Will You Write ANYTHING Just Because YOU CAN?

The kinds of 'guilty pleasure' stories in the publishing industry and films these days are just too much. They are everywhere. I owned 'Twilight' long before the movie. The edition is the smaller one, the hand holding the red apple cover. And I enjoyed reading it. I even passed it on to my younger sister, who never return it until today eventhough she just visited me yesterday. And I bought and read 'New Moon' and 'Eclipse' long before the movies came out. But when the books became movies, I started backing out. I took my sister's copy of 'Breaking Dawn' (the same sister) and never read it simply because Bella and Edward got married. I said, hey, that's too close to reality - I already know the drill, I'm going to leave this.

Then, hoardes of vampire books invade the market, making me embarressed to own the series. Then, there is this 'immortal' series called 'Evermore' which I owned until the second book. I dropped the third book because I thought the STORY in the second book is not a story. Next, there's the 'fallen angel' book called 'Fallen'. I bought it and then kept it wrapped and unopened because I was trying to finish my sixth novel. You cannot imagine the torture. This beautifully illustrated cover of a gothic girl, crying with her hands covering her face against black-blue background sitting next my computer screen, while I was trying to key in the description of Plato's cave into my computer in Bahasa Melayu! When I finished and posted the whole cave away, I tore open the book and pfff! What a disappointment! The fallen angels are fighting over a girl!

Then  it made me think of me writing one of these gothic novels too. I didn't want vampires, angels, or immortals, because that's just wrong. So, how about a girl whose words turn to reality? It's like a gothic Inkheart (part 2) after the girl Meggie read the words she wrote on the skin of her arms and brought them to reality. And she got visits from a prince whose kingdom was stuck on a verge of war when the writer of a book the kingdom is in dies when she was writing it. And guess what? The dead writer is the heroin's aunt. Something like that. That's going to be delicious. It's like a writer's heaven. Imagine, the whole book about the passion of writing and I'm going to blame it all on her unstable view of reality because she was struggling with guilt of causing the death of her parents. Redemption abound.

And because this is jake gyllenhaal month, I also discovered the script to the film in post-production 'source code'. It's a sci-fi about a dead soldier whose brain is kept alive so the military can send him back to an event of a terrorist attack in the past, so he could find the bomber and stop OTHER attacks from happening, not change the past. Is that even right? The brain kept alive and with its full capacity of thinking while all the sensory receptacles of the human host/body are dead. But it's really tempting. And the soldier asked for death, true death after he completes the mission. His soul finally lives on in the 'source code' dimension with the girl he met and saved on the doomed train. It makes a delicious story, but is it right?

Why all these rantings about stories that are just wrong? Because I have been tempted to do them. Just because words are property of any man/woman, it doesn't mean I can just write anything and everything as I please. There are consequences to what I have written - to my faith, to my morale as a person and writer, and the legacy that I'm going to leave behind.

And if people view me wrongly because of something I have written, yet I didn't intend for it to be viewed wrongly (misinterpretations that lead to slanders that lead to me being condemned), there must be something that I have done using those words that made people believe the way they believe about me. Maybe I should step back and review the whole thing.