“The characters do the work for me.” Straczynski on Babylon 5

J. Michael Straczynski discusses writing for children, arc-driven television drama, and letting the characters do the writing.

J. Michael Straczynski is a rare beast, fêted by his TV fans for the ground-breaking five seasons of Babylon 5 (1993-98), by comics fans for his audience tripling run on The Amazing Spider-Man (2002-06), and film fans for the Oscar-nominated Changeling (2008), starring Angelina Jolie and directed by Clint Eastwood.

He broke into the business writing shows like He-Man and Murder, She Wrote, though his latest TV show Sense8 is a collaboration with the Wachowskis (The Matrix). In 1992 asteroid 8379 Straczynski was named in his honour.

In the first of a two part interview, Creative Screenwriting spoke with Straczynski about writing for children, arc-driven television drama, and letting the characters do the writing.

You got your first break with He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. What advice do you have for screenwriters regarding writing for children?

When I worked on those shows, I didn’t think about it as writing for kids. The cartoons that I grew up on had jokes that the kids got and jokes that went over their heads that the parents got.

I’m a goofball. I like cartoons; my house is covered with Warner Brothers cartoons and Max Fleischer artwork. I tend to write for myself, things I thought I would enjoy.

It’s important not to think about writing for kids as much as to ask “if I were I kid, what would I like to see?” and “what did I like to see?” When you talk down to kids, they know it.

Some would say that the best screenwriting is taking place within the arc-driven TV show, referencing The West Wing, The Wire, and Breaking Bad. It’s an area where the screenwriter, not the director, is in charge. With Babylon 5 (first aired 1994), were you 10 years ahead of the game?

Yeah, I kinda was.

It’s really rather funny. Before Babylon 5, every TV show had the reset button. You’d have your story, self contained, and at the end it was done. At most a two parter and that’s it.

They were afraid that audiences could not follow a story across a season or multiple seasons and they were worried that when the shows hit syndication, the guys who ran the syndication stations or organisations might just pull shows randomly off the shelf, so you couldn’t have continuity. You couldn’t tell a story if everything’s being constantly shuffled.

And when I said I wanted to do a continuous 5-year story for Babylon 5, they used those arguments against me. I said “our audience is going to be smarter and hipper than you guys.” I called a number of syndication programmes and asked how they determined what order to show shows in. They told me they went off the episode number going in sequence, because that’s how they knew how to pay residuals.

I went back to them told them I was going to do it. “Embrace the nightmare, let’s go!” We were the first show to use foreshadowing to tell a story across multiple arcs where you start something in year 1 and get payoff in year 4.

Everyone thought it was crazy and that it was never going to work. Once we had proved it could work, I got an email from the folks at Battlestar Galactica saying that they wanted to do a multi-year arc based off what we did in Babylon 5. Also, Damon Lindelof said they would do a Babylon 5 style arc with Lost and it went off from there.

Many of the characters, such as G’Kar and Londo, go through incredible character arcs across the whole of the show. Can you tell us about that depth of arc?

I wanted the Babylon 5 show to be about change, about choices and consequences and responsibility. The only way you can show those things is by showing change to the character over time.

And that flew in the face of what TV was. Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote didn’t become a surgeon in episode 3 of year 4. She was in the beginning what she was at the end. This was the whole idea of being a franchise.

But I thought that if we want to show how people make changes which are often dangerous or destructive, which have consequences for other people, we need to have it reflected in them.

Londo starts out with no power in the world and all the freedom he wants, and ends up with all the power he wants but no freedom at all. That’s a lovely arc to go through.

G’Kar goes from being this warrior and this hateful guy to a religious figure. That should be what storytelling is about.

It’s about the change. It’s about going from A to B. Television had not previous afforded that opportunity, and I wanted to take it in a new direction.

Did you map out these arcs?

I knew from the very beginning that these characters would go through these changes and before I shot a frame of film, I broke out in rough strokes all 5 years.

At the start of each year I would say “At this point a G’Kar has to have a change happen to him; Londo has to have a change here.” Then I would work the stories around those things.

It was like a tapestry, and I sketched it out as far as I could ahead of time, then when each year came up I would pull out those cards and break them down into more individual stories and go from there.

It was really carefully planned out, but you really have to have a brain like a bucket of snakes to pull that off!

During the run you wrote 59 episodes in a row. What led you to take so much ownership of the writing?

I wrote half of season 1, half of season 2, all season 3, all season 4 and all but one of season 5, so that’s 92 out of 110 episodes!

I’m a big believer in using freelancers, but the deeper we got into the story, the more arcane it got and the harder it became to tell an outside writer “the story begins here and ends here.” They were all becoming one big huge story.

So, in year 3 I said that I was going to try and write it all myself and it was one of our strongest seasons. So Warner said: “Do that again!”

The story was so complex and so interwoven that I just couldn’t snap off parts as assignments. The exception being Neil Gaiman who wrote one episode in season 5 because I chased him for 3 years!

We recently interviewed the producer and writer of X-Men: Apocalypse, Simon Kinberg, who said: “It’s not a coincidence that both Deadpool and The Martian were successful movies, and movies that had the same writers from start to finish.” What do you think about that?

I think it’s dead on. When you bring in a writer to “punch it up,” that writer doesn’t have the same emotional investment as that person does who first created it. If you bought a script from someone because you liked it, there are enough elements there for you to say “You know what you’re doing, let us keep working on this together.”

When I sold Changeling, Clint Eastwood didn’t even consider bringing in other writers. He shot the first draft.

My experience has always been – if the writer’s passionate about it and wants to stay involved, keep them involved. If they fall down and can’t get it done, then you do what you gotta do, otherwise give them the chance. It’s their universe, their characters, just let them play.

How did you manage to write such a volume of work to deadline?

The problem was both writing the show and showrunning the show. There were no other creative producers, so I had to be involved every day, with every aspect of production. Writing had to be more efficient when you’re doing that.

I have a very weird process of writing, which is that I don’t write. I let the characters do all the work for me.

Imagine your best friend walking across the living room at night and they bang their shin on the coffee table. You know your friend, you know exactly what your friend is going to say when that happens. You don’t have to worry about it, you don’t have to think about it, you just know and you write it down, you transcribe what you hear.

In Babylon 5, I got to know the characters so well that whatever I dropped them into, I just sat back and wrote down what they did. A window opened up, I looked through, I wrote down what they did, I closed the widow again.

Too many writers try to force the issue, try to make the characters do what they want them to, not what the characters intrinsically or authentically want to do. That makes it into work. It makes it hard.

For me, when it’s at it best, writing should be easy, it should be effortless. Writing isn’t something you make happen, writing is something you let happen. There’s trying to write, and there’s writing.

The more you can become invisible and not interpose your own ideas about what should be happening, and let what happens happen, the easier the writer becomes and the faster the writing becomes.

The longer it takes me to write a script, the more I second guess myself. The more I can write it in a white heat, when you’re really in the moment with your characters, watching what they do and say, the better the draft tends to be.

How do you get to know your characters that well?

You research them. You write up their bios. You spend time with them and there’s this point when they start talking to you. To this day, I’ll be in a meeting or having dinner and I’ll still hear Londo or G’Kar’s voice in my head. They won’t shut the hell up!

Shooting a movie is all about the prep. Get the prep right, the shoot will go OK. In writing, the more you prepare, the more you research, spend time on who are they, where did they come from, what do they want, how far will they take to get there, and how far will someone go to stop them. Once you start answering those questions, you start getting to sit back and just let them do it.

The best example I can give from Babylon 5 is the episode where the Centaurii Emperor was assassinated. It was always going to be Londo who did that, because that’s what his character is like. Right up to the moment I go to write that scene it was always going to be him.

Then just before, in my head, Vir said ‘No, this is wrong.’ I said ‘What do you mean its wrong?’ And now I’m having a conversation with myself, and that part of my brain which is Vir said “If Londo does it, it’s business as usual. He won’t feel anything about it, he’ll just get on with his life. If I do it, I’ll grieve, I’ll have guilt, and you can dine off this in scripts for episodes to come!”

I thought about it for a while and thought… you’re right. Which is a strange thing to say to yourself. I wrote it that way, but I would not have gotten there had not that character in my head said “No, you’re wrong.”

How long were you preparing for Babylon 5?

It took us 5 years to sell the show, which did give me ample opportunity to go out and play with the characters. But once we knew we were going to go ahead, I dived in and spent weeks just thinking about the characters and where they came from.

The point where I know that I’ve done it is when I start to hear the character in my head, just talking to me casually. I hit that point – I know I’ve got there.

[addtoany]

Before You Go

Don’t miss the second part of this interview, Straczynski on Sense8!