Serling Paradigm

Just coming off of 2 scripts and gearing up for a third, and I found myself wondering how Rod Serling would define the basic structure of a story.

I wonder how Mr. Serling, specifically, would define a story because when he was writing THE TWILIGHT ZONE he had 30 minutes to introduce COMPLETELY UNKOWN characters and tell a story with them, and MOST OF THE TIME he had us from the very beginning.

The casual observer might say "It's the twist ending," but I don't think that's very accurate. There have been 2 TWILIGHT ZONE series after Serling's, and a lot of the time they just didn't hit the mark as many times as Serling -- and Beaumont and Mathison, et al -- did.

So I asked the late Mr. Serling, out loud (there was no one within earshot as I did this, of course; I may be crazy but I'm not stupid) and a couple of thoughts just sort of appeared in my head:

1. Weird beginning and weird ending.

He seemed to always start (in his Teasers) with something that made you go "What the...?!" and, of course, his surprise endings are legendary.

And once I started considering this, it just seems to make good sense. Even if you're writing a story with continuing characters, you can never go wrong hooking your audience right from the beginning and giving them ample reason to want to tune into your story. But this makes even more sense if your audience is not already familiar with your characters. (See the pilot of THE DRESDEN FILES for a SUPERB example of how to hook a brand new audience in 5 minutes or less.)

2. Strong human question.

I think that the reason the other incarnations of THE TWILIGHT ZONE failed when they did is because they would open strong, then just follow the characters through a very uninteresting series of events until they got to the twist at the end. They were just killing time.

But very often Serling would use his characters and their reactions to the bizarre event at the beginning of the story to explore a theme, to try to find an answer to a strong question about the basis of the Human Condition. They weren't merely trying to figure out what the weird event at the beginning of the story was all about, they were also searching for some human truth.

I see this approach as a sort of safe-guard in case the actions of your story aren't very compelling. As long as you keep working your theme at the same time you're allowing the exposition to unfold, you've got a pretty good chance of having SOMETHING going on that your audience is interested in at any given moment of your story.

I'm jotting this down so I can refer back to it at a later date, but I thought I'd share it with you, in case it does someone else some good, too.

:D