I love the fact I have Netflix and Netflix is now showing a lot of the stuff I used to watch as I was growing up. Over the course of a week I was able to cherry pick some of my favorite Star Trek Next Generation episodes, a few Buffy and Angle shows, and some Arrested Development. I'm eagerly waiting for them to get Deep Space Nine so I can watch those as well. TV was a huge part of forming my imagination, more so than books or movies, although they also played a huge roll, just as big as Television.
What I found interesting as I was watching Next Gen was just how much that show did influence me. Story structure, characters, situations, all the things that show did well I can see in my work today. The Arwen, my very own Star Ship series, can easily trace its roots back to Episodes like Best of Both worlds, Cause and Effect, and The Inner light. It's no coincidence I guess that those are my favorite episodes and, on some level, I wanted to re-write them in some way with my own characters. It wasn't really a conscience choice, it just sort of happened.
Another show that really influenced me, more as a young kid than a teenager, was Star Blazers or, if you were in Japan, Space battleship Yamato. I loved that show so much. I used to race home after school to watch it. I would then try to draw the episode and when I figured out I have no artistic ability I used to write stories about the show, using my own characters in place of the ones on TV. Of course, the stories I wrote were just mirroring the stories on the TV by that really was my first attempts to write a story, all because of that show.
One of the odd things that struck me at that early age were characters. I felt like I was giving people life! If I thought of a character and I wrote about that character I was sort of creating a new life form in my mind and that life form could only act if I let them act, could only do what I wanted them to do. As an 11 year old that was a pretty powerful concept and one that I held on to even as I was learning how to write and how to build story and structure. I would create a character and in my eye the person was alive, not just a figment of my imagination but a real, live being. Which is way I always feel bad when I kill someone in a story.
I also hate it when I just remove a character completely. To me I not only killed someone but he or she no longer existed! That's kind of dark.
In my one novel, Ida, I had to do that. I killed a character half way through the book for impact not realizing I would need him later in the story. I had created another character to take his place but as I wrote it I thought, "why did I just create this new guy when I had a perfectly good guy that I killed?" So, I went back and unkilled the guy and totally wrote out the new guy. I felt bad for the new guy so if I ever do a sequel maybe I'll give him a part. I also think the guy I killed was pretty happy to be alive again, especially since his death was kind of painful to begin with.
I also did that with another character in my Arwen books. I was going to kill him in book two but decided not to but then I killed him in book three for no good reason really. Come to think of it he should have died in the second story cause his death then would have meant more than his death in the third. Oh well, if I could do it over again I would but I can't so he lived to see another story. . .where he died.
When writers talk about how the characters tell them what to do most people who don't write have a hard time understanding that. I understand it. More than once my characters have told me what they want and what they want to do in a situation. I find it hard to get anything past my characters, if they need to act dumb for some sort of plot point to happen I have a hard time making them dumb and I feel I need to trick them into going for the plot point before going forward. Smart characters who act dumb really annoy me so I think it's more that I don't want someone to read my work and go, 'wow, that character is normally on the ball, how does she not know what's going to happen?'
That drives me nuts when I see it on a TV show or a movie. I'll give you an example of a show that I liked a lot but had a hard time watching because the characters acted way dumber than they were supposed to be.
One of the news shows I enjoyed, before it was canceled, was No Ordinary Family. In this show you had a bunch of really smart people. It was a show about people with super powers and how they adjusted to those powers. In fact, one kid had the powers of super-duper smartness.
In one of the episodes they meet a shape shifter who could make herself look like anyone in the family. Now, I can see that fooling people the first time and it made that episode kind of fun. Eventually they find out she's a shape shifter and beat her, she escapes and they hope they've seen the last of her, only they don't know if she'll be back or not.
A few episodes later she does return and does the same thing, taking the shape of family members to get information out of them. Now, as I'm watching that show I can't help but think, "boy, these guys are dumb. They know someone is out there after them who can look like any member of the family wouldn't it be smart to, oh I don't know, come up with code words to ask someone a question only they know when they first meet?"
That's just one example from one show, there are lots of other shows with lots of other examples I can think of. I personally think it takes a lot of imagination to come up with a way to fool your characters without them being dumb.
Like I learned in improv, play up to your characters intelligence, don't make him a dumb guy cause the audience can see right through that.
