I recently attended Robert McKee’s Story Seminar and had the good fortune to hear an additional day-long lecture from the screenwriting guru on TV writing. I was eager to hear this lecture, as I have been jumping back and forth between thinking of my novel as a novel and a TV series. Novels, particularly those of a certain length, can be challenging to adapt into a 90-120 minute movie. TV has been the answer to many writers’ and readers’ prayers, who have wanted to see their favorite stories brought to life on screen. But TV is also, obviously, so much more than a mere adaptation-producing machine. It has transcended the novel as the ultimate vehicle for long-form storytelling, attracting the best writers working today. Naturally, anyone wanting to write a successful novel these days would wonder if it might not be better to write it as a TV series right away.
The exception that proves the rule
While this doesn’t mean that no one is writing good novels, it
does mean that the novel has been playing second fiddle in terms of overall
quality to TV for a while. This became clearer to me when I applied to Creative
Writing MFAs for prose fiction. I was advised to look for the programs that
produced the writers I most admired. I was discouraged to find that almost all
the writers I admired who were still living had not attended an MFA program but
were all working in TV and had gotten their degrees either in film, in some
other completely unrelated field, or had not gotten a master’s degree at all.
Not only this, but I had become disenchanted with many of the fashionable
techniques that rule creative writing MFAs and contemporary novel writing in
general. While at McKee’s seminar, I was sitting next to a fellow novelist.
We spoke about the distasteful attitudes we had encountered
among novelists and teachers who preach faulty techniques to anyone aspiring to
write in this medium. The attitudes my fellow novelist and I discussed brought
me back to my theater days and how I had first encountered a combination of
feeling fashionably misunderstood by the masses and yet doing as much as possible
to make themselves inaccessible to those masses by writing deliberately dense
and strange work that all but requires a college degree to understand it, and
even then, rarely to get much enjoyment or insight from the practice. What
satisfaction there is, lies in being in on the joke, and the joke becomes less
worth getting in on the more people understand it. It is a vicious and vacuous
circle that is disheartening to be near and participate in. Making good art is time-consuming,
and all art tries to communicate something. While there is some good art that
artists create for a niche audience, and the artists who make it seem to do so
in a self-aware and generous spirit, many artists crave an audience large
enough for them to make their living off of their art. Thus, at some point, you
have to broaden your appeal. You must dig deeper into yourself to say something
true without erring too far in the opposite direction and just pandering and
telling people what they want to hear.
Often, when I hear the lamentations of playwrights,
novelists, or other artists whose medium’s heyday has passed, they come across like
the incels, chronically commented on in the media, who, after having been
rejected by women, retroactively declare to have taken themselves voluntarily
off the sexual market. As with these unfortunate, bitter, and misguided young
men, these aspiring artists’ claims of independence ring hollow. They strike
anyone with half a brain as a defense mechanism born out of rejection. After
suffering the sting of rejection, which is, unfortunately, part of trying to
improve as an artist, they try to protect themselves from it by broadcasting as
loudly as they can to the world that they don’t care.
TV, on the other hand, though still full of temperamental
artists with fragile egos, at least has the sensibility to see that accessibility
has always been something that great artists have striven for. Experimentation
and challenging an audience are all well and good. There is, however, a crucial
difference between setting an invitation down for your audience that says,
“Hey, I’ve got something I want to show you. It may seem strange and
unexpected, but if you bear with me, I promise it will be worth it,” and the
snide leering of a pedant who says, “You probably will never understand what it
is I’m trying to say, but try if you can.”
While this is disheartening for me as a novelist, I would
much rather be honest about which medium produces the best writing. I do my
best to learn from them without being resentful and still appreciate my chosen
medium for what it has to offer. The unique joy of setting your imagination,
which has no budget, and no need for a location scout to throw up whatever
images immediately come to mind, is one that novelists can still capitalize on
if we don’t get too precious about our egos and retreat into high-handed
literary sleight of hand.
