Wednesday night

[ksmith]

It rained all day. Now it's windy as hell. More rain tomorrow as I take Kuro to get his engine light checked. Spring in northern Illinois.

Another great post from tightropegirl. She has this to say about writing for television as opposed to feature film:

Film is splendid, but how can you not love television? Film is short story! Television is novel! Television is the long, leisurely Victorian novel, with a chapter of biting suspense followed by one of black despair followed by one of effervescent farce; where "The Trouble With Tribbles" co-exists with "City On the Edge of Forever." Where three years into a series you can pull one of your heroes aside onto a road not taken and hear things from him you've never heard before. Television, for the love of god! Does not the blood run more quickly with the very word?

What's my analog? Writing a series. Because characters I thought I knew kept veering off in directions I didn't imagine, right to the very end, upset and amazed and unsettled me, right to the very end.

You really do get to the point where you know what type of shoes they'd wear, and what gifts they'd like. I recall some writer-bloggers disparaging LKH for saying that about her characters, and it may sound obsessive. But you don't obsess about it is the thing. You just know.

It's the character that's the tricky part. That's what makes it worth the work, at least for me.

"Don't you understand that the greatest risk you can take is to take no risk at all?"

Yes.

Comments

[battle-of-one.livejournal.com]

I love serial television, all my favourite shows follow the continuing format and I think it is more akin to a novel. There's a reason actors like it a lot better too; you get to develop things over time. It's why I love writing novels too and rarely can write a short story.

[janni.livejournal.com]

Being asked "how can you not love television?" does, I confess, put me in a grumpy space before I can even read the rest of her more reasonable arguments. :-)

I appreciate long forms, and television is well suited for them, but the problem is, so much of it is also so badly that I nonetheless can think the form has promise without loving the results or feeling my blood run fast.

(And every time I say this, people start telling me about all the shows that are different, that really do it well. Except, most of them only do it well if your only basis for comparison is more television, and not art and literature and the wide world--and if you no longer see the cheap plays to sentimentality and cliched emotion because you're so used to them they seem the norm.)

Sorry; I know I'm really sidestepping both her point and yours. The assumed universality of television does get me up on my soapbox, sometimes.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I appreciate long forms, and television is well suited for them, but the problem is, so much of it is also so badly that I nonetheless can think the form has promise without loving the results or feeling my blood run fast.

But you can say that about any medium or form, I think. They're all guilty of cheap sentimentality of one form or another. Cliche. I don't love TV, but when it's done well, it's hard to beat.

[janni.livejournal.com]

A good point--how many people look at the bad stuff in fantasy and then say fantasy mostly doesn't work as a genre, after all?

Although saying "how can you not love television?" is a lot like saying "how can you not love fantasy?" There'll always be folks for whom any form is not quite their form. It's just that with television, folks seem more likely to forget this is so, and to assume a certain universality, I guess.