Deadwood and the New Novel

January 21, 2007

Turns out my brother might have been right about Deadwood.

This weekend I picked up Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills written by the series creator, David Milch. I’ve only read the first couple of pages, but it seems to be a book all about the making of said series. It should be known that I absolutely loved this series and found the characters and writing in it nothing short of astounding.

As I mentioned in that previous post, my screenwriter brother Andrew suggested that episodic TV (the kind you find on HBO - Big Love, Rome, Sopranos, and Deadwood) was the new novel. David Milch agrees:

The number of characters in Deadwood does not frighten me. The serial form of the nineteenth-century novel is close to what I’m doing. The writers who are alive to me, whom I consider my contemporaries, are writers who lived in another time – Dickens and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Twain.

Again, I’ve only read the first couple of pages, but it was so inspiring I just had to let someone else know about it. After the first couple of paragraphs all I could think about was, “Why the Hell aren’t you writing?!”

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