Should I, Shouldn’t I?

05Jun08

I feel like the clock is ticking on my writing. I have to do it now or it won’t matter at all.

 

Nineteen and twenty three-year olds are doing it. And doing it well.

 

The Eyes of the King (2008)

 

Nineteen year-old Catherine Banner lives in Cambridge, England. She wrote the Eyes of a King trilogy after school and on summer vacations. She began when she was fourteen. She is being hailed as the new J.K Rowling. Though, time will tell if she is one. I remember Christopher Paolini’s Eragon series was similarly hyped.

 

Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow (2004)

 

Faïza Guène’s first novel, the semi-autobiographical tale of a young woman in Paris’s deprived suburbs, was an instant publishing sensation. The French have always loved coming-of-age stories be it François Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel films or Françoise Sagan’s novel “Bonjour Tristesse”. But Guène’s looked beyond the façade of the slick central neighborhoods into the surburbs, which erupted a year later in the 2005 riots.

 

A friend of mine will gently remind me that age has nothing to do with it. I agree sometimes.  

 

I remember this wonderful line from the recently-recognized French film, “The Class.” I haven’t seen the film just snippets while the excited voice over of a bored journalist describes yet another Cannes story. In a classroom, the teacher tells a group of students that their outer lives are boring – eat, sleep, drink, brush teeth etc. But what do we feel? That is what he is interested in. The world is the same; the activities are not different. It’s this “feeling” that counts. All art is at some level this perception of the world and our reaction to it.

Filed under: Life, Reading   |  13 Comments
Tags: art, feeling, perception, Writing