A couple of days ago I ran across a post by Robin Agnew about the soaps http://heydeadguy.typepad.com/heydeadguy/2011/04/the-soaps.html which brought back a lot of memories for me.
For a woman of my age, the soaps impacted your life whether you watched or not. I remember everything stopping in our house for that one hour a day that my mother watched her show. Staying at my Aunt's we traveled from house to house every day during the week as one of the ladies in her circle of friends hosted coffee and a soap, usually "As the World Turns". When I married and had kids, those soaps helped me keep my sanity. With no car and the nearest neighbor five miles away they were the only adult voices I heard all day long. I didn't stop watching them until in the late eighties when there were more commercials than show and there were too many characters vying for the time. Trying to follow the story lines got very frustrating.
Robin's post also reminded me that the very first book about writing that I found was "Writing for the Soaps" by Jean Rouverol. I picked this book up for $3 on the discount table at K-Mart. While I didn't plan on writing for the soaps there was plenty of good advice between the pages for a short story writer and back then I was desperate for any help I could find.
Here's a few quotes from the book that I found circled, underlined, and highlighted as I flipped through the pages yesterday.
"Writing means turning the worst moments of your life into fiction."
"It is the expectation of surprise that keeps the audience coming back"
"And though the need for suspense is always a given there can be no real suspense if we don't care about the people we're watching. Above all, we need to care."
All of which can be easily translated from watchers to readers.
The soaps themselves taught me about dialogue. I was usually in the kitchen and couldn't see the TV but my ears were always tuned to the voices, listening to the story unfold through those lines of dialogue. You only had to see the show when everything got quiet because you knew someone was either kissing or getting killed depending on the music. :) And probably why my stories depend so heavily on dialogue instead of description.
How about you? Any good soap stories to share?
4 comments:
My mother-in-law has been visiting and I'm watching (kinda sorta) Stefano DiMera's scheming ways on DAYS OF OUR LIVES and Victor Newman's scheming ways on THE YOUNG AND THE RESTLESS. She has been watching these shows for forty years!
Can’t say it can hook me but, occasionally, I find myself caught up in some scenes.
Yes, they're very good at pulling people into the story lines. Did you notice that Victor was the bad guy from "The Rat Patrol"?
I gave up watching soaps around 1980, when THE GUIDING LIGHT wound up the Roger Thorpe (villain) story line. That was just the best. It also happened to air during the the time that my energetic mom was coping with a broken leg (three places), and it was tough to keep her occupied / entertained. Roger Thorpe's nastiness was often the highlight of her day.
Roger Thorpe the best villain the GL ever had! I remember him well, Naomi :) His antics would keep anyone glued to the set.
Post a Comment