The Empire Strikes Back was on TV, or perhaps VHS when I was in day care at the house of a friend of my mother’s. The TV was usually on as background noise and a distraction for us kids. I was eating lunch at the time. PB&J? Grilled cheese? What I was eating at the time is completely forgotten, but I remember imperial AT-AT walkers.
I recall that I came in in the middle of the attack on the rebel base on Hoth. I imagine that I stared with eyes as wide as saucers and spoke, or perhaps only thought, WHAT IS THIS?
The plot of the movie was entirely lost on me, but my tiny child’s brain was being filled up with such epic awe that by the time the Millenium Falcon was dodging its way through an asteroid field I had been forever changed.
I went home and insisted to my mother that I needed to write. I somehow doubt that I typed what came next myself and suspect, though I don’t recall, that my very patient mother typed while I dictated my first fan fiction. Fan plagiarism might have been more accurate.
Ever since then I’ve desperately wanted to share the awe I felt that day. I don’t feel like I’ve ever lived up to the power of those images on the screen in my writing. That’s the goal I will forever strive toward.
Does anyone else, writer or otherwise, remember some pivotal influence from their youth? What was yours? Mine is likely greatly altered in the recollection so it’s ok if yours is fabricated to some degree too.
Haste Writing 
Certainly one major influence for me in terms of movies was a film called The Legend of Hell House. It came out in I believe 1973 and had Roddy McDowell. It was a haunted house exploration story in which you never see an actual ghost, though there definitely is one. It has some low moments, but it is incredibly atmospheric.
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