Solo4114
Master Member
Spoken like a guy who doesn't know how to write endings.
Honestly, I think there are different goals. I'm not a writer, but I think there's a difference between a writer who's writing to tell a compelling story, and a writer who writes because they love writing and the process of it.
If you're deep into the process of writing, the very act of writing itself, then I can see where a "gardening" method would be more engaging. You don't know where the story goes, you have revelations yourself, and you can more quickly jump into the actual writing of it, instead of spending ages in the planning.
On the other hand, I think that approach has many, many flaws to it, including:
- Blown deadlines.
- Lost/dropped plotlines which just create unanswered questions (and not purposefully unanswered questions, either).
- Lost focus on the overall point of the tale. I would assume that most writers have a general sense of where they want their stories to end
- Not being willing to kill your darlings, which ends up degrading the overall quality of the work.
- Writing yourself into a corner, which requires a really unsatisfying solution.
- CRAP ENDINGS.
I far, far prefer the mapped out approach. I'm not saying he's the best writer ever, nor am I saying that the show is the best ever, but I have to say that Babylon 5 is probably one of the most satisfying overall tales ever told on television. And J. Michael Stracynski mapped the hell out of that story, to the point where he created "trap doors" for characters to leave if the actors playing them needed to move on (e.g. Andrea Thompson). As a result, his story feels like it has a solid beginning, middle, and end. The disparate parts come together, the questions that were introduced are generally answered, and characters get solid resolutions. They aren't always happy, they don't always occur neatly or cleanly, but it's clear that things played out according to plan.
Now, was that fun to plan out? No, probably not. I expect it was pretty painful and tedious, in fact, and required a good bit of backtracking and reevaluating. But once done, it allows for a much cleaner rollout of the actual story.
Still, it strikes me that there's this attitude within writing communities that that approach is too "plot driven," which, of course, means it's deserving of derision and scorn. Because everyone knows that plot-driven stuff is crap and character-driven stuff is better. The problem with that attitude, though, is that I think it ends up with stories that are satisfying only to other writers, and seems to be a very elitist "We know better than our idiot audiences" view. And it relates to this attitude that great art must, almost by definition, be completely unapproachable by the masses.
To me, that ultimately misses the critical role that storytelling plays in the human experience.
