In all seriousness, thank you so much for your motivational posts. NaNo, here I come!

Knowing the basic four-act structure of an hourlong TV drama (I learned all about it from watching Quinn Martin shows) helps me to know when to watch for new information, possibly something I know nothing about. I’ve learned a lot about surveillance and interrogation techniques, methods prosecutors and defense attorneys use to construct or deconstruct a case, and all kinds of jams protagonists are put into and how they get out of them (The Man from UNCLE and Mission: Impossible are great for that). It isn’t as though I can’t get the same thing by reading a book, but with TV shows and movies I can feel and see when something’s coming. And seeing something on the screen helps me put the action into words and gives me a sense of how long it takes and how it should be paced. That’s as valuable as any of the new knowledge I can gain from the show. When you’re pantsing your way thru a 50,000-word story, you know that when you get to around 12,000 that you need to make something happen to take you from the first act into the second.