I confess, I’m one of those writers with a deep and abiding love of the much-missed Friday Night Lights, a television show that not only entertained me, but made me think about how I want to live and who I want to be.
Now I admit, I have loved a number of shows of the young adult variety, starting with but not limited to Felicity; Gilmore Girls, seasons 1-5; Veronica Mars, seasons 1 and 2; and—surely you were expecting this—every all-too-short second of the single season of Freaks and Geeks.
I suspect young adult television, much like young adult literature, has such a hold on me because it is often about people building their identities, determining their values, and shaping their characters (as we are wont to do when we are young).
And this is why I mention Friday Night Lights in the context of teaching creative writing. More than any two characters on television, high school football coach Eric Taylor and high school guidance counselor Tami Taylor were working hard every week to shape the values of their daughter, their high-school-age-charges, their no-longer high-school-age-charges, and even themselves.
In writing workshops, we often talk about character—character-driven work, characterization, character arcs—and what we mean most of the time by “character” is simply a fictional human being (and some nonfiction writers mean nonfictional human beings). But what if we really meant character? The content of someone’s heart. Their integrity. Their values. What if instead of obsessing on that workshop workhorse—what is at stake for this character?—we put character at stake instead?
At the end of the pilot episode of FNL, the star quarterback of the Dillon Panthers has been paralyzed, and Coach Taylor, in voice over, reminds his team (us! It’s us!) how they (we!), at some point in their lives (our lives!), will all be tested.
What better scenario for fiction (or any creative writing, really) than the moment in which someone’s character is tested?
Next workshop, instead of talking with my students about what their characters desire, I’m going to talk with them about what will test and shape and skew their characters’ “very souls.” And I will ask my students to consider what their characters might do as a consequence of being tested. Because as Coach Taylor so wisely said in season five: “character is in the trying” and “the trying” is as good a definition of plot as any I’ve ever heard.