JJ Abrams advanced his idea in a Ted Talk in 2008.
I started to think that maybe there are times
when mystery is more important than knowledge.
And so I started thinking about "Lost" and the stuff that we do,
and I realized, oh my God,
mystery boxes are everywhere in what I do!
What's in the mystery box matters not, according to Abrams. In his presentation, he boasts of an actual magic box he acquired as a child (a multi-pack of magic tricks) from a magic shop and which he has never opened.
The idea is that the magic of movies is in our minds, our anticipation, guessing, wonderment, etc. and so the content doesn't matter all that much. The plot or premise is, itself, just a McGuffin.
This goes a bit beyond even the debate between plotters and pantsers
You can be a pantser and still recognize that you need to deliver the goods in terms of actual content in the finished product. That stated, "pantsers" sometimes meander through their stories. Stephen King, for example, is a pantser. He claims that when writing he is surprised by what his characters do. He sets the initial conditions and watches the garden grow on the page. Gardens still need weeding and trimming, however, and Kinds books tend to be long, ponderous, and poorly resolved. He seems to writing until he's out of gas. If you don't know where you're trying to get at the end of the story, you might wind up just stopping at some random point. King's short stories, on the hand, concise and quite effective in terms of emplotment--he know's how he wants these stories to end (he doesn't just sit behind keyboard watching a culture grow in a bottle as he types away, but has the end in sight), and have more satisfying endings.
I propose something rather stodgy here and something dissatisfyingly unromantic. It is bad, as a global policy, to flaunt emplotment so as to rely upon one's muse to "see where it goes." The end matters as much as the premise matters (Breaking Bad works so well IMO, because the premise IS the plot, the arc is baked into the premise of "Mister Chips becomes Scarface").
After having watched JJ try to outrun his plotholes in his action fare, Ronald D. Moore make increasingly strained story choices (Look, this is shiny!) in his reboot of Battlestar Galactica, and David Benioff and Dan Weiss ruin Game of Thrones when they ran out of source material, I am convinced that you need a pilot who has a good sense of where the plane is supposed to land.
Emplotment isn't sexy and I am all for being a pantser, but the final product has to deliver the goods and writers need a process by which quality is assured in the final product.
I started to think that maybe there are times
when mystery is more important than knowledge.
And so I started thinking about "Lost" and the stuff that we do,
and I realized, oh my God,
mystery boxes are everywhere in what I do!
What's in the mystery box matters not, according to Abrams. In his presentation, he boasts of an actual magic box he acquired as a child (a multi-pack of magic tricks) from a magic shop and which he has never opened.
The idea is that the magic of movies is in our minds, our anticipation, guessing, wonderment, etc. and so the content doesn't matter all that much. The plot or premise is, itself, just a McGuffin.
This goes a bit beyond even the debate between plotters and pantsers
Plotters outline and plan the structure of their entire story, while Pantsers prefer to write by the seat of their pants.
I propose something rather stodgy here and something dissatisfyingly unromantic. It is bad, as a global policy, to flaunt emplotment so as to rely upon one's muse to "see where it goes." The end matters as much as the premise matters (Breaking Bad works so well IMO, because the premise IS the plot, the arc is baked into the premise of "Mister Chips becomes Scarface").
After having watched JJ try to outrun his plotholes in his action fare, Ronald D. Moore make increasingly strained story choices (Look, this is shiny!) in his reboot of Battlestar Galactica, and David Benioff and Dan Weiss ruin Game of Thrones when they ran out of source material, I am convinced that you need a pilot who has a good sense of where the plane is supposed to land.
Emplotment isn't sexy and I am all for being a pantser, but the final product has to deliver the goods and writers need a process by which quality is assured in the final product.