What Writing TV Soap Operas Taught Me About Writing Novels

Soap School wasn’t its real name. It had no name, no accreditation. It didn’t award a degree. But it did hold out hope of a well remunerated career in the wonderful world of soap operas. And here’s the kicker—it didn’t cost a penny. In fact, it paid its student body of four to attend. That’s why I was there.

My experience at Soap School was so bizarre and confidence-battering that for years I managed to repress it. Not until the protagonist of my novel The Trouble with You landed a job working for the head writer of several daytime radio serials—she’s adamant about never calling them soap operas or soaps—did the memory seep back into my consciousness.

Though I had managed to repress the experience, some of the tricks of the trade I picked up during the semester I was enrolled, or perhaps indentured, did linger. To prove it, let me set the scene.

A well-appointed corner office in a Manhattan literary agency with a backdrop of the city skyline visible through the windows. The scene features two characters: the writer and her agent.

The writer (in a recap of the backstory for viewers who missed the last few episodes) tells of her history of ghosting other people’s books and writing novels to formula under pseudonyms, the publication of her first novel under her own name, her euphoria at the good reviews, her despair at discovering that the reading public who pony up hard currency in exchange for books did not share the reviewers’ enthusiasm.

Backstory taken care of, viewers brought up to today’s segment, the agent announces she has an offer the writer can’t refuse. An executive at a television network is looking for two promising young novelists and two playwrights of the same ilk to be trained in the craft of writing daytime serials. And—the agent pauses dramatically to underline the full import of what she’s about to say—the writer will get something no novelist, especially a fledgling one, has ever dreamed of. A weekly paycheck.

Closeup of the writer. Her eyes widen in amazement and joy. “A weekly paycheck,” she murmurs under her breath, though loud enough for the audio to pick it up.

The camera holds. Her eyes narrow in anguish. Can she sell her soul to the soaps? Can she compromise her literary integrity for filthy lucre? The music builds to a crescendo. The program cuts to a commercial. (See the lesson in suspense below.)

This scene really did play, minus the musical accompaniment leading to the commercial break. Another novelist, two playwrights, and I spent the better part of a hot New York summer in a well air-conditioned building in midtown Manhattan learning to write soaps.

By day we sat in a swanky conference room being taught the tricks of the trade by a successful head writer. By night we toiled in our considerably less glamorous digs over scripts that never quite measured up to the head writer’s standards.

The problem was less artistic than personal. He was determined to show us arrogant whippersnappers that soap operas were an art form. We were resolved to prove that we might have something to learn from Trollope and Fitzgerald, Chekov and O’Neill, but what could a hack like him teach the likes of us who had published novels and seen our plays produced? We thought he was overbearing. It never occurred to us that we were insufferable.

The first lesson involved the division of labor. We tried not to snicker. We were writers, not workers on a Henry Ford assembly line.

The head writer explained that he was responsible for the ongoing story, which he mapped out months in advance. Three or four lesser writers, known as breakdown writers, turned the ongoing story into outlines for daily scripts. Each of us would write the actual scenes in those scripts. Of course, nothing we novices churned out, he warned, could be used, but if we worked hard, perhaps someday we’d see scenes we’d written performed on the small screen.

As I worked on my novel decades later, the memories of that painful summer began to seep back, but like so many miseries of youth, the incidents now seemed more amusing that agonizing. They were also useful. Few traits betray a character like the lack of them. As Hemingway never tired of saying, a writer has to know more about a character than she puts on the page.

I understood, thanks to those hot summer nights and overly air-conditioned days how my protagonist Fanny would struggle at her job and the attempt to rise in it. I shared her dismay at being told by the head writer that wit is the death of daytime serials. I wrestled with her to find motivation for a character whose actions are dictated not by who she is but by how the plot must advance.

Even the chief lesson hammered home in that chilly conference room found its way into the novel when Fanny, who has now graduated to more serious writing, grapples with foreshadowing – how much to put in to create suspense, how little to keep from giving the away story.

Suspense, both Fanny and I learned, is the holy grail of soap opera construction. The four of us soap students thought we knew a thing or two about the technique. We’d learned to slip in a line here, a reference there to keep the reader turning pages and the audience in their seats until the final curtain.

Merely keeping the reader or audience interested, however, wasn’t good enough for the head writer. Nail-biting was the order of the day. Each scene had to end with a cliff hanger. Witness the character close-up and mounting music while the writer debates selling her soul above. How else to prevent the viewer from switching channels during the commercial?

Soap School lasted six weeks, though it felt longer. On the final day the four of us burst out of that chilly midtown Manhattan building as exuberantly as second graders set free for the summer holidays. I don’t suppose the head writer was sorry to see us go. None of us was hired to write full-time. As far as I know, the endeavor was not attempted again. But one lesson I learned did help me when, a few years later, I began to teach a course in creative writing.

As I went through the samples required for admission to the course, I was struck by the obvious talent of one applicant. Her writing wasn’t yet polished, but that was what I was there to help her learn to do.

When classes began, however, and the students started submitting their weekly assignments, I noticed a strange recurrent tic in her work. Instead of developing a scene or chapter and letting it run its course, she always cut it off halfway through a conversation or at a crucial moment in the action. I couldn’t figure out why.

Then the memory, which I’d repressed and would again bury after the incident, surfaced. I asked her if she’d ever written daytime serials. She said she hadn’t written them but had acted in them. I’m delighted to report that within a week or two she’d stopped interrupting her work for commercial breaks. I’m even happier that two years later she published her first novel. Perhaps Soap School had paid off after all.

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The Trouble with You by Ellen Feldman is available via St. Martin’s Press.