Breaking Bad, Writing and Netflix

Writing is no doubt a vast and complex field. If as I, and many of the people who are likely to read this will have, you'll know that somewhere along the course of your studies you can end up weaker in one aspect than others. Personally, I know that I came out of University far weaker in Poetry than many of my colleagues. I've struggled and had a long road to work out how to write screenplays too. Of course, I never studied poetry beyond first year. I strongly disliked my tutor and felt that the module overlooked a lot of contemporary poetry. This shouldn't come as a surprise though; before I began studying Creative Writing, I had a contempt for what I saw as academic poetry. The academics it seemed were quick to judge but slow to evolve. There was a huge us and them situation. There I was, a performer who had gone from mewing my poems at open mic nights, to a confident festival and street poet accosting people at festivals with random poems. I knew absolutely when someone hated my work. After enough performances you understand the different between the polite smiles and applause and the 'oh my god we loved it' applause. Every poem I wrote, or rewrote I had an immediate reaction to how well it worked. Yet, when put in front of the academics my poetry was looked down on. I remember one particular instance where a poem that had moved people in performance to tears was criticised for how plain, pedestrian and cliche it was. In that instance the critics missed the point. If you create a familiar character then your audience can associate with that character. I remembered the frustration at knowing that poetry is not just the written word. Yet, when I went to University what did I find? Tutors who proclaimed that it couldn't be quoted or analysed if it wasn't in a published book (excluding of course vanity and self publishing). What, I began to question, about performance poetry?  What of poetry used in advertising? What of Rap? (Whilst not a fan of Rap, it does mean Rhythm and Poetry)

I should state at this point that this is not a rant about the academic structure. Far from it, even if I don't agree with the structure, I do understand it. What this post is about is illustrating some of the difficulties in today's media filled world with teaching 'successful' forms of writing.

Let's take Breaking Bad for example. That show was one I absolutely couldn't stand. It was slow and largely filled with two-dimensional characters (one or two leads notwithstanding). If there were no Netflix, I don't think anyone would argue that Breaking Bad would never have achieved the popularity it has. You see if you read the anecdotal evidence around you come across tales of people who decided to give the second episode a chance, or those that claim you need to get a few episodes in to really begin to enjoy it. That's all well and good, but in the days when there was only broadcast TV such a show would never have been successful. If it wasn't good on the first episode, it got ignored in planning next week's viewing. Of course, it's important to note you had to plan your viewing. Either making sure you were at home or that you could record your shows. If you sat down to watch something you'd gone to the effort or setting the VCR for, and it was rubbish, are you going to bother going to the same lengths next week? Netflix, and catch up services have given us more options though. It seems that people are more willing to sit through more mediocre episodes or shows in order to 'give the show a chance'. Of course the double edge to this sword is that you can end up binge watching entire seasons of shows and losing all track of time. You'll sit there with nothing else to do, no new shows on TV and a weekend free. So on goes NF and you browse for new stuff. A show you always meant to watch pops up and you watch. The first episode's not great, but you want to give it a chance besides which, the next one has already started playing. Why not watch just this one more. Before you know it you've sat through an entire show that you think is middling to fair quality. Half your weekend has flown past and you figure there's no point doing anything now. Why not just begin the next season. After all you're keen to figure out just how that obvious cliff hanger is resolved.

All of this gets me thinking. Is 'good writing' as cut and dry as academia portrays. I'm currently working on a piece of writing entitled The Anti-Lecture I've been through hugely successful examples of poetry, screen-writing and novels and pointed out where these pieces of writing fail to match up to the example of good writing that is held up for us. The fact is that many of the things we're told not to do when studying writing many writers actually do.

Perhaps though this is missing the point. Perhaps these shows which owe their popularity to services like Netflix are good and I'm finding faults where there aren't any? Personally, I doubt it. The really important question though is what do you think?

A week without social networking.

Along with many, many others I've just finished participating in a week long experiment aimed at helping to answer the question: is it possible to avoid social media in the modern world. This has meant not using any Social Network for five days. Yep no Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+ or forum based website. Unfortunately, it also extended to no pages where commenting exists. A surprising effect was that this meant no news websites.

I went into this thinking it'd be a breeze, it'd be simple. Oh how wrong I was. At first I sat at my computer joyfully writing with no distractions. I was limited to viewing such a small collection of websites that it just wasn't worth browsing.

Of course later, it got more difficult. I sat down to watch TV and realised that where I would usually pick up my Nexus 7, doing so would make this more difficult. You see everything about our modern smart phones and tablets is integrated (especially on Android OS) all our social networks, all our contacts, all of our hard earned information. Don't worry though, I'm not going to start blabbing on about how information is dangerous and all the big companies don't let us have privacy. I did have to disconnect all the services and accounts that I'd connected to my tablet. Just when I thought I'd got all of them a friend Facebook messaged me. It immediately popped up on my tablets home screen. An unavoidable bit of social networking had got through the net. I contacted the team running the experiment but they simply told me not to worry and to carry on. Apparently slips like mine were a vital part of the data they were collecting.

What these past few days have taught me if anything is not that these services we use are frivolous, but actually that they are extremely useful. I know, believe me I know. You're sitting there going 'duh', but before this week I seriously thought that I wouldn't miss social networks or their like. The fact is though its not that simple. Here's a few of the thoughts that I've had about our communications and usage of Social Media.

Sites like Facebook, while being a serious invasion on your privacy, allow people to be more private in a way. I've never been comfortable asking for people's phone numbers. I've always assumed that if I needed a person's number or they wanted me to have it they'd give it to me. We so often see our phone numbers as private information to be controlled. With Facebook though we are able to provide people with a simple link that gives them as much, or as little information as we want them to have. There is a downside to this though. If we come across something we want to share we used to call (or perhaps text) the information, but what if we don't have that person's phone number or email address? Well it's not really possible. Of course that's a relatively minor problem often the information might be cool or interesting to your friend but ultimately, it's no great loss if they don't get it.

'Some of the information I share IS important' I hear you scream. Of course it is. Huge congratulations are owed to a friend who got engaged recently. Now that is something that I wouldn't of heard about for quite a while. Let's face it, that's a BIG life event, and naturally, I wanted to text and congratulate the couple. It got me thinking though. Previous girlfriends I've been in relationships with have taken the relationship status on Facebook with a severity I've long been perplexed by. Quite frankly to me a relationship is no less real because my status is hidden. Yet with so many different kinds of life events I've spoken to people who've said that it felt 'more real' (or in one unforgivable case 'more realer') once they'd told the Facebook and Twitter world about their event.

Maybe then social networks only have the value we place in them?

Well, I'd say yes if it weren't for the likes of Google+. I know, I'm sounding odd now. Not many people in the UK use G+. Personally I love it. Where it can be difficult and tiring to trawl Facebook or the internet in general for (writing, theatre, sci-fi, special interest) communities, Google+ makes it lot easier. As a result I've missed tons of news that I'd otherwise have read.

Likewise Twitter is often the first place I hear about jobs. Okay, I don't see that many vacancies appear, but I do hear about them there.

My point? I guess I don't have one, but I will say that for everyone who might moan or otherwise get irritated with it, there's a mountain of reasons why social media has now become so important. Sure a lot of it comes down to convenience, but if it wasn't so useful, we wouldn't keep using it would we?