As well as occasional updates about my writing and books, this is about images, sounds, conversations, experiences and how they may imspire, or trigger an idea, or resolve a problem in our writing. They come from many sources: pictures, poetry, films, books, music, or just being out in the real world. For example, poetry and jazz can inspire rhythm in words and sentences. Films and images evoke atmosphere, narratives, characters. Novels, radio and newspapers (both online and offline) can spark interesting story lines. Music and lyrics create new colours and trigger memories. People – known, unknown, and imagined – contribute to characterisation.
So, check out my Pinterest Boards and discover some of the things I find a source of inspiration.
Reminding Flori of Matt ‘Stay with me till Dawn’ is Flori’s inspiration and strength.
Like or not like the film, doesn’t really cut the mustard. It’s fascinating, appalling, obscene, decadent. Three hours of sex, drugs and rock’n roll, a savage critique of traders and their mentality. A study in alienation and pyschopathy, it’s autobiographical. What makes such people tick? Money, power, possessions. By the end of the film I was glued to the seat, waiting for his downfall. I was pleased by the end result: he was well and truly screwed. A dog eat dog scenario but like Dracula such men rise again to continue...
read moreAnother film by McQueen who doesn’t shy away from the difficult areas of life. He chooses actors who have the ability to translate his passion for the truth into gut wrenching characterisation. The captured slave, the brutal sadistic slave master, the traumatised young black woman broken by life. McQueen’s genius is to portray the endurance of the human spirit without sentiment or superficiality. The film ranks in terms of his courage to confront the politics of oppression with the portrayal of Bobby Sands’s death in ‘Hunger’;...
read moreA man in an existential crisis brilliantly acted by Tom Hardy. He drives alone late at night along the motorway, contemplating where his loyalties and duties lie. At the same time he imagines himself speaking with his dead father who persecuted and criticised him, and through internal dialogue and actual conversations over the phone , Locke struggles to become true to himself without losing his personal integrity. The film is beautifully shot and atmospheric, intense, clever, gripping and highly recommended.
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Marguerite Valentine is a former child protection specialist now writing psychological thrillers. Her debut novel is 'Between The Shadow And The Soul'. 
