I don’t read a whole lot out­side of genre. That’s prob­ably not a great idea, but what can I say? My To-Be-Read stack is taller than I am, and con­tains a number of man­u­scripts by friends and col­leagues, as well as a fair number of books I am excited about by authors I don’t know. Add to that my being in the for­tu­nate posi­tion of being occa­sion­ally asked to read a man­u­script for a blurb, and there just isn’t a whole lot of time to get around to that  mono­graph on the mating habits of the knobbed whelk.

But I do watch TV.

I’m a firm believer that pro­ducers of media had damn well better be con­sumers of it. Nothing in = nothing out. Garbage in = garbage out. TV is a quick way (with dis­crete bound­aries) to make sure I’m get­ting sto­ries in my head, get­ting to see the output of other writers (TV shows are written, ya know).

Lately, I’ve been fol­lowing a few shows. Game of Thrones goes without saying (and hardly counts, I sup­pose, since it’s in genre). I’ve been watching Modern Family and Mad Men among others, and they are fan­tastic. Grip­ping. They have all the trans­portive and res­o­nant effect I look for in my favorite stories.

And they’re pretty much plotless.

I’m not kid­ding. Nothing hap­pens. Mad Men is about the staff of a Maidson Avenue adver­tising firm in the 60’s and their fam­i­lies. Modern Family is about three branches of an extended family that are … um … modern.

Each char­acter is fully real­ized, com­pli­cated, quirky, lov­able. Each char­acter acts in their own inter­ests, which inevitably brings them into con­flict with the char­ac­ters around them, who act in turn, and wack­i­ness ensues.

And I’m not kid­ding. Nothing happens.

Case in point: In one of my favorite Mad Men episodes, the pro­tag­o­nist decides to sur­prise his wife with a weekend get­away. They go away for the weekend, get into a fight. He storms off, comes back to find she’s gone. He searches for her fran­ti­cally, then finally gives up and goes home to find she’s there. They fight some more. The end.

In one of my favorite Modern Family episodes, A husband/father’s wife and daugh­ters all go on the same men­strual cycle and become emo­tion­ally charged at once, over­whelming him and his young son. Mean­while, a man con­nives to prove that he didn’t lose his tup­per­ware dish, it was actu­ally hidden in a family member’s cabinet.

See? Plot­less. Nothing hap­pens. And it’s fantastic.

I just watched the first episode of Hat­fields and McCoys tonight. Now, that may be based on a his­tor­ical episode, but the fact remains that what little plot there is is a product of well real­ized char­ac­ters who are set­ting goals, moving toward them and coming in con­flict with one another.

Now you have less of this in science-fiction and fan­tasy. By its very nature, SF/F is more “plotty,” as the spec­u­la­tive ele­ments nor­mally accrue to the set­ting or world out­side the char­ac­ters (the Others in A Song of Ice and Fire. The Chan­drian in the Kingkiller Chron­i­cles, the magic at the core of the earth in The Demon Cycle). But I still think the very best SF/F, the sto­ries that truly take me away from myself, are the more char­acter heavy. A Song of Ice and Fire isn’t the block­buster it is because Wes­t­eros is such a unique  dream­scape. Martin isn’t doing a whole hell of a lot we haven’t seen before. We love it because we are crazy for Tyrion, or we want to watch Jof­frey pay for his crimes, or we want to know if Robb will ever avenge his family and throw down the Lan­nis­ters. We’re hooked on the the Lies of Locke Lamora not because Lynch has done some­thing par­tic­u­larly spe­cial with the magic or the set­ting (it’s 16th C. Venice, basi­cally), but because Locke really is a gen­tleman bas­tard, and that con­tra­dic­tion is so deli­cious to watch that we can’t wait to see what hap­pens to him next.

People are pack ani­mals at the root of it. We’re social, tribal. We’re fas­ci­nated by one another. I’ve said this in many inter­views: All sto­ries are, ulti­mately, about people. Richard Adams’ Water­ship Down? It was about rab­bits … that were people. Kirkman’s The Walking Dead? The zom­bies are back­ground noise for a story about people.

Every time I think of a great piece of film, tele­vi­sion or lit­er­a­ture, I always come down to the same thing: I loved it not because of the amazing plot, the fab­u­lous con­ceit, the incred­ible prose. All of those things are sizzle. The steak is the char­ac­ters and always will be. It’s why romantic comedy and sit­u­a­tion comedy are so impres­sive to me. Face­less ter­ror­ists hiding a bomb in a public building is a plot device that can drive char­ac­ters to do cool things. A malev­o­lent dark lord who is locked away behind a mag­ical bar­rier can have a sim­ilar effect. But a lot of the best tele­vi­sion has none of those things. It is simply people with agendas rub­bing up against one another.

It is a thing I hold close as I write my third novel under con­tract and pitch new ones. If I’m ever going to be good at this job, my char­ac­ters are going to have to seri­ously sing.