. It is a complicated business that you have to start young at and work your way through, and I am sure it is not as easy as it sounds. I find even putting a story in writing a very hard undertaking. But I am loathe to say hard work, as it is not. I love doing it and I get mad when fellow writers and artists insist on claiming it to be toil. I can tell you what toil really is – doing what you hate, day in and day out just to pay the rent and feed the cat. Disappearing into my imagination for hours at a time is not toil. It is escape.

What makes creative pursuits hard is putting them out into the world. They are your children, they are you.

If I could show my stories on the big screen this would be the culmination of all the art, writing and photography I could possibly make. There could be awesome scenery and beautiful places that words cannot adequately describe. Pages of emotion can be displayed on an actors face in only seconds. I think this fantastic. It gives me chills.

We usher in a new era of movies; animation and CGI (computer generated images) that are so lovely that I find myself holding my breath watching them. I was first introduced to modern animation with Howls Moving Castle, which left me spellbound. How To Train Your Dragon is mesmerizing. Both have stories to tell, not just dazzling animation.

In my mind, every story I write is a movie in my head and I am at once, all the characters, the plot, the scenery. It is the grandest of escapes, my only escape from the drudgery of the reality of my actual life.

There are movie reels and then there is my escape highlight reel in my head.

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Second Childhood

I laugh to say this –

“Technology had to catch up to me”

Especially since I was a hold out on landline telephones until this year.

Locked in me is my 5 year old creative self.  So many interests that, unfortunately, in the mindset of 1960’s middle class dumb were not valid careers.  At least, not for a woman.

Acceptable career choices were like frame selections for glasses – four.  Round, cat eye, aviator and engineer glasses (plastic top, wire bottom).  Secretary, Stewardess, Telephone Operator, Housewife.  Breaking outside of these boundaries were not for the faint of heart as any woman who did can now attest.

Creative endeavors were regarded as cottage industry crafts.  Lots of manual labor, little profit.  But I saw a world beyond craft sales.  I wanted to have my own column in a magazine and publish my stories in books.  Display my art on book covers and advertisements.  See my photo’s in journals and coffee table books.  Design clothes and merchandise.  Most of all, I wanted to make epic movies like Cecil B. DeMille, Sergio Leone and John Huston.  Not very likely to happen for a middle class suburbia girl.

Careers slightly outside of the norm lacked imagination.  Thus, because I excelled in math, my parents envisioned a career in accounting.  The only creativity I could find in that involved food – fudging the numbers and cooking the books.  I was bored to tears and quit.  My head was off into astronomy, physics and mechanics.  I had a love affair with cars.  Exploration of these pursuits were confined to books, museum visits, and much to my parents chagrin, tinkering with mechanical beings – including the car.

Womanhood arrived, dragging with it, office work, the killer of imagination.

Severely strangled, but not snuffed out, all my interests stayed with me through an emotional adulthood.  They surfaced occasionally, wrecked havoc with the boredom of office work, fought with me constantly to be expressed and whenever possible completely took over all my senses and caused me to quit viable jobs.  Left and right brain waged war.

Enter the digital age.  My knight in shining armor.

Publish?  Design?  Create?  Permission granted!  No panel of judges to determine if I am worthy.  Software and hardware abound!  Upon the discovery of this new world, I plunged in with a custom built computer, affording me ten years of epic film making.  Bless the internet – I publish books, design merchandise, I have my own Blog!

I don’t much care if no one ever sees my stuff.  I am a child once more.  That is enough.  My second childhood.