Storytelling Inspiration
The adage to writers is to read what you want to write. But watching K-Dramas is an exercise in learning good storytelling technique.
The first K-Drama I saw was Extraordinary Attorney Woo. Netflix served it up to me as a show I’d like. I wasn’t a fan of foreign-language movies in theatres and don’t recall watching any on TV. At first, I was, like, meh. But Netflix can be stubborn in suggesting to you what its algorithm is convinced you’ll like. And maybe because I’d already watched a show from Saudi Arabia, which had upended my ideas of how women would be portrayed in that medieval country, I decided to give it a try.
Back in 2022, I wasn’t familiar with Korean, Japanese, Chinese — K- , J- , and C-Dramas — or Indian dramas or comedies made for television. The closest I’d come was the blockbuster movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. So I had some familiarity with spectacular martial arts instead of guns being used, but none when it came to story structure or tropes from countries other than Canada, the USA, and UK, with a couple of what-the-fuck-is-in Scandinavian-water noir-aka-murder-mystery shows.
I like mysteries. I’ve read murder mysteries of all genres, from literary to cozy, since I was a teenager. I enjoy mystery TV shows like Murdoch Mysteries. And since my brain injury, I prefer episodic television because who can remember a continuing storyline?! Not me!
But Asian dramas are all about the continuing storyline.
A good thing Netflix releases them either all episodes at once or a couple per week (or four to six for C-Dramas), otherwise I’d be lost. Even so, since I became a huge fan, I oftentimes have to go back and rewatch episodes previous to the one Netflix has just released for that week.
Continuing Storylines Require Memory and Attention
But that’s not only because of my memory issue...well, maybe it’s harder to visualize and verbalize when you’re reading subtitles and thus harder to recall an episode. I find when I rewatch it, I can pay more attention to the faces and body language from reading the subtitles quicker or already knowing what is happening.
These dramas, being layered like onions, with adjacent storylines, also require more attention to keep it all straight with different names, geographies, cultures, and tropes.
They contain backstory, flashbacks, epilogues, mystery, twists, real-life issues like suicide or binge drinking or mental disorders as part of the story, not as a special needs earnest type of portrayal like happens in North American shows, whose saccharine takes and pompous self-righteous lecturing to the audience zing your teeth. You know. The kind of dialogue where it turns from natural conversation to a public-education announcement.
Natural Versus Over Earnest
The thing that hooked me about Extraordinary Attorney Woo is that the portrayal of autism wasn’t about educating the audience in an instructional, let’s-all-be-inspired-by-her-bravery way (like how is it brave to live inside your own skin, even if the skin is different from the norm?). This show wove her relatable storyline through ever-peeling-away layers of her backstory, romance, coming of age, abandonment, who’s really a parent, envy, malice, remorse, redemption, and an ending that made you go, Where’s Season 2 already?!! In other words, her autism shaped her and made her coming of age different from “regular” folk, but it’s the same story we all live through.
We’ve all been awkward twenty-somethings, trying to fit in to a new job, a new set of friends, a burgeoning romance.
That’s the kind of storytelling that inspires me.
Storytelling Inspiration
Prior to my brain injury, I aspired to write like Charles Dickens. Not the length of his novels. Long and descriptive from serializing his novels. The more he wrote, the more he was paid. It doesn’t work like that now. No, what inspired me was how he wrote entertaining novels that captured readers’ attention with their memorable characters and fantastical names while also exposing deep problems in society, becoming part of the movement to rid Victorian England of some of its worst features like workhouses and debtors prisons.
But now, I have a different model to learn from.
Netflix didn’t invest a billion bucks into K-Dramas just for me. I’m part of a tsunami of viewers who, upon discovering them, launched themselves into binge-watching them. On the heel of K-Dramas, Netflix began to release J-Dramas, with their biteable 10-episode arcs, and 32- to 40-episode C-Dramas based on a particular kind of historic fantasy novel. Don’t ask me to explain them. Go look up on Reddit. Lots of sub-reddits on these kinds of shows.
Then, Thai, Philippine, and Arabian comedies and dramas began showing up on the platform. I’ve mostly come across Indian movies — don’t they watch TV in India?!
But I’m getting off track.
The Point Is the Storytelling
These stories are not only entertaining, but reveal some serious aspect of life while hooking you with humour, mystery, and thriller elements. These dramas tell me about the major concerns these countries have while devoid of the lecturing that turns me off.
I’ve learnt that globalization really is a thing. We have far more in common than dissimilarities. We all tell the same kinds of stories. It’s the way in which North Americans tell it that now feels like so much earnest pap after immersing myself in Asian dramas.
As I begin revising the second novel of The Q’Zam’Ta Trilogy — The Soul’s Reckoning — I’m hoping that some of this onion layer approach will appear. That my story will be entertaining while diving deep into fears and concerns we all have about death and what comes after, about human relationships and our relationship with animals, about whether it’s too late to mend broken parts of ourselves and our relationships with other beings. And about love.
It’s fairly easy to write stories like we’re used to seeing. It’s much harder to imagine dialogue that builds conflict and de-escalates, to weave plots with twists and layers like every Asian drama and Keigo Higashino does in his detective series, to pepper humour in a dark, tragic drama and tragedy in comedies in a way that feels like real life, not a let’s-be-serious-moment as North American shows do.
You must do your research. (I always feel like I’ve never done enough like with Lifeliner when I called a halt to interviews after I told myself 60 people was enough, otherwise I’d be interviewing into the 22nd century!) You must have a good grasp of dialogue and beware falling into the trap of earnestness when dealing with a “serious” subject or a person with a disability or dementia. You must think about story structure and remember the threads you’re knitting into the plot.
The famous adage to writers about how to improve your writing is read, read, read.
Read what you want to write. If you want to write cozy mysteries, read cozy mysteries. If you want to write Canadian literary masterpieces, read Rohinton Mistry. In my case, since I’m still practicing my reading, still haven’t returned to my voracious pre-brain injury habit nor do I have the energy to read for hours, I watch the kind of storytelling I want to write. I find that in K-Dramas, some J-Dramas, and some C-Dramas.
A storytelling adage: torture your darlings.
One last note: since reading Story Genius, Lisa Cron’s book on storytelling, and attending workshops on her book a year ago, I can’t help noticing how writers of these Asian dramas reflect the advice of throwing your characters into the worst possible situation. Then these writers turn the screws to the point you think there’s no way out for them.
I think other writers, too, are inspired. Running Point, which was released on Netflix this week, pays homage to Asian Netflix dramas and this advice.