Marland Monday: Careful Who You Let In the Door
Welcome to Marland Mondays!
If you haven’t read the previous essays in this series, what’s stopping you?
Part one can be found here,
part two here,
part three here.
Before we get to Part Four, here’s a picture for you:
Yes, Douglas Marland did a play with Jayne Mansfield, star of The Girl Can’t Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? I wish we could know what he thought of her. In the meantime, enjoy the photo.
Now on to rule three:
Read the fan mail. The very characters that are not thrilling to you may be the audience’s favorites.
Listening to other people when it comes to your writing can be scary. Listening to anyone critque your art can be scary. The other day I was listening to Joni Mitchell’s “Catcus Tree” on YouTube. I made the mistake and read the comments. One commenter said Mitchell really had to lose the background vocals in the chorus and lose the high pitch at the beginning. Here’s the deal: Mitchell did the background vocals. The song was recorded oh, over fifty years ago. So unless Joni Mitchell can get into Marty McFly’s DeLorean and redo the song, he’s pretty much stuck with this beautiful song with Mitchell singing background vocals and a high pitch in the beginning that somehow, no one else noticed. Sorry, dude!
Last week I talked about how Marland used backstory/daydreams to flesh out the character of Nola Reardon (Lisa Brown) Something else inspired the change: fan letters. People loved to hate Nola. According to an old issue of Soap Opera Digest, Marland received hate mail about Nola and how she tried to break up the long suffering Kelly Nelson (John Wesley Shipp) and Morgan Richards (Kristen Vigard) For a while Brown had to have bodyguards. But Marland noticed something about the fan mail: how emotional it was. They didn’t really want her off the show. They loved to hate Nola. She was, in Marland’s words: “…The cog in the wheel of a good romantic love story.” He realized he had to learn how to read the fan mail. The audience loved to hate Nola. Therefore, make her more appealing to the audience.
If a character inspires passion, even hate, this is a good thing. In my Young Adult novel Ella Bella that I workshopped at Mills College, one of the women would often exclaim “God! I hate the mother in this story!” Me being me I used to worry about this. She hated the mother? The mother had issues, but man, hate, what a strong word. But then I realized that was a good thing. To make someone feel passionate about a character, to make them frustrated by their actions, that’s a good thing. Again, in Marland’s words: “It takes time. Because what they’re really saying is that they’re fascinated and nothing in the world would make them turn off the show while she’s doing what she’s doing.”
When Marland moved to As The World Turns, there was an ongoing story of Craig (Scott Bryce) Lucinda (Elizabeth Hubbard) and Sierra (Finn Carter) where Sierra was Lucinda’s long lost daughter, and oh yeah, Craig slept with Lucinda. However, he was in love with Sierra. Yes, classic soap. Marland realized there were no more surprises. The audience knew what was going on, they said so in their letters. They were getting bored. You never ever want the reader, or in this case the viewer, to get bored. As Anne Lamott said, you want your readers’ eyemotes to go click in reconigtion to a character’s actions. You can’t risk them getting bored. So in one fatal swoop: Sierra found out about Lucinda being her mother and oh yeah, her new mom slept with Sierra’s boyfriend. This led to Sierra running away and finding an old boyfriend-creating more tension, more drama.
You want the reader to keep reading the story. I recently stopped reading a novel where the writer made the narrator so wishy-washy and victim like. The writer was basing it on events that took place forty years before, events that had been written about in various forms of media. I don’t want to say who the writer is, but I will say this: Several times (and the writer has admitted this) has gotten fan letters saying hey, you’ve written about such and such subject oh, several times now. Maybe move on? The people writing these letters weren’t trying to be cruel; they had been reading the writer for years and knew the writer could generate better work. The writer ignored what they were saying. Of course, this was the writer’s choice.
It’s hard to listen to outside voices, or as Barbara Kingsolver once said, you have to be careful who you let into the door. But in order to be a better writer, you have to listen to the ones that make sense to you. You want the readers to be, in Marland’s words, facinated. And keep them reading.
Turn in next week….
