I've been watching a variety of TV shows and movies, lately, mostly as an escape from my inbox. (I have a bad case of students. I'm told they'll clear up by themselves with time, but recurrance is likely), and I'm not sure whether it's my writer-brain evolving or just the steady exposure to episode after episode, but the structure of the story has become inescapably transparent to me. So much so that as I'm watching, I can hear the inner-editor calling out the beats to come.

It's most obvious with movies and television, I find, because the medium requires the stories to be distilled down to their essentials. Shifting a story on screen takes a lot of screen time, and complexity or nuance increases that time exponentially, so the bones of the story are that much more evident.

I'll admit, I'm not enjoying movies and TV shows like I used to. There's still the curiosity of how they're going to achieve those beats - no, she still has to be alive, so somehow there's a twist here, to - ahh, there it is - but the arc of the story itself doesn't have the same immersion when you know what's coming.

I felt this way several years ago with books, when I first started learning the story craft, and I realise that writers foreshadowed things, and endings were apparent from beginnings, etc. It was a lesser version of this - less detailed, less fine-grained. It faded for me, after a while - the knowledge of the structure no longer got in the way, it was just part of what I was gleaning from the book. Hopefully this will, too, when my inner-editor stops being so damned proud of itself.

I wonder if there's a third stage, where I glance at a movie-poster and, Jedi-like, predict the entire synopsis. That could certainly save me time as a film critic.