What Channel Surfing Has Taught Me About Writing

I'm not a channel surfer--if there's a show I want to watch, I watch it--but Honey Bear is, and I've started to notice a pattern. Sometimes he stops because he knows the show, but sometimes he stops because the scene simply refuses to be ignored. The conflict is easy to grab hold of, and it's interesting enough that he wants to see what happens. Heck, I want to see what happens, and I'm not usually paying attention.

In other words, the best scenes are the ones that don't require you to know wh...