M. Suzanne Terry

As mentioned in my previous post, my dear friend Michelle visited this weekend. We watched a lot of TV, as per our custom.

One of the many shelves of my TV collection

We watched one episode of The Newsroom and many episodes of Firefly. After she left, I watched more Firefly and Gilmore Girls while knitting.

I love TV. I love it much more than I like movies, because it allows me to get to know the characters. It’s difficult in a two-hour movie for me to attach to a character enough to care what happens to them. I mean, it’s sad when they die in the general sense that I recognize death as a sad experience for the survivors and thus experience some generic human empathy, but the character deaths that really affect me are the ones in TV shows. It’s been over a decade, and I’m still not over Serenity.

Many writers might not share this experience, but I think that watching TV and participating in fandom have made me a better writer.

I often say that Elmore Leonard taught me to write dialogue, and that’s true, but I also learned a lot from Joss Whedon and Aaron Sorkin and Amy Sherman-Palladino (and Shonda Rhimes and David E. Kelley). Television rewired my brain so that dialogue doesn’t stay flat on the page; when I’m writing it, I’m imagining it in action. This also helps me visualize my characters better and write character-driven plots.

Being an active member of fandom (and by that, I do mean “one who reads and writes fanfiction,” although that is not the only way to be active) also helped my writing. Writing and sharing fanfiction taught me to receive and give constructive feedback. It also taught me to recognize feedback that wasn’t helpful and learn to disregard it without wasting emotion on it. Most of all, though, writing stories with someone else’s characters taught me how to stay true to a character (because diehard fans will definitely let you know if you get it wrong or if it seems a little off). This skill has been invaluable when writing with the characters I’ve created.

So while I don’t recommend a regular four-hour-a-day habit, letting yourself get involved in the world and the characters of your favorite TV shows can improve your skills, too.

What TV shows/characters do you love? What fuels your creativity?

I’m showing and telling 31 days of shelfies this month.