Stranger than Fiction

Today after having finished all of my homework for my classes tomorrow, I decided to settle down to watch a movie and I picked Stranger than Fiction.

I love this movie quite a bit.  It's one of the few movies that I can tolerate Will Farrell in because he's not doing stupid and painful things, and it actually seems like he creates a character, which I appreciate.  Plus Emma Thompson is my hero.  And it's about writing.  As a writer, I feel compelled to fall in love with anything related to or dealing with writing.  Plus I understand the depths of writer's block that Karen Eiffel feels.  No joke.  As demonstrated by my blogging of late.

I'm intrigued by the idea of meeting a character that I've written.  Maybe not discovering that I've killed them, mostly because I don't think I've ever killed a character in my life, but maybe talking to them.  So I'm going to write a little about that.  We'll see how it goes.

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It was mid-afternoon in Chicago, and a young woman sat in a large room, the walls lined with bookshelves.  The young woman had golden blonde hair and green eyes hidden behind black plastic rimmed glasses.  She wore an overlarge cream old man sweater and she sat in an armchair behind a large desk covered with papers.  The papers were strewn across the desk in no particular order, some scribbled on in strange corners and others completely blank.  Bent over the desk's surface, the young woman looked up only when she heard a knock at the door.

"Come in."

The young woman watched as the door opened to reveal a girl in her mid-teens who seemed to be wearing every article of clothing she could find on the floor of her closet.  The girl was clad in about seven layers of clothing, all covered by a tan trench coat.  A maroon beret sat jauntily atop the girl's mousy brown hair.  The writer watched as the girl looked around the room, taking in the stacks of books, the paper strewn across the desk, and the carousel horse standing in the corner on its wooden hooves.

"Have a seat," the writer said, gesturing to the chair across the desk from her.  The girl sat down without a word, realizing only then that her mouth was still wide open from her journey across the room to that very seat.

"Um, hello," the girl said, looking up at the writer who had been as captivated with the girl as the girl had been with the room.

"Hi, yeah, remind me again, who are you?" the writer asked, pulling a beaten up composition notebook from the haphazardly arranged papers and notes.  She opened it to a fresh page and poised the tip of her cheap pen over the white.

"I'm Marcella, I thought you knew me already," the girl replied, folding her hands in her lap.  She wore mismatched gloves, one without fingers and the other that was made from a thin material that allowed her free movement.

"Oh, uh, yeah, I do, don't I?" the writer sputtered, a nervous smile creeping onto her face as she wrote out notes about the girl's attire and general attitude towards their meeting.

"I love the carousel horse, how did you get him to follow you home?"

"Excuse me?"

"The carousel horse.  Usually they don't like being cooped up in one place for very long, and they only ever go places if they follow someone there, so how'd you get him here?" Marcella asked, blinking her midnight blue eyes.  There was no sign of jest in her face, she was dead serious.

"Oh, aaah, well I'm not really sure, actually," the writer admitted with a slight shrug.  "About why you came here..."

"I wanted to ask you for a story," Marcella said.  She delivered this statement with the same seriousness with which she asked about the carousel horse.  She blinked at the writer and nodded pointedly.

"A story."

"Yes.  You see, you wrote me, but I don't have a story, so I'm kind of stuck," Marcella explained, her face scrunching up a little as she described her predicament.  "I'm not really sure how these things work, so I thought I'd ask and see what you can do about it."

"Well, I don't really know what to tell you, I don't have a story for you right now," the writer said apologetically.  She had abandoned her notebook a couple bullet points ago and had lost her place in her own notes.  "I honestly have no idea what to do with you."

"Well, let's start from ridiculous and go from there."

- Stranger than Fiction