"What about personal demons? You said once that Sheridan's father was not
like your father. Is it something like you would have wished him to be?
And Ivanova's father, the same? If this is too personal don't answer it,
but I just wonder to what extent your personal demons have to enter into
your writing process. O, and in what forms. How far into those parts of
yourself that hurt the most do you have to look?"

Suddenly lately I'm getting all these questions that leave me staring at
the screen for minutes at a time, trying to come up with an honest answer.

(several more minutes pass...AOL is getting its $ from me tonight, that's
for sure.)

Okay, I have an answer...well, I have a *reply*, and as we all know, while
all answers are replies, not all replies are answers. This is the best I
can do.

I have this theory that there are five kinds of truth. The truth you tell
to casual strangers; the truth you tell to your friends; the truth you
tell to only a very few intimate people in your life; the truth you tell
yourself; and the truth you will not admit even to yourself.

(Note: some people have distorted this to mean you tell contradictory
things to different people; no. Just the *extent* of the truth, how deep
the blade cuts, is the operative issue.)

On reflection, the answer to this one falls into the category of the fifth
truth. There are some questions I'm just not prepared to deal with yet,
not in any specifics, anyway.

In general terms...yes, that aspect is always there, if you're writing
honestly, and telling a story that matters to you. Sometimes, that's
painful. There are some scenes this season that were very hard to write,
because of the personal stuff that went into them. The trick is to not
bleed too much onto the page so that you obscure the words, or it becomes
simply self-indulgence.

An example far enough away that I can look at it now...in the first season
(for the old timers still around), when Catherine Sakai and Jeff Sinclair
got together again for the tenth time, there were some fairly emotional
exchanges. The one where she comes to his quarters, unsure why she's
really there, starts to leave...that whole exchange is pretty much word
for word a conversation I had in real life. (There's a lot of that in the
relationship stuff in this show; it shows up here and there.) It was
something I was even then still dealing with, and worked out via the
script.

When we got ready to shoot that section, and the scene when they first
meet, the director, actors and I went off to rehearse that one privately.
I practically had to nail my feet to the stage floor to stay through it
all. Finally, when we were all comfortable that the scene felt right,
everybody headed out, and I pulled the director aside. I said, "The scene
is fine; you need to know that now so you'll understand...I won't be here
the day you shoot this stuff. I won't be anywhere *near* this set. I'm
still a little too close to this." I just couldn't be there.

So yeah, sometimes the writing gets very personal. Unfortunately, I don't
know any other way to do it.


jms