Why Watching CSI Will Make You a Better Writer

Have you ever wondered why crime dramas are the television genre that will never die? Law & Order ran for a staggering 20 seasons, and SVU is still pumping out episodes. The CSI: Crime Scene franchise includes five main series, 39 total seasons, 838 episodes across all the shows, and millions of viewers. The format works. 

The popularity of these shows has much less to do with original content than it does with a satisfying form. The key to their successful structure? Motive. I don’t mean what motivates a person to commit a crime, but rather, the motive that sustains the episode’s plot. Viewers are provided an initial premise, but there must be a shift that invites a deeper exploration: there’s a complication or contradiction; a seemingly insignificant detail that reveals something larger; the prevailing assumption doesn’t hold against particular evidence; a missing data point. 

You might already be asking: so what does all this have to do with writing? 

I’m not suggesting that simply watching CSI will make you a better writer, but there’s something worth examining about the show’s key elements that closely parallels an effective writing process. 

Walk with me. 

You begin with evidence. A question emerges. You launch an investigation. You start forming a possible theory and ask whether there’s something worth pursuing here. You collect more data. You talk to people. You encounter conflicting evidence. You rework the problem. You reach an aha moment. 

This could be a description of another episode of investigators discovering that an accidental death was really a homicide, or someone researching the effects of erosion on soil productivity. But more than just a cutesy comparison, I think there’s something of deeper value here that writers can use to understand motive. 

Motive is one of the hardest things for writers to bring into relief. When we write about something we care about, we come to see it as inherently interesting. Or when we’re writing and reading within a specific subfield, we assume buy-in from an audience. Or maybe we see the argument we’re making about the subject as especially compelling, clever, or original. But neither our personal investment nor our thesis are the same as motive. We have to ask, just as the writers of these popular shows ask themselves all the time, how do we keep people interested? Why should someone care about this story? 

The burden for writers is to illustrate to readers the puzzle, the mystery, the contradiction, an overlooked or surprising detail, a shift in thinking or understanding that propels the narrative forward. Writers need to foreground the why of their exploration (not just what they explore and how). The secret to popular podcasts such as NPR’s Radiolab and Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History is not the topic per se or arguments made about them; it’s motive. As you listen to or watch these programs, pay close attention to the format and see if you can identify the motive that draws the audience in. Just as in writing, you might not fully grasp the motive until you reach the end, take a step back, and reconsider the bigger picture.