[Poster compliments Joe on the scriptwriting book and mentions that he does much the same thing, only smaller, writing 30 to 60 second radio commercials.]

I definitely agree; the well-done 30 or 60 second spot is a true rarity, and requires just as much attention to detail, the story involved, it has to move you or touch you at some level...it's a *very* tough business.

jms

[ Summary: Asks Joe if he can explain where the deeper meaning in his work come from and if he does it on purpose. Worries that the question might be insulting to JMS. ]

Nothing at all insulting in the question. It's a hard one to address, but I'll give it a shot.

Harlan says, when someone comes up to you and says, "Listen, when I read your story, I saw you had structured the whole thing around the Jungian notion of inner conflict vs. external conflict, and...." that the proper response is, "Absolutely, and you're the first person to figure that out," whether it's true or not. Let them think you're an utter genius. (This was, obviously, somewhat tongue in cheek, but there's some truth there, I think.)

Generally, some of the "deeper meanings" attached to the work are less a product of what's written, as what's perceived and how it's perceived; it's a function of what you, the viewer, bring to the table. In that respect, a good story is like a Rohrscarch test (and I think I just hideously misspelled that).

Some of the hidden meanings or subtext (the more proper term, I think) are deliberately set in place during the writing process.

And there are some that slip past me, when I get ambushed by my own subsconscious. Often I'm working something through myself at the time, or going through something, and when I'm not looking, the writing part of my brain shoots it out onto the page. Then, afterward, sometimes minutes later or months later, I'll look at it and suddenly realize what was going through my mind at the time, and realize I've given away more of myself than I had intended. It's an awkward feeling...like coming home from a party and discovering that your fly was undone the whole time. There are times I'd like nothing more than to take my subsconscious out and give it a *really* good thwacking when it does this to me.

Sometimes those meanings are very personal ones, sometimes more general in nature, trying to figure out stuff. The only way to stop it is to ride herd on the part of your brain that does the writing, making sure nothing slips past you...but then it becomes a more mechanical process. As a writer, you learn to listen to the small, tiny voice in the back of your head and trust it, that it knows where it's going even if the logical part of your brain does not. You have to get rid of the gatekeeping, get rid of what you were taught writing is supposed to be, get rid of what you think others want to hear from you, get rid of *everything* that gets in the way and overpowers that small voice.

If you do that correctly, then you are *always* surprised by what comes out, which is necessary; if you cannot surprise yourself, you have no chance of surprising an audience.

jms

Thanks, and good luck with your own writing. Follow your passion; the rest will take care of itself.

jms

I debated long and hard about including a section about comics in the script book, and finally opted against it, on several grounds. 1) I wanted to specialize in performance-style scriptwriting, involving living people, and 2) while I've written some comics, I don't feel enough of an expert yet to set down my poor understanding in book form.

jms

Thanks. The script was easy to write story-wise, I think it only took me a few days (in general, the faster the write, the better the script, when it comes to something like this...writing in white heat is best), but *very* difficult from an emotional standpoint. I was just about as wasted after writing it as you were after seeing it. There's a lot of stuff in there that's difficult or painful to touch, and you can only hope that it comes out okay. I'm happy it did.

jms

[ Summary: Explains to all that she sees Sheridan's fall into the abyss as more of a reference to classic literature, such as:

"1) I think Homer started it in the Greek/Roman mythology (I know there have been journeys to the Underworld in other mythologies, but I'm not familiar with them). Unfortunately, I stalled around the death of Patroclous in the Illiad, and it's been a while since I last read the Odyssey.

2) Orpheus went to the Underworld to bring back his wife, Eurydice. He sang so beautifully to Hades and Persephone that they agreed to allow Eurydice back to the real world, if Orpheus didn't look back at her until they reached the surface. He couldn't stand it, and looked. She faded away.

3) Theseus went to the Underworld to kidnap Persephone (not one of his brightest ideas). He was caught and held in the Underworld for some time. I believe he was rescued by Heracles (Hercules).

4) Aeneas visited the Underworld in the company of the Sibyl. He saw his father, Anchises, in the Elysian Fields and was reproached by the shade of his lover, Dido. He received prophecies about his destiny as founder of Rome.

4)[sic] Dante Alighieri was sent through the Three Kingdoms of Death in the company of Vergil (who chronicled Aeneas's journey in the Aeneiad and was regarded as a white magician in medieval popular thought) by the glorified spirit of his lady, Beatrice. Dante's journey was one of self- discovery and growth - a trio of "ladies" in Heaven had seen he was in danger of damnnation and that his redemption required the vision of evil in all its squalor and monotony. " She goes on to state that the last example seems the closest parallel to what's be seen with Sheridan. Delenn is Beatrice in this case. ]

THANK you. I've mentioned elsewhere that I was going more for the roots of this. Though the Dante thread you mention is closest in many ways (again, you dig into archetypes you end up with similar structures, that's the nature of the beast), it was Orpheus going into the underworld for his wife, and losing her, that was in the back of my head when I was blocking out that part of the story. (You can also toss in Christ's temptation by the devil, and descent into the wilderness, if you want.)

This will probably get me in trouble, but...on the one hand, I am always delighted and impressed with the breadth and depth of analyses and thought of the larger group of SF fans, and the insightfulness with which they apply those perceptions.

On the flip side of this discussion...for a certain percentage of them, that breadth and depth is only or primarily within SF and mainstream fantasy. The wellspring of material from which to draw when making comparisons is not often as broad as it should be in classical literature, mythology, medieval studies, and so on. They see a drop into a chasm, they think "Oh, Gandalf." Not understanding that the root of this goes back way, way, way further...to Orpheus and his kindred spirits.

I was copied a note from someone on another newsgroup who insisted that everything in the show had an elvish/Tolkein base, including and *especially* the names of everyone, citing the Agamemnon as meaning something or other in LoTR elvish. The symbol is RIGHT THERE, in the name, Agamemnon, and the whole unfortunate history of that character and his wife, and the Cassandra character (which is at the center of G'Kar's character)...and yet she says, "No, no, it's all a clue, it means this thing over here."

My background is as an SF fan myself, so I offer the above without stereotype or pejorative intent. But as well as reading SF, I spent most of my early adult life reading from classical sources. Goethe's FAUST informs Londo in many ways, as well as the history of early Rome, and Hegelian notions on the role of conflict, and the divine role of the emperor. You're talking to someone who read Plotinus' The Aenneads just for kicks, and whose favorite character was Zeno and his paradoxes. You want to talk Plato's perfect forms? The Socratic method of teaching? Greek tragic structure as embodied in Oedipus? The overall work of Sophocles? The Bible? I've read that one cover to cover twice...anyone else in the room who's done that, raise your hands and tell me you didn't fall asleep halfway through Numbers and Deuteronomy, the two most boring books in the whole darned thing.

There was a period in my life -- from around 1976 through 1981 -- when I devoured everything I could in these areas. Mythology. Existentialism. Zen. 18th century literature. I took part time jobs in libraries so I could get access to the widest possible range of books, especially new ones in areas that interested me. A lot of the details have washed away over the years, but the cumulative *sense* of that remains. I can still remember how excited I was when a brand new translation of the Inferno, the Purgatario and the Paradisio came out (from Penguin, I think), putting it all back into the proper lyric form, and I devoured them, one day each, then read them all again using the footnotes and marginalia.

All that time, I never knew I was preparing myself to write this show, because it could *only* be done with a generalist background, knowing a little about a lot of areas...just enough to get into trouble, ususally, but still the grounding is there.

Funny thing...about two, three weeks ago, I got an email from a woman who is a professor of medieval studies at a major university, who said she'd been nudged into watching the show by her graduate students, and is now a big fan of the show. She said that as she watched, she "clicked" constantly on the sources from medieval and classical literature, mythology, and other deep well sources, and was pleased to see them being used in a contermporary or futuristic venue.

Anyway, it's what I've always said about this show...you see the paradigm with which you are most familiar. Sometimes that's great, and sometimes it's a curse.

jms

Joe,
This is something that happened to me yesterday, and I wanted to share it with you.

Recently, I quit my job. Not because it sucked or I hated the people I worked with, in fact it was probably the easiest job I ever had, stocking for a retail store. I took this job after the newspaper I worked for went "poof" in the night. But slowly, I began to grow more and more distasteful of the mindless chore of putting Holiday Barbies and shower curtains on shelves. The only relief I could get was to come home and work on the comicbook I had created for an independent company, first issue to be published in March. At work I would yearn to write and often thought out plot lines and story development while stocking and prayed to God I wouldn't forget it all by the time I got home. Then came this last Monday. It was my day off and I had just come from our weekly company meeting when I came upon the realization of "What in the bloody hell am I doing?" I mean, I wanted to write. Hell, I dropped out of college with a 3.6 average and a full ride PLUS money back because after all the bulls##t was over with "you'll never get a real job being JUST a writer, try an English minor with a Theatre major or something a little more practical" from my advisors, I found they really didn't have a good writing program. So I talked it over with my wife, and since she was making enough money to support us both, I quit my job. The next two days were filled with both working on the second issue script and several questions the size of a small state; questions like "did I do the right thing?", or "Am I just lazy?", along with "Get a real job you loser, you're not a writer." My parents were freaked out enough that I quit college, but this?!? I don't even want to know what they'd say/are going to say. But I knew that if I went back to my job, I would either blow my brains out or be forced to wear a sporty straight-jacket for the fall season.

And then, your scriptwriting book came in. I read the preface. I quote:

"It's just that writing is the only thing {writers} can do for an extended period of time without chewing on the furniture or checking in for therapy. It makes them happy. It fills a need, whether that need is a longing for self expression or a quest for immortality through the written word."

In the intro:

"Everybody is wrong."

Thank you, Joe. For having been there, for knowing. And I AM right, damn it. I am. And thanks to you, I know that now.

Onward and forward,
Jerry

Good luck to you. In doing what you're doing, you are removing yourself from the system, and the system always objects to that. Follow your voice, and your passion, and you will never go wrong.

Again, good luck.

jms

"Does reading through all these Internet discussions of your work, speculations, and analyses help you not only generate ideas but maintain a higher level of cohesion and complexity in the saga?"

No, for one primary reason: there is no continuity of opinion about much of ANYdamnthing among the netizens out there. Which is the good thing about all this; no two people see the same show.

But from this end, the story is the story is the story.

jms

"Is babylon5 intended to be a modern myth? If so, what influences might have lead to the scripting of the B5 saga? Jung? Campbell perhaps?"

Yes and no. I'm aware of Campbell's work, and have read much of it...but bear in mind that his analyses came *after* the creative fact. If you try to consciously implement that during the writing, it can start making the writing feel artificial. It's the difference between the first two Road Warrior movies and Thunderdome...in the gap between 2 and 3, he read Campbell, and started doing things by the numbers rather than following his gut instinct. Consequently, 3 feels the least natural.

It's the job of the storyteller to provide myth, or perhaps more properly, to reinterpret and reinvent myth, since myth tends not so much to be created as to be newly understood, as we remake the world in our own image every 15 years.

This is one responsibility that TV has, for the most part, abrogated. So I'm trying as best I can to draw some archetypes and myths out of the collective ether and stitch them together into new patterns for new audiences....

jms

I always have to have the title before I begin writing, since it sets the whole tone for the episode. I can labor for hours just coming up with the right title...other times it just hits me.

And I've read the Yeats poem...even had G'Kar quote that passage in "Revelations."

jms

There's always new stuff cropping up and creeping in; half the struggle in this show is deciding what to tell, and what not to tell...it just goes on and on.

jms

[ Summary: Tries to figure out who and/or what is "Falling Toward Apotheosis." ]

"To define is to kill, to suggest is to create."

-- Franz Kafka

jms

[Someone commented that G'Kar's torture scene in "Falling Towards Apotheosis" was more powerful because of a small bit of humor immediately proceeding it.]

It's the roller coaster theory: if you move someone to horror or fear or shock from a neutral place, the emotional jump is less than if they're laughing...then suddenly you whipsaw them into the absolute emotional opposite.

jms

[ Summary: Asks if JMS has had to "tweak" the storyline over time. ]

Any work of fiction is organic and changes with time...it's part of the process.

jms

There's a lot more to be said of the story of Kosh, and the Vorlons in general...and part of me says explain it later...and another part says that if you explain mysteries too much, it destroys them.

jms

Thanks. Hope is one of the things that seems greatly missing from most commercial entertainments, and if they do try to do something in this area, it often tends to wander into the treacly or saccherine. We have to entertain, that is the requirement...but there has to be more, for me, for it to be worth doing.

Thanks for the kind words.

jms

"In WHTMG, Marcus is talking to G'Kar about his friends and says he's had "Damn few of them, and most of them are dead." My instant reaction was "That can't be an allusion to Return to Zork." Can it?"

Y'know, if I were to read this group as an outsider, I'd think that this jms person was incapable of coming up with a single line on his own.

NO, it wasn't a Zork reference, for chrissakes. Can we possibly get any more obscure here? I don't even know what this REFERS to. Marcus came from a mining colony. The shadows struck, and killed everyone there. Hence, the line above.

There was some goofing around with SF references early on in the show; this got out of hand, and it stopped. I don't sit here, thinking, "Oh, goody, I can make a reference to The Day The Earth Stood Still here," or some other show. I write what is appropriate for the character to say. Period.

I'm sorry if I'm a bit cranky in answering this, but jesus christ, people, give it a rest and stop looking for references that don't exist. There are only so many permutations in the english language, and something has got to echo somewhere for everyone...but that ain't the source. "Oh, look, he use the word THE in this episode, he must be nodding at "The Ipcriss Files" or "THEM" just leaving off the M to throw us off."

Your point of reference is your point of reference, it's nothing to do with me. It's like a Rorscharch test, you see what you're familiar with.

As a writer, you work your brains out trying to come up with something, and you try your damndest to make it original, and fresh, and interesting...do you have any idea how infuriating, how maddening, how bottomlin *insulting* it is to have 10,000 people parsing every sentence and saying, "Oh, here, did you take this from that? Is this a reference to this over here?"

NO, IT'S NOT.

I allowed a little of that in the first season or so, often in scripts by other people, on a couple of occasions by myself, but that's the end of it, because everyone decided that the show was one big easter egg hunt. Fanfic is full of this stuff, which is perhaps why everyone keeps looking for it here.

If it's an absolutely blantant, and extremely recognizeable line, line the Tolkein reference in year two's "Geometry," then yeah...but some of this is getting so obscure and ridiculous that it's starting to make me crazy.

Can we *please* declare a moratorium on this for a while?

jms

[Comments of JMS's version of "Snow White", which he wrote at eighteen and is begging people not to see.]

"Of course the question that I have is, what prompted you to write the play in the first place?"

Sigh....

I was 18 years old. I'd had about 5 or 6 one-act plays produced at Southwestern College, to generally good reviews. (I really hate to use the term, but I was kind of a prodigy in some ways.) Anyway, one day, the head of the theater department pulled me aside and said, "Look, every summer we do a summer stock production that runs about 12-16 weeks, usually for younger audiences. Most of the time they're established plays, but sometimes we do an original if we see potential. I'd love to see what you could do with something like the Snow White story. And we can afford to pay a reasonable fee for it."

Understand...this was the first time I'd been *commissioned* to write a full length play. I was somewhat conflicted about the whole thing, most of the plays I'd done had been either offbeat comedies or these terribly indulgent and self-impressed treatises which will never, ever be seen by anyone again (I have the only recordings of them), and this was about as far away from that as you could get. But it was the chance to have a long-running summer-stock production, and at 18, fresh out of high school...I fell for it.

After it ran for that year, I sent the script off to a play publisher, figuring they'd turn it down, but not wanting to waste it...and they picked it up. And it's still there. And every six months, I get these royalty statements showing that it's being performed all over the planet...from the US to Singapore, Thailand, once from Burma, Germany...urk....

It was intended for kids...and ONLY kids. So when adults go see it, knowing my current work...I just blanch, that's all.

jms

"If/when you have to review dialogue from an earlier episode, how do you do it?"

I pick up the binder with the script and look at it. We keep these around in an adjacent office.

jms

[Someone comments on how characters in Babylon 5 continuously step across the boundaries of how we perceive them to show that they are so much more, ie. the "good" Vorlons blowing up inhabited planets or the "strong" Delenn going to pieces when she thought Sheridan was dead.]

All of which is, of course, the irony in the situation...many times, fans ask for shows with colors other than black and white, shades of grey, changes in character...but when you start executing those changes, showing more than one side, even contradictory sides (as humans are masses of internal contradictions) often some of them yell "HEY! STOP THAT!"

Which goes back to the moral: "Be careful what you ask for."

jms

There's been a fair amount of speculation and concern about the fifth season, and how the story is laying out to handle the possibilities of renewal vs. no renewal. Though the ratings have continued to improve despite the shifts and changes in the syndication marketplace -- it's a very different market than it was when we first debuted -- nothing is certain yet about a fifth season. Some at WB say yes, some say no. My job is to pick my way through this minefield and make it all work, and assure the story ending where is was meant to end. So how does one do this?

Here's the skinny.

First, you have to understand that writing is a *process*, and that process is constantly changing. Ask any writer, and they'll tell you that many times they've been working on a short story, or a novel, and they have to edit for space. This applies to both fiction and nonfiction writers. Sometimes it's done by the writer, sometimes by the editor. On my second novel, the editor told me at the halfway mark that we'd have to keep the book down to 100,000 words, which was about 75-100 pages less than I'd been planning on, so the story had to be adjusted to fit. As a journalist, I've often walked into the office with a story in hand and been told, "Okay, you've got 15 column inches," or 25 column inches, or 10 column inches...and you just learn to write to fit. Every writer goes through this.

And in most cases, the average person never knows. Done properly, it should be seamless. Look at Stephen King's The Stand, cut by almost 25% by the editors at first, then later released with all the ancillary material replaced. I've read both, and the latter is not appreciably better than the former...if you didn't know the material was there, you would never have missed it.

This also happens on a per-episode basis. At LosCon, I showed a finished scene from 405, and the daily of the master shot of the same scene, which had another minute or so of material cut from the finished scene. We cut material all the time; if you added up all the material cut from the third season, you'd have enough for almost two episodes. And we often slide manterial from one episode into another; we slid Ivanova's scenes in 402 into 403, and another scene from 405 into 406...we've done that in prior seasons as well. Sometimes you go back and you *add* material. Again, it's all part of the process.

(Interestingly enough, I just bought the new laserdisk of "Young Frankenstein," which has about 15 minutes of material cut from the movie for time. I watched it the other night, and of those 15 minutes, 13 were easily expendable...only one scene was fairly interesting, but not really necessary.)

Okay, so how does all this relate to B5?

My obligation as a storyteller is to get to the end of the story in a satisfying way. So after we got the year 4 renewal, and knowing that the PTEN business situation had the potential to impact us (when the network that supports you is no longer there, so now your entire structure is shot out from under you...you've got a problem), I looked at the structure for the story, and began planning adjustments so that it could go either way without padding anything, and without shortchanging the story.

First thing I did was to flip out the stand-alones, which traditionally have taken up the first 6 or so episodes of each season; between two years, that's 12 episodes, over half a season right there. Then you would usually get a fair number of additional stand-alones scattered across the course of the season. So figure another 3-4 per season, say 8, that's 20 out of 44. So now you're left with basically 24 episodes to fill out the main arc of the story.

Now, that arc is very intensive, and has three primary threads: the resolution of the Shadow war, the situation regarding Earth, and a series of smaller sub-threads that feed off those main threads. But if you charge right from one to the other, it's going to feel rushed, you're going to need some breathing room between major movements, particularly after the shadow war. Not so much stand-alones as episodes that let you begin to rearrange your pieces for the next major movement. So now you're back up to about 27.

Okay, so *now* what do you do? The solution to that came in several unassociated pieces.

First came the word of the two B5 TV movies for TNT, which were envisioned as taking place within the arc of our main story. Suddenly I had 4 hours into which I could slide some of this material. One sub-thread I'd been planning on was a 3-episode arc that would look at how the Earth/Minbari War started, and Delenn's situation at the start of the war, joining the Council, that sort of thing. Now I was able to split that out. So in the series I can, in an episode, get into Delenn's role in the war and go into the background of how she got to know Dukhat, how she got into the Grey Council, and so on...all the stuff you'd need to see prior to the war. Then the two hours covering the rest, the progress of the war itself, could be covered in the two-hour movie.

With the *benefit* that we'd have a little more money for the movie than we would for two conventional hours, so we could do *more* in the way of EFX, production value, and so on, which you're going to need to really sell the E/M war. So strangely enough, and as tends to happen, this has put us in the position of doing it *better* than if I'd dropped it into two standard-budget episodes, as was my original plan.

Another sub-thread wouldn't have been introduced until late in year 5, in part to set up the possibility of a sequel (which, as I've stated from the very earliest days of the show, was always in the back of my head) and which would stand on its own in any event; a thread designed to illustrate the notion that the duration tends to be a lot longer than the war. (You'll understand that one later.) That sub-thread would've filled about 3-4 episodes.

Now, again, having the second 2-hour movie lets me slide that piece of story into that category and cover nearly all of that ground in doing so. The remaining material could (and will, one hopes) be covered in the actual sequel itself. (If the sequel never ends up going, the material will be sufficiently stand-alone to still work on its own.)

Then, finally, you take the stand-alones you pulled out earlier (which nobody would miss, not knowing what was in them), and the final couple of sub-threads (not yet introduced or implied in the main series) and slide them into the sequel series, CRUSADE.

So if we *had* to collapse everything into a fourth year, it would all fit perfectly. If word came that there *was* going to be a fifth year, you commission some scripts early, drop some of the stand-alones back into the slot, and bring up the sub-threads that would otherwise have been transferred into the sequel.

Bottom line is...you're covered either way. You end up where you wanted to end up, the main threads get dealt with, secondary or tertiary threads have other venues in which they can be dealt with...you're solid.

There's nothing particularly extraordinary or amazing in this...this is how all writers work, since there are always going to be varying constraints in length or venue. Writing is a process, and that process is such that it is infinitely variable while still proceeding where you want it to go.

So that's where I am currently. If I know the fate of the fifth year by late February or early March, I can then flip either way and get out cleanly. Worst case scenario is that I might have to write alternate scenes or alternate endings for scenes in the last few episodes if the word comes much later than that, just to give me the flexibility to adjust the story in editing, which would definitely take place after we wrapped, at which time we have to have word by contract.

None of this could've been done in three seasons...we had to have a minimum of four to give us the flexibility of cutting either way. There's no point to reading a book that leaves you hanging for an ending, and B5 was meant to have an ending. At this juncture, finishing off script 15, I feel very comfortable with the way all this is laying out. The flow is there, and I know we'll get where we need to. No matter what happens, we're covered. We can handle year 5 without padding, and handle year 4 without shortchanging the storyline. Granted it took only slightly less planning than the invasion of Normandy, but it works, and that's the crucial thing.

Anyway...I've gone on for longer than I'd intended. I hope that this will answer some of the questions and concerns raised about the situation, and explains how you do some of the planning for this kind of thing. Again, this online experiment is about letting people understand the process of telling a story like this, and of making a TV show in general. As I've noted before, telling a story of this nature for television, with all the exigencies and real-life surprises involved, is like doing an elaborate step-dance while people are throwing live chickens and chainsaws at you...but I knew that would be the situation going in, and it was only a matter of whether or not the story was worth the grief involved in telling it.

And it most definitely has been.

jms