Taken awhile ago at the Meridian Room. Photo by Bethany Keeler.
Great interview with Antony Johnston (click here).
I'm a planner, a plotter. I like to know where I'm going before I start scripting. That's why the brainstorming phase is so essential to the way I work.I never work without some kind of outline, but the detail of that outline can vary a lot. With WASTELAND, it's relatively loose from issue to issue, because I know the characters inside out and know roughly where I want to go. But with, say, THE LONG HAUL it was extremely detailed, because it was an original cast and the book revolves around a heist. If I'd jumped in and started without a plan, I would have ended up rewriting the entire first half of the book a dozen or more times just to make sure plot points were foreshadowed and that the heist plan would work. I've never seen the point of that, when you can deal with all that in an outline.
Not that I don't rewrite or revise at all. I do, a lot. But that's because I tend to write scripts with increasing amounts of detail in each pass; basic blocking and dialogue first, then a second pass to add detail and revise pacing if necessary, and a final pass for overall polish. These stages all inevitably end up incoporating revisions as I go.
