Another fun blog about writing and life. I found this article below, by author and educator June Trop, to be creative and thought provoking. It is an enlightening look at those zany soap operas that I have scoffed at, many times in the past. Sure, I was hooked on at least one soap opera many years ago, but totally missed the obvious lesson potential for improving my writing. I expected the cliffhanger every Friday. I picked up on the potential for a murder coming up when a character made a bucketful of other characters angry. I just didn’t realize how darn creative these soap opera writers were, then. So, fellow writers, let’s look at these shows (not many left of what used to be a crowded genre) that continually attract huge audiences, even if they don’t attract us. We can learn from so many genres… even if we, at first glance, do not appreciate their lessons.
So, I invite you to learn a little lesson about writing that you may not have noticed, before. Read on…
Unless you’ve been hooked, you can’t imagine how addicting a soap opera can be. When I was teaching in the local school, I could leave there at 3:20, just in time to make the beginning of a 30-minute soap, The Edge of Night. I didn’t run anybody over, but I broke the neighborhood speed limit. That’s for sure. Scriptwriters know how to keep their audience captivated. Their scenes are all action. (Don’t forget dialogue is action too). You can use dialogue the same way they do. You can lace it with foreshadows. The actor’s complaint of pain could mean he has a hangnail or a brain tumor. Or not. Foreshadowing will keep your readers captivated too. Is your character speaking sarcastically or mournfully? Instead of cluttering your dialogue with adverbs and adjectives, zoom in on what the soap actors are doing. Is their upper lip curling, their brow furrowing, or their cheek twitching? Use those fine-grained gestures rather than modifiers to communicate your own character’s feelings. When a new character is introduced in a soap, notice how the actors gossip about his or her past. You too can use dialogue instead of description and exposition to tell your readers whether the woman being brought home to Mama is a brazen hussy or motherly widow. And while you’re watching, observe the transitions. No lengthy explanations bridge the scenes. Trust your readers to navigate the same kind of shifts. Begin the next scene with action. Throw your characters into the center of a conflict. Then end the scene with a cliffhanger like the scriptwriters do every Friday. Finally, see how scriptwriters weave subplots into their story. Subplots add breadth, depth, and complexity to a story. Moreover, they can slow the pace of the main plot, throw obstacles in the protagonist’s path, and prolong suspense by interrupting the action of the main plot. So take an occasional break from writing to watch a soap opera and concentrate on how the scriptwriters use dialogue to foreshadow and reveal a character’s past and how they use fine-grained gestures to clarify a speaker’s meaning. Then focus on how they manage transitions and weave subplots into their story. AUTHOR: June Trop and her twin sister Gail wrote their first story, “The Steam Shavel [sic],” when they were six years old growing up in rural New Jersey. They sold it to their brother Everett for two cents.
Another fun blog about writing and life
Business for Writers
Wasn’t that fun? Now, go watch a soap to see what you’ve been missing.
