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

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