Everyone Is Doing Writing Reality Wrong

 A little over a month ago, Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware posted this article about writing reality TV shows as another attempt is made.  Reading about the new show and the attempts in the past (apparently the last one was in 2013 so it's been a while) they were all doing it wrong.  

The shows were all based on competitions like American Idol, usually with some Big Brother thrown in as the writer contestants would all be locked up together.  None of the shows really made sense, which is why none of them succeeded.  The thing is, writing a book takes a long time--a really, really, really long time if you're GRR Martin.  It's not something you can just up and do in a couple of days like covering a song or even writing a song.  I mean a song is 3-5 minutes usually while a novel takes hours to read. 

It's just really stupid to keep trying to make writing fit into that mold.  Almost instantly I knew the way to do a writing-based reality show is more like Shark Tank or Dragon's Den.  In those shows people go on and try to get four businesspeople to invest in some product or idea.  This can obviously work for writing:  have four agents/editors as your sharks or dragons, writers come on to pitch an idea, the agents/editors either reject the idea or bid against each other to buy it.  And then you just have more of the same with different ideas.

Periodically you might also want to do updates on some of the contestants to see how their book is coming along towards publication.  Maybe talk to editors and illustrators and whoever.  Get some famous author like James Patterson or Stephen King to "mentor" a writer.  If you can get it on network TV then have the author go on whatever their morning news show is to promote the book and maybe have like one of those book club things with it.

It seems so obvious that you have to wonder why no one's done it.  Other than maybe it sucks?  It would get a little repetitive, especially if the ideas are all the same.  I'm not sure it could get one of the big 4 networks, but maybe something smaller like TLC or Discovery.

Another possible alternative is to do it cooking show style.  You could have writers try to write a story based on some prompt and then have judges judge them.  You'd really need to find some known writer who could scream at people and throw shit like Gordon Ramsey.  Even then I'm not really sure because writing isn't as physical and visual as cooking; I mean it's basically sitting at a desk or table and writing on a computer or paper.  Of course you can use montages for that, but it still doesn't seem that interesting.

Or you could do something like that show where Gordon Ramsey goes to restaurants to "help" them fix their problems by screaming at them and throwing stuff.  There are others like Bar Rescue where some guy goes to bars to fix them up.  By the same token you could have some known writer go to unknown writers and "fix" their manuscripts.  But again it would be hard to get a lot of compelling visuals of the writing, though you could get drama in the known writer berating the unknown writer and the unknown arguing back and stuff before they give in and everyone hugs and cries.

Would you watch shows like those?  I probably wouldn't because I don't watch "reality" shows.