The Key of Imagination
Lessons in writing from the Twilight Zone
“You unlock this door with the key of imagination”
A Lesson from The Twilight Zone
“You Open this Door with the Key of Imagination”
I’ve been streaming the original Twilight Zone series. Before Star Trek, Star Wars, Supernatural, The X Files, or American Horror Story, Rod Serling took a very small budget and created classic episodes that still resonate today. In fact, I was reading that a recent big-budget movie release was inspired by a Twilight Zone episode. I just forget the name of the movie right now.
If you watch these episodes, the special effects were crude by today’s standards. In many ways, they were crude by 1959 standards. However, you will also notice that most episodes use few if any special effects.
So, what makes these shows with low budgets and minimal special effects so enduring. I think it boils down to three elements: Character Focused Stories, Universal Themes, and Imaginative Premises.
A Focus on Character
Much of current science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories today depend on the action to move the story ahead. The character is chased by zombies. The space ships are firing lasers, phasers, or photon torpedoes at each other. The captain is braver, smarter, and more competent than ordinary people. Indeed, you find few ordinary people in much of the science fiction and fantasy worlds today.
This is not an old is good and new is bad type of argument. I love a good space battle as much as anyone else. And yes, I want to see three plucky hobbits take on an army of orcs. I love the amazing special effects we have available today. And many of those movies and TV shows also had and have relatable, complex characters.
What I am talking about is specific to shows like Playhouse 90, Armstrong Circle Theater, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits, and, of course, The Twilight Zone. These shows had limited budgets, limited prestige, often considered “low-brow” entertainment. Pulp fiction for TV.
Yet, those shows are now considered classics while many of the better funded programs fell by the wayside. Their lack of budget forced them to look at the essentials of storytelling. They could not depend on special effects, big stunts, or amazing sets to hold the audience’s attention. One of those elements was creating strong, complex, and relatable characters.
One of the classics is called The Monsters on Maple Street. A power failure happens in a neighborhood. A boy tells about a comic book story about aliens invading in a suburb by pretending to be neighbors. Then one of the neighbor’s lights go on, but all the others are dark. Small things keep leading people to suspect each other ending in murder. The final scene shows two aliens manipulating the power while everyone runs wild below. It was the prelude to an invasion, but the “monsters” were the residents themselves.
A powerful story driven by the characters. Whatever the genre, characters drive the story.
Universal Themes
Great art touches on the universal. The themes that resonate year after year across cultures and generations.
This is not to say they are sermons wrapped up in stories. Nothing is heavy-handed within the story. But as the story plays out, we see themes such as fear, suspicion, prejudice, love, human connection, compassion, and hope emerge. Some tales are cautionary. Others hopeful.
It got me thinking personally about my stories. The best ones. Not necessarily, the best selling ones, but those that seem to connect with my readers the most, are the ones that touch on universal themes. One of my stories is about a woman born through the process of cloning who faces institutionalized prejudice and is even ostracized by the church as being devoid of a soul. That story addresses the question of “the other” in our midst, and the struggle of a pastor who must navigate church politics and his own pride in dealing with the situation.
It's called Parmenter’s Wager. Many of the comments I’ve received from readers have indicated it touched something inside of them of times they felt isolated or marginalized.
Imaginative Premises
“You unlock this door with the key of Imagination.”
That’s the first line of the opening credits of The Twilight Zone. What a perfect expression of the writer’s process. Every day we pick up that key and unlock the door to worlds that exist inside ourselves. We open that door and invite our readers to explore those worlds with us.
The Twilight Zone stories didn’t follow trends. They were always fresh with a unique twist. The alien invasion didn’t begin with bombardment from outer space. It began with a power outage on Maple Street. The astronauts land on a planet where everyone is frozen in time only to discover it’s a cemetery. The girl working at the counter in a department store is chagrined to discover at the end of the month that she is really one of the store mannikins come to life for just a month.
Yes, one cannot find an absolutely new idea in the general sense of the word. However, you can take that idea and reimagine it. Make it different. And don’t follow trends. If I see one more teenage girl falls in love with a vampire story, I think I’ll scream. Of course, I did write a story myself of a middle-aged college professor who fell for one in a night class she taught on supernatural literature.
The theme may be universal, but the presentation must be unique.
Well, that’s all I have to say. I’m going through that door again and enter The Twilight Zone.