Day 8 Fascination

So spending time watching all the behind the scenes of Harry Potter movies I remember Emma Watson saying that she has a book in which she writes down conversations she has had with people that she thought were important to her. Maybe i should start with one of those. This challenge comes at just the right time for me to write about John Marsden. He is the one who wrote the Tomorrow series that i go on about all the time. I went his talk and book signing and he just said so many things that made sense to me. I waited in line for ages to get my book signed. I was blabbering of course because i was excited so I hope that I didn't sound rude as i sometimes do. But thats besides the point. I want to write about what he said about language. He said that language has guidelines yes, but never rules. Whenever you want you can just chuck the grammar book out the window. Um is a word and the more you try to stop someone saying it the more the will say it. Characters in a book must be unpredictable and hypocritical. He said that when writing a book a character must change status for it to be interesting. By failing or embarrassing themselves they can lose status. By succeeding they can gain status. He talked about taking risks. He once had a job sorting through job applications and he learnt a lot from that experience about how to stand out in a crowd. After reading a few applications that were formal and boring he knew what not to do, so when he applied for a job at Geelong Grammar he knew that in order to stand out above the rest he couldn't just send in a polite letter to the headmaster of the prestigious school and hope that he wasn't application 285 being read because he would have no chance of having his application read to the end. So he decided to write something out there and humorous. Instead of 3 references he sent 30. He got his students to all write him a reference and sent them all in, even the ones with the bad spelling mistakes and the rude ones. He knew if he censored the references it would be apparent to whoever read the application. He said it was a risk to do something different, but in a way it was a risk not to try stand out of the crowd. And it paid off. He got the job, even though he ended up hating it.
He started by talking about his primary school. Every week his teacher would give them a story writing task. She would give the class a topic and everyone would say words related to that topic and they would all be written on the blackboard sorry I didn't mean to be racist towards all the chalkboards out there....they would all be written on the chalkboard and then everyone would would go along and write their story. Of course John Marsden was a stubborn kid and refused to use any word from the board. To him it was just a game of dot to dot, taking words off the boards and stringing them together with ifs ands and buts. So he didn't contribute to the board and so he extended his vocabulary and challenged himself to write something creative.
He said soo much more but i have a physiology test tomorrow so.....bye!