“I have an insatiable appetite for movies—they were my gateway to the creative world when I was a kid, long before books were. Books, I can’t live without books, but movies help my brain wrap around an idea, help me put it all into pictures that I can translate into words. When I’m starting a new manuscript I find a movie, something that speaks to the general feeling or atmosphere of what I’m going to be exploring (for Mesilla I was inspired by All Is Lost and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford). I write down scenes, copy them verbatim, and study the pacing of the language. I examine how long the shots are held and what they’re showing us, the viewer. And then I root around and find a soundtrack for my writing, something that I will listen to incessantly and that will immediately bring me back into the writing—I hear that music, I remember the visuals, and zoom, I’m off. Movies and music ultimately supply my writing with a tangibility that makes the process, the ideas, that much more real, even at the very early stages of drafting and character mapping.”
—Robert James Russell, author of Mesilla (Dock Street Press, 2015)
Photo credit: Bob Russell