Keats and Yeats are on your side.

Over at Cinephile Paradiso I was ruminating on my own writing and I thought I might share with you a quote from Evelyn Waugh regarding his own writing:

"I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama, speech and events that interest me."

And it got me thinking about the way this little project is going to get itself writ. I tend to be someone who starts writing the plot or script first and begins thinking about the characters who will inhabit the world next - it's not that I don't care about character; it's that I'm often preoccupied with exploring ideas and themes using film language first and thinking about the characters in the way they can represent those themes and ideas.

I've discovered mainly through my time in Manchester and witnessing the way my classmates approached writing and filmmaking and I definitely agree that characters in themselves need to be grounded in something real - they need to feel like fully realised people in order for the audience to engage with the themes, ideas and film as a whole. But I've also learned, thanks to fellers like Tarantino, Hitchcock and Waugh, that it's ok to think about structure first, and even vice versa. This is a free country after all!

So my question to the wider world is, how do you write? How do you want to write? Do you work to a formula to think through your ideas or do you just purge onto the computer? Do you like that imagery of vomiting up words?