Back Again.

Even if nobody is actually reading this blog, I feel obligated to explain that I was a bit busy for the past seven months with a new job. Fortunately I got laid off, so now I can get back to important things like writing a blog that nobody reads and working on an animated film that nobody is likely to see.

One insight on the craft of storytelling: I've been watching "Battlestar Galactica" on DVD lately, and I was scoffing in the beginning at all the contrived (as I thought of it) problems the characters brought with them. The conflicts between Apollo and his father, Tigh's alcoholism, everything seemed very obviously set up by the writers to produce drama in future episodes.

Then I compared it to the original Battlestar Galactica, where (if memory serves) each episode dealt with the characters responding to some outside force. They had no inner lives or multilayered relationships with each other (again, to the best of my memory), and so the writers had to keep coming up with some new cosmic threat or cylon attack to hold our interest.

I always knew in a general sort of way that good plots come out of characters and the relationships between them, but it was good to get this object lesson. The tension among the characters in this show is not thrown in there just for an excuse to have them occasionally yell at each other (which, in some shows, does pass for drama), but to move the plot along a trajectory. For me this is the main thing I can't get a handle on in my own attempts at writing.