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WATCHING TV

Submitted by joshua mertz on March 19, 2013

I know how these stories end
All of them
The inciting incident is usually best
Some parts of the rising conflict
The second act is always too long
And then the inevitability of the third
Which leads to the end
A car chase, a wedding
A drawn-out fist fight or gun battle
A dog come home, a final showdown,
A family re-united
Then hugs and tears and kisses
And finality
I know how these stories end
They end with silence

Comments

joshua mertz

March 19, 2013

You can begin to call the camera cuts. One of the drawbacks of Aristotelian structure is its predictability. Not so in life... or is it?

Michael Mayhew

March 20, 2013

...but I like that the last word of your poem is the title of Clayton's poem, right below it.

And yeah, I used to do a sort of show-off parlor trick where I would watch a TV show and say "cut" just a half second before each edit. Modern shows are a bit more quirky in their editing, but story structure and performance rhythm are powerful things, and hard to ignore when you are building a show.