Yesterdays Gone: SEASON TWO (THE POST-APOCALYPTIC SERIAL THRILLER) (Yesterday's Gone) (13 page)

SEAN:
Serialized fiction isn’t really new, it’s actually a really old way of doing things. It’s how Dickens released the majority of his work. Readers love open loops and cliffhanger endings because it gives them more to think about, pulls them deeper into the narrative, and gives them a deeper connection with the characters, as well as investment in their story. And that’s what an author wants most, for their reader to care about their story.

 
I love TV. But the TV I think about when I’m not watching, are the shows that leave me asking questions and wanting answers. It’s a ridiculously fun way to watch a story, so surely it would be a ridiculously fun way to write one, too.

 
And it was. Just as television shows are shot with scenes out of order, that’s how we wrote
Yesterday’s Gone
. Dave wrote his scenes and I wrote mine, then we went into post production together, edited into a unified story with the best possible flow.
 

 
We’re thrilled that it worked, both for us as writers and you as a reader, because our inspiration flies far beyond this title. Writing
Yesterday’s Gone
has been so much fun, and so creatively rewarding, we can’t wait to follow it up.

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE WORLD? WHAT KEPT THESE PARTICULAR PEOPLE ALIVE?

David:
You’re gonna learn what happened to the world real early in the season. That’s one of the answers we knew we HAD to answer early on. One of the criticisms I heard for
Season One
is we (the writers) didn’t answer that many questions. One person even suggested the theories that we posited were ridiculous and showed no understanding of quantum theory. The thing to remember is that the speculations about what happened in
Season One
were from the mouths and minds of the people trying to figure out what the hell happened. The explanations weren’t informed in any way by knowledge, but rather people with limited knowledge, trying to figure shit out.
 

Imagine if you and your friends woke up and most of the world was gone. Unless you’re a scientist, or well-versed in scientific theories, you’re probably gonna say more stuff that sounds crazy and far fetched than things which make sense. As a reader, you are limited to what the character whose point of view the chapter is, knows.

That being said, you’ll get a peek at someone a bit closer to the original event early in
Season Two
.

As for what kept these particular people alive, that would be spoiling one of the bigger secrets. Sorry.

SEAN:
 
I’ll add that this was one of the most rewarding parts of writing the second season for us, was really putting all of this together. When we started writing, we didn’t necessarily know what happened to everyone, though we’d certainly batted around a few ideas. But by Season Two, we needed to know a lot more about our world, even if the characters didn’t.
 

Dave did a lot of the heavy lifting for this part of the story, and did an amazing job threading everything together. I couldn't be happier with the story’s direction, or more proud of the world building that’s been done since the first season concluded.
 

WHO WAS YOUR FAVORITE CHARACTER TO WRITE? WHO WAS THE HARDEST?

DAVID:
I know Sean’s answer to this before he gives it! My favorite was probably Brent Foster, only because he’s similar to me. Brent is an overworked journalist with a young son, trying to do the best he can to keep his family together and doing what he feels to be the right thing even as he distances himself from his family.
 

I approached his story thinking,
how would I respond?
Some of his scenes in Season One, particularly the one where he laid in bed with his son and came to the realization that he was an absent father, were difficult to write because it was an admittance of my own feelings to that effect. I actually cried when I finished that scene.
 

The hardest to write for me was probably Boricio, because that is all Sean’s creation, and his dialogue is way over the top. It’s hard for me to get the voice just right, and we don’t want Boricio to become a caricature of himself. It’s a fine line. I think Boricio’s dialogue might be the closest we’ve come to disagreeing with each other. Arguments over Boricio could be an entertaining inclusion for a book! Sean: “Why can’t we call him a cum-colored cracker?” Me: “That doesn’t even make sense!”

SEAN:
Ha, that’s too funny. Dave’s not exaggerating. We actually have that email. There’s no doubt, I love writing Boricio and even have fun rewriting Dave’s interpretation. He’s a ridiculously over the top character, sure, but I do think we fill him with enough fun to make him a blast to read. I thought he would be more polarizing than he was. I figured some people would love and some would hate, and it would be around half and half. But it seems like most people enjoy reading him. My wife’s the best litmus test. When I read Boricio’s parts out loud and she’s smiling, I know I’ve done a good job. I would even give Boricio his standalone series, but Dave won’t let me. So you need to speak up, send him an email, and let him know how wrong he is. GO TEAM BORICIO!!!
 

As far as the most difficult to write, that’s Luca for me, by far. Part of him is easy because I have a son his age, but my son isn’t fighting voices in his head, or aging years in seconds. Getting his voice just right is difficult. It’s also funny that some of the criticism for the unrealistic dialogue of Luca are things I’ve taken directly from my own son. BONUS FUN FACT: My son named Boricio and knows about the character, though he only knows he is a “bad guy” and doesn’t know any specifics.
 

WHAT WAS THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE IN WRITING
YESTERDAY’S GONE?

SEAN:
Knowing the story we wanted to tell. We never wanted to build out so much of the story out that we left nothing to discover along the way, but we also didn’t want to leave so much to chance that we wrote ourselves into a corner, or made the story a molecule less than what the reader deserved.

Finding the
just right
between the magic of surprise and the intelligence of plotting was instrumental to delivering the best stories possible. But it’s hard to know where that
just right
is. Because the first season started from nothing, we were able to make up more of it as we went along in the first couple of episodes. By the end of the first three episodes, we were much more focused on specific spots the story needed to hit so we could deliver a more rewarding payoff at the end.

Season Two has had a different sort of process. We’ve had to script our story out with more precision this time, from the start. But we are extremely pleased with the results.

DAVID:
Timing. The biggest challenge was making it all come together in a way that keeps a lot of the mystery, yet reveals enough in character development and storyline to keep readers hooked. A lot of times, especially in the horror genre, the story falls apart after the mystery is gone. We’d love to leave readers in the dark as long as possible, but at some point, they need to have an idea what’s happening or they lose faith that YOU know what’s going on.
 

I think the writers of LOST faced a lot of criticism because many viewers thought they had no clue what was happening late in the game. We NEEDED to understand and refine the back-story before starting Season Two. Because if WE don’t know what’s happening, then we’re gonna make mistakes. We have a fairly big reveal coming in Episode Eight, one I
wanted
to hold off on delivering until the end of the season, but if we did that, the story would have suffered. So we’re answering questions, yet raising new ones, as all the best serials do.

I think we were learning as we went along in
Season On
e. This is certainly the most ambitious thing I’ve worked on and I think we’re hitting our stride now.

HOW MUCH OF THE STORYLINE WAS MAPPED OUT AHEAD OF TIME? DO YOU KNOW HOW IT WILL END?

DAVID:
In the very early stages, we wrote the first episode without ANY idea of what was going on aside from a very basic premise — On October 15, most of the world’s population vanished. Write what happened next. We were each assigned to write our own characters with minimal direction, and then we traded our pages, and began to piece the puzzle together. I was shocked by how little we changed and how well our ideas meshed. We then brainstormed the rest of
Season One
, and a bit beyond, and got busy writing.

Very early on, I knew a few things, such as some of the key cliffhanger sequences well into
Season Three
, and how the whole thing might end. I plotted a good chunk of
Season One
out, but kept things fluid, open to change as the characters and situations presented new ideas. Some of the best changes were ones we’d never planned and which came up in our brainstorming sessions.
 

SEAN:
Yesterday’s Gone
started with only a premise, and quickly grew cooler with every conversation and fresh pile of pages. We realized early on that we had to know where we were going, not just immediately, but long-term. We wanted our story to have the same sort of vibe as cool, serialized TV, but we didn’t want it to meander to nothing, shedding its audience like dead skin along the way, as many great shows have done.
 

This usually happens because there isn’t an endgame in mind. So it was important for us to keep things as open as possible so that the creative possibilities never dulled, while building the mile markers required to make sure we were going the right way.

 
We have an idea of how our story will end, but not necessarily how every
character’s
story will end. We need more time to live with our characters before we can conclude their stories. We love them, and if we did our jobs, you love them, too. So we want to make sure we end things in a way that respects the story as well as the characters themselves. Dave has pushed this from the beginning, character arc over everything else.

HOW DO YOU BOTH HANDLE WRITING CHORES?
 

SEAN:
David and I have different ways of putting our stories together, depending on the project. One of the ways we work best is when Dave builds the house, and I come in to landscape the grounds and decorate the interior. That’s largely how
Yesterdays Gone
has been put together, especially in the second season. But the best parts of the project for me have been during those brainstorming sessions when the pieces of our story click together between laughs and gasps and
ohmygod’s.

We each write our pages, pass them between us, then usually get on the phone to discuss what worked, what didn’t, and how to blend things better the next time. Though we’ve been writing together for over three years, we live hundreds of miles apart, and have only met one another in person twice. So I pace my basement in circles, or turn the treadmill on low, while we shoot the shit and hash it out. I think much of
Yesterday’s Gone’s
magic is dusted in those moments when we’re building our story out loud. And I think part of that is because we often speak in terms of how our story would play out if it was shot for television.
 

DAVID:
I think we bring out the best in each other’s writing, each with our own strengths. We both write and edit an equal amount of each other’s stuff, though we vary on stories, or even within chapters, who will be taking lead. It comes down to whoever has the best idea for that particular story. Sometimes we’ll handle our own first drafts of the segments, and other times, we’ll write story beats or prompts for the other to flesh out. It’s a very fluid and fast process which has an energy I’d never have working solo. If left to my own devices, I’d still be perfecting my first unpublished novel.

IS IT EASIER OR HARDER TO WRITE WITH ANOTHER WRITER? DO YOU EVER GET INTO ARGUMENTS OVER WHAT GOES ON THE PAGE?

DAVID:
Sean and I work remarkably ego-free. We listen to one another’s ideas and never worry about who gets credit for the stories. When we first started publishing, we had to consider whose name would be first on the book covers. The first idea we had was to go with whoever was lead on that story. However, we decided to just stick with one constant branding, “Sean Platt & David W. Wright.”
 

It doesn’t matter if people think Sean wrote something I did, or vice versa.
Though, I did write all the really cool shit! And Sean wrote the parts you didn’t like as much :)

The thing you need with a co-writer is trust. Trust to carry out a vision, trust to respect what you’re doing, and trust that they’ll tell you when something isn’t working on the page. It’s kind of like marriage, except without all the sex (though Sean keeps propositioning me!) and arguing, two people working for a common goal and more concerned with the final product than individual accolades.
 

SEAN:
I’m a collaborative writer, so I probably prefer to write with someone else. I’ll probably always have at least one project going on that is just mine, but I write fast and love working with others. When you have a great writing partner, ideas are easy and verbal riffing is ridiculous fun.

In three and a half years, I can’t remember a single argument over whether or not something went on the page. Dave will make suggestions and I take them on first call. The opposite is true, too. Dave and I have wonderful, creative harmony. I’m sure there will be something one of us has to fight for at some point in the future but we haven’t seen it yet.