Entertainment comes in many forms and we all have our own preferences. Remarkably, however, entertainment is an area in which many of us feel a lot of social pressure. I, for one, am often persecuted because I have no interest in sports. (I’d like to apologies to the Greater City of Geelong, I don’t know what our local football team is. I’m anticipating the hate mail.)
Just about every adult I know who plays computer or video games is treated like some kind of juvenile delinquent with a peter pan complex and a lot of people tell me they feel guilty because they don’t read enough.
I’m baffled. It’s YOU being entertained. If the truth is, you don’t like reading, that’s okay. Really. If you’re a surgeon in a hospital by day, it’s perfectly okay for you to go home and play Grand Theft Auto. Ignore what anyone else says.
That said, this is a tutorial for writers (I really hope all the writers like reading, but I’ll save that for another tutorial), so we’re going to look at the different mediums of entertainment and how they relate to books in a competitive sense.Now, every time there is a new entertainment revolution, the cynics start wailing that it is the end of -insert old entertainment source of choice-. Video did not kill the radio star, kids. Now pay attention, there will be a test.
Television - It’s fair to say most people in developed nations have a television in their homes. This makes it the most dominant of the entertainment mediums. It’s right there in your living room, you just sit down and turn it on and you can sink into a stupor, absorbing the sights and sounds the networks deem worthy to present you.
Television is a long way from being an enemy to writers (I can’t say the same about books, but books don’t have children to feed). Television is all about writers. All those advertisements you see, even the annoying bargain basement ones, had a writer. Television shows all need writers, even reality TV. Writing for television is hard, of course. Probably harder than writing for anything else.
As I’ve said, there is a television in most modern living rooms. It takes a second to turn it on. It also takes a second to change the channel. Television shows have to be interesting for every second they are on air. If a consumer flips to a TV show in the middle of a scene it has to captivate them and keep them there. Otherwise, it won’t stay on air for very long.
People can spend a LOT of time in front of the glass teat. Often upwards of fourteen hours a week (two hours a day). Some people indulge in a lot more than that.
Movies - Movies (unless they are on TV) require some level of commitment from the consumer. You need to pay for tickets, or pay for a DVD, or pay to hire one and then set time aside to watch it. It’s not just THERE like television is. So there is more chance if a person sits down to watch a movie, they will watch it all the way through because they have put effort into acquiring it.
Again, movies are a writer’s friend. A very lucrative friend who will buy you a house by the beach and a large screen TV. It’s a very hard field to break into and often movies started life as successful books.
Sometimes movies are a medium to make books more accessible to those people who can’t or won’t read.
It’s not uncommon for blockbuster movies to have massive budgets and expect massive returns and a lot of movies, regardless of budget, are true masterpieces of cinematic elements.
However, unless someone is a real movie buff, they probably aren’t spending more than four hours or less a month watching movies (eight if they hired titanic and the green mile!).
Computer/video games - The computer and videogame industry is a growing one. New technologies are making game play more realistic in appearance and more immersive. When computer games first appeared in the eighties, they were limited to an audience almost completely populated by young boys. This stigma still clings to the medium as a whole, however those boys who were playing computer games in the eighties have evolved with the industry and are still playing now.
These days there are games with MA ratings, designed SOLEY for adult audiences. There are also games with X rating that are designed for a particular audience of adults, but you have to go to Japan for those.
It’s a fast growing and changing industry and anyone who still believes it is a medium targeted at children, or even males, has yet to come out of the nineties.
Again, this is a medium that embraces writers. Computer games can be LONG. Anyone who hasn’t played recently probably doesn’t realize how long.
Some games have infinite replay value, however even the computer games that consist of in depth plot and character developments might have a play time of over two hundred hours. That’s a lot of personal investment for a consumer all around. These games are expensive, their consoles are expensive and they take up a lot of time.
Games such as these still aren’t making as much as money movies, because despite the growth of the industry the consumer base is still small compared to say, television. However more and more is being spent on development and this is resulting in bigger and bigger returns.
How many hours a week someone plays video games is hugely dependant on that individual. I still read books more than I play games, despite having a passion for the medium. However with some people’s interest in games being compared to addictions like heroin and nicotine it’s fair to say some people are playing a lot more than I am. Men, women and children.
Books - Critics are bemoaning the slow and painful death of books. I’m inclined to say they are wrong. Google the list of top selling books for any given year and you will see that each year dozens of books are making over a million dollars in sales. This doesn’t include movie deals. Every year the number of books earning over a million dollars increases, as does the number of books acquired by publishers.
Publishing is becoming cheaper and easier with the electronic age of computers, which is allowing greater opportunities for books and writers around the world. Email and online sales have evolved the publishing industry into a new animal.
Books have evolved too, to compete with all the other mediums on this list, particularly the first three. Books are faster paced, they have more intense and dynamic plots and characters and writers are being forced to push past new boundaries in creativity and voice.
This excites me. This is something I want to be a part of.
I know there are people bemoaning the loss of all manner of things when it comes to writing and novels and the industry as a whole. However I think its like bemoaning the introduction of the electric light. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I can’t read by candle light.
I think a lot of writers are afraid of trying to compete with television and movies and video games, but as I’ve already stated, these are created by writers too. Don’t be afraid, step up to the plate. It’s the same game, only the mediums are different. You’re not facing off against the beast of televisions, just the creativity of other writers.
If you can’t do that, take your bat and go home. If you can, well, lets play ball.
Music - Music is not a medium that competes with the others very much. Firstly, everyone likes music. It’s human nature. Our blood flows to a beat and music resonates in our bones. So its safe to say the majority of people have some form of musical entertainment in their life on a regular basis. The radio, CDs, tapes, MP3s, concerts, singing... the list goes on.
Secondly, you can listen to music and do other things at the same time. I’m listening to music right now. TV shows and movies rely heavily on music. We listen to it in the car on the way to work and we can listen to it while we read, or cook or shower if we feel so inclined.
I couldn’t begin to estimate how many hours the average person listens to music in a week. If you include the music on television, on the radio in the car and that left on while we’re working or doing something else, it really adds up fast.
Personally I listen to upwards of twelve hours of music in a single day. That’s eighty four hours a week, three hundred and thirty six a month and four thousand and thirty two hours in a year.
Wow.
Theatre - I love theatre. It’s one of so few entertainment mediums that a live. Even live television can be edited to some degree and if someone suddenly has a heart attack they can cut to Joanne in the show room. Not so in theatre. I’ve seen people fall in the orchestra pit, break bones, pass out or just plain forget their lines. And it’s all REAL, it’s all right there in front of you, actually happening. You got for the acting and the script, but you stay for the possibility a light’s going to fall from the ceiling and kill someone. Okay, maybe that’s just me.
I know theatre has a very small, specialized audience, but god it’s a fantastic one. Once upon a time, particularly as very few people were literate and there were very few books written for entertainment, theatre was the primary form of entertainment.
Again, theatre is an entertainment medium that embraces writers. Someone has to write the plays.
And remember, though it no longer pays well, Shakespeare wrote plays.
Hobbies and sport - Yes, I am lumping these two together and I’m doing so because they both require physical movement of some kind. Entertainment that requires physical activity is in a slightly different realm to other kinds, because it requires a great deal more motivation and self investment on the part of the individual.
There are a great many types of sport in the world. Cricket, football, walking, rock climbing, diving, spelunking, netball, horse riding, polo, aerobics, bike riding, running, etc, etc, ad infinitum. Some are competitive, some are simply fun or designed for weight loss and personally I think they are all fantastic. Anything that gets people out of the house and moving about, because exercise produces endorphins. If we all just did a half hour of cardiovascular exercise a week the world would literally be a happier place. And that’s something to think about. (For the record, ladies, shopping isn’t a sport. I may compromise and class it as a hobby.)
Unless you write books made into audio books, writing isn’t going to come into sport much, as reading about sport falls under reading, not actual sport.
Hobbies, on the other hand, are very writer friendly. There are a lot of hobbies in the world. Writing is one of them. So are drawing, singing, cooking, wood work, stamp collecting, photography, sculpture, knitting, metal work, animal husbandry, gardening, playing a musical instrument, again, etc, etc ad infinitum.
I personally feel everyone needs a good hobby they are passionate about. I have well over a dozen, and I engage in them all regularly. Particularly cooking and writing, as I usually get around to doing both at least once a day.
The great thing about hobbies, apart from keeping the brain active and making you more interesting that a wet bar of soap, is that for every hobby there can be a manual. I have upwards of thirty cook books. Just as many art/painting/drawing books. I have books about stamps, sculpture, a whole library on gardening, books on taxidermy, knot tying, entomology, herpetology, photography, html, keeping tropical fish, designing graphic novels... the list goes on.
Get a hobby, there are so many to choose from, then read about it. Maybe next you can write about it.
I have no numbers on how many hours per week people spend playing sport or on hobbies, but it’s probably not enough.
Role playing and other miscellaneous games - There are a variety of other kinds of game around that people might play for entertainment. Board games like monopoly come to mind. Some of these do provide work for writers, but it’s a limited field and computer games pretty much killed the industry completely.
However I had to put this section in because when it comes to all out relaxing and entertainment, role playing games are my primary source. I’m not talking about role playing games like world of warcraft or final fantasy. Those belong up with computer and video games. I’m talking about play by post or tabletop role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons.
Play by post role playing games are great for writers and over the years they have rally honed my ability to write at a consistent quality, regardless of my mental alertness.
On a good day I might write five thousand words in role playing games alone, and that’s on top of my daily word count. Its an interactive form of writing that can teach you a lot about pacing, characterization and plot. Or, it can just be a good way to release steam.
I know a lot of people have no idea what I’m talking about when it comes to play by post role playing. I’ll write you a tutorial on it some time (I’ll clarify now that its not the kind of role playing adults do alone in chat rooms, I’m usually a G-rated rpg-er).
Normally play by post role playing doesn’t give any work to writers, as people are just writing their own. As I’ve said, though, it’s a great way to hone your own writing skills.
In conclusion, we can see that while there are many industries competing with books, the book industry is far from dead, and new mediums only offer new jobs for writers.
So how do you make your book stand up to the flood of other great novels out there, or harder still, how do you make you book fair competition for the latest, greatest thing on TV?
Part Three -- Being The Entertainer
Copyright Talitha Mitchell. 2006.