Yeah, Write

My wife and I have been playing catch-up on Dancing With The Stars for the last two weeks. ABC makes all its prime-time shows available for free on their website the day after they air, so we rolled-back to the beginning of the season, cuddled up on the couch and queued it up.

I am not a devotee of reality shows. Despise them, in fact. All that faked-up conflict and people spouting sound bites at each other for the benefit of the camera makes me ill. We mute a lot of commercials so we don't have to listen to a "worst-of" parade of insults and trash talk during the shows we do like.

So why did we start watching Dancing?

Lesson #1: It's about people
I happened to see a list of the celebrities this season and the thought of seeing them dance was intriguing. Marlee Matlin, deaf actress who won the Best Actress for Children of a Lesser God, dancing? How does that work? Penn Gillette, the taller and more obnoxious half of the magic/comedy duo Penn and Teller? He's about seven feet tall and built like Bigfoot. Kristi Yamaguchi, Olympic gold medal-winning figure-skater? Oh, she's going to kick so much butt...

Lesson #2: It's not about technique
Every second show is a "results" show with musical guests and featured professional dancers. When Jose something-or-other, world rhumba champion and Kathy whats-her-name, two-time American Foxtrot champion come out to show you what pros can do when they have a "real" partner, I'm instantly bored. It's just a bunch of dancing. Which is fine, I guess, but I wouldn't watch two episodes a night for two weeks, no matter how technically spectacular.

Some writers tackle spectacular subjects, delving into the ramifications and twists of an alternate reality or world-changing event and try to wow you with their insight and daring. Their characters are robots who do what their choreographer tells them, but they're nobody. I can't get into stuff like that.

Others do the same with setting, trying to wow you with what it's like to sit on this veranda, staring at those mountains with the sun coming through the trees just so... Snore.

Lesson #3: It's about struggle
These are not professional dancers. They're not in dance shape, even though two of them are athletes. They learn one or sometimes two new dance routines a week for almost 3 months, starting from zero in most cases. The learning curve is a cliff.

After six seasons of shooting this show, they know how to package the stars so you engage with them as people. They struggle like mad week after week, half of them in way over their heads, but every Monday they step into the arena. It's a hero's journey for every couple, in the Joseph Campbell sense, with a smokin' hot twenty-something in the Obi-Wan Kenobi role.

Lesson #4: It's about bad things happening to good people
Half of the stars invited on this show came into it with no real hope of winning. They wanted to have some fun, learn to dance a little, perform in front of an audience, charge (or recharge) their careers. Several came in with something to prove about their particular minority.

But every week they didn't get sent home, hope grew. Every week they weren't the worst on the stage, desire sharpened. You could see them coming alive; the hangdog expressions faded, the backs straightened, they found joy where they least expected it.

Then one day, the axe fell on them, and it tore their heart out.

They put on a good face, talked about how fantastic it was, but it's the Oscar nominee speech: I'm happy just to be here in such distinguished company.

Then the day came (for me it was this past Monday) when there wasn't anybody left you could stand to see leave. But they sent one home anyway, and that's the weirdest lesson of all...

When it comes to stories (and that's really what this is to us), we like to get our hearts broken.

What a strange, illogical and glorious species we are.

In any long-term endeavor, there are going to be times when you don't feel like doing your work. Days when you just can't face the keyboard, canvas, whatever. During these periods it's very easy to hate what you're doing or wonder if it's worth doing at all.

An important thing to note is that once you're into it, once you've warmed up and let the world fall away from you, it's almost impossible to hate what you're doing.

During the down times, when you're procrastinating instead of doing your work, this should be your mantra: when I get to the middle, I'll find the joy. When I get to the middle, I'll find the joy. Then when it comes, allow yourself to feel it, be replenished by it. Don't stop working; just acknowledge that this is what happiness is and that you have found it.

It's worth sitting through the agony of the first fifteen minutes, when you're stone-cold and dumb as a stump, to get to that first accidental chord that makes you do a double-take, or a character turning left instead of right, to get to that question mark that demands you answer it. Then you fall through the hole in the paper or start riding the melody line and all is right with the world.

When I get to the middle, I'll find the joy.

Everybody argues about whether it's plot or character that's the source of good fiction. Of course, it's a trick question: the real answer is that there is no real plot that doesn't derive from character and no way to show character except by their reactions to plot. But I'm starting to think both of these miss the point. The works I really and truly adore derive their succulent power from relationships.

My greatest writing hero is Joss Whedon. He's the creator and driving force behind 3 of my favorite dramatic series of all time: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly. The opening sequence of "Serenity", the movie extension of the tragically short-lived Firefly TV series, is a masterpiece of film-making on at least 3 levels: cinematography, economy of language and character development. Joss introduces his entire crew of eight characters,¹ tells us what they do on the ship, how they interact and what matters to them in probably the longest single camera shot since Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope".

Oh, yeah... and the whole time the ship is this close to burning up during re-entry.

How does he do it? A classic SF info-dump? Some ninety-second blast of exposition beginning with "As you know, Captain..."? A slow crawl of yellow type yammering on about trade agreements with the planet Naboo? Hell, no.

Arguments. Five of them in a row. Some of them no more than two sentences long. Each as distinct and beautiful as jade chess pieces. What Captain Malcolm Reynolds says to his pilot, his lieutenant, his muscle, his mechanic and the ship's doctor in that single sequence describes the entire dynamic of this crucible called Serenity. It also sets him up as a larger-than-life figure: anyone who can have a coherent argument with his entire crew is a man to be reckoned with. I've talked with people who'd never watched the series, had no idea what they were walking into, but by the end of that scene felt completely at home in the world.²

That scene wasn't an accident. The history of all three series³ bears out this credo: it ain't got a thing if the ensemble ain't got that swing.

Author Jenny Crusie has two brilliant essays on her website about the work of Joss Whedon and reading them really brought home for me why Buffy and Angel are so addicting.⁴

No man is an island. True. But even if one was⁵ there wouldn't be anything to say about them! People are only people by their relationships with other people. This is in part about conflict, sure, but people agreeing with one another can be a defining moment, especially when you can feel their hearts breaking as they do it.

Let's take Cordelia Chase, for instance. A minor character in the early days of Buffy, Cordy became a central figure for most of Angel's run. By the end,⁶she was my favorite of the cast and her swan song episode possibly my favorite of the run.

Taken alone, Cordy is a shallow, self-absorbed beauty queen that deserved all the loathing the Buffy cast lumped on her. But through her interactions with the other characters, her "layers" begin to show and she matures into a real hero and a real woman. Her perpetually-bemused relationship with Xander Harris on Buffy, then later with Grue on Angel forced her to face the fact that perhaps her goals in life "marry rich, divorce richer" weren't actually where her joy was after all. By the time her relationship with Angel begins to develop, she is -- and we are -- ready for it to be as powerful as it deserves.

The complicated relationship between Buffy and her Watcher/father figure/punching bag Giles is another example. By the legendary musical episode "Once More With Feeling" in the sixth season,⁷ he realizes his role as her surrogate father at almost the same moment that he must step aside in order for her to become a woman. His duet with Tara (who expresses similar torment over her doomed relationship with Willow) "Wish I Could Stay" peaks with the line "Believe me, I don't want to go... And it'll grieve me 'cause I love you so..." If that doesn't break your heart, you don't have one.

I could beat this into the ground -- it's possible I already have -- by talking about Buffy and Spike, Spike and Dru, Angel and Xander⁸ or Willow and magic. The examples are strewn across the Buffyverse like semi-precious stones. Joss didn't put them there as lessons, he put them there to tear your heart out and make you beg for more, but that doesn't mean we can't learn from him anyway.

The cult of conflict states: they must fight to keep our interest. Interest is not enough: it sells our creative birthright short by a mile. I say: it's how they fight that makes us fall in love.

1. The ship Serenity herself is the eighth [↩]
2. Let me take a few seconds to let my heart stop pounding. Honestly, the guy's a rock star. [↩]
3. Abbreviated as Firefly's was [↩]
4. My wife and I inhaled them on DVD, two and three episodes every night for months. [↩]
5. Tom Hanks in Castaway, for instance [↩]
6. I won't steal Ms. Crusie's thunder by discussing the last half-season. Read the essay. [↩]
7. Don't get me started; we'll be here all night. [↩]
8. No, that's not what you think; they're just both in love with Buffy [↩]