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Complex Numbers #978883 added March 23, 2020 at 12:01am
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In The Neighborhood
I found this interesting because it's a kind of insight into the writing process. It's from a couple of years ago, but whatever.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/mr-rogers-neighborhood-talkin...
Mister Rogers Had a Simple Set of Rules for Talking to Children
The TV legend possessed an extraordinary understanding of how kids make sense of language.
And, yeah, it's kind of a plug for a book, but again: whatever.
For the millions of adults who grew up watching him on public television, Fred Rogers represents the most important human values: respect, compassion, kindness, integrity, humility.
And cardigans.
He insisted that every word, whether spoken by a person or a puppet, be scrutinized closely, because he knew that children—the preschool-age boys and girls who made up the core of his audience—tend to hear things literally.
This is something I think every writer needs to keep in mind: not the talking-to-children part, unless that's your goal, but the necessity of knowing your audience. Or as a comedian might put it, "Read the room." Only for a writer, the room is the world, or at least a part of it.
For instance, Greenwald mentioned a scene in a hospital in which a nurse inflating a blood-pressure cuff originally said, “I’m going to blow this up.” Greenwald recalls: “Fred made us redub the line, saying, ‘I’m going to puff this up with some air,’ because ‘blow it up’ might sound like there’s an explosion, and he didn’t want the kids to cover their ears and miss what would happen next.”
You know, ordinarily I'd say that demands like that would be enough by themselves to raise peoples' blood pressure, but I choose to believe that Fred Rogers knew how to speak kindly to adults, too.
And Rogers’s secretary, Elaine Lynch, remembered how, when one script referred to putting a pet “to sleep,” he excised it for fear that children would be worried about the idea of falling asleep themselves.
I'd think that pet euthanasia, or really death in general, would be a difficult topic to work into any kids' programming (though I'd certainly have fun with it in a parody aimed at adults). But if anyone could do it, Rogers could. Of course, I grew up with that show, but I don't remember too many specific scenes; certainly none involving dead puppies.
Rogers also wrote a song called “You Can Never Go Down the Drain,” because he knew that drains were something that, to kids, seemed to exist solely to suck things down.
Oh, man, I wanna have so much fun with that. "You Can Never Go Down the Drain, But Your Soul Can."
In 1977, about a decade into the show’s run, Arthur Greenwald and another writer named Barry Head cracked open a bottle of scotch while on a break, and coined the term Freddish. They later created an illustrated manual called “Let’s Talk About Freddish,” a loving parody of the demanding process of getting all the words just right for Rogers.
Can you say "scotch," boys and girls? Scotch is a fountain of creativity. Do you know what creativity is? It's what happens when you drink a lot of scotch. Ask your parents where they keep their scotch.
This is one of the reasons Rogers was so particular about the writing on his show. “I spent hours talking with Fred and taking notes,” says Greenwald, “then hours talking with Margaret McFarland before I went off and wrote the scripts. Then Fred made them better.” As simple as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood looked and sounded, every detail in it was the product of a tremendously careful, academically informed process.
Getting back to being serious for a moment... again, I think this is important for all writers. Well, not this specifically, but the general idea - editing, researching, being aware of your audience, and knowing what you're writing.
But mostly what's important is scotch. |
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