Thursday, January 20, 2005

Laws of Fiction

Replying to my comment on Lee Goldberg's blog about the surprise ending for Law & Order's Serena Southerlyn, someone made the point that real lawyers can have the same blandness of character that fictional Southerlyn did.

I replied:

A couple of essential differences between real life and fiction:

1) Real life can be random; fiction has to have "roundness": expectations set up in the beginning must be resolved in some way by the end. Revelations at the end must have some basis in clues, however subtle, along the way.

2) Fictional main characters such as Serena Southerlyn have to hold our attention longer--be more memorable--than any dozen real people passed on the street, or we could care less about them.

...if Southerlyn's orientation really didn't matter, as her boss said, why not introduce it sooner? If nothing else, it would have piqued my curiosity and made her more memorable.

No comments: