Blog RSS FeedHow writing is like Survivor
I watch a lot of reality TV. I tend to stay away from shows that are just sitcom-style reality (sit-real?)–you know, The Hills,Keeping Up With the Kardashians,Jersey Shore, any kind of real housewives anywhere. I like shows where somebody learns something or is inspired–either me (Project Runway, Top Chef) or the participants.
Which brings me to my ultimate guilty pleasure: Wife Swap.
The format is basically this: two women from drastically different households switch places for two weeks. For the first week, they live the life of the other woman. For the second week, each wife makes up a set of rules that force the other family to live by her rules. The drama comes when you have a control-freak personal trainer switching with a laid-back competitive eater. Or a shallow, pampered shopaholic trading place with a farmer. Or a devoutly religious woman switching place with a family of more, ahem, relaxed morals.
At the end of the two weeks, the pairs of husbands and wives meet up across a table and talk about the experience. About half the time, someone gets up and leaves in a huff, but they always come back to finish up. (You can just picture the producers saying, “Now, come on, you’ve made it this far. And the contract clearly states that if you want your $25,000, you have to do every singe thing we tell you to do.”)
Wife Swap is on about forty times a day, so there’s never a shortage of episodes to watch. But my style of watching the show has evolved. Instead of watching beginning, middle, and end, for a total of 42 minutes of program time, about eight of ten times, I watch the first ten minutes and then skip ahead to the last ten, for about fifteen minutes of program time. Why? Because those are the bits of the show when something changes.
In a vast majority of the episodes, the middle chunk is all drama–kids whining, dads whining, moms crying, everybody yelling… it’s all filler. The interesting part is finding out whether the experience changed them, and how they think about it later.
Notice I said that I skip ahead in about 80% of the episodes. The other 20% bring something extra to the table: characters who draw you in. Unexpected connections between the women and their surrogate families. Revelations, growth, moments of self-reflection. Sometimes a woman, faced with having the other family live by her rules, realizes that she doesn’t particularly like her rules. Sometimes a fundamentalist housewife realizes that the biker family she thought were heathens are actually (gasp!) Christians, just like she is!
I think this is an extremely valuable lesson for a writer. A novel chronicles events in a character’s life. It cannot be an interesting beginning, a bunch of filler, and an interesting ending. The middle needs to be about more than just whining, crying, and yelling. You need to have a story. Once you get the formula down, as a consumer of books or TV or movies, you find yourself looking for the next plot point. The next moment when something’s going to change, or somebody’s going to grow. It’s the job of an author to make sure that a book is so full of those characters and moments that the reader doesn’t want to skip the middle.
And on that note, I’d better get to work!
The Daily Plah: Day 4
Currently reading: The Battle for God by Karen Armstrong
Song of the day: Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood, the Nina Simone version
Book 2 progress: Wrote a new opening chapter. Ready to get a move on!
Other notable facts: I’m so excited for the return of The Office tonight!
- Jury duty = preschool
- My life as a pioneer woman.
- Learning from the (hilarious) mistakes of others.
- In defense of American Idol.
March 4th, 2010 Katie Alender
Watching reality TV as a writing/learning exercise is either genius or pure rationalization.
Nevertheless it makes sense since as long as you can tolerate the-over-the-top melodrama!
I don’t watch much t.v. (even though we’ve inherited a satellite package and everything comes with Arabic subtitles, which is sort of compelling, but still…) So I tend to turn my nose up at reality t.v. And yet, reading this, I started to feel worried: I’m crazy about this sort of memoir — people from completely different walks of life having to switch places, then having those crucial moments of self reflection. And now I wonder what the difference is, really, between memoir and reality t.v.? I feel a bit hypocritical…
‘Kids whining, dads whining, mom crying, everybody yelling’ — sounds like every other day around here!
LMAO, Larramie! I plea the fifth. And yes, the melodrama is well-tolerated.
Mary, I hate to tell you, but there’s a lot of good reality TV on these days. There are talented producers and writers who are turning away from scripted and applying themselves to making good documentary-style programming. I’m not necessarily including Wife Swap in that category, by the way! I think the category of “reality TV” has gotten big enough to include many genres and many levels of quality and watchability. It’s not all good, and it’s not all bad (like most things in life, I suppose).