Away I go.

Stats for Day Four:

Current word count: 3,700
Currently listening to: The Swell Season's Strict Joy, U2's How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb.


So I came home from work last night pretty wiped out and brainfried. Decided the best thing to do would be to call off writing for the night and just chill out with the Missus. Besides, I have a day off today, so I'll be able to (hopefully) churn out a hefty amount of wordage.

The centerpiece of our chilling last night was Away We Go, the latest film by Sam Mendes, co-written by one of my favorite writers, Dave Eggers.

(A quick side note about our library. I found Away We Go there yesterday morning, along with just about every major new DVD release. This library, seriously, is amazing. It's practically a Blockbuster.)

So back to the movie. This is easily one of the best films I've seen in quite some time. Eggers co-wrote the screenplay with his wife, novelist Vendela Vida, and their writing is fresh, funny, insightful and, when you least except it, completely moving. John Krasinski (The Office) and Maya Rudolph (SNL) are both perfect as a young couple in their mid-30's living in relative poverty in Colorado. She's expecting, so the two begin toying with the idea of starting anew, as a family, somewhere else. They figure they should live somewhere where they can be connected to someone they know, so they make a list of various locations (Phoenix, Tucson, Montreal, Miami) based on who they know and where they live. Thus begins their odyssey, which is part road movie, part relationship drama, part balls-out comedy. (I'm not kidding, there are some BIG laughs in this movie. I mean deep, cleansing, belly laughs.) Their journey leads to some of the best supporting characters you're likely to see in a film for a while. Alison Janney as a crazy former boss of Rudolph's, who gets some of the movie's choicest lines, Maggie Gyllenhaal as Krasinski's friend "L.N." (Ellen), who lives with her neo-hippie husband and two children in a "Continuum" home, in which they avoid "The Three S's" (Separation, Sugar and Strollers), and Catherine O'Hara and Jeff Daniels as Krasinski's ridiculously immature parents.

But enough about the movie. This is a blog about writing a novel. However, I suppose the film did serve a purpose, rather indirectly, in regards to the whole novel-writing thing. It managed to encourage me to really plumb the depths of my characters, to peer inside them and get to know them, to give them heart, humor, warmth, even some serious issues. To set them free to be themselves. To not simply root my story in plot, which is temporal, but to ground it in the humanity of my characters, who will live forever on the page.

Many words to be written today, so away I go. See you on the other side.