How watching bad movies can improve your writing

 

What just happened?

I just finished watching possibly one of the worst movies I have ever seen, The Wilding on Netflix. 

The characters were completely unfleshed out and cardboard cutouts and because of that and other issues I found myself not caring about what happened to them. Strangely though, I still couldn't stop watching. 

The movie seemed perfect for me. A great cast. The story was an interesting one: a family struggle to adapt back to normal family life after the daughter leaves psychiatric care.

What could and should have been a taut and twisty thriller, turned into a big hot mess. 

So what went wrong?

Give characters character

1. There were too many characters for starters and too many of them were being treated like main characters without any characterisation going on to tell me who those people were. This meant I didn't care what happened to them. 

What that taught me about writing a novel - every character has got to earn the right to be in your novel. Make them all interesting especially your main characters. Novels hinge on the main characters just as movies do. Make them weak and ruin your novel. 

~Choose your main character carefully~

Lisbeth Salander - now that's what you call
a great lead character. 

2. The main character in the movie who had the most screen time was the most uninteresting one of the lot. Not because they were a bad actor but because the writing/direction/editing or all three was a complete mess. 

Especially when it came to the editing which looked like an Andrex puppy have been allowed to run about with the film. Hey, I do know a lot of it's done digitally these days, but you get my drift.

What that taught me about writing a novel - Make sure your main character is the most interesting person in the novel. This is especially important if your main character is going to be in a series of books like my DI Duncan Waddell in my Detective in a Coma series. They have to possess enough depth to make people read on. 

Is that really the end?

3. An extremely confusing ending that made me think someone had cut the last 5 to 10 minutes off of the film. Either that or it was the first episode of a series. It wasn't. 

What that taught me about writing a novel - You don't need to have everything sewn up at the end of a novel but your ending has to be a clear and satisfying one. 

You don't want people to be setting scratching the heads and say "Where's the rest of the novel?"

Movies and novels are a completely different form but they do have things in common. Just as you can learn things from reading what you consider to be bad novels, you can also do the same when you're watching bad movies.

And everyone thinks I just watch Netflix so I don't have to write:)