or, How Human Target Inspired My Writing
I am very excited to be working on a new writing projects, and I’m currently in the planning stages of how to lay out some stories. Obviously, there’s the chronological approach (this happened, this happened next, etc.), which is tried and true. There are many, many other approaches including the backwards storytelling of Memento, which I especially appreciate after recently viewing the film again. There’s also the scattered ideas of Pulp Fiction that a score of movies tried to copy with few results comparable to the original. And there is the idea that is so enormously popular with TV writers: start in the middle of the action, and back up to tell how we got there.
The method itself has turned out a number of great stories. Heck, Lost practically built its first few seasons on a variation of this flashback method. Speaking of flashbacks, FlashForward is another series built on a variation of this same technique. Both series are fundamentally based upon non-linear storytelling.
But for quality series like Lost, there are innumerable copies out there that just aren’t that good. Human Target is a series that frequently uses the non-linear approach, but it turns out to be more a crutch rather than a true device to advance the artistic quality of the show. I’ll be honest… Human Target is a guilty pleasure of mine, and it’s always in my Hulu queue. If it’s even remotely based on a comic book property, I’ll probably check it out at some point. In this case, the book and the show are remarkably different, but that is a discussion for another time. For now, just know that the comic book is much more layered than the quick adventure of the week we see on the television.
The main difference between Human Target and Lost – or even FlashForward – is that Human Target could very easily be told in a linear fashion, and you wouldn’t lose any information. At some point, we are going to learn more about who is chasing Christopher Chance, and we’ll probably get to know a little bit more about his shady past. But so far, we’ve already figured out a lot of his history. And all of the revelations about his past have come in the form of dialogue, so show creators missed out on one justifiable reason to jump around in time!
I’m not really sure how many of the episodes in the first season have used this approach, but at this point, it feels like well over half. Please, show writers, it’s okay to use linear storytelling. Really. This show has inspired me to stick with linear storytelling for a while in my own writing.
