I’m a writer. And, I admit it, I’m a writer who’s a sucker for creating action scenes. Now it’s possible you might think my everyday life is full of excitement and action to spur such scenes, but no, it usually begins with a cup of hot green tea at my computer desk.
Nonetheless I’m an action junkie; books, movies, tv, whatever.
Star Wars, Deadpool, Sword Dancer Novels, Orson Scott Card! Yes, I like detail as well, background, the backstory, but what really sucks me in is the action. Don’t make that backstory and setting too lengthy or I’ll be peeking ahead or see where the action again picks up. Not everyone is like this, but that’s me.read article
Is the novel dead in the U.S.? Replaced by deep, nuanced, characterization and subtext-laden TV series? Here’s what one deep thinker has to say:
by Ken Pisani
They say this is a new “golden age” of television, and whenever “they” say something so definitive we should be very skeptical—especially since TV’s first “golden age” gave us shows like Our Miss Brooks, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Heinz Studio 57, an anthology series about ketchup. But let’s concede the point, if only so I can continue writing about it.
The New York Times has posed the question, “Are the New ‘Golden Age’ TV Shows the New Novels?,” while Esquire has written “[T]he TV boxset is the ‘great literary novel of its day.’” Bill Moyers has compared David Simon’s hardscrabble take on Baltimore in The Wire to Charles Dickens’s depiction of “the smoky mean streets of Victorian London.” And I’m pretty sure another smart guy said something smart about smart TV writin’. The consensus seems to be that television has gotten more literary, regardless of the fact that most of us are watching Dancing with the Stars.read article
If you don’t read “The Bitter Script Reader” you’re missing one of the most perceptive writers about the subject of television ever to pick up an angry pen and let the media have it. (Okay, so he doesn’t use a pen, and he clearly loves TV, still…well, check it out:
Not what this article means when it says TV “evolves” but still kinda cool, yeah?
by The Bitter Script Reader
TV shows evolve over time. Certainly if you were to watch the first couple episodes of Seinfeld, you’d find them to be strange, slightly stilted and slow affairs, lacking the complex structure and quotable dialogue that made the show one of the last true mega-hits of the TV boom. And yet, you can still see the germs of genius, the voice that was unlike anything else on TV at the time. It’s not honed or polished yet, but it is distinct. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is another show that took a season and a half to evolve into its ideal form. The moment “shit got real” is when Buffy lost her virginity to Angel, triggering his reversion to his evil personality and completely upending any sense of safety within the show. For that matter, the spinoff show starring Angel himself took at least 11 episodes to truly find its footing. It needed that time before its voice emerged and it found where it was going to fit into the Buffy-verse. Still, I’d argue that if you watch the first season of Buffy, it might be a little campier, cheaper and less ambitious than what followed, it still is distinct and unique in a way that draws you in. Joss Whedon’s voice is there – he’s just still finding his best keys.
One of my problems with the way network TV is run today is that programmers seem to have itchy trigger fingers. A new series could find itself canceled after two or three airings, which hardly seems like a fair amount of data on which to judge a series. Of course, it’s important to realize that by the time most network shows have had their premiere, the series has probably shot six or seven episodes and may be working on the script for the 9th or 10th episode. At that point, the studio and the network have a pretty good sense of what they’ve got creatively, and if that’s not working for them, a limp debut isn’t going to convince them to throw good money after bad. (Though streaming figures and the Live+3 and Live+7 viewing numbers can end up extending a show’s life just by virtue of the fact they take longer to compile.)read article
Super writer-blogger Ken Levine gets to the heart of the matter – again:
by Ken Levine
An interesting discussion arose from Sunday’s post – whether or not to write at Starbucks. It brings up the question: where do you write and why? For you non-writers, it brings up the question: why do you go to Starbucks at all when Dunkin Donuts has better coffee?
Usually I write with a partner and most of the time we dictate scripts to our assistant while I pace back and forth with a yoyo so a public coffee house is generally not the ideal workplace. It’s bad enough when the assistant says, “No, really? You really want me to put that in?” without total strangers chiming in the same thing. But when we’re just working through a story we’ll often meet at a Coffee Bean. Yes, there’s always that danger people will think we’re just posturing pretentious writers so we counter that by wearing priest collars.read article
Well, here we are again writers – or those contemplating being writers, or those who really shouldn’t be considering writing.
It seems like it’s about time to consider why you, as a writer, want to write. No, no, I don’t mean the airy fairy stuff where we get all philosophical on the wonders of the written word. I mean let’s get down, dirty, and face reality.read article
by Peggy Bechko
by Ken Pisani
