WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM by Steven Johnson

On the subject of creativity…

WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM by Steven Johnson.

#27: 30 classic films: 3 down, 27 to go

It would have been better to make headway on this challenge in the winter; now the clocks have gone forward and I’m no longer getting up at 5am for my job, I can feel the call of London nightlife grow louder.

1. The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

The opening sequence of this film hasn’t dated at all. There’s something clean and modernist about the block colours and the silhouette horses running across the screen.

As someone who loved earlier Westerns like High Noon and Stagecoach as a child, it took me a while to get used to the long, slow shots and lack of dialogue for the first five minutes. Also everyone looked blatantly Italian and it was hard to remember we weren’t in Sicily. But why shouldn’t they look Italian? If the characters in earlier Westerns look more northern European (ie blonde haired and blue-eyed) that probably says more about Hollywood than it does about the immigrant population of the Wild West.

#3: creative writing… a source of inspiration

Yesterday I came across the amazing Made Me Think, via this post on the excellent Marc and Angel blog, where I spent many happy hours procrastinating instead of writing.

MMT has some amazing stories, not just because they’re true but they’re also because they’re so concise, leaving lots to the imagination. Here are 3 of my favourites:

Today, as a young ‘up and coming’ lawyer, everyone in the firm was congratulating me for winning my first big case this morning.  And all day long all I could think about is how I used a technicality in the law to help a murderer walk away a free man. MMT