They are lucky to have you fighting for them.

Best wishes from your mad pulp bastard,

B

Second, I remember the first time I worked with characters who had minds of their own. It was a kids’ series created by the late great Don Arioli and I had a few freelance scripts. I was stunned when the characters insisted on saying and doing things that I hadn’t planned out because up till that point every writing experience I’d had had involved shoving the characters around and putting word into their mouths in order to achieve my ends. I had no idea that characters could be so well drawn that you didn’t have to force them to do things. One of Don’s characters lived in a closet and every time I let him out, he’d talk so much and steal the limelight that I would have to scramble to shove him back in there so I could keep the story moving.

But the point here, because we always have to keep coming back to my blatant hero worship, is that well made characters do know what they want to do — independent of the writer or even their creator. It takes a skilled writer to create characters of that depth and then to trust the characters to do what they must.

Third, as to the network note about it taking too long to get to town, as I mentioned in the post, the episode follows a very classic literary structure. Did they tell Joseph Conrad it took too long to get up river into the Heart of Darkness? Or Frank L Baum that he should have started the story in Oz?

the first act of the story you described came about because the network consensus was that “we got to the town too fast” so i wrote the journey to town as an homage to old slasher films like “the hills have eyes” and figured a creepy trucker was always good for a little apprehension as it played into the whole creepy trucker underage girl thing that worked in “freeway(?) — that wacked out retelling of little red riding hood.

because i knew that, in later episodes, the little boy was going to become the focus of the bad guys in the story so when caleb crawled into the window he just started going for the little boy instead of the girl. while that surprised me i went with it and it did double duty by being a misdirect while giving the scene a little sicko pedo twist (never a bad thing in a story like this). the minute he did that i knew that he was going to turn out to be the reverends son and the trucker then became a key continuing character in the first half of the first season of the series.

as an aside, the major complaint i got from the network after we finished the pilot was that “it took too long to get to town”.