Nathan Fillion vs. David Tennet

The best piece of writing advice I’ve ever received is to simply embrace the writing lifestyle. Write all the time, and when you’re not writing, think about writing. Anytime you’re not writing, you are making a conscious decision to value something over writing, which is supposed to be the most important thing in your life. This advice is a bit over-the-top, but it’s effective. (I should probably thank Rachel Toor for that, but I’ll attribute it to Mur Lafferty.)

What I like about this mindset is the way it colors the world around me. Everything is either black or white, a help or a hindrance. I can draw a line down the middle of my interests into things that make me want to write, or things that are keeping me from writing. Some of these things are more obvious than others; my day job keeps me from writing, but reading The Yiddish Policemen’s Union inspires me. I don’t watch much TV anymore, but I’ve begun to categorize my favorite shows.

Doctor Who is probably my favorite TV show but it is far from encouraging. The show establishes a wide open universe when anything, on any planet, in any time, is possible. At first, I thought this expanse of possibilities help program my brain to think outside the box and really cut loose. It’s not that simple. In over forty-five years worth of episodes, TV movies, books, comics, stage plays, and radio dramas, Doctor Who has managed to do just about everything imaginable at least once. After every installment I can do nothing but shrug at its inventiveness.

Castle is different. Ostensibly a mystery-comedy-slash-police-procedural (Psych meets Law and Order) with plenty of romantic tension (the parts of The X-Files I didn’t care for), this show becomes truly enjoyable for me when Nathan Fillion corrects drug dealers’ grammar. At the end of each episode, Richard Castle has solved a crime and returns home to crank out another few hundred words of the next Nikki Heat novel. While I doubt I would enjoy the schlocky detective books Fillion’s character writes, and while I don’t always care for the writing on the show itself, watching someone sit down to practice their craft seems to remind me to do the same.