Jemini
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Part of improving your own ability to write is looking at how other writers have practiced their craft. I find that you can sometimes actually learn more from a TV series than you can from another person's web novel. TV series are also writing, someone has to write the screen-play for every single episode of the series and a lot of planning goes into the whole thing.
Writing for TV is something that also presents several challenges. I have no experience with it myself, but you can easily picture it. What is normally put across with descriptive details is instead portrayed visually. There are very seldom few cases where there is a narrator present in a show. Meanwhile, the medium allows for the character and the dialogue to shine through far better than it does from most written stories, and it allows the viewer with a critical eye to learn more about character portrayals.
I thought we should probably share a few of the better examples of TV or internet streaming service series that someone can learn from. Here are a few of my selections (more may be added in later posts in the thread.)
The Twilight Zone (Original 1959 black-and-white version)
The Twilight Zone is a series of short stories in which, in the majority of the episodes, something paranormal happens. In the few episodes where there is nothing paranormal, a person's extreme abnormal situation has various consiquences that result from their actions and life choices. In either case, every single episode contains 2 stories (each short story taking half the episode) that uses excellent minimalistic story telling, getting all the important points out in a "show-don't-tell" way, and getting all the important points across as quickly as possible in its short run time.
Most of the original Twilight Zone's stories, including the ones which do not include paranormal events, also have a tendency to make some excellent social commentary that will strike a chord with most viewers. Some stories in the original Twilight Zone are even adaptations or retellings of stories from some of the greatest writers before this time. It is my opinion that the original Twilight Zone boasts some of the very best top-tier writing ever seen, and any writer can find a lot to learn from it.
Batman - The animated series. (1992 - 95 version)
This is another excellent use of a single-episodic format to tell a story, and the fact that it maintains most of the characters from one story to another allows for an excellent character study on the characters. Some stand-out greats are the characters of Mr. Freeze, Harly Quinn, and Baby Doll. The motivations, flaws, and personal situations of these characters are all incredibly sympathisable and humanizing.
It is a frequent challenge of many writers to write a good humanized villain, and Batman the Animate Series is one of the better example of good villain characterization done at a top-tier level. The best part about this is that the comic book origins of the villains the writers of the series were handling at the time were not really done anywhere near this well before. This series actually set the standard and changed the views and expectations on several of these characters, and also forced DC comics to step up their own game in portraying these characters more like how the animated series had as these sympathisable versions had become the ones most of the fans identified with. This is a sign of some truly great writing so far as I see it.
Avitar the Last Airbender
This is an example of good episode-to-episode story telling. Rather than a single ongoing story though, it also manages to tell a number of smaller stories within each episode. Although these episodes each tell their own self-contained stories, they each serve as more of a C-plot under the larger A and B plots that arc over the entire series. These self-contained stories though also genuinely feel like they can stand on their own, while also progressing the larger overarching stories of the series.
This level of story telling is something that tried to emulate Japanese animation, but in doing so it managed to recapture something that actually hadn't been seen in Japanese animation for a long time prior to this, and it is done to such an amazingly high level of implementation that I felt I would not be doing a good job here if I did not include this in the roster of first recommendations for good series to take a lesson from.
All larger stories really are a collection of smaller stories when it comes right down to it. We may not write in an episodic format in our own works, but there is a lot we can learn from the idea of progressing the larger plot using a series of smaller incidents and events within the story.
Writing for TV is something that also presents several challenges. I have no experience with it myself, but you can easily picture it. What is normally put across with descriptive details is instead portrayed visually. There are very seldom few cases where there is a narrator present in a show. Meanwhile, the medium allows for the character and the dialogue to shine through far better than it does from most written stories, and it allows the viewer with a critical eye to learn more about character portrayals.
I thought we should probably share a few of the better examples of TV or internet streaming service series that someone can learn from. Here are a few of my selections (more may be added in later posts in the thread.)
The Twilight Zone (Original 1959 black-and-white version)
The Twilight Zone is a series of short stories in which, in the majority of the episodes, something paranormal happens. In the few episodes where there is nothing paranormal, a person's extreme abnormal situation has various consiquences that result from their actions and life choices. In either case, every single episode contains 2 stories (each short story taking half the episode) that uses excellent minimalistic story telling, getting all the important points out in a "show-don't-tell" way, and getting all the important points across as quickly as possible in its short run time.
Most of the original Twilight Zone's stories, including the ones which do not include paranormal events, also have a tendency to make some excellent social commentary that will strike a chord with most viewers. Some stories in the original Twilight Zone are even adaptations or retellings of stories from some of the greatest writers before this time. It is my opinion that the original Twilight Zone boasts some of the very best top-tier writing ever seen, and any writer can find a lot to learn from it.
Batman - The animated series. (1992 - 95 version)
This is another excellent use of a single-episodic format to tell a story, and the fact that it maintains most of the characters from one story to another allows for an excellent character study on the characters. Some stand-out greats are the characters of Mr. Freeze, Harly Quinn, and Baby Doll. The motivations, flaws, and personal situations of these characters are all incredibly sympathisable and humanizing.
It is a frequent challenge of many writers to write a good humanized villain, and Batman the Animate Series is one of the better example of good villain characterization done at a top-tier level. The best part about this is that the comic book origins of the villains the writers of the series were handling at the time were not really done anywhere near this well before. This series actually set the standard and changed the views and expectations on several of these characters, and also forced DC comics to step up their own game in portraying these characters more like how the animated series had as these sympathisable versions had become the ones most of the fans identified with. This is a sign of some truly great writing so far as I see it.
Avitar the Last Airbender
This is an example of good episode-to-episode story telling. Rather than a single ongoing story though, it also manages to tell a number of smaller stories within each episode. Although these episodes each tell their own self-contained stories, they each serve as more of a C-plot under the larger A and B plots that arc over the entire series. These self-contained stories though also genuinely feel like they can stand on their own, while also progressing the larger overarching stories of the series.
This level of story telling is something that tried to emulate Japanese animation, but in doing so it managed to recapture something that actually hadn't been seen in Japanese animation for a long time prior to this, and it is done to such an amazingly high level of implementation that I felt I would not be doing a good job here if I did not include this in the roster of first recommendations for good series to take a lesson from.
All larger stories really are a collection of smaller stories when it comes right down to it. We may not write in an episodic format in our own works, but there is a lot we can learn from the idea of progressing the larger plot using a series of smaller incidents and events within the story.
