Trials and Tribulations
J. Michael Straczynski talks good, evil and online publishing.
      by David Rosiak

Crusade's Gary Cole.

Known for his prolific output (at least ten pages a day), Straczynski worked on the Tribulations from start to finish for a period three months. Still, it was only after production finally halted on Crusade that he was able to finally set aside the time needed for the actual writing process.

"That's one of the few drawbacks of television," he confides. "It's this all-consuming beast. Once you go in at the beginning of the show, you just vanish for all intents and purposes until you're done. After I finished the first two books, I wanted to do a third, and I had some ideas for what it would be. I like horror novels, and I like the genre, and I wanted to get back into that as soon as possible. But then I found out just how much time television took from me, and so I didn't have the opportunity to get back to it and give it the proper time until twelve years later."

Unlike his television work, however, Straczynski opted not for extensive written outlines but instead kept most of the novel's plotline firmly situated in his mind.

"I like to sit down with a novel and think it out in great detail," he says. "So it isn't just an action story or a mystery. There's a lot of other stuff going on -- social commentary, subtext, so I finally had the chance, the window, to do another novel, so I grabbed it. I wrote it where it took me."

Where it took him is indeed the most surprising destination of the book, which eventually introduces heroine Susan Randall to the enigmatic character of Raymond Weil, a self-styled soldier of the Christian faith. The plot itself is steeped in Judeo-Christian beliefs, beliefs which Straczynski, himself an atheist, does not share. But he had no trouble putting them on paper.

Straczynski's Tribulations, available free at Bookface.com.

"I think it allows me to look at things objectively," he offers. "I have no axe to grind. I'm not out to advance a theology. I can't just jump in and say `Believe in nothing.' How do you do that? I treat believers and their beliefs respectfully, and in that way I'm able to weigh the positive and negative with a degree of equanimity. And I think people respect that in return. In all the time that we were doing Babylon 5 and we touched on religion, I think we got maybe five angry letters."

Since the novel deals so much with the trappings of faith, primarily the ins and outs of demonic possession, he turned to the internet as a research tool.

"I spent a fair amount of time online visiting various websites and research groups concerning Catholic dogma and exorcisms," he offers. "There's actually a wealth of information out there on the subject."

The underlying subject of Tribulations comes down to the quintessential battle of good and evil, and this is a topic of discussion into which he is eager to leap.

"I think that good and evil are very much intertwined. One thing I wanted to do with the book was to not simply tell a scary story. I believe, as Mark Twain said, if you want your work to last, you must neither overtly teach or overtly preach. But you can covertly teach and covertly preach. And it provided a great opportunity to discuss the nature of evil. What is the worst evil? That which is supernatural or that which we do unto ourselves? Is the worst of us stronger than the best of us?"

These are heady concepts for any book, much less a work of popular horror fiction, and it is no surprise that Straczynski prefers them in the prose form that he originally envisioned.

Straczynski's comic book, Rising Stars.

"I wrote the book to be a book, and if it becomes a movie, so be it. You can only sleep in one bed at a time, eat one meal at a time, drive one car at a time. How much do you actually need? I would rather tell good stories and make a fine living at it than take it to the wall commercially and sell off certain elements of it to get another X amount of dollars. What good will it do me? I'd rather go to my grave knowing I wrote some good stories."

There seems to be no limit to the stories Straczynski has left for eager fans, and although many fans who have discovered Tribulations are already clamoring for a sequel, there won't be one any time soon, in spite of an ending that leaves ample room for a follow-up adventure.

So, come on, how about just one sequel?

"No, not at this time. I left it open ended because I wanted our two main characters to get out alive, because I liked them, but whether or not anything else comes along for them, I don't know and haven't planned for now."

As for the opportunity to publish future works on the Bookface site, he remains uncertain what the future holds, though he tends to keep as many options open as possible.

"I don't know -- it's a totally open question," he states. "I don't have any thoughts currently for what the next novel would be, and until the opportunity opens up again -- it may be a year from now, it may be five years from now -- at which point they may have telepathic transmissions to beam books into people's heads. I'll look around at what is most flexible and what is best for me at that time. But I never commit way too far ahead of time on that kind of stuff."

But his output continues to show a commitment of vision unparalleled in today's market of unassuming sci-fi knockoffs and horror potboilers. It is this tendency toward candid social observation that informs his work and provides fodder for endless debate.

"There's a tendency in culture today to lock ourselves behind our doors, to not get involved anymore, to, in essence, build a wall around ourselves and that tendency is really one of the more dangerous ones that I see out there -- more than any supernatural menace. And I wanted to use the book as a venue to talk about those issues as well. How much have we neglected in ourselves, in our culture, in our society and our people?"

These are the kinds of questions that J. Michael Straczynski will continue to ask in venues like The Amazing Spider Man, for which he is set to begin writing next spring, Jeremiah, his upcoming cable show, and the Rising Stars film, which he is currently scripting. Can we expect as many debatable issues in his upcoming works? Count on it.

"If I can start a discussion or a barfight, then I'm a happy man."

The 11th Hour would like to extend special thanks to Suzanne Connolly for her tremendous assistance with this interview and to J. Michael Straczynski for his time and generosity.

We welcome your comments on The 11th Hour and this feature. Please send letters to: letters@the11thhour.com

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