Thanks. I will confess I go back and forth about getting into this kind of conversation on the nets; either way, it will have an effect on how people perceive the show. And, basically, I'm here to talk about the show, and be responsive to questions, not necessarily to put my beliefs, attitudes or prejudices out there in other people's faces. I'm not what matters here, I'm not terribly interesting...it's the show, and those two can't ever be allowed to get confused. I was kicking myself for days for allowing myself to get dragged into this (and it's nobody's fault but my own that it happened). It's not really my place to go around lecturing anyone or spouting off to anyone about what they believe, and a few times, when the debate got really warmed up, I did that.

What I do or don't believe is fundamentally irrelevant to the discussion, as long as I can keep it out of the show. (The one area where it does get through that you note -- the importance of life and the right to choose one's own road through that -- is there, granted, but there aren't a whole lot of reasonable counter-arguments to that one.)

Because I make this show, I have -- for lack of a better phrase -- a platform from which to spout off. People tend to at least note what I say, even though most of it is rather silly, though I don't for a second buy into the notion that people are overmuch influenced by anything I say here. Particularly those on-line, who tend to be a fairly hardy bunch, intellectually speaking. But there's still an obligation not to misuse or abuse that platform, or take advantage of it to spout notions that don't really touch the show per se at any two contiguous points.

In short...sometimes I say more than I should, and should learn to just Shut Up once in a while. If this time out the discussion has done some good, then that's great. But I still think some days I shouldn't have allowed it to happen. If somebody wants to take a pot shot at my beliefs, let 'em. It's only pixels.

jms

That's the hard part, the doing. Lots of folks have ideas, but they flit, or they don't have the discipline to sit down behind a keyboard and just *do it* for the requisite number of hours per day. And that's the one thing neither I nor anyone else can help or advise with. It's what Marcus said: patience, determination, direction and strength.

And to quote somebody else, sometimes some people mistake a passion for reading for a desire to write. They're wholly different impulses.

Writers write. It's what they do. If you're struggling to do it, maybe it's part of your brain throwing roadblocks in front of you to try and tell you something. Maybe it's a lack of discipline, or attention span, or something deeper, a concern about finishing, or some other area.

I dunno...this is one area where I can't advise worth a damn, because I've never had this problem. It's Heinlein's (and Ellison's) rules of writing: you must write, you must finish what you write, you must put it on the marketplace, and you must keep it on the marketplace until sold. Sometimes we get caught by the *idea* of a story, but to actually finish writing it, the *execution* of that idea, takes a great deal of work, and if the basic idea is already down there, the impetus to write it, the steam feeding the machine, evaporates quickly. Only a conscious decision to finish the damned thing can carry you the rest of the way, a commitment to follow through on the craft of the STORYTELLING.

It's the difference between two kinds of people who talk about how they met their respective spouses. One says "at a party," the other says, "at Bob's part in Toluca Lake, and she was wearing a red dress, and I couldn't take my eyes off her until I got her alone for a minute." Idea vs. execution, telling the idea vs. telling the *story*.

jms

Hmm...that's a tough question, and one I've never gotten before. (And those are hard to come by, lemme tell you.)

If I'd gone right into the series in 1986, what would've been different in the writing and the show in general...hmmm.....

Given my notes of the time, I think it probably would've been more from Sinclair's point of view. The characters would've likely been more defined in terms of their relationship with Sinclair, as opposed to seeing their lives out on their own, without that defining *context*. That's probably the single biggest creative difference. I don't know if I could've given it the depth of characterization or sub-plots that I feel I can do now. Certainly, the time spent on Murder, She Wrote taught me a *lot* about setting up clues, foreshadowing, construction, and playing fair with an audience, experience I didn't have in 1986.

On the other side, you've got the reality that CGI wasn't available then, and it'd all have to be done with models. It would've been *very* difficult to do all we've done now with CGI, using models; I think you'd have to cut way back on the scale of the thing. It's very doubtful we could've done the Narn homeworld bombing from "Twilight," or the rescue in "Fall." I'd've had to come up with some other way to do that.

Basically, I think the show would've still presented an arc, still would've been ambitious for its time, but I don't think it would've been *as good* as it is now. In a way, though the long wait was frustrating, it put us in the right place at the right time to do this show the way it needs to be done, both creatively and physically, from a production standpoint.

On the other hand, one can probably make a good argument that if the show were done in the year 1999 instead of 1996, with even 3 years more advancement in CGI and EFX, and 3 more years of writing experience, it might be even better then than now. Who knows? All I know for sure is that the show being done now, is the show I want to do, the way I want to do it, and I'm very comfortable with that.

jms

"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

"Mr. Straczynski, what is most important in your life, why do you consider it important, what are you willing and unwilling to sacrifice to attain and/or maintain that which you consider most important, and how has this affected your writing (including BABYLON 5) and life in general?"

Yeesh....

Okay, in something resembling the order asked:

The work. The writing. It's the only thing I'm worth a damn at doing.

I'm willing to sacrifice anything that is of myself specifically, and unwilling to make anybody else pay that price. I won't walk over somebody else to take a job, and I won't compromise on my standards or (if I can use this word) the art involved. I won't sacrifice control or quality for security; I've walked off half a dozen jobs on principle in the last ten years or so. I don't hold that up in search of applause; it's not something that served me well, it made my life harder, it was probably financially and career-wise stupid...but it's how I'm hardwired. I don't have much choice.

To the "of myself" part...best example: when I was working to break in as a writer, I didn't earn a lot of money, never more than about $3,000 a year IF that much, and it was often close to my sole source of income at times. Very often I had to choose between food and writing supplies. I chose the latter every time. I got by on beef jerky and Mountain Dew for days at a time. At one point I dropped down to about 150 pounds, even at my current height of almost 6'5". I looked like a refugee from Dachau. (A photo of me at this time got printed as an illustration for my colulmn in Writer's Digest a year or two ago...very bad.)

The writing was all that mattered. The work is all that has *ever* mattered. And if that meant getting by on beef jerky, and not going out, and dropping every dime on typewriter ribbons and Liquid Paper and stationery and postage, then that's what was done. In retrospect, it was stupid...I was of the mindset of, "Either I'll make it, or I'll crash and burn," but I didn't know any other way. And I'd probably do it again.

How it's affected my life...some you've just read above. I'm a very hard person to get to know. I'm constantly working stuff through for the current script, the next story, the new book. In an interview with Richard Biggs published in a UK magazine, he commented that whenever he sees me, at lunch, I'm off by myself, "a million miles away. I don't know where he is, but it's nowhere near reality."

I'm a perfectionist, I won't settle for less than absolute 100% effort, and thus tend not to accept less in others. Consequently, I'm a pain in the ass. I don't have a lot of friends, mainly because I don't have time for much outside the work. I'll meet someone, we'll get along, in will come an invitation to a dinner party, I'll have deadlines, or meetings, or revisions to do, and I won't go or I'll just forget (I have a 64K brain in a 3gigabyte profession), and after you do this enough times...the invitations understandably stop coming. When I'm caught in the white-heat of a project, everything else goes by the boards. Finding the right words, the _mot just_ is extremely difficult, and if I'm on a roll, and it's finally coming, and I get interrupted...I can get cranky.

My life is my work, my work is my writing, and my writing is my life. That reads as awfully indulgent and pretentious, and maybe it is. But as Henry Kissinger once noted, "it has the added benefit of being true." If the universe said, tomorrow, "You can't write anymore," there'd be a pause, then a puff of purple smoke...and I'd disappear.

jms

Without giving anything spoilerish away....

When I wrote the script, I wanted there to be a snow globe not because of any allusion to Citizen Kane, which really hadn't occured to me, but because I knew I wanted something to smash, to shatter, to visually convey the emotional content of something that just happened. A snow globe not only breaks, shatters, it splashes...nicely visual.

When time came to prep that episode, the art department went around and tried to find a good snowglobe. They brought back, I think, 3 different ones we could use. Of the three, the lighthouse one seemed the most appropriate given what was going on in the story. I file this one under ABA, Art By Accident. (This is the one area academics never get into, because it's totally random, not easily reductible...a nasty little X-factor in their literary equations.)

For me, the interpretation part of the viewing experience is a synthesis of what happens on either side of the screen. There is the author's intent on the one side, and what the viewer perceives or responds to on the other; art is what happens in the space between those two. For instance, an artist can say, "The ball is blue." That is a simple declarative sentence, theoretically accurate about the ball in his hand. The viewer sees it, and if all conditions permit agreement -- a good TV, not color blind -- says yes, the ball is blue.

The author's intention is absolutely clear, the interpretation either non-existent or in simple agreement of fact (whichever way you want to phrase that)...but is it art? Does it *resonate* or simply *inform*? A news item about 17,000 more homeless people in a given city this week *informs*. An interview with a homless mother, her child beside her, crying...*resonates*.

The key is to communicate your statement as clearly as possible; you must know what you intend to say, and to a large extent judge your success or failure on the degree to which the audience correctly perceives your intent. But to do so in an artful fashion. To somehow tie emotionally in with the viewer, so that it causes a sympathetic vibration, the way a tuning fork can make a champagne glass vibrate at a similar frequency. The viewer should feel what YOU felt when you wrote it.

This is why I tend to gauge if my script works by whether or not it affects me; if it makes me laugh out loud, I'm reasonably sure it's funny. If I start to mist up at a scene, then it's probably going to do so to others. It's the only yardstick I've got.

(On the other hand, there will *always* be some who just Don't Get It. There are some who look at certain kinds of modern art and just weep for the beauty of it. I see a triangle and a ball and a black smear, shrug and move on. You just have to hope that you're sufficiently In Tune to get the majority of people who are exposed to your work. As another writer once said, "A book is like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can't exactly expect an apostle to peer out.")

Someone else once said, of art, "To define is to kill, to suggest is to create." That part, the suggestion, the interpretation, is the place where art happens.

jms

I have known writers who feel that their work, their scripts, have been fouled up by somebody rewriting them. And it happens. What power do you have? None, really, if you're a freelancer. They can do whatever they want to the script. The only recourse if you REALLY hate what they did is to put on a pseudonym so nobody ever knows it was you.

I've been very lucky in that I'm generally very careful about who I work for, I check them out thoroughly, and make it clear that I *don't* like being rewritten, and will do as much work as necessary to avoid that. If it's got my name on it, it should reflect my work. I'm responsible and accountable for that, and people have come to expect a certain kind of storytelling from me over the years...if that's going to be changed, I don't want to be put in that situation.

The main area where you're most vulnerable is in the spec screenplay (or screenplay in general) area. The practice these days is to buy a script from person A, give it to person B to insert more gags, person C to rewrite again for more action, writer D to do clean-up and tweak...and what you get at the end is sausage.

Now, there are ways to avoid that. My agent has a number of spec scripts that I've written over the years...mostly SF, some mysteries, some comedies, one or two horror scripts. All for feature films. None have yet been produced. But almost all of them have been optioned at one time or another. (99% of all scripts optioned or purchased are never made...scary, ain't it?) But the situation is that in all cases, the producer buying or optioning the script must agree that all revisions will be done by me. If not, then we pass. Does this end up with me not making as much money? Absolutely. There were a number of times when one or the other of these scripts were read, and we were told they'd be fast-tracked into production...but they wanted the freedom to have it tinkered with by others.

No, and in case it wasn't clear the first time...no. Money's never really meant that much to me. You can only sleep in one bed at a time, eat one meal at a time, live in one house at a time. I do okay. I'd rather wait for someone to do the story right -- which was why I wrote it in the first place -- than take the cash and watch it get messed up.

The problem, I think, is that a number of writers are too quick to take the deal and worry about the rewriting or changes later.

jms

"So, my question is, was this (An Edge In My Voice) your first interaction with the man who a decade later would be the Creative Consulant on your televison masterpiece? If not, what was?"

Depends on how you define interaction. I grew up reading Harlan's books, and his commentaries on writing very much formed and influenced my own. When I was in junior college, and I hit a period where the writing wasn't selling (it had before, and did later, but I hit a slump at age 18), noting his phone number in one of his books, I risked a call. It went something like this: Phone rings.

"YEAH WHAT?"

"M-m-m-mister Ellison, my n-name is Joe Straczynski, and --"

'WHAT?"

"Well, see, I'm a writer, well, trying to be a writer, and lately my stuff isn't selling, and I was thinking maybe you had some advice on --"

"Listen, kid, if your writing isn't selling, there's a simple reason for it."

"Which would be?"

"It's crap. Stop writing crap and you'll sell. Anything else?"

"Errrrr....no, sir. Thank you." (click, and then hide in basement for 7 days.)

It's the same dopey question I get sometimes, and the folks who ask don't know any better than I did at the time that there IS no answer to that question. There was absolutely nothing he could've said to me that would've meant a damn.

Years later, we met again in person, first at a Writers Guild picket at CBS, then at the occasional social function. Somewhere along the line, we became friends. One day, over dinner, I recited the above incident to him, asked if he remembered. He said yes, and asked, "Were you offended?"

I considered it. "If you'd been wrong, I'd've been offended. But looking back at what I was doing then, having gotten too caught up in academia and what school teaches you writing is *supposed* to be about...it WAS crap. As soon as I knocked that out of my head and just followed my gut, I began selling again."

We're best buddies. Funny old life, ain't it...?

jms

"That except (possibly) for grammar, most academic writing courses and (especially) literary analysis course are absolutely useless for writing good stories..."

I will, however, make a slight exception for a number of university writing *workshops*, where the student is encouraged to write a lot, find their own style, an get critiqued, mercilessly, by fellow students. With that proviso in mind....

I do agree that the majority -- not all, certainly, but from what I've personally experienced and encountered from others -- of college or university writing classes, where they tell you how to write, are more or less useless, and can even hinder a writer's development. For starters, there's a very special kind of literary writing or style -- very nihilistic, eschewing anything as crude as plot or (gasp!) commerciality -- that is in vogue at most universities that is utterly useless in the outside writing world, unless you choose to make a career going on and teaching this same kind of writing, and placing little literary structureless stories in college literary magazines, which pay in copies and are sucked into silence thereafter.

In many creative writing classes, the goal is for the teacher to get you to write in a way he finds acceptable, what he considers proper writing style, and fundamentally to write like he does. Now, it's true that first you have to have the basics of langauge and grammar down first, you must know the rules before you can break them with any degree of efficacy. But once you've got those rules, the goal of a writing class should be to encourage you to find your own voice, and remove any impediments of what you *think* writing should be so that your own voice can come out naturally. Making yourself write like the teacher just so he will grade you well is like forcing a southpaw to write right-handed.

There's also a lot of politics involved; favoritism that has nothing to do with the craft. At a creative writing class I took at Southwestern College, I was nominally the star pupil...until one day the teacher began going after a young woman in the class, being extremely insulting, derisive, and it was clear she'd been trying, and she was in tears, and given my background this is the one thing I won't stand for, and next thing I knew a voice yelled out from the back of the class, "LEAVE HER ALONE." To my surprise it was me. Suffice to say we "got into it," to use the vernacular. From that day on, though nothing changed in my writing, I began to get D's on everything instead of the A's I had received previously. And at the end, the instructor announced that I would *never* be a writer. (For five years thereafter, I regularly mailed him clips of my latest published article, story, reviews of plays...you get the idea.) You play the academic game, you get the grades, and you're a writer...you don't, and you aren't. Absurd.

For one semester, I actually taught writing at San Diego State University, taking my tack of not telling students how to write, just encouraging them and guiding them in their own efforts. Anyone who published a story or article in a professional publication would receive an A for the semester, guaranteed. And by semester's end, about half of them had done so, and many others did so later, after the semester was over. Others placed pieces in smaller publications (worth an assignment-grade A). The other instructors *hated* me, and what I was doing. They insisted that writers shouldn't care about publication, and they had a very bad feeling about an actual selling writer teaching writing instead of someone with an academic background in the area. (By then I had almost 100 published pieces and 3-4 produced plays.) Yes, Emily Dickenson died without publishing a word; but it was written such that it is still around now...and would've been publishable at the time had she not been painfully reticent about it.

All of which is why I definitely did NOT want to get a degree in writing; the academic approach, especially literary analysis, is complete anathema to creativity. Not everything can be reduced to literary theory, and if you put the theory in front of your creativity, it's like putting a boulder in front of a train, you'll never leave the station. Analysis is what happens *after* the fact, not what goes into the hopper *during* the fact. It makes the writing artificial on the best of days, and reduces you to the caterpillar trying to decide which foot goes first on the worst of days...you're too aware of structural/literary process and analysis, when writing is at core an intuitive process.

So while an initial creative writing class is okay, you should always move on as fast as possible to workshop situations. Take what you can about the basics, and get the hell out fast. (And workshops, while more useful, can also be a trap, if you begin writing to the flow of the workshop; once you begin to know what the group likes and doesn't like, you can tailor too closely to that. The other trap is that you get out the need to publish within the group, and never leave that particular womb for the real world of magazines, books, theater and media.)

jms

"Each of those persons has gone away a smoking, crispy critter, in my view. What I want to know is, is this a skill you've developed yourself, or has your long association with Harlan been what gives you your marksmanship skills with those Ellison Guns you fire?"

(blink, blink)

I'm a writer.

Anybody who goes up against ANY half-decent professional writer in a *written* medium has got to be out of his gourd.

Beyond that...it isn't actually something I'm terribly proud of; any time I've gone after somebody, regardless of how stupid or provocational the original message might've been, I always find myself thinking I should've handled it different. Yeah, somebody comes in looking for a fight, but I shouldn't have to stoop to that level, and give them what they want, really, which is attention. I should be aloof, dignified, above it all....

Then some yipyop comes flying in with a snide, harrassing, abusive piece of nonsense and suddenly I'm Arnold S. standing in the third-story window in T2 firing every gun I've got. It's stupid. It's probably vaguely Pavlovian. But nowhere in any of my online agreements does it stipulate that I'll be a standing target.

On the other hand, I end up coming up with some nifty lines which eventually wind up in Ivanova's mouth.

jms