Family, familiarity, defamiliarisation

This 'write every day' thing is tricky. Possibly I should have made the goal 'make sense every day'. Still, only short a few hundred yesterday, shall try again today.

I read a screenwriter once being surprised about how few people go to college. Everyone he knew went to college, so he kind of thought it was a majority of people, but no, still a minority even if you're measuring just the current year of school leavers. Over the whole population, a tiny minority. So what seems familiar is a very local phenomenon. To him, this explained why there's so much TV set in high school, so little in college; and why Buffy failed when it went to college. ... I'm not sure it did, but I get his point. When you want the widest possible audience to be watching your show, you want to connect with them via experiences shared by the widest possible number.

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Today I am annoyed at the fictional people.
They have feelings and people and opportunities and employment and meaningful things to do that they are in fact capable of doing
and then they just arse around for between four and forty thousand words feeling miserable because they don't just ask someone out when they like like them.

at some point the gap between my life experience and theirs stops being escapist fantasy and becomes bitter
and then I feel very foolish about it.