One problem, of course, is that your message about predestination
being a drag is that you think you know where it's going. When we first
went on the air, I saw many messages from people saying "Boy, this is
gonna get real boring, everybody's part is already laid out in order for
this to be a five-year story, Londo's the funny guy, G'Kar's the bad
guy, they're locked into their roles...."

Well, now...I think we see the flaw in that particular approach.

On the notion that "plots are less than organic," plots are by
definition not organic. Plots are artificialities which we graft onto
a sequence of events in order to give them meaning. As someone noted,
"The king died, and the queen died" is not a plot or a story; "The king
died, and the queen died of grief" IS a story, IS a plot; there is
connective tissue.

There is always a guiding hand behind the story, otherwise you'd
just have the characters sitting around and having random things happen
to them.

And not all foreshadowing is real foreshadowing; some is planted as
red herrings. Some foreshadows don't mean what you THINK they mean. I
have planted no end of turns, twists, surprises, reverses, double
reveals, backtracks, ironies and revelations all along the path.

I have always considered the Babylon 5 story to be, in essence,
future history. "Babylon 5 WAS the last of the Babylon stations. It WAS
our last, best hope for peace." Past tense. If I write a novel about
the incidents of World War II, then I'm dealing in history. The events
are set...but where the characters go is another question. You can read
all the information about how we got a thousand clues and foreshadows to
what was going to happen at Pearl Harbor...but it happened anyway. The
guiding hand of Fate...or a crucial bobble at the wrong moment? One can
look back at it now and argue both sides.

Finally, any time a writer writes a novel, the characters are all
going somewhere under the guiding hand of the author. That's what a
novel IS. Scrooge is GOING to be visited by three ghosts, and he's GOING
to reform, and that's the end of the discussion. Unless you're willing to
throw long-form novel writing out the door as an artform because it's not
appropriate that the characters should be on a specific and crafted
journey....

jms