Hi! I'm back. How's your writing going? Is the heat keeping you locked away at your keyboard or breaking your spirit? I'm sort of waffling back and forth myself. Gotta bear down!
I've got some great TV shows I'm looking forward to talking about in the coming weeks -- FOR ALL MANKIND, WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS, BETTER CALL SAUL, THE SANDMAN.
But I thought I might mix in some other kinds of posts that offer other ways into thinking about writing, stuff I've come across in my own reading.
For instance, you might not know the name Stephen Lawrence. He was a songwriter who spent 30 years writing songs for SESAME STREET, and did some other very cool stuff as well. He died in January, and in his obituary the New York Times pointed to something he'd written on a blog about writing songs for kids.
"One of the most effective devices," he writes, "and for children, one of the most important, is repetition." When you repeat a lyric or a melody, you give it more weight. It becomes more deeply embedded in the listener's brain.
Lawrence points to a bunch of his own songs, and also many modern composers like John Lennon and Elvis Presley.
On one level, repetition is something we avoid as screenwriters. You never want to hit the same beat more than once. So in the early episodes of THE SANDMAN there's a tendency to see our protagonist Morpheus responding pretty much the same time and again to the problems before him. It can make those early episodes, which are gorgeous and interesting in a hundred ways, feel oddly static. It also undermines the concept. I found myself wondering, What is the point of this show? (It gets better.)
But repetition can be a powerful force in screenwriting, too. Take the rule of threes--if you return to a situation or line three times, it tends to build interest and also tension. Whether it's a drama or a comedy, the third beat becomes a sort of release valve, the resolution (aka punch line).
SNL skits are generally built around some kind of repetition--a line, an action, a conflict. And waiting for the repetition to occur becomes a big part of the entertainment. When will it happen? How will it occur? With what variation?
In a long form drama, there's also the repetition that occurs over seasons and series. BETTER CALL SAUL is approaching its series finale, and a finale is often a moment when a show goes back to the very beginning and brings back lines, events or motifs. And even if we're not aware of it, we're sort of expecting that or hoping for it. And once again the delight is both in the repetition and in its change, the new way something familiar lands now, after all that has happened.
If there's any show or movie you're watching right now, keep an eye out for anything that's repeated. See how the writer uses repetition. What seems to be its purpose(s)? And does it work?
And if you want to see just how many different ways repetition can function, check out that Sesame Street video. I don't know if Lawrence wrote it, but it is something I remember watching as a kid. Any time I think of Sesame Street, it comes to mind.
