Rhetorical Questions Answered, Pt. 1

In checking out various links for yesterday's post, I stumbled upon Maureen Ryan's Watcher column for the Chicago Tribune. In her last installment, she asked why no one ever writes about women who are competent, intelligent, in great relationships and still interesting. The original piece has been taken down, but a revised version is here.

I can answer that question. Such women--hell, such men--don't show up on television because it's almost impossible to tell a story about them that an audience would watch for FIVE YEARS.

One of the best screenwriting professors I've had began his first class with the admonition that as writers, we must never be boring. He broke the idea of boredom into two root causes:

1. Overwhelming confusion - When we don't know who to care about, what to care about, or why we should care about it. With all due respect to Fellini, when I think of his later work, this is the exact emotion that washes over me--uncomprehending boredom.

2. Total certainty - When we know exactly who our protagonist is, what they're going to do next and why, and how it's going to turn out. I had a hefty dose of this experience while rewatching "Rope" recently. If you know where it's going, sitting through a screening is draining--you just run out of things to think about. Ditto the experience of sitting through a Catholic mass celebrated by a priest with no particular gift for sermons.

The cure for both conditions, according to my professor, was to walk the delicate line between hope and fear. Continuously give your audience something specific to hope for, but never stop supplying hints that the exact thing they fear most might come to pass.

This particular class has completely reshaped my writing, but even if I didn't find it helpful advice, I can't deny that it's validity is proven anew almost daily. Another Hitchcock film, "The Wrong Man," drove me right to the brink of insanity because I had nothing to hope for throughout it's two hour running time. The poor schlub protagonist had literally NOT ONE CLUE about how to fend off the advances of the aggressively lazy detectives who suspected him of a crime he didn't commit. The Hitchcock Ex Machina ending did not surprise me, except that I was actually more angry, not less, when the credits rolled without providing a hint of closure.

Which brings me to Ms. Ryan's question: Why would I watch a show in which I had nothing to fear? If my hero is intelligent, competent and in a great relationship, then really, what could possibly stand in her way? Every criminal, no matter how devious or evil, would be caught by my gifted protagonist. Every wrong would be righted. And she would continue through life, knowing only success at every turn.

Not only does that sound unbelievably boring, I also have to say my protagonist sounds like an insufferable goody-goody. Bleh. I'd always wonder "Doesn't she ever doubt herself? Doesn't she ever screw up?" And if she never doubts herself, and never screws up, then what do we have in common? And if she's nothing like me, then how can I identify with her long enough to get through 42 minutes of plot every week?