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Brief update
Mar. 25th, 2020 09:38 amThe crisis continues and I continue to function more or less as normal. I feel very lucky that my personal disposition is so well adapted for these times we live in. I’m used to going without social contact, aside from my beloved husband, for long periods of time and suffer very few ill effects from spending time in isolation. I’ve been writing a fair amount, praying, reading, fiddling with music, watching nonsense, and getting out for a little fresh air when I can. This is a pattern of living I can maintain indefinitely. It’s a salutary reminder that disability has a significant social context. I’m more or less hopeless at life when things are normal but force everyone to remain indoors and I’m completely fine.
We’ve been rewatching Babylon 5 recently and it’s always instructive to review older television after a gap because the contrasts with the current style of production is that much sharper and makes you more aware of how endemic certain tropes have become without you really noticing. I’ve often criticised current television for flabby writing, especially on HBO, Prime, and Netflix where episodes are no longer tied to specific runtimes. The idea that episodes can go on as long as they need to, budget permitting, is freeing but it can easily become a vice. Episode 10 of season 3 of Babylon 5 manages to fit in a tyrannical government attacking their own colonies, the dissolution of a thousand year old alien council, a space battle, and a Declaration of Independence into 43 minutes of run-time without feeling too hurried. Part of that is how well the ground work has been laid in earlier episodes but a lot of it simply comes down to disciplined writing. Everything serves the story, every event shown on screen matters. I can’t help but compare that to the final season of Game of Thrones, particularly the two battle sequences that form the main spectacle of the narrative. The battle for Winterfell is full of extraneous material, endless sequences of various supporting characters fighting wights in the dark which get repetitive and surprisingly dull, especially on a repeat viewing (and still somehow fails to check in with Bronn - we literally never learn what he was doing during the battle). We get multiple fights with dragons, all of which achieve nothing, they’re irrelevant to the outcome of the battle. So much of it is empty spectacle, it lacks an emotional context and a clear narrative structure. You could have boiled it down to 45 minutes and it would, paradoxically, have felt more epic and exciting.
So much good writing is discipline. I read Alan Moore’s Jerusalem and found it frequently hard going. He’s the greatest comics writer of all time but Jerusalem is a flawed behemoth of a novel, all 600,000 words of it. It’s an epic a deserves a decent word count but there’s nothing in it that couldn’t have been said better in 200,000 words. Alan Moore’s comic scripts are notoriously lengthy, often running to hundreds of pages but, and this is the important bit, they all have to be boiled down to twenty two pages. No matter how big the idea is you have to be able to get it done in twenty two pages. That takes discipline. I’m a big fan of 2000AD and there the page limit is even more stringent. Even long form stories are broken down into weekly six page chapters and their signature one off shorts come in at only four pages. Writing a short story that comes in at four pages is a hell of a thing. That’s a maximum of 28 panels, probably no more than five hundred words of text. I submitted a spec script to them just before everything went to hell and I spent a hell of a long time condensing the story I wanted to tell down to four pages. I banged out a ten thousand word short story last week and it took me about half the time to finish the first draft as it did to get those four pages to where I wanted them to be.
I feel like a lot of TV writers are drunk with power at the moment. After decades of needing to turn in 43 minute scripts that told a complete story and that more or less reset at the end the fashion is suddenly for long form storytelling with arcs designed to run over multiple seasons, never mind multiple episodes. It’s led to some great television but I think more shows could do to rediscover the art of the tight 43 minute episode and stop wallowing in the self-indulgence that space provides.
We’ve been rewatching Babylon 5 recently and it’s always instructive to review older television after a gap because the contrasts with the current style of production is that much sharper and makes you more aware of how endemic certain tropes have become without you really noticing. I’ve often criticised current television for flabby writing, especially on HBO, Prime, and Netflix where episodes are no longer tied to specific runtimes. The idea that episodes can go on as long as they need to, budget permitting, is freeing but it can easily become a vice. Episode 10 of season 3 of Babylon 5 manages to fit in a tyrannical government attacking their own colonies, the dissolution of a thousand year old alien council, a space battle, and a Declaration of Independence into 43 minutes of run-time without feeling too hurried. Part of that is how well the ground work has been laid in earlier episodes but a lot of it simply comes down to disciplined writing. Everything serves the story, every event shown on screen matters. I can’t help but compare that to the final season of Game of Thrones, particularly the two battle sequences that form the main spectacle of the narrative. The battle for Winterfell is full of extraneous material, endless sequences of various supporting characters fighting wights in the dark which get repetitive and surprisingly dull, especially on a repeat viewing (and still somehow fails to check in with Bronn - we literally never learn what he was doing during the battle). We get multiple fights with dragons, all of which achieve nothing, they’re irrelevant to the outcome of the battle. So much of it is empty spectacle, it lacks an emotional context and a clear narrative structure. You could have boiled it down to 45 minutes and it would, paradoxically, have felt more epic and exciting.
So much good writing is discipline. I read Alan Moore’s Jerusalem and found it frequently hard going. He’s the greatest comics writer of all time but Jerusalem is a flawed behemoth of a novel, all 600,000 words of it. It’s an epic a deserves a decent word count but there’s nothing in it that couldn’t have been said better in 200,000 words. Alan Moore’s comic scripts are notoriously lengthy, often running to hundreds of pages but, and this is the important bit, they all have to be boiled down to twenty two pages. No matter how big the idea is you have to be able to get it done in twenty two pages. That takes discipline. I’m a big fan of 2000AD and there the page limit is even more stringent. Even long form stories are broken down into weekly six page chapters and their signature one off shorts come in at only four pages. Writing a short story that comes in at four pages is a hell of a thing. That’s a maximum of 28 panels, probably no more than five hundred words of text. I submitted a spec script to them just before everything went to hell and I spent a hell of a long time condensing the story I wanted to tell down to four pages. I banged out a ten thousand word short story last week and it took me about half the time to finish the first draft as it did to get those four pages to where I wanted them to be.
I feel like a lot of TV writers are drunk with power at the moment. After decades of needing to turn in 43 minute scripts that told a complete story and that more or less reset at the end the fashion is suddenly for long form storytelling with arcs designed to run over multiple seasons, never mind multiple episodes. It’s led to some great television but I think more shows could do to rediscover the art of the tight 43 minute episode and stop wallowing in the self-indulgence that space provides.
