Over on his SciFi.com blog, Ron Moore (the mind behind the brilliant Battlestar Galactica relaunch) reminisces about the late Michael Piller, a producer and writer of various entries in the Star Trek franchise since the late eighties. In recounting his early experiences with Piller in the production offices of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Moore recounts Piller's process of "breaking" a story.

"Every episode – every episode – on Trek went through a process known as “The Break,” wherein the entire writing staff was gathered in Michael’s office to “break” the episode on a white dry erase board in excruciating detail, before a word of the teleplay was ever written. Michael ran the breaks and he was the final arbiter of what went on the board (and hence, in the show) and what did not. With a roomful of writers, this means a continuous running argument about where the story should and should not go and it takes a particular kind of show-runner to successfully guide a break session without blood on the walls. "

What's interesting to me about this is that the process Moore describes is virtually identical to my own writing process--if you substituted "Me talking outloud to myself" for "a room full of writers," and "spiral bound notebooks" for "white dry erase board." When I'm writing, whether a short story or a chapter from a longer work, I block out a rough outline of where I anticipate the plot will begin and end. Then I take that outline to pieces, attacking it from all sides--to see if there are any points where the plot falls apart, any instances of characters behaving in illogical ways just to advance the needs of the plot, any plot holes or dangling threads needing stitching up. Then I work up another outline, in more detail. Then I go at this more detailed outline, this time with thematic concerns in mind, to make sure that the story still says what I intended it to say; sometimes, a bit of shoring up brings the theme back into focus, and other times it turns out that the message of a story is something other than I originally intended. Then I break the story down on a paragraph by paragraph level, and comb through it to make sure that crucial bits of information are revealed to the reader at the right time--not too soon, not too late, or, worse, not at all! Only when I've done all this, and built and rebuilt the plot several times over, do I write the first word.

I don't think I'd known previously that the Star Trek writing staff used this same sort of approach--I've found a similar approach in the "story is king" approach used by the Pixar folks, though; the audio commentaries on any given Pixar DVD are the best instruction in the art of storytelling that I've ever found--but it's impossible to calculate the kind of impact that ST:TNG (and, later, Deep Space Nine) had on my conception of storytelling. I was a senior in high school when "Encounter at Farpoint" relaunched the franchise on television (and changed the face of syndicated tv forever... but that's a different matter entirely), but I was in college before the series developed to the point that it was anything like "good" (it's not a coincidence, I think, that the quality of the series picked up exponentially when Piller came onboard as a staff writer, based on what Moore has said above). My friends and I watched and rewatched every episode of TNG with a level of devotion and attention that approached that of medieval rabbis poring over the torah. Admittedly, it became a game early on to see who could predict the ending of the story earlier than the others. In later seasons, we perfected the game to the extent that we could often predict with unerring accuracy the entire shape of the plot, from beginning to end, by the time the opening credits ran, seeing the whole encoded in the shape of the opening few minutes worth of teaser. There was definitely a formula to what the TNG writers were doing, but for all of that it was a good formula, one that served them well. Arguably, it was a good enough structure for storytelling that they were able to cost for the better part of two decades, spinning series after series out of the franchise with only minor retooling.

I think that formulas, and by extention the formulaic conventions of genre, can unquestionably be limiting, and the best writers are those who grow beyond them. But it is through understanding these formulas in the first place that most writers learn their craft in the first place. (I say "most," while I was tempted to say "all," because I'm sure that there are those who arrive at their craft sui generis, owing nothing to the traditions that preceded them; but I don't know any of them.) It's like that old saw--"You have to learn the rules before you can break them." And while I hadn't really recognized it before, one of the classrooms in which I learned the rules of formulaic storytelling were the years I spent watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. And I suppose, in hindsight, that I ultimately have Michael Piller to thank for that.