Critiques, Movies, and Writing

Kind of all over today--the last movie I discuss will relate to writing.

Managing Your Critiques
Over at the iWriteNetwork blog, I wrote a post about a handy technique that will make it easier to manage all the critiques you get back for a WiP. You can check it out here.

Movies
Hubby and I finally got to see a couple of movies that were on our to-watch list. The first was The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.

I don't know yet if I liked it. I'm going to hold my judgement until the third movie comes out because I had some plot issues that might be resolved there. It was definitely slower paced, and I kept having feelings of 'been there, done that'.

And good grief but Tolkien sure had a lot of "men who should be king" running around Middle Earth, didn't he?

I knew that the Martin Freeman who plays Dr. Watson on the BBC series Sherlock Holmes (love it!) was Bilbo, but I didn't realize they'd enlisted the aid of Benedict Cumberbatch who plays Holmes to be the voice of the dragon Smaug. Cumberbatch's voice is so deliciously deep that it's perfect--as you can see in this clip:





The second movie was Saving Mr. Banks. Wonderful story and the acting is exceptional. I've watched the movie Mary Poppins many times over the years, but now I want to see it again. I'm sure I'll view it differently.



This story totally supports one of my favorite saying:

You are who you are because of where you were when ...  

What happens to us and around us shapes who we are, how we view the world. Ask Baby Boomers where they were when John Kennedy was assassinated. Few won't be able to tell you--in great detail. It was the same way for people when Pearl Harbor was bombed and when the Twin Towers fell.

One of the (only) advantages to getting older is living enough years to be able to put things in perspective, to have lived through the changing times so you saw the transition.

What does this have to do with writing? 
Writers should be thinking about that statement--we are who we are because of where we were when...--as we craft our characters' backstories. If we're writing contemporary or even historical fiction, we need to consider what major events might have shaped our characters. If we're writing fantasy, we have more latitude since we're making it up anyway, but we should still be asking ourselves what happened to our characters to make them so passionate about whatever it is that drives them.

But, as so deftly shown in Saving Mr. Banks, we must also consider what personal or family tragedy might have made the characters the way they are in the book. This can be so much fun with antagonists, finding what happened to make them believe a certain way.

What about you?

What do you do to manage your critiques?

Have you seen either of those films? Did you like them?
Have you lived through an historical event you'll never forget?