A short time ago, I had the opportunity to go to a workshop at the New Jersey Romance Writer’s Put Your Heart in a Book conference on world building in novels. The presenter, Kristen Painter, told us that no matter what kind of story is being told, the author has to engage in at least a bit of this important process. In other words, your audience has to know the rules, rites and rituals, the values and belief systems that guide the decisions and actions of the characters. The audience also has to know who the heroes are, the villains, the monsters…and in my case (I write urban fantasy), the actual monsters. The person who gave the workshop made a point of reminding us that as we write book after book in a series, we can’t break the rules we’ve laid out. We have to be consistent.
Although I clearly was supposed to be thinking about my books, I sat in the workshop thinking about my favorite television shows. (Yes, in addition to being an author I am a pop-culture junkie. I LOVE television, movies, music.) At any rate, I was struck with an understanding of why, from time to time, television shows that were previously favorites slide lower and lower on my priority watch list. (Yes, I have a priority TV watch list. Don’t judge me.)
It’s because they change the rules. Sometimes, even the game. For example, on one of my former favorite shows, the lead character behaved like a classic narcissistic, misogynistic, amoral supernatural creature. He was brilliant, fierce and unapologetic. A viewer could count on skillfully crafted mayhem from him. He captivated me.
Then he fell in love– hard– and became a self-doubting and reluctant creature. Instead of creating mayhem, he tried to be good and kind. His cunning was replaced by a sort of guilelessness…and occasionally sheer stupidity. Not the same character. Not the same world. Not the same show.
Had there been an adequate explanation for his dramatic change in behavior, I might have gone along with it, for a while at least. Falling in love is not reason enough to become a different person than he’d been for the last couple hundred years. In the end, this character’s behavior became so “out of character”, watching him was painful. I had to stop.
Have you ever experienced a shift so dramatic, in a book series or television series, that you lost interest?
The Connecticut Writers' Circle 