Y'know, every time a character gets introduced on this show, there's always somebody who yells about killing him off. I've been told by folks on the nets, variously, to kill Londo ("Who's the jerk in the Bozo hair? He's a joke, he's ruining the show, space him!"), Vir ("Flounder in space? Give me a break, he's nothing, throw him out an airlock!"), Lennier and others, including Sheridan ("He smiles too much, what's the deal, Smilin' Jack," which was a setup for his fall). Many people screamed to kill Sinclair during the first season...and then were the first ones wanting him back a year later.

And in each case, they went on to become some of our most popular characters.

Patience is a virtue. We get to know people over time. See their strengths and weaknesses over time. There's a lot more to Marcus than meets the eye...and many people *do* like Marcus' character quite a lot.

The sad thing to me is to see folks who, if they don't instantly spark to someone, say "Kill him!!!" Which seems to me rather cruel and intolerant for just not sparking to someone. I wonder if they have friends, or if they meet someone and instantly don't take to them, do they wait in an alley and blow their brains out...or give them time to grow...or at least take a wait-and-see attitude. I sometimes wonder about a society that breeds the notion that if you don't like a character, let's *kill* them. Not, "let's not feature him," not "write him out," but KILL him. There's something rather disturbing in that.

But...if Marcus doesn't work for you, he doesn't work for you. He does work for others. And he works for me.

I think you're outnumbered.

jms

"Having read JMS's posts on the net for years and now having seen him talk in person, I have heard probably hundreds of anecdotes from him about his life, his career, growing up, getting the show on the air, and managing the cast/crew to keep it going. It dawned on me last weekend that many of these stories are quite similar to the example stories that one finds in a book on self-esteem, self-motivation, and management books (the ones about how to get the most out of your employees by making sure they enjoy working for you). JMS: Have you ever considered writing these down into a book about your philosophy/ motivation/etc? I think it would be great reading!"

I think it would be an absolutely hideous waste of several dozen old-growth trees.

It would be the height of stupidity and arrogance on my part (your suggestion was well-intentioned and sincere, don't confuse the two) to even consider the notion. I have nothing to teach *anybody* in these areas. I don't have any answers, only questions. And my experiences are generally so idiosyncratic, so much the product of just falling on my face a thousand times until one day I figured out a way so that I didn't *have* to fall on my face anymore, that I can't imagine they'd be of much use to anyone, and their entertainment value is mainly either anecdotal or for humorous effect.

A book about the trials and tribulations in making the show...sure, maybe. A book of my philosophy about this sort of thing, with anecdotes? I can't imagine anything that could be more boring and self-serving.\

jms

"How would the story have differed if it were a written novel rather than a novel for television."

More descriptions, more internal monologue. More locations off-station. Larger cast of characters. Shorter arc (5 years at 22 episodes per and 45 pages per script is a hell of a lot more than you can get into any novel or series of novels.)

jms

Thanks. The problem is exactly as you state, too much formulaic writing in TV. That's why I object to the seminars and individuals who say they can teach you to write like everybody else, using a formula. First, if we already HAVE everybody else...why do we need you? You need to have a distinct voice we can't GET anywhere else. That's the only real commodity you've got. Second, the formula some offer is mechanical and works only at a minimum level; you'll never produce anything of value or real interest using it.

So when I did my original writing book, and the new, expanded revision coming out this October, I had to find ways to direct people in their writing without telling them what to write or how to write it. That, I think, would be a mistake. So it's an odd sort of book, but I think it worked in the end.

jms

Depends on the writer. Freelance writing almost always takes longer because they don't know, and can't be *expected* to know, the show as well as you do if you're on staff. You can have several pitch meetings over the course of weeks before a good story walks in (though in the case of B5 the stories are generally assigned out by me, saving that process); then you wait anywhere from 1-3 weeks for the outline; you have a meeting about it; another week or so for the revised outline; you have another meeting; then about 2-4 weeks for the first draft script; then another meeting; then another 1-3 weeks for the second draft. (These are *optimal* periods, sometimes it's shorter, but usually it's longer.) And then, on a show as eccentric as B5, you often end up rewriting large portions of it anyway. So it can take as much as 2 months or more to produce a shootable script.

I can write a script in 7 days or less, that's ready to go before the camera as written. Which isn't to say anything qualitative, only to say that it's easier and faster because I'm inside the bubble.

jms

"If you had to do it all over again, what would do you do differently, or would you even do ANYTHING differently?"

Professionally? No. I wouldn't change a thing.

If "it" includes the personal side...

(he looks off, a long moment, smiles sadly and shakes his head)

There are an infinite number of moments I would like to rewrite, words I'd recall, opportunities lost I'd give a right arm for one more chance to take...five minutes when I would've stopped going through my life like a man late for a bus, missing the moments, because in the final analysis, the moments are all we have.

Would I do some things in my life differently? Yes. Most definitely.

Goes with the territory.

jms

"Why have you chosen not to tell us how WWE or the Talia/Control situation would have been handled if Sheridan had not been introduced and/or Andrea wanted to stick with the show for as long as she could?"

For the reason that it may not have changed as much as you think it might've.

For the reason that a writer never publishes his rough draft. Any time a writer writes a novel, by the time you're halfway through you're learning things, and changing your mind about stuff, and coming up with better ideas...it's a *process*, rememer...and as you hit these things, you jump back into the earlier parts of the book and edit and revise and realign so it all hangs together, and the first part is made better by what you know of the latter parts. The reader never sees those parts.

Nor should they. Any more than the audience should see the fumbling part of a magician's education when he's still trying to get that rabbit/hat thing worked out. Any more than he should stop in the middle of a performance and tell them how he got to this point.

And frankly, it's taxing enough just keeping all the permutations of the current story going smoothly without dragging in possibilities of other permutations.

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

"It is said that a fanatic will redouble his efforts, but lose sight of his goal. From what I have just read, you are starting to sound like a fanatic. Maybe I shouldn't say this, but sticking my foot in my mouth seems to be a genetic defect we both share. I am not sure I would like to see any show written by a fanatic."

Don't know many writers, do you?

I care passionately about my work. If that passion makes me a fanatic, then I'm a fanatic and proud of it. I've been this way all my life, and it's a little late to go changing things now. It's a choice that works for me. Your mileage may vary.

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

"If you and associates like John Copeland and Doug Netter were in a position to acquire the rights to a property by an author whose work you respected (Harlan Ellison's screenplay for *I, Robot* comes to mind), would you consider investing your time and energy to bring that work to fruition (be it in television or cinema) as a *producer* rather than as a writer?"

In a word...no.

Being a producer is a pain in the butt of mind-bending proportions. I never had any desire to be a producer, and frankly still don't. It's not an ambition or a career goal. The ONLY reason for wearing this particular pointy cap, for putting up with the grief and the nonsense, is to protect my words. That's *it*. I'm a writer, first and foremost. Producership is just an insurance policy for the story. I would have no interest in producing someone else's work.

I'm not a producer...I just play one on TeeVee.

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

I think that the influx of writer/producers onto the nets cannot help but further the process of helping people understand (and thus influence) television. Although a goodly portion of this is in the category of "let's flog my new show/movie/whatever" some of it is also in the area of discussions about how writing works. There're plenty of others doing this out there beyond me, and what's good about that is that you end up with a multiplicity of views; no one of us has the single right answer to any of this. Any information we convey is anecdotal under the best of conditions, and may be of more interest as curiosities than as How Things Work, when taken alone; taken together, like blind men sizing up an elephant, a picture of the whole slowly emerges.

I have heard that some of my stuff has ended up in term papers on the media, and theses, and that's good in its limited way, given the disclaimers above. There's just so much bad mythology and misinformation about how things work that the more light that can get spread, the better.

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

"Any chance you, or Babylonian Productions, or Netter Digital, would get involved in a top-down effort to change The System?:

You cannot change the Hollywood System. You can survive it, or subvert it, but you cannot change it.

Eventually, the system self-corrects when the individual components of the System -- writers, producers, actors, directors, the audience, others -- reach a kind of cultural or technological critical mass. When talking pictures came along, The System said "This is a passing fad, we shall ignore it and all who advance this cause." But when the audience got a taste of it, and actors learned how to talk into plants (where huge microphones were hidden) without looking goofy, and directors learned how to stage for sound, and makeup stopped using heavy pancake, and singers learned how to act and actors learned how to sing...the System had no choice but to change.

I don't feel comfortable with the notion of setting up any kind of Sundance situation, or really being any substantive part of it, to tell folks How To Do It Without Being Crushed, because again, my background is purely anecdotal and limited in perspective; the suggestion I give you, which worked for me, might kill your career.

I'm more along the lines of the saying, "If you see the buddha on the road, kill him." Direct experience is the best teacher once you're past a certain level of professional proficiency.

The only thing I've done in the past, and may do at some point in the future, is teach newbies in the area of writing and breaking in, mainly ways to avoid the big bear traps, potholes and snipers at the gate. I actually *enjoy* teaching, and it's one of the things I'd like to get back into eventually, if I can find the right berth.

jms

"Specifically: in an ep like "Severed Dreams" where cgi effects take up literally almost 1/4 of the script, how much input does the director have on "camera" angles, close ups of 'Fury pilots, and the way in which the SFX is intercut with live action? Or is that entirely your job?"

Generally, a lot of that material is either storyboarded, or supervised by our on set EFX supervisor, who determines the angles to be used. This is especially important in an episode like Severed Dreams when you have to make sure that the pilots are oriented the right way on camera (i.e., going from left to right, and facing left to right) if that's the direction their ships are going in; otherwise you'd have to flop the film to make it match. In larger set pieces, using virtual sets and composite shots, the director has more influence.

"Also: when dealing with an ep with a lot of flashbacks or reused footage (WWE, especially part 2), how much freedom does the director have? Does he/she have to match the style of the previously show footage (in terms of angles, close ups, pacing, etc), or is there more room for the director's own style?"

In the case of WWE, you had to match lighting and composition pretty closely. That's about the only time it's really become an issue.

"(one more question: if someone other than you had written "Babylon Squared", would they have to be paid royalties for the reuse of parts of that episodes script and footage in "War Without End"?)"

Anyone who writes a scene which is reused gets residuals. Doesn't matter if it's me or anybody else, as a Writers Guild member, it's guaranteed and required. Also the actors, the director, and others get re-use fees of varying amounts depending on how long the sequence is.

jms