What I Learned about Writing from Doctor Who: Part 1

After another three hours of watching Doctor Who tonight, I did what I always do...I quickly checked my email at 12:30 in the morning as usual before stumbling into the kitchen to see the disaster there, shuffled some plates around, cleaned the counter enough so my husband has somewhere to make his breakfast and then came back in to write this:

I came back to the computer and checked Facebook, very normal. Only some friends remained - my friend Kathie laughing at herself for starting up her Farmville farm again....after I scored some mystery trees and tried for a rainbow egg from her I gave up, made some comments, and then shut it down. Checked my Gmail next and noticed Kristen Lamb had posted an article about blogging themes, so I headed to her site to read because I really do want to find a groove with my blog. For a long time now I have felt there is no focus here, that I have four blogs in the world, and like Kristen says in her article, they're all me, so my worlds need to be brought together... (You can read her excellent post here.)

I've been tossing around ideas for regular posting days for this blog, but part of me thinks the idea is ridiculous because I can't imagine sticking to a set schedule of anything. I'm the mother of two 8-year-olds and a 6-year-old...my life is not about schedules. It's more about What the Hell are We Doing Now. But even more truthfully, I don't follow blogs because someone posts about the writing process on Thursdays. I usually only follow blogs because they either always entertain me with their writing or what they do in their lives, or because their blogs contain information on writing or publishing I can't find anywhere else.

Since I have no insight into anything except myself and the world I have created around me, I guess I'll have to stick to that first one....the world I've created for myself and all the things that happen there. This makes sense, since it is the underlying theme of what Heartberry Ink represents -- everything in the world I really love, the creative, the amazing, the fantastical. Those things we humans come up with that give life meaning, and I'm not talking religion.

I'm talking about art, I'm talking about music, I'm talking about the Sand Dancer and those photos from NASA that show up in my Facebook feed every morning. My friends who are the most amazing comic book artists, my friends who are writers. My friends who somehow manage to raise 8, 10, or 15 children and then turn to tell me they are blessed whereas if I tried that, I would be sitting in a corner somewhere eating my own hair, wishing all of those kids would go away. (The laundry and dishes alone would kill me!)

So instead of doing what Kristen says and creating themes for this day or that, setting a schedule or at least thinking along those lines, I'm going with one theme -- just me. What I love and what I think about and how it relates to the world around me. It's all I've got, so it has to be enough.
And I think it is.

So let's start with my current obsession .... Doctor Who.
The Doctor.
My Doctor.
I started watching Doctor Who when it was Tom Baker. Wayyyy back in high school and then in college.

The Doctor wore a long, long multicolored scarf, a ratty old brown hat, and always had a toothbrush in his pocket so he was always prepared. He had a metal dog named K-9 and lived in a blue Police box. I had a Tardis key... and I still have that key. It's on my key chain right now, only it's nearly 26 years old and the metal has worn so thin it's about to fall off my key ring. I don't know what to do...I don't want to lose it, so I may have to take it off and put it somewhere safe. But I like it on my key chain, which means a replacement is in order, but then it will be new and it won't be the same. My Tardis key used to say, "Spirit of Light" on the back but it's so worn down you can't even read it anymore. I guess I'll be getting on Amazon soon to order a new one. *sigh*

Skipping ahead a few decades, my friends on Facebook were all shrieking with joy because a new season of Doctor Who was starting starring a man named Matt Smith. Their continued excitement was enough to get me excited, so much so that I started leaving the TV at night on the BBC America channel. They were showing reruns and specials leading up to the premier of the new season of Doctor Who.

It was a Saturday and I realized the new show was starting. I had planned on letting it run in the background but I would be working on the computer. Well, that didn't happen. Seconds into the first episode and I was hooked. HOOKED. Why? What did it?

Because a box fell from the sky, man fell out of box, man ate fish custard... all accompanied by an adorable little red-haired Scottish girl named Amelia Pond. The opening scene of that episode left me with so many questions -- he crashed the Tardis and smashed a shed -- can the Tardis fix itself? How is he going to fix that?

Then the Doctor himself was just amazing with his floppy hair and face all full of angles... talking so fast, insulting the girl in that way only The Doctor can, grilling her on all kinds of things, being totally insane, and yet she lets him in.

Little Amelia, there in her nightgown and wellies in the night garden, asking this strange man if he came to fix the crack in her wall, while he just starts ordering her about, "You're Scottish -- fry something!" And she does -- she makes him bacon, gives him an apple, yogurt, whatever. He's just regenerated and so he isn't used to his mouth yet, doesn't know what his mouth likes. He keeps spitting it all out. He settles for fish fingers and custard.
*blech*
This is all in the first five minutes! Such an excellent episode! I was so totally HOOKED! I wanted to know why she had a crack in her wall, but more than that I wanted to know why she was alone, in the middle of the night. Where were her parents? Turns out she doesn't have any. Lives with an aunt and the aunt was at work. The Doctor asks if she wants to come with him, and she says yes. He says he'll be back in five minutes and she goes upstairs to pack a bag. This is the point where if this were any other TV show I would have been creeped out -- grown man asking a 10-year-old to leave with him in his magic time machine... but it's The Doctor. He's not like that.

He comes back, but his five minutes were Amelia's twelve years. She's 22 and pissed. She went a little crazy and had to deal with therapy and all kinds of fun things growing up because of course she told people about him, but now he was back and she was old enough to go with him... and that's how The Doctor got his new companion. The rest of the season goes full-steam ahead and I loved every moment of The Doctor and Amy and all of the people getting dragged along for the ride with them, but my friend Kathie kept saying I had to watch the other seasons... I had to go back to watch the shows between Tom Baker and Matt Smith, and that's what I've been doing.

The thing is, Doctor Who is not just a TV show. It's an AMAZING TV show. It is like filo dough, or like the fabric of space-time itself... it is multi-layered with a new story each episode, but also stories running through all of the episodes and by going back to Season 1 with Christopher Eccleston as The Doctor, I began to see what I had missed -- one of the greatest lessons I could ever learn about story arcs and character development. I realized what I was seeing could be put in practice, and should be put in practice, in my writing...in everyone's writing. If more shows were written like this, I would watch more TV.

And I also have realized that the Doctor Who show is falling into a pit with the Matt Smith shows I love so much, so I am really hoping they realize what I discovered on my own and fix it, otherwise their show will fall apart, because they removed the one element of the show that gives it meaning... they removed Rose, the human woman The Doctor is in love with and always will be.

To say that Doctor Who is merely a love story is not what I'm saying. But the character as portrayed by both Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant is so complex... he's basically immortal, but he does eat. He sleeps. He does feel pain. He feels happiness, joy, excitement for life. He revels in science and seeing things in a new way. He has a time machine that can take him anywhere in any time. He saves people, he saves entire worlds, he makes the bad guys pay for what they've done. He has gadgets galore that can do things we couldn't even imagine in the first place, but he is alone. And he hates that.

When I watched Matt Smith as The Doctor ask Amy Pond to travel with him, I didn't even blink. Of course she would go with him, how exciting! But I was looking at the situation through Amy's eyes. After watching the previous actors play The Doctor, I started seeing the show through The Doctor's eyes. I knew why he needs two hearts, because one is forever breaking.

Look for Doctor Who Part 2 in my next post.

Good night, sleep tight... don't let the Daleks bite.
Cynthia