Yelling at the TV, Or How I Learned to Read and Watch Like an Author

Rob Kelley thinking about learning narrative structure. I’ll start with a clarification. I never (seldom) actually yell at the TV. But my wife, author Margot Anne Kelley, is extraordinarily tolerant of my habit of pressing pause while we are watching a thriller movie or police procedural TV show to see how far into it we are. Most of the time I’m confirming that the twist is, in fact, at the midpoint, 20 minutes into a 40 minute television show. But once in a while I’m surprised to see that an event that captures my imagination is at the 25% mark, or that a substantial climax is at 80% of the run time, with more revelations still to come.

It’s those surprises I’m looking for. As a thriller writer, I’m always wondering why a screenwriter or author makes the choices they do, and trying to learn from their narrative structure. Writers first learn craft from what they read. But writers who want to improve their craft have to ask why the writer of the text they are reading, or media they are consuming, made those choices. Seeing an example of a deftly handled situation, a thrilling scene, an unexpected twist, a deeply conflicted character, all provide examples that help me to solve particular narrative challenges.

One I pay special attention to is narrative time. As an author, particularly of a thriller or suspense novel, you want to be in control of the pacing of the action. You want the reader excited by fast-paced, explosive action, or anxious for the fate of the protagonist at the edge of a cliff. Matt Bell in his wonderful book on editing your novel, Refuse to Be Done, quotes Jim Shepard on the rate of revelation: “the sense we have of the pace at which we’re learning crucial emotional information about the stories’ central figures.”

A great example of this would be a striking set of scenes in Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes. Avoiding spoilers for those who have not read the book, late in the story, in anticipation of a disaster, King pauses narrative time and takes us into the POVs of several important characters. It is like a 360 degree view around a ticking time bomb, with some characters terrifyingly aware of the danger, some dangerously unaware. (Thereby fulfilling Hitchcock’s famous analysis of surprise vs. suspense. It’s surprise when a bomb goes off and the viewer experiences the danger in the same moment as the character, whereas it’s suspense when the viewer knows there’s a bomb under the table with a ticking timer but the characters do not.) As a reader, I flew through this section of King’s novel, my heart racing, fearful for all of the imperiled characters.

In writing a pivotal climactic scene for my forthcoming novel Raven (High Frequency Press, 2025), I adapted this strategy specifically. My protagonist is in danger, my antagonist has the upper hand, and the potential for disaster or salvation hangs in the balance over several simultaneous scenes. When the three POV characters and their actions collide, I want the reader to feel a sense of satisfaction after an extended period of heightened anticipation.

And while time and anticipation are paramount to the structure of a thriller, they are critical in all fiction. As I was writing this post, LitHub featured “Ayeşgül Savaş on creating your story’s clock”, a piece that was picked up the next day in the Maine Writer’s and Publisher’s Alliance newsletter The Peavey. (If you don’t yet, I highly recommend you subscribe to both!)

On occasion, I’ve been asked if analyzing an author’s strategies and execution ruins my enjoyment of reading. I can absolutely say it does not. It enhances it. (To be fair, early on, sometimes the distance between my prose and the prose I was reading bummed me out. For anyone who is in that situation, Ira Glass of This American Life, has an inspiring monologue for you.)

In this same vein, Francine Prose, in the encyclopedic Reading Like a Writer, has a chapter titled “Reading for Courage.” She speaks specifically about channeling the strength of writers who you respect, knowing that they inevitably went through the same doubts and fears to get to the book or movie or show that you are liking and admiring.

One of the great joys in reading a physical book is the heft of what’s behind and what’s ahead of you, more action, more revelation, more heartache or redemption. On TV, I have to pause to test my assumptions and see how far we are into a narrative. And while I try not to yell at the TV when some dumb narrative move happens, I am prepared to give Audible/Amazon a piece of my mind given the fact that you can’t easily see how far you are in an audiobook.

But I’ll save that rant for another day.