David Cerreta <72630.3433@compuserve.com> asks:
> How you get to those milestones is dependent on who you have to
> play with at the time, true or no? Do you look with anticipation
> these unexpected opportunities? Do they make your work more
> exciting because it keeps you on your toes? But I wonder if you've
> experienced the same thing you've experienced in writing your
> novels, that is new characters ask to be born, others ask to die
> and others ask to have their fates changed? I assume that is the
> case with adding Sheridan and killing off Kosh, but was that the
> case with Marcus? Was he planned all along?
> Did Lyta's appearances in Season 3 and Patricia's availability
> make Lyta's character *demand* more time? Finally, has it ever
> gotten to the point where you literally have to rein in your
> characters before they make a shambles of your carefully designed
> and laid-out plot?

Actually, the progression of the B5 story has been almost
exactly the same as the way I write my novels. I start off knowing
where the story has to go, what benchmarks I need to hit en route to
the end, what my repertory group of characters consists of, and then I
start writing.

As someone said of a battle, an outline never survives contact
with the enemy, which in this case is the actual writing. The outline,
for me, is a safety net whose purpose is to keep me nominally on track
while allowing me the freedom to bounce around the landscape, adding
new threads, broadening out the storylines, fleshing out the
characters, and reorganizing how the characters move in and out of the
story. That makes the work organic. I still end up exactly where I
wanted to end up, but the road there is much more interesting than if
I'd just hewed to a very rigid structure.

It's like driving from LA to San Diego...you can just jump on
the freeway, or knowing the freeway is there, jump off from time to
time to grab lunch at Pea Soup Anderson's or a quick ride or two at
Disneyland.

And yeah, sometimes I have to work to keep the characters in
line. Londo's the worst. He's always going off and pulling me in one
direction or the other, he's very peripatetic...and getting him talking
for dialogue is never hard...getting him to shut the hell UP for two
minutes so somebody else can get a word in, tha's hard.

Writing is a very schizophrenic business.

jms