User blog comment:Mroddy/Writer's Workshop: Organic Elimination Orders/@comment-1874924-20150726030736

Yes, I know I'm late to the party, so returning to the original subject...

Based on how you define “preplanned elimination order”, I must admit I’m skeptical that it’s really as common as you suggest. I’d bet good money that most writers, or at least those who use OC casts, do not have all or even most of the elimination order set before they start writing. Maybe before they start posting, but that’s not the same thing. Those who do plan the entire order first thing seem likely to either abandon their story after a chapter or two or try to pass off short summaries or a standalone elimination table as a story.

(Preplanned order may be more common with canon casts, as writer favoritism can come into play. I recently saw the seminal Total Drama Comeback described as "a 350,000-word character ranking".)

You also seem to define “organic elimination order” more narrowly than I would. For example, giving most of the characters comparable screen time is not inherently part of organic planning, but a separate concept that just happens to mesh well with your other methods. After all, if your main concern is with character-driven storylines, there’s nothing inherently wrong with it becoming apparent early on who the main characters are. To me, developing the elimination order organically merely means that the elimination order follows the storylines.

In LTDI, I use a mix of preplanned and organic ordering, and I suspect this approach is common. I determined LTDI’s winner and at least three of the Final Five very early on, simply by virtue of what the story is about. (Hint: it’s not about strategy or gameplay, although those are important plot elements.) For the most part, I have written LTDI out of sequence, i.e. as scenes come to me. Because some of these scenes occur late in the story, I knew which characters had to be available at those points. Generally speaking, filling in LTDI’s elimination order tended to start at the ends and flow towards the center. Only with the last two team phase eliminations did I have any real trouble coming up with an elimination reason that seemed good to me.

Although some characters are clearly more prominent than others--the first part of the story was largely about Heather and her alliance--everyone has gotten their share of "screen" time, although it did take several episodes for D.J. to do much.

In some cases, substitutions were possible, which is how Cody became a former Possum Scout. Owen and Harold are canonically the outdoorsmen, but I knew that neither would be available at the point in the story where those skills became relevant. In other cases, though, I could not make substitutions because the scene required someone’s defining character traits/behaviors. Two or three contestants get deeper into the game than they otherwise might have because I had a specific dramatic need for them in certain later episodes. Similar considerations dictated who will return at the merge.

Conversely, at least two other players were victims of the elimination order following the storylines. One of these I would very much have liked to keep around longer, but the storylines were such that she had to go when she did. (At least she got a couple of big scenes before then.) Another was a reader favorite, but moving her elimination back would have required too much revision of later events--even rewriting entire storylines. Instead, I gave this character more screen time while I could, resulting in what TV Tropes calls a "sacrificial lion".