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

{original post unavailable}

No, you can see Pea Soup Anderson right from the freeway, going
down the 5 south.

jms

{original post unavailable}

Yes, there's also one on the SD/LA route; I wouldn't have said
so otherwise. (I know, I've eaten there.)

jms

David Cerreta <72630.3433@compuserve.com> asks:
> Do you know of any others that might take the stage as late as
> Season 5, or haven't they let themselves be known to you yet<G>?

Thanks...and yeah, it happened again. I'm writing 405, "The
Long Night," and there's something that one character was supposed to
do in the script, that had been the plan all along, that was my intent
even as near as 1 page from where it was going to happen...then just as
I got to that scene, another character stepped up and said, "no, let me
do it." I was kinda flummoxed. "You?! You're the LAST person anyone
would think to do this." The character nodded. "Exactly." And the
symmetry was perfect, the impact would be greater...so that's who did
it.

On one level, it's always wonderful when this happens; on
another, it scares the hell out of me....

It's at the bottom of act two, you'll figure it out when you get
there.

jms

{original post had no questions}

Thanks. A lot of people are looking back at season 1 and
finding it better than they remembered, now that they know the
characters. They also now see the little touches here and there
pointing forward in the storyline.

The plot-recap stuff is difficult to pull off without being
obvious; you have to slip in the backstory a line at a time, here and
there, so new viewers can follow it but without annoying the constant
viewer.

jms

Batman <104635.1044@compuserve.com> asks:
> Ever consider doing a "recap" show, ala the X-Files two "Secrets
> Of" episodes?

We suggested it to WB, and were turned down, on the grounds that
as a network, Fox can just go ahead and program what the want in those
hours, if it's a secrets-of special or something else; but PTEN isn't
really a network, it's a syndication division, and in syndication you
have to sell each item separately, so they'd have to go out and sell
that one hour special the same way they'd sell a series, and they were
loathe to do that.

jms