J. Michael Straczynski Quotes

My writing process is very organic. I start with an idea. I have the general story arc and the cast. But then I sit down to write, and things change.

When I write, my brain moves faster than my hands so I'm always trying to picture things.

I let the images crowd my mind before I start writing a script.

I have these huge black foam boards on the wall, and tacked to them, I have these white punch cards with my story ideas, scenes and notes.

My writing process often begins with a question. I write down ideas and let them stew for about a year. Then, when I sit down to write, I make a list of characters and try to see how they fit.

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

It's kind of a mysterious process, but something will catch my attention, and I'll make a note about it. I may even write a few pages about it, and then I'll put it aside, but I'll sort of keep it in mind. Then as time goes on, other things will gather to it as if it's a magnet, almost, and eventually, there's enough to make the story.

I start with an idea that is no more than a paragraph long, and expand it slowly into an outline. But I'm always surprised by the directions things take when I actually start writing.

When I have an idea, it goes from vague, cloudy notion to 100,000 words in a heartbeat.

I'm not like a Sears Catalog of ideas. I don't have that many ideas. I've more or less written them over the years. Usually, I come up with a situation or a character, and it rattles around in my head until the story or the plot emerges.

If I can find the right idea, I can get out of the way and do a good story.

I write, having seen what's happening already in my head. I see it as a movie, and I'm just writing down what's happening in front of me.

In the past, I'd been sort of a fan of writing a coat hanger of a script, and something I could hang ideas off of.

I believe in working with your morning brain - you have your coffee, and then maybe you'll start thinking about the grand plan and what's going to happen in the next arc, and then you write for a while, and then you get really dreamy, and over the course of the day or in the middle of the night, something comes, and you just throw it in!

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

Basically I started to jot notes, lots of faxes back and forth to my writer, we faxed ideas throughout the whole first draft, and started all over again.

If you take a few days to write an outline, you're just making up scenes that you think will work, that you think will be interesting. But as you write it, other ideas occur - better ideas that have to do with what you're writing.

I don't stare at a sheet of paper and try to think of a good word to use. I try to see where the story should go.

So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.

I think most writers will say that at the start of each book they think, 'I'm not sure I can do this.' But eventually, you reach a magical point where the story suddenly becomes real to you, and you become totally invested in it.

Weirdly, often the more I write, the more ideas I have.

At first, I see pictures of a story in my mind. Then creating the story comes from asking questions of myself. I guess you might call it the 'what if - what then' approach to writing and illustration.

I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.

I think about my films for a long time, maybe years, but I write them in days.