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- <TITLE>JMS: Arc a Fake? (10-May-96 14:01:14)</TITLE>
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- <H2>JMS: Arc a Fake?</H2>
- <h3>Date: 10-May-96 14:01:14</h3>
- <pre> Laurence Moroney <100546.50@compuserve.com> asks:
- > What I cannot help but come up with is, magnificence of the
- > series and storytelling aside, are we being had? Have we been
- > subject to sales banter and are still expecting to see what we
- > expected? Have we been distracted from our original impressions by
- > the sheer brilliance of the show? (i) How come Ironheart who 'knew
- > everything' didn't see the fake personality? (ii) We saw
- > interaction between Kosh and her in (was it?) 'Deathwalker' which
- > resulted in Kosh recording something of her - what ever happened
- > to that?
-
- It's a fair question. I'm going to try and deal with it as
- best I can. The problem, first and foremost, is trying to explain the
- craft of writing to someone who isn't a writer. This isn't intended as
- a slight; if a brain surgeon tried to explain his work to me, I'd be
- about as much in the dark. I have no idea where music comes from; I
- can sit with Chris Franke for hours, trying to understand that process.
- I never will. I'm not hardwired that way. I *am* hardwired for
- writing. So it's not a judgment, just a minor truth.
-
- The creative process is fluid. Has to be. Consider for a
- moment the position in which I find myself. Let's say I'm writing a
- novel. I start with a fairly clear notion of where I'm going. Six
- chapters in, I get a better way of doing something, so I go back and
- revise chapters 1-5, so it now all fits; you never see what went
- before. Now, compare that to a situation where you're publishing each
- chapter as you go, and you can't go back and change anything. (This is
- pretty much the situation Dickens found himself in, as he published his
- works chapter by chapter; you can never back up, only go forward.)
-
- At the same time, because we're using actors who have real
- lives of their own, to whom things happen -- broken limbs, health
- problems that may preclude appearing in a given episode, sudden career
- changes, you name it -- you have real-life obstacles constantly in your
- way.
-
- The closest thing I can compare this to...is if you're on
- stage, in front of a large audience, and you have to do a very
- elaborate dance...and all the while people are throwing bowling balls
- and chainsaws at you. You either learn how to accommodate all that,
- and keep pretty much on rhythm, or you're dead.
-
- This show was originally conceived in 1986/87. About 10 years
- ago. Back then, all TV episodic stuff was done pretty much from one
- person's point of view, your nominal hero. Yes, you'd occasionally
- dive outside that for a quick scene with other characters, usually to
- set up something, but for the most part, it was about that one person.
- In MURDER, SHE WROTE, Jessica Fletcher was always at the heart of every
- episode; you had the occasional guest character with whom she'd
- interact, and the recurring supporting cast, but none of them ever
- changed, and none of them ever really took center stage for more than a
- few minutes at a time. That's how TV has been done up until now.
-
- Novels, on the other hand, are often omniscient in narrative
- structure, and you blip in and out of multiple points of view. THE
- STAND, for instance.
-
- Now, I've done both; I've written novels and I've written TV.
- When it came time to pull together B5 initially, you go into the "okay,
- who is the TV point of view character" question. Which was Londo's
- narration, and which was the way I'd learned to write TV all these
- years. Once the series got going, it quickly became apparent that I'd
- have to learn a whole new way of writing TV that was a lot more like
- what I'd been writing in my novels, which were multi-POV huge stories.
- It's a kind of writing that's never really been done before for
- American TV; and I had to somewhat invent that style or form of writing
- as I went, in front of millions of viewers.
-
- You can't prepare for something like this, as much as you try,
- because it's never been done before.
-
- (On reflection, probably the closest thing to what I've been
- doing here was the miniseries The Winds of War, in terms of the
- multiple viewpoints involved.)
-
- Also, in the last 10 years, I've become a better writer,
- learned more about my craft, added more tools to my toolbox. That
- means being able to perceive better ways of doing things now than I
- could've seen before.
-
- So here we are. I sit at my word processor with my notes from
- 1986, and I see a better way of doing something from those notes...do I
- go with what's there, or do I strike off and do the better approach,
- PROVIDED that it still takes me where I want to go in the arc? To
- ignore it is to be inflexible.
-
- I've stayed fluid. It's the same way I write a novel. You're
- just seeing the *process* acted out right in front of you, a process
- which normally the public never gets to see. That, I think, is some
- part of what you're reacting to.
-
- Also, you have to be careful in how you define an arc. There
- have been definite arcs of character all through this. Look at Londo
- when we first met him...and look at him now. Same for G'Kar, Delenn,
- Franklin... look at Sheridan when he first arrived: happy go lucky,
- smiling, glad to be there, fresh fruit and a hot shower, able to take
- care of anything and everything, how bad can it be?...and look at the
- dark, haunted, almost overwhelmed figure we see now.
-
- The story has also arc'd, peeling off layer by layer. The
- Minbari war leads to the secret of the Grey Council, which leads back
- to the first shadow war, which leads to the current shadow war, each
- really on a direct line one from the other. The slow corruption of
- Earthgov, the death of President Santiago, the rise of Clark, the fall
- from Earth...all of it a very definite arc.
-
- It's not just a matter of "living in interesting times." What
- makes a story is *causality*. A sequence of linked events. "The king
- died, and then the queen died" is not a story. "The king died, and
- then the queen died of grief" is a story. It is an arc, however small.
-
- Finally, I'd just note the posts -- public and private -- from
- folks who have sat down and watched the *whole show* as a unit, once
- per day, or several per day...and the linked aspect, the real *arc* of
- the show, becomes far more apparent when watched that way right now.
- It's there.
-
- jms
-
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