6/14/26
An Old Dog
This is number 147 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
YOU CAN’T TEACH an old dog new tricks. Or so they say. Perhaps that’s part of what is wrong with the world today. Old dogs have given up learning. And about the only thing we remember learning when younger is to lie down and play dead.
This, however, is not about our socio-political environment. You can apply it to that if you want. It’s really about what I’m learning in my writing.
I recently completed a YouTube tutorial on writing short drama, produced by the Short Drama Alliance. If you follow me, you know already that I’ve been watching a lot of Chinese short dramas, or duanju, lately. I found them quite addicting, even though many of the plots and even the scripts are identical. I’ve often been several episodes into a short drama when I realize the script is the same as a different one I saw with an alternate cast of actors and setting.
Then I realized that I often read half a dozen stories by the same author on SOL and it dawns on me that they are the same story with different names and settings. It’s like reading the entire Dan Brown library of works. If you don’t recognize all the characters and the plot by the second chapter, you haven’t been paying attention.
So, according to the tutorial on writing short drama, there are specific characteristics that are expected. For example, alternate names for the short drama include, micro drama, vertical drama, and feel-good drama. The latter, in fact, has the name shuangju, which is literally ‘feel good drama’ or ‘satisfying drama.’
Going back to my roots, I’d just finished writing the Nathan Everett mystery For Money or Mayhem and found it extremely depressing. Life added to my depression, and to get myself snapped out of it, I decided to write a story with a happy ending. That’s a basic premise of romance in general, and what could have a happier ending than erotica?
Or as a Tantric Massage ‘therapist’ once told me, “You can have a happy beginning, middle, and ending, if you’d like.”
My first attempt at writing an erotic novel was The Art and Science of Love (ASL). The 2012 version was rewritten and expanded in 2020 and released as a Signature Edition paperback in 2025. And it was definitely a feel-good novel. The hero, an artist, made all his models feel good as well. When I reworked it, I realized that each chapter was a full satisfying drama. So, perhaps I’ve been toying with short drama for a long time.
The Art and Science of Love by Devon Layne is available as an eBook from ZBookStore, and in Signature Edition paperback from my Ingram Spark bookstore.
ASL was very successful and highly rated. I didn’t learn my lesson well, though, as my second story did not fare as well. I forgot the happy ending!
According to the short drama tutorial, that is a common mistake with American short dramas. Instructor Wenwen Han cited the short “Luigi” as an example. First, the subject matter is too close to real problems of healthcare and insurance that many Americans face. Second, it doesn’t have a feel-good ending. Fundamentally, the hero is a murderer. And while the film garnered critical fame, it fell far short in terms of popularity.
In the instruction course, it was stressed that there has to be a sense of justice. Crime and evil must be punished. That’s what makes people feel good. The hero must be heroic.
There are technical restrictions of the medium, even though it is a natural outgrowth of the web novel or serial. The short drama is typically viewed on a smart phone in short bursts. So, episodes are usually between two and five minutes and the average short drama has about 65 episodes. While reading a novel is an immersive experience and people often sit down to read undisturbed for an hour or even all night, the short drama is made to be consumed in small chunks, often in a distracting environment, like on the subway or bus, or during lunch, or on the toilet.
Compared to my online serials, I’m known for being rather verbose. My Living Next Door to Heaven books are 150,000-300,000 words in length. My more recent novel, Forever Yours, is well over 400,000 words. And that works fairly well, but the stories tend to be quite complex with a cast of thousands. The action often stretches over several years. In the Photo Finish series, for example, the first book begins in 1966 and the last book ends in 1976.
By contrast, the plots of short dramas tend to be more compact with far fewer characters, often readily identifiable as to their role. It is wrapped up in a fairly short period of time—at most a few months. There are no subplots (or relatively few). The hero acts nobly—even when it is a rebirth story in which the character who is a victim in a past life is resurrected as the villain to take revenge on the one who was a hero before.
Finally (for now), it is not enough for the story as a whole to have a happy ending, but each episode needs to feel good. At the end of the episode a hero appears who can change the expected outcome, or a discovery is made that will change the hero’s destiny.
I started putting what I learned from short dramas into practice with my upcoming web novel, Just My Luck! Fewer characters with readily identified roles. Chapters that have hope and a hook that keeps people reading. The second book that I’ve begun sharing with my Sausage Grinder Patrons as a work in progress is called Sky & Co. The plot in the second one is more direct with fewer diversions to other viewpoints than Just My Luck! It also has somewhat shorter chapters or episodes. I worked on making episodes that take less than 20 minutes to read aloud in the current story. The previous chapters took between 25-30 minutes to read aloud.
In the third story that I’ve begun working on, I’m focused on episodes that take five minutes or less to read aloud. That’s only about 650 words. That story is called Code Kitty and will begin posting for Sausage Grinder patrons in a couple of weeks, as soon as I’ve gotten the system down. Since those episodes are too short for the readers of web novels or serials, I’ll need to figure out how to prepare them for online readers.
Am I planning to write all my future stories as short dramas? No, not at all. But these three stories are teaching me to focus my plots and keep the story feeling good.
They are, I hope, proof that this old dog can learn a few new tricks.
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
