What Crap TV Can Teach Creative Writers

Following on from my last post about the seamless and subtle Twenty Twelve currently showing on BBC 2, it occurred to me that you don't have to watch excellent television if you're curious to learn how good writing is created.  You can learn just as much from watching crap TV.

To this end, you might like to cast your eyes over The Syndicate, Kay Mellor's "gritty" drama about the lives of a group of lottery winners.  See if you can last for a whole episode, and when you next find yourself in front of your computer with a blank page ready and waiting, think of everything this drama has attempted, and do the opposite.

The programme aspires to tragedy, setting brother against brother in true biblical style, but in spite of sterling work by the likes of Timothy Spall and Lorraine Ashbourne, it never manages to get beyond hollow melodrama.

There are a few reasons for this: some of the plotting is clunky -- it is unlikely and far-fetched and because it strains of the willing suspension of disbelief whereby we collude in the story we are being told, it becomes difficult to believe.  This has a knock-on effect. If the action is implausible, then the emotional responses of the characters starts to seem empty.  In an attempt to breathe life into a dodgy script, many of the actors put their heart and soul into their performances, but they only come across as histrionic and insincere.  There is a lesson here -- don't over-compensate, if there is a flaw in your work, go back to the drawing board and rewrite until it rings true.

For a story, or a script, or a novel to succeed, it must have integrity.  Never write for effect -- to create beautiful prose, or to evoke emotion as Mellor has done -- because you will be putting the cart before the horse. Instead write in the pursuit of truth, both in terms of how you plot your narrative, so the action stays plausible within the conventions you have established, and in terms of the characters who are caught in its grip.  And before you set to work, remind yourself again and again: less is more, less is more. Wise writers will always leave some work for their readers to do.