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Write Your Story

Write Your Story

A successful writer once said something like, “Everyone has a book inside them.”

I’m not going to look up the name of the writer or the precise quote, because worrying about those details at the outset of the endeavor is what keeps books buried inside their writers’ minds. 

I’m here to help you pry your story out onto the page by sharing the techniques I’ve used to coax books out of several first-time writers as well as in editing titles by prolific professionals. The trick is to bypass the many pitfalls that trap even the most experienced writers—like stopping the flow to look up a quote, identify its source, and go down a dozen rabbit holes as a result—and to keep marching toward the goal:

A BOOK
by
YOU

Join me for a pay-what-you-can workshop at 6 PM Pacific Time on Thursday, 31 August 2023, and I’ll share the strategies that have worked for writers on page one as well as those on page 400 of their 100th book.

You have a story to tell. I have the tools to help you tell it. Let’s get together.

BABYLON 5 comes to Blu-ray

I’m sure most of you saw on Tuesday that Babylon 5 is coming to Blu-ray.

If you didn’t see the news: 

Babylon 5 is coming to Blu-ray on 5 December 2023! 

The set is now up for pre-order at:

Amazon US 

Amazon UK 

There’s not a lot of data available, but the 21-disc set appears to include the pilot and the 110 episodes of the series proper, as exhibited in high definition on HBO Max between 2020 and 2022.

I have many thoughts on the release, mostly informed by my talks with co-producer George Johnsen and editor David Foster, but they’ll keep until I’ve had time to write them up properly in a forthcoming briefing. 

But, briefly, I am delighted with this news. Not only does it allow future viewers to see a version of the show much closer to the intended vision of those I’ve been interviewing for the last few years, but it signals–along with Babylon 5: The Road Home and the potential television reboot–a renewed interest in the property.

Now I’m off to interview an Australian and make an appointment with someone else who’s never–to my knowledge–spoken about B5…see you Monday.

Faith manages,

JASON DAVIS

STUNTLADY: Falling for the Stars by Sandra Gimpel (Felion Productions, 2023)

In late 2022, Patricia Tallman (Babylon 5) introduced me to Sandy Gimpel, who’d written a memoir of her Hollywood career and wanted a picture-filled print-on-demand publication she could add to the array of publicity photos she signs at conventions.

Over a couple months, Sandy and I worked together on the text, integrating her personal photos to achieve a book reminiscent of Pleasure Thresholds, the memoir I edited for Tallman in 2011 and helped her update in 2020. The resulting book, Stuntlady, was published on 17 April 2023. It was a hit at Trek Long Island (19–21 May 2023) and was featured on the 22 May 2023 episode of Inside Edition.

For editorial and/or publishing services, please contact me at ellison.editor@gmail.com.


STUNTLADY by Sandra Gimpel

Sandra Gimpel began her Hollywood career dancing with Elvis Presley in fifteen films and doubling Bill Mumy on Lost in Space. She even played the M-113 salt vampire on Star Trek before discovering her true calling: Stuntlady.

She’s doubled Adrienne Barbeau, Olympia Dukakis, Barbara Eden, Sally Field, Estelle Getty, Melissa Gilbert, Holly Hunter, Cloris Leachman, Susan Lucci, Shirley MacLaine, Alyssa Milano, Kate Mulgrew, Sarah Jessica Parker, Debbie Reynolds, Betty White, and more.

After establishing herself as a stunt coordinator, Gimpel broke the glass ceiling at Universal and became the first stunt woman to join the DGA and direct second-unit at the height of the studio’s television output.

From dancing with Fred Astaire in The Pleasure of His Company to being shoved by Daniel Radcliffe in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, Gimpel’s seven decades of falling for the stars are all here.

Stuntlady: Falling for the Stars by Sandra Gimpel (Felion Productions, 2023)
Edited by Jason Davis. Cover cartoon by Luis Silva.
ISBN: 9798390149782 • 7.5″ by 9.25″ Trade Paperback 350pp.

To order signed and/or inscribed copies directly from Sandra Gimpel, click here.

To order unsigned copies from Amazon.com, click here.

CRUSADE: What the Hell Happened? Vols. 2-3 by J. Michael Straczynski (Synthetic Worlds Publishing, 2023)

For eight years, I was senior editor at B5 Books, overseeing an array of volumes documenting the creation of Babylon 5 and its spinoffs for Synthetic Worlds Publishing and Publishing 180. When I resigned on 31 December 2016, I had one regret: that Volumes 2 and 3 of Crusade: What the Hell Happened? by J. Michael Straczynski remained unreleased, their publication postponed by the author’s busy schedule.

While thirteen may have proved an unlucky number for Crusade the series—cancelled after that many episodes were produced—it’s a luckier one for the story of that ill-fated series, with Volumes 2 and 3 published in hardcover, paperback, and e-books thirteen years after Volume 1, which has been reissued.

While Volume 1 was reprinted as it originally appeared in 2010, I approached the editorial work on Volumes 2 and 3 from scratch, selecting the script drafts after thirteen years of detailed study and annotated each teleplay with information gathered while preparing my own books for the Babylon 5 Preservation Project.

Highlights include Straczynski’s first draft of “The Needs of Earth”, which differs substantially from the filmed episode; early drafts of later scripts, before TNT’s problematic resulted in a production shutdown; a version of “The Path of Sorrows” featuring Lyta Alexander and Lennier; as well as the two unfilmed stories that would have seen the series arc bare its teeth.

These are not the books as originally conceived in 2010 (or even 2022), but I’m pleased to see them finally complete the saga of the Excalibur in print.

For editorial and/or publishing services, please contact me at ellison.editor@gmail.com.

Crusade: What the Hell Happened? Volume 2 by J. Michael Straczynski (Synthetic Worlds, 2023)
Edited by Jason Davis. Cover art by Luc Mayrand.
Hardback ISBN: 9781630771331 • Paperback ISBN: 9781630771348
8.5″ by 11″ / 7.5″ by 9.25″ 354pp.

Crusade: What the Hell Happened? Volume 3 by J. Michael Straczynski (Synthetic Worlds, 2023)
Edited by Jason Davis. Cover art by Luc Mayrand.
Hardback ISBN: 9781630771324 • Paperback ISBN: 9781630771287
8.5″ by 11″ / 7.5″ by 9.25″ 354pp.

To purchase, please visit B5Books.com.

“Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” by Mark Twain

Photo by Ernest H. Mills.

I have not read as much of Mark Twain’s œuvre as I should, A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT when I first dove into Arthurian mythology, THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN in school, “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg” at the behest of a friend, and others here and there.

But my favorite of Mr. Clemens’s works—thus far, at least—is:

“Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offesnes,” which opens thus:

It seems to me that it was far from right for the Professor of English Literature in Yale, the Professor of English Literature in Columbia, and Wilkie Collins to deliver opinions on Cooper’s literature without having read some of it. It would have been much more decorous to keep silent and let persons talk who have read Cooper.

Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in ‘Deerslayer,’ and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.

There are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction—some say twenty-two. In Deerslayer Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:

1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the Deerslayer tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air.

2. They require that the episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the Deerslayer tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.

3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.

4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail also has been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.

5. They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the Deerslayer tale to the end of it.

You can read the rest here: https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/3172

An excerpt from ALL ALONE IN THE NIGHT: The Making of Babylon 5, 1987-1994 (forthcoming)

There are three phases in the production of a television episode: Pre-Production, Production (aka Principal Photography), and Post-Production.

At 6:47pm on Thursday, 2 December 1993, principal photography on “Chrysalis” (112) concluded in Morden’s Quarters. After seven days of work and 19,940 feet of exposed negative, Babylon 5’s first season finale was in the can—halfway through the season, to allow for extensive cgi. While the cast and crew would move on to “DeathWalker” on Friday the 3rd, the aforementioned can(s)—containing the day’s exposed Super 35 negative—would go to be processed at the lab and transferred to VHS cassettes for the producers to review.

Meanwhile, the film shot on the previous days of production had already been loaded into the Avid of Lisa M. Citron, one of three editors who worked on Babylon 5’s freshman season. (Suzanne Sternlicht cut 101, 104, 107, 110, 113, 116, 119, and 122, Skip Robinson cut 102, 105, 108, 111, 114, 117, and 120, and Citron cut 103, 106, 109, 112, 115, 118, and 121.) The editor begins their cut as soon as footage becomes available, assembling the show according to the shooting script, exercising their personal taste in choosing the shots and takes. As scenes are cut together, Citron would report back to the script supervisor, Haley McLane, noting the length of assembled scenes so that the production could keep an eye on the episode’s running time. If the scenes cut together shorter than expected, the episode will underrun and require costly additional photography that will eat into a later episode’s schedule, not to mention the expense of recalling guest actors, if required.

Meanwhile, in Valencia, 19 miles northwest of Babylon 5’s stages in Sun Valley, Foundation Imaging worked on the cgi, but with the footage rendered at roughly one frame per seventy minutes, a second of video material—24 frames—required more than a day of computer processing during the first season. Citron would estimate the length of the shot based on pre-production discussions, placing a note into the episode that might read “EXT. BABYLON 5 – ESTABLISHING” or “SHADOWMAN CRUISERS FIRE ON MOONBASE” as a placeholders. By the end of Friday, 3 December, Citron’s cut would be complete.

From the advent of motion pictures, film editing was both a manual and linear activity. The editor physically cut and spliced the film to create edits. Thousands of feet of footage would be organized in bins, with the constituent shots of the scene in progress within arm’s reach. Until the 1970s, most film was edited on a Moviola, an upright machine that allowed the editor to run the film forward and backward, making cuts and splices as required. Flatbed systems—like those produced by the German companies K-E-M and Steenbeck—became the norm from the 1970s, allowing the editor to sit comfortably during the days and weeks and months of cutting. The creation of this work-in-progress edit is called an offline edit, one in which the original materials are not affected; the editor uses a work print, a dupe of the negative created specifically to be personhandled in the editing suite.

Once the final cut was approved by the required parties, the negative would be conformed to the editor’s notes, a terrifying process where a single mistake would destroy a frame of film forever; this is the online edit, from which there is no return. If one were philosophically inclined, the conformed negative is The Film, the Platonic ideal, the actual artifact from which all copies derive. When you see on the package that a Blu-ray was created “from a 4K scan of the original camera negative,” that means that you’re viewing a clone of the original, albeit one restricted in resolution to the Blu-ray standard and compressed accordingly.

It’s worth noting that most prints you saw in the movie theater prior to the advent of digital projection in 1999 were three generations removed from the negative, usually struck from an internegative made from an interpositive that was duped from the negative. That’s why you sometimes see the strings in special effects shots on Blu-ray when you’re certain they weren’t visible in the theater; until the age of high-quality home cinema, no one ever expected to view the negative (or a compressed clone thereof), just copies three generations down the line.

(As an aside, when cinema enthusiasts lament the lack of a high-definition release of the 1977 release of Star Wars, they are effectively mourning the death of that version, which was disassembled splice-by-splice to create the 1997 special edition. Yes, there are extant release prints—three generations down from the negative—but there is no longer a conformed negative of that movie as it appeared in 1977. The Special Edition is The Film now.)

By the 1980s, filmed television shows were often being edited on videotape. The film would be transferred to videotape and edited linearly, one scene after another, on an apparatus that was effectively two VCRs controlled by a simple computer, accumulating start and end times for each shot, then exporting them to a master broadcast-quality videotape from which further copies could be dubbed, losing picture quality with each subsequent generation (or cloned without such loss in the digital era). This approach would cause problems after the introduction of high definition television. As noted above, a conformed negative can be scanned to obtain an image of higher resolution than a 4K television can present, but the best DigiBeta videocassette of a show finished electronically without a conformed film negative is locked in standard definition forever…unless, as happened with Star Trek: The Next Generation, a studio pays to have the negatives of every shot of the series exhumed and painstakingly assembled into a conformed negative, giving the show a new lease on life for modern broadcast, home video, and streaming applications. (It should be noted that some studios continued to create conformed negatives for their series, avoiding the issues faced by those that took the less-expensive post-production route.)

Avid Technology changed everything. In 1988, the company introduced The Avid/I, a non-linear editing system based on the Apple Macintosh II. Editors could digitize the dailies—at much lower than full broadcast quality, due to the data storage limitations of the era—and create an editorial timeline, dropping shots onto it with a mouse. It was no longer necessary to build the scene in order, splicing one shot after another with actual film, and if the director wanted a reaction shot dropped in the middle of the scene, no de-splicing, cutting, and re-splicing would be necessary. With the Avid, everything was drag-and-drop, and simple alterations were effectively instantaneous.

Additionally, the system allowed filmmakers to experiment with transitions in real time. The creation of a dissolve—where one image fades in while another fades out, typically to indicate a passage of time—or fades—where one image emerges from or submerges into blackness, as usually happens at the beginning or ending of a show, or at commercial breaks—used to require an optical printer. The optical printer was a contraption consisting of one or more film projectors affixed to a film camera, allowing the latter device to photograph the output of the projectors, creating effects in the process; in short, every time you see a picture fade to black prior to 1980, that entire shot was rephotographed via optic printer to achieve that effect. Then it had to be processed and edited into the conformed negative; and because it was effectively a generation removed from the shot preceding it, the drop in quality before a fade or dissolve is often evident before it begins; the image gets suddenly softer and grainier. The Avid could execute dissolves and fades on-screen in real time, at the push of a button.

(Optical printers were also used to superimpose credits over live-action footage. For reasons I haven’t been able to ascertain, it seems that optical printers are infrequently cleaned, and you can see specks of detritus in exactly the same positions during the credits and subtitled sections of Four Weddings and a Funeral [1994] and Backbeat [1994], which apparently went through the same apparatus relatively close together.)

When the cut was finally locked, the Avid would export an Edit Decision List (EDL), a digital account of every cut in the episode, logged by frame numbers on the negative. That EDL, housed on a 3.5″ floppy disk would be taken to the editorial facility where the negative would be conformed to the instructions exported from the Avid.

As with any new technology, the entertainment industry was slow as a whole to embrace the new technology, but television was faster than film, and Babylon 5 was among the first generation of series cut digitally on a non-linear platform. (In 1997, Walter Murch won the Academy Award for editing The English Patient [1996] on the Avid. For more on Mr. Murch and editorial philosophy, I recommend IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE: A Perspective of Film Editing by Murch [Silman-James Press, 2001] and THE CONVERSATION: Walter Murch and the Art of Film Editing by Michael Ondaatje [Random House, 2004].)

On Monday, 6 December, director Janet Greek began working with Citron to create her director’s cut. The Directors Guild of America mandates that directors get two days to create their cut of a television episode. Greek might prefer a closeup to a midshot, favor one take over another, trim the air out of a conversation by tightening the cuts between speakers, delete a line of dialogue she found unnecessary to telling the story, or eliminate an entire scene if it proved redundant in the context of the assembled episode. The director’s cut also offers an opportunity for experimentation, perhaps intercutting two adjacent scenes to ratchet up the tension between them, cutting back and forth, back and forth, and building to a double climax. Depending on the director, their cut may be close to the target running time, or they may leave the episode a little long, deferring to the producers.

With the director’s cut completed, John Copeland and J. Michael Straczynski would review the it multiple times and make notes. They’d then join Citron in the edit suite and begin the producers’ cut. Like the director, the producers adjust shots, vary takes, or perhaps resequence an entire act; the producers’ cut is effectively the final re-write. Unlike the freelance director, who comes and goes, handling maybe three or four episodes of Babylon 5 per season, the producers have the big picture in mind. Their adjustments are made in the context of all the episodes to date and those planned down the road; they see the series rather than the show.

Originally published as the 15 October 2021 installment of the Babylon 5 Preservation Project weekly briefing.

Peter Cushing

Peter Cushing in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), courtesy Hammer Films Prods.

You cannot make a film like this without integrity.
To make the audiences believe in you, you must believe utterly in what you are doing.

Peter Cushing (1913-94)

Story #6 – 6 January 2018

Suppressing his excitement, Toby thanked Alicia for participating in his telepathy experiment, and ushered her out of the psychology lab. As she crossed the walkway that bridged the third floors of the more conventional, 1950s-built psychology building and the modernist 1970s-nightmare where the physical sciences resided, Toby lost sight of her in a sudden surge of transiting students. He returned to the lab.

Fifty out of fifty, he thought, picking the uppermost Zener card from the stack, that’s statistically impossible. Then he noticed the card: three wavy lines. He consulted the notepad where he’d tracked the actual cards against Alicia’s verbal guesses; a circle was the fiftieth card drawn according to his notes. He checked the forty-ninth—the card was a square, but his notes recorded a star.

Panicking, Toby wound back the audiotape he’d made of the session.

His voice, irritatingly high, confirmed “Star. And number fifty…”

Then another male voice, a much deeper one, said, “Circle.”

“…is a circle,” Toby’s voice concurred. “That’s fifty out of fifty, Alicia. I think you must be reading my mind or something.”

The deep, male voice replied, “Or something.” The deep voice laughed. “I should go; I’ve got a class to get to.”

© 2018 by Jason Davis. All rights reserved.

In 2018, I tried to write a short-short story every day. I was eventually derailed by a weekend away from my desk and mounting guilt that the Harlan Ellison Books Preservation Project was taking longer than expected, and every waking moment should be dedicated to its completion.

With five years distance, I like some of the stories, each one having been placed before me by Facebook for the last week, and I think the exercise is serving a purpose now that it failed to accomplish at the time. We shall see.

ANATOMY OF A SPEC SALE: Changeling

“It’s all storytelling, one’s just longer than the other, and with a larger budget,” says J. Michael Straczynski regarding his feature script, Changeling. “You still have to keep up the pacing, deliver strong characters, and tell a coherent, internally consistent story.” Despite a varied career of writing for magazines, newspapers, comicbooks, novels, and television, Straczynski’s aversion to film has been based on the industry’s uncertainties. “In tv, when they say, ‘Here’s a series order; go make x-number episodes,’ that’s what you do. When you get into film, suddenly there’re all kinds of things that can go wrong…you have to get foreign investors, there’re various distribution deals; it’s go, then no-go, then go again…it can make you crazy. It’s too much like going to Vegas and betting your house on one roll of the dice.

“Consequently, I only go to the feature world when I think the story really, really merits it…and even then it’s with great caution,” says Straczynski alluding to Changeling, a spec script he sold in June to Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment. “For many years, I’d been a freelance reporter/stringer with such publications as the LA Times, the LA Herald Examiner, TIME Inc. and others, and as such you develop a lot of contacts around town,” said Straczynski, recounting the screenplay’s origins. “I’d gotten a call from one source at City Hall who was getting rid of some records from the ’20s and came across a transcript of a hearing he thought I should see. So I zoomed down there and was allowed to read some of it before it was destroyed. As I read the transcript, I initially couldn’t figure out what had been going on, and when I did finally figure it out, thought, this can’t possible be real, this can’t possibly have actually happened. I was able to copy a few pages before they took it away, just some critical pages, enough to get dates and places to launch into several years of research into the events of that story.”

“The main thing with this story—which involves a woman whose young son goes missing, and is later supposedly returned, but there’s something very much wrong here—was just getting it as accurate as possible,” Straczynski continues. “I didn’t want to fictionalize it much, because the story is so extraordinary, so hard to believe, that if you start faking things suddenly you call the whole story into question.” Rigorously adhering to the facts, the writer found his greatest challenge was determining which material would be left out of the screenplay. “I went through several iterations of the script, tried various different approaches over a very long period, then put it away to stew. Finally, one day, it dinged like a toaster in my head, and I sat down and I knew suddenly how it had to be written. I blasted through the script in eleven days.”

Upon finishing the draft, Straczynski ran it past his feature agent, Martin Spencer of CAA. “He was stunned by it,” says Straczynski who notes that Spencer read the script in one sitting. “He was also kind of taken aback by it because, as he put it, it’s ‘outside the box’ of what I’m known for, which is for being a sci-fi kinda guy,” says the writer best known for creating the science fiction television series Babylon 5. Refuting the industry pigeonhole in which he’s often filed, Straczynski notes “I’ve written, and sold, comedy, mainstream drama, murder mysteries, cop shows, sf, fantasy, horror…but in this town you are what you’re most recently known for, and that’s B5.”

On the script’s reception, Straczynski couldn’t be more pleased. “As was expressed to me by a number of folks after the fact, when a spec comes in the door, there’s usually some measure of backing-and-forthing, where one person likes the A-story, another the B-story, this or that needs work. But this one came in over the transom fairly bulletproof, which I attribute more to the original events than my skill as a storyteller.” With one suggestion from Spencer, Straczynski revised the script and the agent sent it out. “I have to say that my agent approached this in a very strategically smart way. He kept a tight rein on the script, and let it only to a couple of people in a very measured fashion.”

“We could have taken it to auction and probably made twice or three times what we ultimately got for it—which is already rather substantial—but my agent believed in the story as much as I did, and wanted not just to sell it, but to do everything to get it to the right people who could get it made—someone who was temperamentally suited to the material.” This led to Spencer sending the script to Imagine Entertainment, the company founded in 1986 by director Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer. Straczynski continues, “They got the script on one afternoon, the president of Imagine read it that night, called Ron the next day, got it to him, Ron read it that night, and they opened negotiations the next day.”

For Straczynski, “The hardest part of the last stages of negotiation was doing nothing. When you get down to the wire, it’s easy to micro-manage your agent, to take what’s on the table and run, but I know and trust Martin as one of the best.” Thus, the writer did not hover over his agent while the deals were being made. “He’d call when there was something to say, and if I heard from him just once during a day, or not at all, I knew he was in there doing what he had to and I kept out of it.” As Straczynski puts it, “I do what I do, and leave him to do what he does. It wasn’t easy, but I did it.” When the deal was done, Spencer thanked Straczynski for giving him free reign. “I think you hire good people and leave them to do their job, otherwise what’s the point?”

When asked how he feels about having conquered another storytelling medium, Straczynski says, “I don’t think I’ve conquered anything. I’ve written over 200 produced tv scripts, created the Babylon 5 franchise for Warner Brothers, written some of Marvel’s top-selling books with their main core characters, now sold this…but I’m still learning and I’ve never considered myself having ‘made it’ at any point. I think the moment you get complacent, the moment you think you’ve conquered something, that’s the moment you get creatively dead.”

Originally published in Creative Screenwriting, Vol. 13, No. 6 (Nov/Dec 2006).