How "Ripples Across Time & Space" Was Written

On the 29th of April 2011, at about 1 past midnight, I finished what was thought to be a webseries, named Ripples Across Time & Space. It ended with a finale spanning 25 (!) pages (that's longer than all the other episodes put together). That finale pretty much cleared up every plot-point, and answered pretty much every mystery, something that was very rewarding, especially when taking into account the fact that when I started writing this webseries, I had no idea where it was heading, how it would end or what the hell was going on.

And with this, I welcome you to my (pretty spectacular) post, where I take you behind the story, and tell you how the hell I pulled this off, one year after I did it. And since a whole year's gone by, do forgive me if I don't remember every single detail. 

Act 1

The tale starts in March; I had a few opening scenes and ideas scattered in different .Celtx-documents (my screenwriting app of choice). So I read through them and decided to combine them into one bigger beginning. That was the start of this, really. And, as David said in Prometheus; "Big things have small beginnings."

The original ideas were as following:

• The line "It's like something out of a horror movie", said over black.
• The opening scene with Peter in the weird room.
• Some of the Café-scene - not the entirety of it, but at least the narrating voice-over and Kirsten walking in was there. Probably not the parts where Kirsten talks - those were added to the new story.

That was all. Three ideas, thought up at different times, without a connection, where tied together. They were the start of something bigger.

And you can read that start right here.

I don't remember how long it took until I finished the first episode till I wrote the second (pretty much every script in this series was written in a blaze of keyboard-tapping; I sat down, started and finished an episode in the same writing session), but it was at least a week.

When I sat down and wrote the second episode, I had no idea of what would happen or how these things tied together. To spare ourselves from me repeating this; I didn't have a clue as to how things, characters and plotlines fit together until I sat down and wrote the last, 25-page finale that, yes, managed to tie everything together and provide a fitting conclusion.

But let's get back to the second episode again; it picks up pretty much right where the first one left off, with Kirsten having left the bar. You can read the episode here, if you don't want me to spoil what happens next.

You back yet? Of course you are. These are short episodes, aren't they? Mhm. Did you like it? Are you interested in seeing what happens next? I bet you are, even if you didn't like it. Well, maybe one day you'll see the continuation and conclusion of this.

So. While in the first episode I threw in song references and weird mythology-stuff ("Five Years", Mare, visions and various other things), the second episode is more restrained. It is also much shorter - at half the length of the first episode. (episode 3, 4 and 5 are all 3-4 pages. #6 is the last episode.)

When I sat down to write episode 2, I knew that the Man in Suit - a very, very important character for the series, something I knew already then - would walk into the bar at the end.

This brings us to...

Act 2

Episode three (which won't be posted here) introduces a new character and starts to gather the threads a little bit - not that I knew that when I wrote it, but I had some half-baked ideas.

Then comes Episode 4. Since I didn't have a lot of thoughts regarding how this story would connect, I gave the assignment of writing the fourth episode to a fellow screenwriter (and good friend) of mine. I didn't share any of my thoughts regarding the continuation, just sent him the first three scripts and asked if he wanted to write an episode. I figured that he couldn't throw a wrench in any of my plans because... Well, I didn't have any.

He still managed it though, writing what's possibly the weirdest and ickiest episode of the series.

And it was my job to not just make sense of it all, but to get it to some meaningful conclusion. Till now I'd kept this going with strange scenes and half-baked ideas, with the plot jumping backwards, forwards and sideways more than a rabbit on steroids, but now came the final test - things had to connect, be made sense of and have some kind of resolution.

Thank god Doctor Who was there to fuel some of my craziest ideas!

Act 3

Hey, we're already at the last part! Maybe this blogpost won't really BE that long after all! (it is if you're going off on more "sidequests". Hey, who are you? Fuck off, I'm trying to concentrate and it's really late.)

Ahem.

After my friend wrote the fourth episode, some time went by until I sat down at school and an idea (more of an image really) popped into my head. I combined this idea (a girl in a school searching for the source of a sound) with what I had planned to happen at some point in this story, and in a few minutes another episode was written.

Only one left (though I didn't know that then).

This was the point where I read through all the episodes and started jotting down all the questions I had - all the stuff that was, as of episode 5, unresolved.

And then Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer, Ben Folds and Damien Kulash made a project called 8 in 8, where the goal was to produce 8 songs in 8 hours. They didn't make it, but they did make 6 songs from scratch in 6 hours. Which is a pretty huge achievement in itself.

It was this album I listened to (you can listen and buy it here. It's great btw.) when my mind just put everything together. I ran up to the computer, opened Celtx and wrote the entirety of the sixth (and final) episode in a great blitz, crossing out the open-ended mysteries as I typed and closed them.

The ending is a little rusty though, and there's still parts of the story left untold, but overall the end has been written and it makes sense. I pretty much obliterated the "show, don't tell"-rule but I didn't care - I had fun and wrote a pretty good story. And I had fun. That's always important.

In a way, you could say the thing went full circle; I started with three ideas and an unhealthy inspiration from tons of pop culture and ended with the pop culture; 8in8 and Doctor Who mostly, though there's some David Lynch in there too somewhere (and probably a lot of other things).

I've also come full circle in the way that I had no idea what would happen when this started, and by the end I had all the answers. Answers that made sense! There's nothing more fun than getting that.

I hope I'll be able to share the story with you in a way that makes it even more exciting and interesting than the six scripts I have on my computer. We'll see.

For now, I'm content to wait and write. Next up is a new chapter of The Lucky Ones. And this one has been a long time coming.