Wednesday, February 24, 2021

Movie Reviews for Writers -- The Nesting


This haunted house thriller features a house that used to be a brothel and is now haunted by the ghosts of the former prostitutes. One that level it's a serviceable flick with plenty of scares. 

But what I'm interested in is the story of the agoraphobic writer who rents the house because the city is too terrifying for her and it is affecting her ability to complete her new manuscript. 

The biggest statement about the writer's life in The Nesting is that of the environment needed for a writer to work. Outside the ghost story, Lauren is unable to write in the wrong environment. Too much stimulation and her task becomes far more difficult and sometimes impossible. But when she moves away from other stimuli and rents the lonely house in the middle of nowhere, she can relax and let the words flow. 

This is something I've experienced myself. When I needed to really pound out a 40k word count for a deadline job, I took a week off from work and traveled to the house that used to belong to my MeMe and set up my laptop in the bay window. Or on the front porch. Two bottles of my dad's Dragon's Blood wine and a week on the keyboard in the country and 40k words flowed like I'd never seen them flow before. 

Still, most writers I know tend to have places where they write best, be it at a coffee shop, libray, home office, back porch, etc. -- without having to take off on a vacation to the middle of nowhere. 

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