Finch and Black Hawk Down: Translating Technique from Movies to Fiction

(What does a scene in the movie Black Hawk Down have to do with fiction? Read on below…)

In a general way, TV and movies have often had a terrible influence on fiction, in that some writers substitute received experience and received ideas from mass media for their own personal vision–some even think the structure of most TV shows is perfectly suitable, untranslated, for novels and stories. A lot of this material, reading like scripts or in other ways underwhelming, appears on editor...