Most writers—and I count myself among them—agree that the best way to learn about writing is by reading…not just the kind of reading that involves passive absorption (though you can also learn a lot that way), but by active analysis of books. Yes. Affirmative. That is mostly how I’ve learned how to write.
But! I often learn about writing through other means. By watching television and movies; by studying science and psychology; in conversation with friends; in hearing about the challenges of other kinds of work; by looking at art and listening to music—all sorts of places have taught me meaningful lessons about what I am doing and how I might do it better.
In an effort to share this learning with you, I want to start doing case studies: a more detailed analysis of a particular thing, be it a television show or a movie or a song, and what it taught me about writing. This will be my first attempt, but hopefully there will be more.
The topic of this case study is ANSWERING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS. What the heck do I mean by that? Well, in order to answer that, I want to tell you about two very different TV shows. The first is one that I don’t love, but that I think succeeds on a very important level. The second is one that I do love, but that does not succeed on the same level.
Enough suspense. Here we go!
Manifest is an NBC show that originally aired in 2018. It has three seasons, and I have watched one and a half of them. (I stopped when the characters were using the word “calling” so much that I started to develop a drinking game in my head instead of paying attention.) The basic premise of the show is that a plane full of people took off and experienced some turbulence…and when they landed, it was five years later. OoOoOoOoOo.
BUT HOW? AND WHY?
This show is super fun and sucked me in immediately. I powered through the first season in a few days. But it’s one of those shows that’s sort of hard to recommend unless the person you’re recommending it to is A. highly tolerant of network TV dialogue where everyone says EXACTLY what they mean at all times and B. very much in the mood for some fun escapism. When I watched it, I was both A and B when I started, and then as I worked my way into the second season I became less and less A, alas and RIP to me. But before I got Dialogue Fatigue, I noticed something interesting:
Where the show succeeds most is in answering the most important questions that its premise raises. What I mean is, this is a concept-based show—you don’t need to tell someone about the plot or the characters in order for them to get an idea of whether they want to watch it or not. (As you can tell from my summary above.) But it also does an excellent idea of first identifying the questions that the viewer most wants answered and then constructing the plot (both the greater arc and the smaller arcs of the episodes) to answer those questions.
In the first episode, we basically want to know what the setup is. What did the flight feel like to the people on it, and how does that differ from what their families and friends back at home experienced? And then we want to know: what happened while these people were gone? If you disappeared for five years and were presumed dead, would your spouse remarry? Would people have died in your absence? Would your siblings have aged past you? Would there be a job waiting for you when you got back? Would they have developed better treatments for your chronic illness? Etc. That’s basically what episodes 1-6 explore.
This is what I call the “backward” plot of the show—the exploration of the past. There’s also a “forward” plot that involves the passengers of the plane hearing mysterious voices telling them to do things—the “callings” I mentioned earlier—but I’m going to breeze past that part of the show, as it’s not really relevant here.
The plot of the first season takes us down a few avenues. We find out how the government reacts to the mysterious return of the passengers (sketchily). We get to see the reaction of the public to this “miracle” in two ways—through the formation of a cult that worships “the returned” as saints, basically, and also through a group of extremists who thinks “the returned” are subhuman, with each group serving as the end of a spectrum of reactions. There are spouses who move on, and spouses who don’t. There’s a pair of twin siblings who are now five years apart in age, and the weirdness that creates. There are people who died in the interim, people who went back to work and people who didn’t. Basically, every question that I found myself asking about how a gap like this would be handled was addressed in some way, even if it wasn’t “answered” completely. (I still remember when I found myself asking “wait, what about the pilot of the plane?” and was then immediately rewarded by an episode focused on…the pilot of the plane.) It was very satisfying.
You would think this is something that all TV shows, movies, and books do reasonably well, but it isn’t. All too often the creator of a thing doesn’t really understand what the most pertinent questions their premise raises are, or they prioritize them in a strange way. It always strikes me as the creator of a thing not understanding just what is interesting about that thing. (I probably am guilty of this myself, in my own writing, on some level!)
For example: the Star Wars prequels offered us an explanation for why some people are stronger in the Force than others: a high level of midichlorians in the blood. The thing is, though, that I never actually wondered about that. It’s a normal part of life that some people have talents that others don’t have, so the movies went to some lengths to answer a question I never asked. I also didn’t really care about the origin of the clone army, to be honest. It’s a clone army, George. It doesn’t have to be a subplot.
The answers I DID want—what led Anakin Skywalker to become Darth Vader, what happened to Padme—were not answered in a very…satisfying way. (Padme dies of…grief? Anakin is so in love with Padme that he…murders a bunch of children? What?) The focus of the movies felt wrong. It’s like George Lucas was taking a family portrait and focused his lens on a tree in the background, leaving the family blurry in the foreground. See what I mean? The movies are not preoccupied with the same questions that the viewer is preoccupied with. We are misaligned.
My second case study is actually an example of where this doesn’t quite come together, too. So let’s move on to…
That trailer? Not even half as funny as the actual show.
The premise is basically that a regular gal, Jessie, goes to a New Years bash and ends up having a one night stand with a guy, Tom, who she doesn’t realize is a famous movie star. For some reason (psst: the reason is that she is a DELIGHT), he seems to actually like her and wants to see her again. BAM. Hijinks ensue.
When I finished it—and I watched the entire show in one day—I had one criticism, and it was that I never got to actually see my biggest questions played out on screen. I wanted to know things like: what would happen if the media found out? How would she react to suddenly being thrust in the spotlight like that? How would his celeb BFFs react to her? How would she react to them? What would happen if he took her to a movie premiere? If his management tried to interfere in their relationship? Etc.
I would argue these are some of the most central questions that the premise naturally provokes. But the show kind of steers around them. At one point, Jessie is almost caught by the media, and manages to pass herself off as household staff—a funny moment, but I kept waiting for her second attempt at this to fail, and it just…never became an issue. She does encounter one of Tom’s co-stars…but the co-star never finds out that she dated him, so that’s also left unexplored. Tom does spend time in Jessie’s world, but we never see her in his, and that was the part of the premise that I was most interested in. We know what “normal” is like. We don’t know what it would be like to, as a “normal” person, find yourself in “celeb land.”
The show I got instead of that, though, was a delightful series of episodes where, for various reasons, these two people keep missing each other—they can’t quite get the seasons of their lives to line up. And I was interested in watching that show, because of the chemistry between the characters, the dialogue, the charm—they all more than carried it. But if you removed the celebrity element entirely, you could still have basically the same show.
And therein lies the issue with not answering the biggest questions your premise raises—you render it inessential.
Imagine, for example, if the show Manifest never explored what happened in the five years that the passengers were disappeared, if they just made the whole show about the mysterious “callings” and about the forward motion of the plot. Would you still have a show? Sure! But there would be no reason for them to be missing for five years instead of, say, five weeks, or five days, or even one day. It’s not that there’s nothing interesting left when you take away part of the premise, but what’s there changes.
In your own writing, well, it’s all your show—you can make your story’s premise everything you want it to be, and nothing you don’t want it to be. You just have to know what those things are. And you have to be willing to let go of the things that aren’t naturally integrating into your plot.
The two steps here, as I see them, are: 1. Figure out the most important questions that your premise raises and 2. Shape your plot so that you can at least give those questions a poke. You don’t have to answer everything or explain everything…but if you find that you aren’t really interested in exploring the biggest questions that your premise raises, you should maybe reconsider what your story is really about. This is about making sure that what’s interesting to you, the writer, and what’s interesting to the reader, are also complementary to each other, even if they aren’t perfectly aligned. (And when are they?)
One way to do this, by the way? Write up your premise, a paragraph summarizing your story, and give it to a friend who likes the kind of thing you’re writing. (As in: maybe don’t give your sci fi premise to your friend who only likes contemporary stories.) Ask your friend what they expect the story to explore, what answers they want most, what scenes they imagine seeing. See if the things that interest them align with your plans for your story. Doing that can be pretty illuminating.
And please, give Starstruck a watch. 😊
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