Movieweb has a detailed transcription of a conference call with Masi Oka, Greg Grunberg and Tim Kring.

Here is a little snippit:

I was wondering if you could expound a little about what are the joys and the rewards and the perils of writing a serial show for such an ensemble cast. Do you have like the whole story mapped in your head and just paste the narration in chapters or so how will you go about it?

Tim Kring: One of the, you know, the challenges is obviously to keep a lot of stories going at the same time. That's a very, very big challenge. But, you know, one of the fun things is again, we do know where we're going but watching characters develop and taking them in places that even you didn't expect because the room is a very - the writers' room is a very interesting place because ideas morph and bend and become very different things when you start filtering through lots of people's ideas.

And the one frustrating thing about writing a big serialized show is that any change that you come up with has a kind of domino effect so you - it forces you to be very diligent about what you're trying to tell. And balancing how much story with how much character development is also a challenge. But so far, we seem to be finding more sort of treasures out of this than pitfalls.


Note: this is the same conference call that we talked about a little over a week ago.

Source: movieweb