No End In Sight

It was with a certain amount of relief that as I was listening to Ron Moore’s commentary on Battlestar Galactica season 2.5, he admitted that for the most part, it’s quite normal for him (and for many TV shows in fact) to NOT know how the season (let alone the series in its entirety) is going end until over halfway through the actual season. This was intensely reassuring to me, because not only did it remind me that creative types are human beings, it also reminded me that even as human beings, they are not the most far-sighted or plan-ahead types.

Of course not all writers are like this. When it comes to giving me a major inferiority complex, JK Rowling of Harry Potter fame has supposedly mapped out the entire arc of the Harry Potter series since the very beginning. But the one who really makes me bow my head in shame is Neil-O himself. The fact that The Sandman ended the way it did and that when you go back, you can see the various mechanisms that would propel Morpheus forward towards that conclusion is an astounding piece of writing. Ron Moore makes me feel slightly better about myself when he does stuff like admit that for the emotionally satisfying end of Star Trek: The Next Generation, entitled “All Good Things,” they didn’t actually have the conclusion to this 7 year old series until about a month before shooting of the series finale was due.

Personally, I like to think that I write in a way similar to Neil-O, though without his obvious experience and or natural instincts at play at the same level. What Neil-O does makes a lot of sense and seems a lot more fun to me; have some kind of conclusion in mind, but leave everything leading up to it up for grabs.

While I’m still not sure that he actually followed this with relation to the conclusion of The Sandman (unless he simply looked back on it afterwards and THEN started building up to his ending) it seems like a very spontaneous and interesting way to write. And it’s something that I’ve pretty much employed in my last three books. I always had a vague idea of how it was going to end (ie, this person dies, or that thing gets destroyed, or this crisis occurs) but I never knew what the events were that led up to this conclusion.

And for me, that’s where all the FUN is. If I have my point “A” and my point “Z”, I know which direction I’m going in, but all those letters in between are spontaneous adventures, and somehow knowing that I’m free to do what I want, provided that it leads to Destination Z gives my brain ample opportunity to play. Suddenly characters, situations, emotions and crises that might never have occurred to me if I were meticulously planning (or simply writing with no clear direction in mind) can spontaneously combust in my brain on any given day as I try to get to the end. Perhaps it’s not the most organized way to work, but it sure is fun for me.

So in the event that my books finally do get to see print and people ever ask me, “Did you know how it was going to end?” I can honestly answer “Yes, I did. I just didn’t know how I was going to get there.”