07 Mar Telling a Story – My Other Life in TV

I have to say, my dream job of all time would be to write for TV.   I know those jobs aren’t a dime a dozen, but I don’t care about that.  When you know something, you know.  And I know I would be great at telling a story on the screen.  I loved TV when I was younger. Still do. The television was my escape to other worlds.   On the screen, I wasn’t a little kid, but a grown Woman.   I was able to make decisions about what I wanted to be, where I wanted to go, and with whom I wanted to spend my time. After all, I felt grown. I packed my own lunch, walked myself to school and I had a key to the house. I was practically an adult.

Some parents of latchkey kids would describe the TV as the babysitter, but I wouldn’t describe it that way at all. TV was my lens into a world of possibility and I would lose myself in that world every night, 23 minutes at a time.

Picture this Hawthorne, CA 1985. It was getting dark outside, but I couldn’t tell you what time it was because curfew wasn’t a time on the clock. When the street lights came on every kid had to be in the house.  Being the first in my family to be born in the US, streetlights equaling curfew was well, a foreign idea. Even so when they came on I ran home just like the other kids.

As soon as the amber glow covered the ground, the games would stop mid-play.  I would often imagine tetherballs and handballs suspended in midair as my friend’s names were called one after the other.  I didn’t hear my name, but I ran as fast as I could right behind them. Only my motivation wasn’t a curfew.  I had to get home for a more selfish reason. I had to get home because I was committed to the storyline of a TV show not produced for children. The show starred four Women over the age of 65.  Each night the Women would sit around the kitchen table in their pajamas talking about life, sex and relationships over cheesecake. I had a date with the storytellers known as The Golden Girls.

Photo Credit: Retroland

A good story always starts with interesting and relatable characters and a great lead-in. That one line that captures the audience’s attention. You can get it done with a laugh or with intrigue. I call it – The Hook. For the character Ma on the Golden Girls, it was always something like, “Picture this, Sicily 1925.” Then there was the character Rose Nylund, who was a naïve, but lovable character from St. Olaf, Minnesota. She would capture your attention by making an absurd claim. For instance, “When a Woman leaves a man, she’s forced to shave her head and wear an itchy hat.”

One of my favorite lead-ins of all time has to be from the story “Stealing Ann,” by Scott Kravitz. I first heard this story on the podcast “Snap Judgment, Storytelling With a Beat.”

The story starts, “Hi, I stole something from a homeless person. One day I walked outside of my apartment and there was a dog just sitting there in my driveway. I could tell the dog was sick, but there was nobody around and the dog didn’t have a collar, so I just put her in my car and dropped her off at the animal shelter and a week later they called me to say that nobody had claimed the dog and she was too sick to put up for adoption, so they were going to euthanize her that afternoon. Now I didn’t want that on my conscience, but I knew I couldn’t take her because my apartment didn’t allow dogs and even if it did I just didn’t want that responsibility.”

How can you not want to know what happens next! Of course, a hook is nothing without a good character to follow.

The next step in your story is the twist. The twist is that thing that you didn’t see coming. You’re reeling them in and things are getting to be predictable when BLAMO! What the character does next is not at all what you expected. I love a good twist. Which is odd because I really love sitcoms. When I beat the character to the next line, I drop the mic, walk out of the room and say, “See, I should have been a writer for TV!”

There’s nothing unpredictable about sitcoms. Each character develops over time and you can count on them to behave a certain way. There’s something comforting and familiar about that. But if ever there were a twist, I would welcome that too.

I guess that’s the difference between getting one chance to tell a story and getting 25 chances in a season (in the 80’s). If you only get one chance, you need to hook your audience with a relatable character, a great lead-in, a twist, and a surprise ending.  If you get many chances, you want to hook your audience with a relatable character and a great lead-in every time. The goal is to keep them tuning in.

The final step to a great story is the surprise ending. Of course the end of a story doesn’t have to be a complete surprise to be good. A story can also have an ending that the audience is excited about. You can give little clues that it’s going in that direction, but don’t give that ending away. The key is growth. How do things change by the end? How does the character change? Is this story something that I want to imagine being apart of well after it’s over?

Speaking of being unpredictable, you probably figured out that I didn’t go on to write for TV. However, I did join a profession that provided me with a reliable story line. I went into the field of Accounting and Operations. Unlike breaking into Hollywood, corporate was easy for me to figure out. What’s not as easy to figure out is what your great story is going to be. Luckily, you have more than one chance to tell your story and you have more than one chance to make a new story.  I’m rewriting mine with Built By She.

Whatever you do just don’t leave yourself out of the story. Your audience relates to you as a living, breathing person, having experiences. If your audience can’t relate to you and never got to know you, why would they keep tuning in for the next episode?