Complex Numbers

On with the Show

PROMPT May 24th

Write about a movie or television show you watched recently that blew you away. What lessons can you learn from the show and incorporate into your own writing?

Hm. Well. I might be too cynical these days to really get "blown away" by movies or TV. I go in to all of them from the point of view of a writer: What works? What doesn't? Why does what works, work? Even bad movies or shows can teach me something, but my time is as limited as anyone's, so I don't often deliberately seek out bad ones. Still, if I happen to come across one, I approach it from a writer's point of view so as to learn what doesn't work.

I've mentioned before, in here and in a recent Fantasy newsletter editorial, that I enjoyed Godzilla vs. Kong. While I can't say I was in any way transported by it, the movie was very enjoyable. But what can you learn from it as a writer, besides "have giant monsters fight each other while wrecking an entire city?" Well, I covered another aspect in the newsletter; if you haven't seen it, you can view the editorial here: "Giant Monsters" 

Besides, city-destroying kaiju battles don't usually translate well to fiction writing. Their impact is solidly visual.

My TV show consumption nowadays consists of two main interests: comic book shows, and Star Trek. The latter is mostly new stuff; it's rare that I want to revisit them, because there are so many that I just don't have the time. With Trek, again as I've noted in here before, I'm on a quest to (re)watch every episode (and movie) in that franchise, in chronological order. As I write this, I just wrapped up Season 4 of DS9 and Season 2 of Voyager, both of which I mostly missed when they first came out in the mid-90s.

A lot of Trek is objectively silly. But it's popular for good reasons, and I've been trying to, as I mentioned above, figure out what works and what doesn't. To me, it comes down to a few basic ingredients.

Characters. Say what you will about Trek, but they have memorable characters. Everyone is aware of Spock, for instance. Or Worf. There's a huge advantage in having characters like them in stories, because they can provide contrast to the absurdity of some human behaviors and customs, by virtue of being outsiders. It's a trick as old as science fiction itself, and it works. But even setting aside the alien characters, the humans in Star Trek generally have well-defined personalities, inner conflicts, likes and dislikes, strengths and flaws.

Plot. Unless you're setting up a cliffhanger at the end of a season or something, wrap things up. In life, things rarely resolve themselves in 45 minutes, but we don't watch SF shows for the realism. It's very satisfying to a viewer (or reader) to provide a firm conclusion to whatever conflict has gone on in the episode, be it a plague that only the ship's doctor can cure, an alien attack on a colony that needs to be resolved by a starship captain, or a malfunctioning transporter that requires engineering expertise. Or whatever. Wrap it up. Sometimes Trek shows don't do this very well, and it sticks out when that happens.

Subplot. Often there's more than one plot involved, because we can only take so much tech gobbledygook before someone does a miracle and fixes everything, so maybe you have a different character bemoaning her love life, or dealing with a personal crisis. This is fine, and it keeps the actors who may be unnecessary for the main plot busy in accordance with their contracts. But from a viewer's perspective, it can be used to create suspense as the subplot unfolds at critical moments in the main plot, or vice versa. But for Kahless' sake, give the plots some parallelism, if only on a metaphorical level, or we start losing patience with the whole thing.

Humor. Okay, maybe I'm biased about this because I consider myself a comedy writer (whether other people consider me a comedy writer is something the jury's still out on). But inserting a bit of comedy into an otherwise tense situation is a very effective technique for keeping the audience engaged. It's basic writing: any emotion can only be sustained for a limited amount of time. That's why they call it "comic relief;" you get relief from the relentless problems the cast are dealing with. The trick is in finding the appropriate level of comedy for the situation. If a bunch of characters are dying all around you, you don't necessarily want a Vaudeville act unless you're going for farce in the first place. But a well-placed one-liner here and there can make the difference between a good plot and a great one, while also illuminating character. And then, once in a while, you get a whole show about tribbles.

Above all, though, what I learned from Star Trek is: don't put space hippies in your show. That was cringeworthy enough in the late 60s, and today, it just comes across as silly.