Greetings and salutations. It is I, Graham.

Lately we have been delving into discussions that touch on our personalities, who we are, and how they lead back to our writing. Now we are covering one final topic in this vein, which might just lead into next week’s topic. We shall see.

Today we are discussing television, and how we can use our favorite TV shows as inspiration for characters, plots, and scenes. Whether consciously or not, we are influenced by the media we consume. The real question is, what conscious lessons and ideas can we take in?

For characters, I will occasionally find images, clothing styles, names, or even dialogue styles from different shows. I’ll mimic someone’s hair style from a character, or a cool name, and find a place for them in a story, even if it is an NPC. I get a lot of fashions and dramatic entrances from non-modern day shows, typically fantasy or scifi. I tend to look out for an interesting dialect or tone of speech, and toy around with them. But more than looks, I am often tempted to latch onto an attitude, a worldview, or a moral argument, and see how that might be used to build the foundation for a character’s personality. After all, television is typically low budget, so the looks and effects are not usually what is going to be inspiring.

With streaming services providing the bulk of new TV shows these days, it has really transformed how the plots of shows are conceived of now. Gone are the serial shows, with each episode opening a plot that is then neatly wrapped up in a formulaic style by the end of the hour. In fact, gone are the requirements that each episode fit a specific timeframe of exactly one hour, minus commercials. Rather, shows now might be 4, 6, maybe 10 episodes, all covering one overarching plot, with each episode typically having its own micro-plot. I legitimately prefer this, as it closely matches what we have done with the Stories of Sainan. We have four books, each with its own micro-plot, all working together to build one solid story.

As for scenes, there are two primary types of scenes that I tend to get more inspiration for from TV than from movies. He first is action scenes. As mentioned before, TV tends to be lower budget. Therefore they rely more on character action, pacing, and camera work to pull off good action sequences, rather than explosions and fancy special effects or CGI. This means I can break down a good fight scene ( I said a good scene! ) and see how they used the characters and the camera movement to block the scene, and then use this to give me ideas on how I can have my own fight scenes move smoothly.

The other type of scenes that I will sometimes use TV for, especially Netflix, is for romantic scenes. I grew up gay in an ultra-conservative area, to extremely conservative parents. I did not get an opportunity to try out dating in middle or high school. I will freely admit that my dating skills are rudimentary, at best. I can use shows like Young Royals, Heartstopper, Atypical, and others for ideas on writing smooth, realistic dialogue. I can also use shows like this to look at how to pace romantic or dramatic scenes. Call it a crutch, call it cheesy, but it helps.

For all of these incredibly useful ways I am able to use TV shows as inspiration, there is one use for television that is even greater than all of these. That is, learning what not to do. So much television is low budget, lowest common denominator, often with high levels of studio interference. I am quickly able to see what types of tropes don’t work together, what level of dialogue falls flat, and more importantly, how quickly something can become formulaic. There are too many examples to list here, but there have been more than a few times when I have seen a scene or a line fall flat, and it remind me of something that nearly made it into one of our books. It reminds me of the difference between quick, slapdash writing, and scenes that have been thought out, planned, and foreshadowed. Hopefully we have written more of the latter than the former.

Well, that’s enough for now. Tune in next time, when Clevenger will manage to do a much better job of this topic! Until then,

Don’t forget to love one another.

Graham