This morning, my alarm went off, and when I tried to get out of bed, I found that a microbe or allergen of some kind had once again invited several million of its closest friends to a twelve-keg blowout in my sinus cavity, with the result that said sinus cavity had swelled to the size of downtown Des Moines, rendering me nearly unable to lift my head, and after a few panicked moments of imagining myself and my swollen head as characters in a Tim Burton movie, I lurched towards the phone and called in sick.

I try to call in sick as seldom as possible – usually, once the immediate threat of having to don presentable clothes and leave the house is removed, I begin to feel better almost at once, which in turn makes me feel as if I wasted a perfectly good sick day for nothing – but when I do, I try to get the most out of it. I curl up on the couch with ratty old clothes on, order in nutritionally worthless food, read vacuous magazines, and watch soap operas. Under ordinary circumstances, I don’t watch daytime dramas, but that doesn’t pose a problem; soap writers deliberately structure the dialogue so that a person who has never watched the show before, and who in fact may not have a working knowledge of the English language, can figure out the characters’ names and the story arc in under five minutes. Take The Bold & The Beautiful as an example. Bold, as we used to call it in college when we watched it faithfully every afternoon, occupies a thirty-minute time slot, so the story lines unfold at an even more glacial pace than the average daytime drama; I might have last tuned in nearly a year ago, but only six weeks will have elapsed on Bold, and I can usually count on one of the characters to sum up everything I missed, because Ridge Forrester, a man so excruciatingly stupid that one of his umpteen wives should have had him institutionalized years ago, has to have everything explained to him in minute detail so that he can repeat it back word-for-word (“Let me get this straight – Brooke shot Thorn with a gun?”).

During today’s episode, I found myself wondering if I could get work as a soap opera writer. I don’t mean “night-time soaps,” or dramas that have devolved into soaps, either, although god knows ER could use the new blood. I mean straight daytime-drama Erica Kane territory. Not to state the obvious, but it doesn’t seem all that hard. Look at today’s episode of Bold, in which I found out that Taylor might have contracted tuberculosis. How did the writers telegraph this development? Taylor hacked a lot. Then she sat on the sofa and read a big old pamphlet with “The Facts About TB” in big old lavender letters on the back. Ah, yes, I see. How veddy clevah. What else did I learn today? Well, I learned that Thorne Forrester gave his mother sleeping pills, and they’ve made her psychotic. How did the writers inform me of this? Well, his mother wandered into Thorn’s bedroom brandishing a giant gleaming butcher knife and made a few psychotic-sounding threats, but just in case we still had doubts, Thorn wrested the knife away from his mother while observing to Brooke that “those sleeping pills I gave her – they’ve made her psychotic!” Does that sound difficult to you? I mean, I can do that, right? And not only could I do it, but I would have a blast. The form presents none of the customary constraints; fans of daytime dramas have exhibited a limitless patience with the absurdities of their favorite shows, a forbearance which exempts soap writers from obedience to principles of law or physics, not to mention the parameters of common sense. Soap-opera audiences don’t even require skillful writing, and in fact seem to prefer the outlandish, clumsily narrated, grammatically incorrect scenery-guzzling that Bold and its ilk deliver on a daily basis – to wit, Ridge’s monologue this afternoon, in which he expounded on the unfairness of our country’s health-care system and the plight of the homeless for, I kid you not, a good five minutes. Huh? I could see his point and everything, but where did that burst of political conscience come from?

If the story lines don’t need to make sense or obey reality in any way, and if individual lines of dialogue don’t have to show any relevance to the lines preceding them, much less ring true at all, writing for a soap seems like a job I could definitely handle. It seems like a job a kindergartner could definitely handle – at first. Then it becomes evident that writing for a soap opera requires a unique set of skills. A soap opera writer must have an unending supply of unusual character names, names which signify either rugged manliness (Ridge, Thorn) or satiny femininity (Macy, Allegra); last names should give some clue as to the relative wealth of the character, viz. the Quartermains on General Hospital, and a soap opera writer should learn how to write lines like, “You’ll pay for this, Strap Worthbillion – mark my words!” without dissolving into helpless giggles. In the same vein, a soap opera writer must accept the boredom and repetition inherent in using the same phrases over and over and over again. After a few months on the job, I suspect that the average daytime-drama scribe can type things like “You – you lied to me!” and “We can’t go on like this. It just isn’t fair to [insert name here],” and “I’m afraid the prognosis is not good. Your [insert relationship here] has [insert number here] months to live. I’m sorry,” and “Well, then, exactly whose baby is it?” and “I can’t live without you, [insert cheesy term of endearment here] – please, give me just one more chance!” with the speed of the wind. Soap writers probably spend a lot of time maintaining elaborate charts that tell them who married whom or had an affair with whom or slept with whom or tried to kill whom, and how long ago, and whose kids belong to what couple and which women have kids with both the father and the son in a given family, and which kid arrived on the show two years ago as a baby, recently celebrated his eighth birthday, and is now due to reappear from a stint at day camp as a hunky high-school senior who performs at the local nightclub and participates in murder cover-ups.

Other duties of a soap opera writer might tax his or her creative capabilities somewhat, like attempting to explain the inevitable resurrection of a character who died in a drawing-and-quartering incident and then had his limbs run through wood-chippers on four different continents, or coming up with yet another deadly “brain virus” that leaves its victim’s lip gloss unscathed in spite of the havoc it wreaks on her cerebellum (and that the doctor will certainly confuse with a similar but completely innocuous disease despite his seven years of medical training, thus saving the character at the last minute), or wondering as she pecks away on her word processor why the diabolical head of the fictional town’s rich family hasn’t landed a better gig in a bigger city if he works his evil ways so well, and so on and so forth. But it still sounds like a pretty sweet job to me – basically, a parody of the genre winds up sounding the same as a sincere version, so soap scenarists can satirize the form all they want without the audience knowing the difference. No matter how wild the plot convolution, no matter how overheated the dialogue, another plot on another soap will have set the precedent – and it doesn’t get any further overheated than Kimberly tearing her wig off in Melrose Place. I would love to work on a soap. To hell with my creative dignity – if I could sit around and write the dumbest damn things I could think of, and get paid for it, I’d never quit.

Share!