Writing what you know

I was starting to write a comment on Amanda’s site, and it turned into a blog post. Amanda’s post was about “writing what you know”, and how that may or may not be a great idea.

But I do think that writing what you know can be a good place to start. The whole reason I started writing a pilot about a college radio station is that for my last TV writing class in college I wrote a pilot about law interns - basically Grey's Anatomy, but law. And I still think it's a good idea...but I quickly realized that I'm not David E Kelley, and I know nothing about law. It became a tortuous semester of research and the discovery that law interns do not have the same juicy involvement in cases the way medical interns do. So my structure of serial personal relationship dramas set against episodic cases did not work. I ended up writing 60 pages of well-developed characters doing very little.

For my Senior project I was writing a TV pilot, this supernatural/Sci-Fi thriller, that eventually just proved to be too much. There was too much mythology, too much plot, too much intensity for my little brain to handle. So I ditched it halfway through the semester and wrote what I knew: a pilot about homeschoolers. Sorta. I was homeschooled through high school, and I attended a program two days a week that taught classes like Spanish, choir, speech & debate, etc. I knew the situation, I knew the characters (I went to school with them), I knew the conflicts. Or so I thought.

When I got to the end of it, it all seemed to fall flat for me. There was no tension, nothing at stake for the characters, and like Amanda said it was really just a lot of people sitting around doing nothing. Turns out there isn’t much conflict in a conservative Christian homeschool program, and so what made me think that there could possibly be a pilot in there…much less 5 seasons of stories?

I think that's why we have so many shows about Lawyers, Doctors, and Police: their jobs have built-in stakes. They deal with life and death, with crime and justice. And if they have relational strife on the side, it’s just icing on the cake. A show like Friday Night Lights can work only in a small Texas town, where high school football is the most important thing. The West Wing was tense and engaging because the protagonist was the leader of the free world, but Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip failed because the protagonist was a showrunner, and most people (i.e. people who aren’t me) don’t care about the lives of television writers.

But then there’s a lot of other reasons Studio 60 failed.

In the end, I think that's the problem with "writing what you know". For a lot of people, living a comfortable, middle-class life in suburban America, what they know is boring. If you work in politics, a hospital, or a courtroom, maybe not. But if you grew up playing video games and watching television, maybe you’re better off doing research on something else. Or just write Sci-fi.