Text 9426, 63 rader
Skriven 2006-10-14 21:20:04 av Joseph DeMartino
Ärende: Re: Compromised 4th and 5th season.
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From: "Joseph DeMartino" <jdemarti@bellsouth.net>

tomhoo wrote:

> Wow, you didn't understand my comment at all.  If you plan to tell the
> story in 5 seasons, you have to know how long your story is, how much
> fits into a single epi, and then divide. If you don't come up with 5
> years of epis, you have to rewrite.

Wow, you don't understand writing, or series television, at all.  Do
you think a novelist plots out every individual *chapter* of a book in
advance?  No.  Most of the good ones know that things will change *as
they're writing.*  So they'll know where they want to start, they'll
know what the ending is supposed to be, and they'll know some of the
key plot turns that will happen in between.  Then they start writing
and see where they end up.  By the time they're finished they may end
up with a different ending, or they may go back and rewrite the
beginning, or they may kill one character and keep one they though
they'd kill, while moving the dramatic fight from the 2nd quarter of
the book to the third.

And that's in a *book* where you have the luxury of going back and
revising  JMS was doing a TV show, in effect publishing each "chapter"
of his novel as he finished it, plus the chapters written by other
writers, and having no abiltiy to change what had gone before.  So he
needed to be even more flexible.

Basically he'd started the first and second seasons with a list of
major story points he needed to hit and roughly where in the season
they would fall.  That would mean he knew that he had may 8 key eps
whose "A" story would advance the arc in Season 1, and maybe 10 or 12
in season 2.  That left lots of "B" stories and 12 to 10 whole episodes
in each season to just explore the "B5" universe and establish the
characters and situations.  "Stand-alone" episodes as it were. By
season 3 the arc portion of the season was approaching 3/4s and with S4
it had to be 100% because when he started writing he was certain that
S4 would be the last season.  That's why he wrote every single episode
of those seasons himself.  As he's said on a number of occasions , part
of the reason he couldn't assign scripts to outside writers is that he
didn't know *until he sat down to write them* exactly what material he
was going to be able to fit into which episode.  (And he was often
surprised.  Kosh did *not* die in the episode he was supposed to die
in, but several episodes earlier.  When he got to that script JMS
reluctantly realized that it was time, and that his original plan was a
way of putting off an unpleasant task.  Cartagia was supposed to be
killed by somebody else.  When it came time the write the scene the
actual killer spoke up inside JMS's head and said, "No, let me do this.
 It will make the story better.")

That's what real writers do. They don't write out diagrams and blindly
follow them.  They don't say, "Do I have enough material for 110
episodes"?   (Does a novelist say, "Do I have enough paper for a 300
page book?"  No.  A writer faces the horror of a blank page and asks,
"Do I have enough material to write *one line*?"  If he's lucky enough
that the answer is "yes", he pushes on to the next line.  <g>)

Regards, 

Joe


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