Television dramas such as The Teenage Psychic (通靈少女) and A Boy Named Flora A (花甲男孩轉大人) have recently garnered high ratings while attracting attention and sparking discussion in society.
A Boy Named Flora A was adapted from writer Yang Fu-min’s (楊富閔) original work, and the scriptwriter brought the show to a higher level by adding vivid and vigorous everyday dialog to it.
STORY CREATION
If the nation wants to build a healthy movie culture, it is crucial to first build a sound “story industry value chain” with the upstream sector focusing on story creation, interesting and touching fiction and comic books.
Japan, for example, has a highly developed story industry value chain, and the scripts for most of its high-quality films or animations come from fiction and comic books in the upstream sector. Since such works have stood the test of the market, the chance that they will be made into hit movies or animations is quite high.
Unfortunately, there have been several factors in the Taiwanese climate that have been unfavorable to the development of fiction. On the one hand, higher education does not directly encourage literature creation, while on the other hand, the nation’s literature market has been shrinking rapidly.
VICIOUS CYCLE
Since it is difficult to publish local fiction, some publishers prefer to spend money on the publication of translated fiction and rarely invest in the publication of local works.
With an overall environment unfavorable to the development of the literary market, it is difficult to increase the output of fiction — this leads to a vicious cycle.
The Forward-looking Infrastructure Development Program, which has been widely debated, focuses on hardware. Important cultural and creative industries, and the story industry value chain in particular, have been unable to gain state support.
NATIONAL IDENTITY
However, film and TV culture is a resource for consolidating the public’s local and national identities, confidence and strength, and fiction and comic books that are capable of touching people’s hearts and raise spiritual values are needed in the chain’s upstream.
For example, on Formosa TV, although its Taiwanese-language dramas have garnered high ratings for a long time, the dramas mostly involve struggles among siblings, between mothers and daughters-in-law, and among other characters, who often slap each other in the face or eavesdrop behind doors in illogical ways.
This is a result of the lack of good stories, because scripts are written in a hurry.
QUALITY FICTION
The public has been numbed by the content after having watched such shows for a long time.
If the next generation of movie and TV production teams want to improve the quality of locally produced dramas, they should look for quality fiction, and then construct good stories with a higher intellectual level and better literary content.
If the infrastructure program were to allocate part of its budget to improve the story industry value chain, the public would be encouraged to write better stories about Taiwan, and then to turn these stories into movies and TV dramas.
The nation would be able to improve the overall quality of its stories and use local culture to nurture Taiwanese. The resulting excitement would expand the impact to the outside world.
Chiang Wen-yu is a professor in the Graduate Institute of Linguistics at National Taiwan University.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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