I have watched more TV in the past two months than I have in the past two years. As a judge for this year’s Edgar Award for best TV episode, it is my duty (or so I keep telling my wife) to watch hour after hour of fantastic TV shows.
I cannot help but recall the words of Norman Mailer, who said the only thing negative about TV’s affect on kids is the commercials. Mailer insisted that television shows, just like books, offer narratives that (when done artfully) force children to think and consider significant issues. Of course, he like all of us, wanted kids to read more, but his main problem with TV was that the narrative (and the viewer’s attention) was broken every 10 minutes, leading to kids who were not capable of focusing on anything (including books) for more than 10 minutes at a time. (I probably am living proof of his attention-deficit theory.)
I have found the dissection of TV episode after TV episode to be extremely insightful—from a fiction-writing standpoint. Author Les Standiford once told me he learned a great deal about writing fiction when he attended a screen-writing course. Similarly, seated on my couch (a tough job, but someone…) I have been forced to grasp the three-act form and to really consider the impact of each act on the viewer/reader.
Like any good student, I have brought this to my own writing. Struggling with a short story I began this summer and drifted away from to work on something else when the going to got tough, I returned to it with a new sense of plot and a renewed sense of clarity. After all, one of the things I love about the craft: you never stop learning—and you never know where the next lesson might appear.
