Marland Monday: Remembering the GOAT.
The past year I’ve been thinking of the past.
Yes, cliched. But it’s true. This is partly because I’ve been working on a memoir that has flashbacks growing up in the late 70s and 80s. Yes, there are mentions of disco and rap, but also missing children. And death.
I was revising a scene about my grandmother and I watching Guiding Light, one of her “stories.” I was home sick with a bad earache. Grandma was slowly dying of lung cancer. We watched as pregnant Rita (Lenore Kasdorf) was at the town fair. She reconized bad guy Roger (Michael Zaslow) in a clown costume, then found herself in a hall of mirrors, completely lost. “Enough is Enough” by Donna Summer and Barbra Streisand was playing. I found myself sitting up on the couch, suddenly interested in what was going on. I had no idea Roger had raped Rita years before. I knew he was bad, but I didn’t know he was that bad. My grandmother was still smoking, but she watched more intently as well.
That winter and spring I was sick every other week. It might’ve been side effects from having Scarlet Fever the year before, or I became sick easily. It was a miracle I passed second grade since I missed so much school. What I remember most of that time is watching Guiding Light with Grandma, then discussing it afterwards. When I finally got better and could go back to school on a regular basis, Grandma filled me on what I missed that day on the show, including Roger falling to his “death.” When you watch soaps on a regular basis, you know characters really never die. Trust me on this.
Wanting to make sure I got it right, I found the Hall of Mirrors scene on YouTube. I watched it, then it recommended another scene. And another. And another. Then I fell down a rabbit hole, and suddenly I missed the man who was responsible for the rabbit hole, Douglas Marland.
Anytime I am asked my favorite authors, I list them in alphabetical order. Towards the middle it then goes “Anne Lamott, Madeline L’Engle, Lorna Landivk, Douglas Marland, Armistead Maupin…” Sometimes people go: “Wait, who’s Douglas Marland?” I tell them “He was a writer for soap operas.” Then they sometimes roll their eyes and I can tell they are thinking “Oh, here we go! Her soap opera obsession again!”
Douglas Marland was the GOAT (Greatest of All Time) of soap opera writers. He never insulted viewers’ intelligence, never talked down to people. He went with his gut on stories he thought people would like. Nine times out of ten, he was right. Something inside me thought: You need to do something for Douglas Marland.
At first I thought huh? Wait a minute, pal. I’m very busy working on a memoir here. Plus it’s part True Crime. Shouldn’t I be blogging about True Crime and stay on brand? But it kept creeping up in my Morning Pages: Isn’t it a shame no one has done a biography on Douglas Marland? I kept on saying no, no, no! I have a novel I need to return to! I’m not Robert Caro, writing big huge biographies of LBJ! I don’t have time to write a biography about Douglas Marland!
Then I started listening to the podcasts You Must Remember This and Cocaine and Rhinestones. The way Karina Longworth and Tyler Mahan Coe told stories about the past, be it Polly Platt, the origins of moonshine, Gossip queens, and Loretta Lynn’s “The Pill” amazed me. Aha! Maybe I should do a podcast about Marland! But the problem is I don’t know how to do a podcast. Plus how do you interview people on a podcast?
And yet it tugged at me. I missed Douglas Marland. I missed his writing. I wondered how he would’ve written in the Virus if he were still writing soaps. When I heard a Douglas Marland was suing Trump, I thought right on Douglas! Sue that guy from the grave! But it was a different Douglas M. I went on Twitter and noticed others were missing him as well.
So I decided to do the next best thing: write about his legendary rules.
Before he died in 1993, Marland was interviewed and gave his rules on writing soap opera:
Watch the show.
Learn the history of the show. You would be surprised at the ideas that you can get from the back story of your characters.
Read the fan mail. The very characters that are not thrilling to you may be the audience’s favorites.
Be objective. When I came in to (the show), the first thing I said was, what is pleasing the audience? You have to put your own personal likes and dislikes aside and develop the characters that the audience wants to see.
Talk to everyone; writers and actors especially. There may be something in a character’s history that will work beautifully for you, and who would know better than the actor who has been playing the role?
Don’t change a core character. You can certainly give them edges they didn’t have before, or give them a logical reason to change their behavior. But when the audience says, “He would never do that,” then you have failed.
Build new characters slowly. Everyone knows that it takes six months to a year for an audience to care about a new character. Tie them in to existing characters. Don’t shove them down the viewers’ throats.
If you feel staff changes are in order, look within the organization first. P&G (Procter & Gamble) does a lot of promoting from within. Almost all of our producers worked their way up from staff positions, and that means they know the show.
Don’t fire anyone for six months. I feel very deeply that you should look at the show’s canvas before you do anything.
Good soap opera is good storytelling. It’s very simple.
I started wondering: Does the rules apply to all writing?
Tune in next week and find out…
