Welcome to my Substack!
Alright… I started to appreciate film and TV in ~2013 - sophomore year of college, for reference. I was lucky to be twenty during “peak TV,” which has since passed.
Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Downton Abbey, Arrested Development, Mad Men, The Office, Parks and Recreation, House of Cards, Orange Is the New Black, The Walking Dead, Homeland, Girls… (!) … historically good content.
It was the perfect mix of cable/network channels still having quality and relevance, plus the streaming services starting to make their own content.
I cried watching the finales of The Office and Mad Men, but didn’t know why. Crying at the end of Mad Men is a potentially off-putting cultural marker - Don Draper was a bad dude. Oh well. Either way, I’m starting to learn why I cried. The writers of the shows wanted me to and wrote the scripts so well that I did. The creators made me care about fictional, often unlikeable, TV characters.
This isn’t profound to artistically-inclined people. They already appreciate the impact and intent of art, especially great art. It’s to make people feel things and question things and expand their mindsets or simply enjoy what’s in front of them. Just read or listen to some Jerry Saltz. Or refer to my wife, Reagan.
But I did not have a particularly artistic background or inclination. Lots of you probably don’t either. So art - movies, TV, paintings, architecture, music, whatever - are something to like but keep at arms length. Take a picture of a nice building, watch a good movie on Friday night, or go to the museum once a year. Fun but nonessential.
My artistically-inclined wife has expanded my mindset on all if this. So much so that I’ve started working on a book.
If you’d asked me five years ago - “if you were to write a book, what would it be about?” - I would have immediately leaned non-fiction. Like, something earnest but hopelessly ambitious for a non-PhD. For example: American Foreign Policy from a Christian Perspective. I did research for this in 2020… really. It was not written for multiple reasons. Maybe I’ll write it, someday, with the right friends for references.
But for now what’s interesting is writing fiction. I’m 17,000 words into a novel about two friends on a weekend trip to Madrid. There will be friendship tensions, romance, and hints of political thriller. Hopefully there will be clever dialogue and layers of unique themes for the reader to find.
It won’t be a best seller or culturally significant, and probably won’t even be published. But it might. And if it doesn’t, it will nonetheless be worth doing.
This Substack is meant to:
Track my progress throughout my first draft.
Share tips for writers & aspiring writers.
Keep me on target to finish the draft by June.
Plug movie/tv/book recommendations.
Back to TV, and art in general. Writing dialogue that isn’t cheesy is so hard. So is pacing, and working in themes and messages that don’t treat the reader like a dunce. It requires true feelings and simple sentences and so many edits.
Those shows I watched ten years ago (and still do) got it right, and let me feel lots of things. But they didn’t force me to feel them. Instead they dropped hints and asked me to focus. And if I did, I’d be rewarded with the emotions they hoped for.
Tough not to sound snobby when citing a Norwegian indie movie, but... last August I watched The Worst Person in the World. I was amazed by the subtlety and realism of the story. I’d just started writing, and was struggling to keep going with my 300-words-a-day rule. I watched it twice back to back, and couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was so simply written yet felt so complex. It was also told in chapter format, which helped.
I felt something similar after reading one of Ian McEwan’s novels, The Innocent. And after watching The Father, and Tár, and so on.
It’s thrilling to read or watch something that works up so many worries and comforts and questions yet is so realistic and simple. It’s exciting to hope that my work might do something similar to others.
Right now, the novel is going well. I’ve been disciplined with my 300 word days and the pages are stacking up. The characters are somewhat interesting and I’ve managed to create some depth in the story.
There’s so much to incorporate and even more to avoid. I find myself thinking nonstop about the novel, then the TV shows I’m watching, then the movie from the weekend, and the people I saw on my commute earlier that day. The stories and themes aren’t yet where I want them to be, but even if they never get there, I’m glad to have these thoughts bouncing around all day.
If you’re thinking about writing, do it. It may frustrate the life out of you. But it’s so much fun. You’ll look at TVs and movies and mundane life differently, more critically but with greater appreciation. If we were stuck with only non-fiction, we’d be smarter but colder. Try writing a few pages of fiction this weekend and cry it out!
In the meantime, tell your friends ?