The trick is making your writing and worldbuilding deep and rich enough that when you do resolve something, you can go back to Chapter One and pick out things that will support that resolution and look like deliberate foreshadowing, even though at the time you wrote them, they were nothing of the sort. There are many examples of this on the show, like Spike's "What rhymes with 'lungs?'" line, when Angelus is talking about the lack of poetry in something. I'm positive that in S2 they had no conception of Spike having been a poet in life, but that line supports the idea that he was perfectly
As I was telling 2maggie2 above - there's a huge difference between say filling in the blanks of Spike's background by using bits and pieces you've written, and leaving unanswered gaps in your story, huge unanswered gaps. We need to know when this tale is taking place - how long after the events of Not Fade Away or Chosen. It's not clear. It shouldn't be something we guess at. We need to know what lead to the bank robbery. We need to know if Buffy knows Spike is alive or not. Not knowing these things...makes it hard to care or see the story as a continuation of the series. It feels a bit like it is floating off somewhere, disconnected in space. Telling us these things, grounds it. And it isn't hard to do so, a few bits of dialogue here or there, would do wonders.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2009-11-06 05:57 pm (UTC)The trick is making your writing and worldbuilding deep and rich enough that when you do resolve something, you can go back to Chapter One and pick out things that will support that resolution and look like deliberate foreshadowing, even though at the time you wrote them, they were nothing of the sort. There are many examples of this on the show, like Spike's "What rhymes with 'lungs?'" line, when Angelus is talking about the lack of poetry in something. I'm positive that in S2 they had no conception of Spike having been a poet in life, but that line supports the idea that he was perfectly
As I was telling 2maggie2 above - there's a huge difference between say filling in the blanks of Spike's background by using bits and pieces you've written, and leaving unanswered gaps in your story, huge unanswered gaps. We need to know when this tale is taking place - how long after the events of Not Fade Away or Chosen. It's not clear. It shouldn't be something we guess at. We need to know what lead to the bank robbery. We need to know if Buffy knows Spike is alive or not. Not knowing these things...makes it hard to care or see the story as a continuation of the series. It feels a bit like it is floating off somewhere, disconnected in space. Telling us these things, grounds it. And it isn't hard to do so, a few bits of dialogue here or there, would do wonders.