Writing & The Good Wife

I really love television. Like, a whole lot. Like, after deliciously amazing books, it is my favorite medium, particularly for storytelling purposes. I’m not into movies for the most part, though there are many* I love. Theatre is a huge love of mine but I don’t get to experience it on a nightly basis, and also there’s something about the long-term nature of television that is super appealing to me. I love being in it for the long haul. I write academic papers on episodes I love (and loathe). I love my TiVo with a rabid** fierceness.

But I will say that lately there are not as many shows I love passionately, unless you count how I record even the billionth-repeated marathons of America’s Next Top Model. And that’s OK, because I believe a lot of pop culture and media is cyclical, and if TV isn’t doing it for me right now, before long it will again.

I DIGRESS.***

Early last season, I totally started watching The Good Wife only because my beloved Josh Charles was in it. No, really, it’s that simple for me. I will EVENTUALLY write more entries in the popular**** MY FICTIONAL BOYFRIENDS series, and probably the longest and most passionate will be devoted to Dan Rydell, so, uh, I pay attention to the man. So I started off a reluctant viewer, but before long I realized I was paying attention far more often than when a scene involved Will Gardner. Yeah, I was hooked.

I won’t get into show specifics, because I think good shows are rarely beloved because of what they literally are. Right? I mean, Uncomfortable Plot Summaries lists Doctor Who as “elderly man serially abducts young women” which is just about true, but even being less reductive can’t describe the feeling evoked in me by watching Donna Noble talk the Doctor out of leaving that family in Pompeii. So as far as The Good Wife goes, I can talk about how it’s a serial about a politician’s wife, post-sex scandal, or I could talk about it being a law procedural, but, seriously, who cares?*****

The stuff I like about the show is the stuff I like about lots of good writing, actually. Even though I write novels and not television shows, there’s something inspiring and educational about watching the pieces of wisdom you know to be true play out in front of you:

1. Don’t overload with background info or exposition. Holy crap, has a lot happened between everyone on this show. (We won’t talk about how much time I’ve devoted to thinking about Alicia and Will’s WTF-happened-back-at-Georgetown?-ness.) Holy eff, has a lot happened, period, by the time we’re dropped in in the pilot (and then, very quickly, thrown six months further). The show doesn’t dwell there, though. The show just keeps on chugging along and trusts that we can keep up.

2. Let grownups be grownups. OK, yes, I write YA, and, yes, I like to race my tiny car around town while singing along to soundtracks to Disney movies, but I truly am a grownup and when I watch TV (or read books) I expect adults to behave as adults. Yes, some people are immature, and some people have devotions to pop culture for people a third of their ages******, but I hate watching people who are supposed to be professionals in their thirties and upward behaving like junior high students. It’s much like how deeply I hate YA where teens seem like… well, no teens I know, just the approximation of what an out-of-touch writer thinks. But, anyway, I like the drama on the show playing out between adults. Sure, adults who aren’t perfect, who sometimes make very bad decisions, who sometimes seem to cling to romantic notions straight out of middle school, but adults nonetheless. And it’s funny that I hadn’t quite noticed how often this doesn’t happen until I saw something where it did.

3. Have patience. It’s tough, because a book should hook you on its first page, and if a TV show doesn’t grab you in its first scene, well, why are you still reading/watching? That said, there is something incredibly appealing to me in an enthralling but slowly building narrative that then can drop bombshells on you… after earning them. I mean, I wanted to see the kiss that happened in the episode “Heart” from about episode… 1.02 on? But how much more did it mean because we saw it in 1.17? (Holy hell, people, A LOT. IT MEANT A LOT MORE.)

SWOON AMIRIGHT

Guys, seriously, can we talk again about how janky Google Image Search has gotten? That image came up the other day when I searched for “the good wife” but this time it didn’t, so I searched “good wife will gardner” and lo and behold, luckily it did again, but on the same page of results was this:

I mean, Google, you’re not even trying now, are you? ARE YOU?

4. Get me to love, get me to hate, get me to reconsider. WHAT! I know it sounds like I’m talking crazy, but, man, one way to three-dimensionalize a character is showing me so many of their sides I have no idea if I’m for them or against them. YOU KNOW, LIKE REAL LIFE. Most of us aren’t all good or all bad.*******

Maybe the most obvious example of this on the show is Peter Florrick. Right? Talking about Peter Florrick would give me an excuse to say for the billionth time that Chris Noth looks like a really hot Sam the Eagle from the Muppets:

  

BUT! Instead I’d rather talk to you about Cary. Cary! Remember when Matt Czuchry was on the Gilmore Girls and he was such an effing tool? I am so glad his toolishness doesn’t have to follow him. One time I was waiting at the stage door area after seeing a play Mr. Czuchry was in, because I wanted to say hi to a super cool actress in it who I had met before and had super shiny hair, and when Matt came out, he thought my friend and I were shy girls too nervous to approach him, so he waited it out and gave us muchos smiles! And then I was like, OMG, this is awkward, I don’t want to break his heart and say “ACTUALLY I DON’T WANT YOUR AUTOGRAPH I AM HERE TO SEE SOMEONE ELSE” so I just kind of kept smiling and looked away and he understood and left.

MATT CZUCHRY IF I MET YOU TODAY I PROMISE I WOULD SAY SOMETHING AND NOT JUST BREAK EYE CONTACT IN A WEIRD JUNIOR HIGH DANCE MANNER.

Anyway. CARY.

ADORBS!

When we first meet Cary, we do not like Cary.******** Cary is smug and bratty, and when he makes that comment about his mom, we’re certain he’s sexist and ageist too. Right? RIGHT? Except then, dammit Cary, you wormed your way into my heart. Was it the shrooms? Was it telling Alicia you didn’t want her to lose either? Was it thinking about how, despite that Alicia is our protagonist, perhaps with my student loan debt and my frustration at paying bills in an expensive but awesome city, sometimes Cary is probably the character I have the most in common with?

And then the pattern continued! Because he would do [annoying thing] but then he’d do [great thing] or he wouldn’t [do great thing] but you grasped why he felt he had to do [the douchey thing] and it’s so hard not to be on his side except when it really freaking isn’t.

(I feel very similar about the show’s main love triangle too; despite that people have made very obvious good and bad moves in it.)

What I’m saying, GOOD GOD FINALLY, is that it’s very easy to make me hate someone who acts terribly, and it’s very easy to make me love someone who does terrific and awesome things. Position someone as the competition and let them act like a not-that-grown-up frat boy and, sure, most of us will hate them. But it’s more interesting when they’re also a very fair person who legitimately works hard at their job. Maybe they have wrongheaded notions, but suddenly you realize from their POV you would feel exactly the same way.

It gets tougher rooting against them. It’s also very difficult rooting for them. It gets messy and complicated, and the story’s ending isn’t broadcast from the word go.

I love being told stories like that, and I try really hard to do it myself.

Anyway, I know there is no world in which it is cool to worship The Good Wife.********* But luckily I am already very much aware of how cool I am not. I could go on and on about everything else I love about this (and perhaps one day I will, because I can think of so many other good writing lessons that tie into the show and, also, I love any excuse to post pictures of Josh Charles********** LET’S JUST BE HONEST HERE).

So embrace what you love. And take your writing lessons from what moves and inspires and entertains you. A lot of times, that isn’t just in a book.

*Of course, many of those are titles such as Sydney White and High School Musical 2, in case you’re imagining my devotion to only award-winners or something.
**Yeah, by “rabid” I mean “foaming at the mouth”, so what?
***Shocking, right?
****Popularity is relative, right? RIGHT, YOU GUYS?
*****Well, I do, but I’m making a point.
******AHEM.
*******I myself am 3 parts awesome to 2 parts assy.
********By “we” I do mean “I”.
*********Except for the world that I dwell in with only Sarah Skilton, which exists only when we’re rapid-fire exchanging v. v. important emails about Alicia and Peter and Cary and Will and Diane and Kalinda. I AM JUST SAYING OK.
**********

My Fictional Boyfriends – Round Two

A continuing series of utmost importance and solemnity in a time of great uncertainty and fear.

My next fictional boyfriend is my newest of the bunch. Unlike the first two, he’s currently age-appropriate, but that does not detract from his dreaminess. Ladies and gents, I present to you the case of Will Gardner.

OK, to be fair, I have a weakness for Josh Charles characters apparently (watch out for a future round, plus there’s Bryan in Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, who is a catch despite his paper hat). But, oh! Will Gardner, Will Gardner. (I can’t stop making this joke, sorry.) Why do I love thee? Let me count the ways:

1. You look pretty dashing in a suit, but you in casual clothes is so amazing that Entertainment Weekly has devoted blog coverage to the phenomenon.
2. You have, on occasion, expressed attraction to inked ladies.
3. You are unapologetically ambitious and accomplished, but you’re not afraid of ladies who are too. SWOON. OUR POWERS COMBINED COULD RULE ALL, WILL, DON’T YOU SEE? YOU ARE A TOP LAWYER AND I, ummm, well, I’m unapologetically a lot of things. Just saying. I have tattoos!
4. Oh man, when right off the bat Cary got all uppity about all his frigging billable hours, Will laid in a super amazing passive aggressive insult to put him in his place, and while I don’t approve of, well, passive-aggression OR putting people in their places IN GENERAL, at this point in the series Cary was a snot who deserved it for his smugness. (Of course I came around to (mostly) love Cary too; he would be my office flirtation while I was waiting for Will to get over a certain someone or to notice my ambition BECAUSE I’M REALLY GOOD AT BEING SUBTLE.)

Oh god I am so off-topic I am not even sure what the eff I was talking about.

Ohhh right. Back to business. I think this material is sufficient evidence. In closing… I am too legally-unaware to push this lawyer metaphor any further than its current half-assed state. So here’s a picture of Will Gardner in casual clothes:

You’re welcome.

My Fictional Boyfriends – Round One

I started thinking about fictional boyfriends because all the lovely ladies at my new office are deep head-over-heels crazypants in love with… Edward Cullen.

Now, look, you guys. I (sometimes) think Robert Pattinson is pretty hot:

…but Edward would be a terrible boyfriend! He can’t even enjoy a good meal with you (unless you’re into biting fresh bunnies or something)! I’m a foodie, so what the eff would we do on dates if we can’t enjoy food together and we can’t get it on? Also he tells you what you can and can’t do! He watches you sleep, which would be a total dealbreaker for me:

…and not just because I’m a snorer and I prefer the boys not to get a whiff of that right out of the gate.

The same ladies mocked me for my High School Musical calendar, but lemme tell you something: Troy Bolton is a way better fictional boyfriend.

Firstly, let’s just get this out of the way: not only is his hair just as dreamy, IT’S ACTUALLY FRESHLY-WASHED. You just know it smells like conditioner and freshly-applied product, not freshly-eaten animals and forest twigs and cold marble. Because, you know, speaking of that, also HIS SKIN WOULDN’T FEEL LIKE COLD MARBLE.

Also: he is a good dancer, he respects musical theatre, and he’ll prioritize your college/career plans ahead of his own when necessary. OK, he’s not perfect. Sometimes he gets a little caught up in his fancy-pants friends and Italian shoes, and he eschews washing certain garments to bring luck to his basketball team, but he’ll dance it out and make amends. This is not a boy tethered too tightly to gender norms.

Next up, because I suppose I should try to balance out my TV and movie refs with LITERATURE, is If I Stay’s (and Where She Went’s!!) Adam. Ag, Adam. You’re dreamy too, and even though I assume you have spectacular emo hair and a punk rock DIY touring sched, I bet it’s relatively clean and fantastic-smelling.

But, YES, he’s a musician! But even though he’s rock ‘n roll, he’s gonna respect my dorky tastes too, as evidenced by just how much (HOW MUCH!) he got out of that Yo Yo Ma concert. Right? Oh, yes. Boys who are passionate about things – and by “things” I don’t mean “how your blood smells” – are boys I can get behind. And, um, other prepositional phrases.

Which leads me to my last point about Adam, which is that he doesn’t care about not besmirching your precious virtue or whatever. BESMIRCHING BE DAMNED. VIRTUE BE DAMNED. PRECIOUSNESS BE DAMNED. Swooooooon.

This concludes Round One of My Fictional Boyfriends. Stay tuned; there are more in store.

On Not Liking Things Ironically

The other day my dear friend Josh asked me what was up with my Zac Efron love. Was it ironic, or did I really think he was dreamy?

Well, I think that’s obvious:

POW.

Anyway, this is the thing. You know what I think? I think people claim to like things ironically, when in truth liking things ironically means liking things one knows aren’t cool or intelligent or even very good. But LIKING them. It’s like you still want your awesomepants cred but you want to like crappy and/or uncool things.

Well, guess what? I have given up on my awesomepants cred. I probably had it at one point, back in the day no one had heard of the bands I loved or the web sites I visited, and I’d learned to sneer at anything that was popular. BUT GUESS WHAT? I don’t want to be awesomepants hipstery anymore. I want to be loud and proud about the things I like you may deem uncool.

Because, sorry. Liking something ironically? It’s still liking it. So just admit it!

Here are some uncool things I like:

Well, this, obviously:

Roxette! OK, their lyrics are, at best, inane and/or English as a third or fourth language, but I truly think this is effing good pop music. Some of their hooks make me a little insane with glee. I wanted to post a video, but EMI is insanely stupid with not letting you embed things (right???) so go here and watch.

Do I even have to explain this one? I do not think so.

There’s the fact that this is one of the only TV shows I never miss:

Hall and Oates, oh man! One time a cute boy I ended up tragically dating but before it got weird and awkward got into an emotionally charged argument about which Hall and Oates song was the best. We then realized how passionate we’d gotten over the subject and quickly stopped. But I still believe the only answer to that is this number:

Have you guys ever seen this awful movie Sydney White? Well, it is AWFUL. And I love it. There is a scene where BOYS SING IN A LIBRARY. Hey, I go to the library all the time! NO ONE EVER SERENADES ME.

There are periods of my life where this is one of my favorite restaurants:

So I encourage everyone to loudly embrace all that they love, cheesy or uncool or awful or all three as they may be. I’ve been enjoying being a giant goober more than I ever liked being cool.

Random Thoughts & Vom

Sometimes I have a bunch of small ideas for blog posts that just aren’t in and of themselves enough. So here are a bunch of random thoughts.

1. I think it’s really weird that one of my favorite albums, Tallahassee by the Mountain Goats, has a line about armies of ghosts in track 6, “Idylls of the King”, and then the lyric “I hope you blink before I do” in the next track, “No Children”. What I’m saying is: John Darnielle obviously foresaw both series two and three of Doctor Who, yes? Also I think – and I’m hardly the first to say it – this album is such a good example of storytelling through a form other than narrative prose. The Mountain Goats are one of those bands that inspire me as a writer as much as anything I read or watch. I marvel at the specificity in description, the sparsity that nonetheless conveys emotion extraordinarily.
2. I keep gearing up for this big post about long-form improv and writing and how having both in my life the past several months keeps informing the other one, but I’m kind of holding off while I’m still going through the program, and also while I’m at work on the book that required me to start taking improv classes in the first place. However, I will say that on Friday I went to an improvised talk show because one of my most longstanding celebrity crushes appeared “on” it. Holy smokes, Jack Davenport is handsome and tall and dashing and sexy, and hearing his voice not through the filter of a movie or television show was unspeakably fantastic. Oh, and afterwards? We might have ended up at the same restaurant. Which is ALMOST like a date, you guys! I mean, except for the part where we’ve never even met and didn’t speak and obvs his wife was there, but, um, still. I highly recommend delicious food in the immediate vicinity of your celebrity boyfriends.
3. I think for me, graduate school is an excuse to talk seriously about very geeky things. This is no different from what would normally be on my mind, but now I get to apply academic-speak and get taken seriously for railing against annoying Facebook groups I belong to and Stephen Moffat’s occasional forays into misogyny.
4. The way I used to feel about Converse, I’ve been feeling about Vans. I’m not sure what that means.
5. So I bought some blueberry pomegranate juice because, summer! refreshment! antioxidants! sounds possibly A++ mixed with vodka! But, you guys. Every time I start to pour my first glass I think about the Ocean Spray commercial where the blue-purple juice spews up and strikes our Young Grower in the face, and I want to vom a little. I don’t think this is the best way to promote your product, marketeers.
   

I want to write an actual post about the awesomeness that was the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and, oh, I shall. But now I have library books to finish before their due dates, writing goals to adhere to, and juice I need to psych myself into drinking.

BEDA Is Hard

Oh man, you guys, I only made it through two days of BEDA before FAILING. Oops! But here I go again!

I’m super excited about new Doctor Who though I don’t always trust Steven Moffat, because while he is capable of writing truly genius stuff he’s also capable of giving interviews like this one. But Matt Smith is awesome, and as long as the camera starts devoting slightly less time to Karen Gillan’s legs, I’m onboard. This is definitely less traumatic for me than the transition from Nine to Ten. For some reason that was devastating.

Tomorrow I will write about another AWESOME BOOK. I promise! Not just that I will do it, but that it will be awesome!

Not Jinxing, Chocolatey Centers, and a Shiny 200

I have been neglecting this blog! But it’s all good because, well, firstly, I’m not neglecting Twitter so you can always find me there, and, secondly, I’ve been writing up a storm, and that is better than blogging up a storm. Yes? Perhaps? I just hit page 200 in Current Project (which might have a working title soon but egads is it long and also I have to live with it for a bit before speaking its name to anyone else because YES I believe in jinxing). OK, I am well-aware that page count means very little. You can jack up your font or you can amp up your paragraph spacing or you can make everything teeny tiny so it’s beautiful, and word count will be the only thing that actually matters. Still, knowing that Ink’s currently-final draft tops off at about 250, looking at that shiny 200 makes me feel really accomplished.

I’ve been reading a ton lately too. I can honestly say I feel amazingly lucky that as of late, the books I’ve liked best have mostly been manuscripts of friends I’ve read on my computer, nothing I’ve bought or taken from the library. (Also Tyrell by Coe Booth which filled me with such a bucketload of emotions it took me awhile to recover.)

Just finished watching the end of series 3 and beginning of 4 of Doctor Who with my friend Val, who is new to it. I must say that despite the I-believe-in-fairies deus ex machina move on writer/showrunner Russell T. Davies’s part, I really enjoy the end of the third season, mostly-if-not-entirely due to the genius that is John Simm, and then an amazing reveal three full series in the making. Then when we started watching the fourth series, it is truly impressive (as a rewatch knowing how it all turns out) how that series starts laying the groundwork for the finale right away. That is some extraordinary plotting and storytelling, and I’m seething with jealousy at how effortlessly it all seems to come together.

Sorry, one more series 3 thought before I return to the land of first drafts and overthinking television series. Does anyone else think the Toclafane sound like a delicious chocolatey treat? When they finally break one open I’m convinced it’ll have a truffle center, much like those Lindt balls.

Not Really a Post

I should actually blog, but in the meantime, this cold open made my day year.

Bonus Post, with Puppets

You know, I never even realized how obsessed I have gotten with the Late Late Show, except that I feel the need to post about it ALL THE TIME.

Anyways, I had a pretty craptastic yesterday, so it was basically the best thing ever that this happened to be the cold open of last night’s show. Good work, Craig Ferguson. It was impossible to stay in a bad mood after seeing this.

Playing Catch-Up

Oh no, I was abandoning my BEDM duties! Bad Ames! My dear friend Sharon was in town for the weekend, and given that I hadn’t seen her since I drove up to SF for my thirtieth, I’m not sure a minute went by not spent yammering about one thing or another.

It’s amazing – OR NOT AT ALL – that I took a few days off from writing/editing hunched over my computer at a crappy table at a coffeeshop and suddenly I’m not having any back pain. I am so old! Ergonomic concerns are certainly new ones for me. I think I must add a good desk/chair combo to my wishlist though I think first is a new bed and a couple new tattoos.

Not necessarily in that order.

My rewrites are very nearly done (for the moment) which is quite exciting, even if it means I have to dive back into the first draft of Current Project. Listen, I love Current Project, but Ink is nearing completion and it’s much friendlier to me. Things are resolved! The plot is actually there!

That said, I’m actually excited (OK, I am always fairly excited, because I am a very easily amused person) because I had to cut a beloved character from Ink, and I love her too much to let her go. So now she’s getting swapped into Current Project, where I think she’ll be used even better. I mean, hopefully so. Maybe I just get way too attached to characters.

(At least I don’t kill them off and then recycle them as medical symptoms. WRITERS OF TWO DIFFERENT SHOWS, I AM TALKING TO YOU.)