Unsold episode ideas that became books
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I don't have anything quite so direct as that, but a few subplots in Places of Exile were based on VGR episode premises I came up with. I've also recycled a couple of SF concepts from unused pitches, modified into rather different forms to fit the new stories -- the planetary-core intelligence from Greater Than the Sum was based on an idea from my TNG spec script, and the subspace confluence idea from Forgotten History was from an unused VGR pitch.
One notable example the story Age of the Empress from the Glass Empires anthology is based an outline for an MU episode which would have been done had Enterprise gotten a fifth season.
James Gunn's The Joy Machine is a novelization of Theodore Sturgeon's first, rejected story proposal for TOS. Alan Dean Foster's original story in Star Trek Log Seven (I think) was based on a rejected TOS pitch, as was David Gerrold's Bantam novel The Galactic Whirlpool.
The 34th Rule was based on a rejected television pitch. From Memory Alpha:
"Deep Domain" was born of research into whales the author did for ST IV (and gets a credit for Howard Weinstein in that film).
The beginning of Denny Martin Flinn's "The Fearful Summons" uses his original "collecting the crew" prologue he originally wrote for ST VI.
"The Ashes of Eden" and "The Return" were both based on Shatner movie pitches, IIRC.
Yes, the Kumara material in "Star Trek Log Seven" is based on Alan Dean Foster's Klingon script for a TOS Season 4. He can't recall the original title, sadly. (I asked him!)
The beginning of Denny Martin Flinn's "The Fearful Summons" uses his original "collecting the crew" prologue he originally wrote for ST VI.
"The Ashes of Eden" and "The Return" were both based on Shatner movie pitches, IIRC.
Yes, the Kumara material in "Star Trek Log Seven" is based on Alan Dean Foster's Klingon script for a TOS Season 4. He can't recall the original title, sadly. (I asked him!)
The Return definitely was, though I'm not sure about The Ashes of Eden.
My S.C.E. novella Small World, and my recent Seekers novel Long Shot both were based on rejected pitches made to Star Trek Voyager.
I've already fessed up to the fact that my TNG novella in the Seven Deadly Sins anthology was based on a rejected pitch to Voyager. I just turned B'Elanna into Geordi, replaced some Delta Quadrant aliens with the Pakleds, and found a way to work Data into the story as well.
And I turned another Voyager pitch into a FARSCAPE story instead and sold it to the official FARSCAPE magazine.
Here's the thing, though: It's easier to turn a rejected TV pitch into a short story or novella than a full-length novel, for the simple reason that a typical TV episode doesn't have nearly enough plot to fill a 350 page novel. Books need a lot more plot than a forty-five minute TV episode, so you'd need to expand on the original pitch a lot to get a book out of it.
And I turned another Voyager pitch into a FARSCAPE story instead and sold it to the official FARSCAPE magazine.
Here's the thing, though: It's easier to turn a rejected TV pitch into a short story or novella than a full-length novel, for the simple reason that a typical TV episode doesn't have nearly enough plot to fill a 350 page novel. Books need a lot more plot than a forty-five minute TV episode, so you'd need to expand on the original pitch a lot to get a book out of it.
Is it not also true that Wildfire was basically your attempt to do "Starship Down" again without the restrictions of budget and not killing regular cast members? But I suppose that idea was successfully sold to TV, so it doesn't really count.
I'm a little surprised to hear that, as I always thought the story was perfectly designed to showcase the Pakleds as an example of the "sloth" concept. And now you're saying that wasn't even part of the original pitch? Plus I also remember saying in my review at the time that the story so perfectly encapsulated the standard TNG tropes that it verged on parody. And again, now I hear it was originally planned for Voyager?
But I suppose that just goes to show how much a story can diverge from original concept to final product.
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Ashes was based on Shatner's idea for Star Trek VI, as I understand it.
I'm a little surprised to hear that, as I always thought the story was perfectly designed to showcase the Pakleds as an example of the "sloth" concept. And now you're saying that wasn't even part of the original pitch? Plus I also remember saying in my review at the time that the story so perfectly encapsulated the standard TNG tropes that it verged on parody. And again, now I hear it was originally planned for Voyager?
But I suppose that just goes to show how much a story can diverge from original concept to final product.
The original idea, which had nothing to do with the Pakleds, was to basically retell the story of the Carpathia and the Titanic in space--but with a happier ending.
To refresh your memory, the Carpathia was the ship that tried to come to the aid of the sinking Titanic--but arrived too late to rescue most of the passengers. I recast Voyager as the Carpathia, racing to get to a floundering alien spacecraft in time.
Years later, when Pocket asked me for a Pakleds story, I went rummaging through my "brainstorming" files and stumbled onto that old Carpathia pitch. I could readily see a Pakled ship getting into big trouble, so . . ..
If anything, I think it works better as a TNG story since Geordi already had a history with the Pakleds, which he had to overcome in order to save them.
Once The God Thing finally gets released, we can add it to this list.
I'm sure it'll be any day now...
I'm sure it'll be any day now...
I'm surprised so many of you successful novelists got rejected when you pitched to the shows, especially since a lot of your books are better than a lot of the episodes that actually made it to air. I understand some of the pitches might have been made before you guys had books published, but the talent still you've brought to the books still had to be there.
Theodore Sturgeon's "The Joy Machine" (ST-67) was purchased during Star Trek's second season, and even became a script during the third season (written by Meyer Dolinsky). Did he pitch it before "Shore Leave" and "Amok Time?"
From Memory-Alpha (http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Undeveloped_Star_Trek_episodes), we have:
- "Images of the Beast", written by Philip Jose Farmer for TOS. Later reworked into a non-Star Trek novel of the same name. Somehow.
- "Tomorrow Was Yesterday," written by David Gerrold for TOS. Before it was rewritten into The Galactic Whirlpool (as mentioned by Mr. Bennett above), it was published as a non-Star Trek novel entitled Yesterday's Children (later renamed Starhunt).
- A story about quantum black holes, written by Larry Niven for TAS. He later rewrote it for his own purposes into the short story "The Borderland of Sol" (a Star Trek story developed into a Known Space story, for a change).
- "The Patient Parasites", written by Russell Bates for TAS. Later included in the anthology Star Trek: The New Voyages 2 in 1978 and much later released online (with permission) as one of the Star Trek: The Animated Series comics
- "Blood and Fire," written by David Gerrold for TNG is probably the most famous example. It was developed into a Starwolf novel.
- Not a novel, but Mr. Cox might be interested to know (or probably already knows) that an episode pitched by David Kemper for TNG was later reworked into an episode of Farscape ("Through the Looking Glass")
- Ronald D. Moore's sequel to "A Piece of the Action" (first pitched to TNG and later DS9) would be adapted in comic book form as "A Piece of Reaction" (Star Trek: Unlimited, 1998).
The planet with a Fountain of Youth. Shatner wanted that for his pitch for ST VI (contractually, he was at last allowed to pitch a sequel to ST V - and direct it - because of his "Favored Nations" contract, IIRC), but was overruled on th story, and so he shunted into his first Trek novel, as to why his romantic interest, Teilani of Chal, had unusual restorative powers.
Ah, yes:
Wiki says: "Chal apparently has fountain of youth properties, which seem proven when Teilani's wound miraculously heals, and the anarchists want to sell it. Kirk accepts Teilani's offer to help protect Chal, seeing it as a second chance.."
"The Return" was from his pitch for "Generations II".
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It's not about talent. Talent is what gets you in the door to pitch in the first place, because they aren't going to waste their time hearing pitches from someone unless they know that person has the talent to make it worth their while. But only a few ideas will actually prove viable. IIRC, during the open-submission process maintained on TNG, DS9, and VGR, maybe one pitch out of a thousand got bought. And that applies to pitches from established industry professionals as well as newcomers.
There are plenty of reasons why pitches might not work. The most common one is that they've already bought a similar idea -- because, contrary to the layperson's tendency to assume that any similarity between stories is evidence of plagiarism, the fact is that different people approaching the same show and characters will hit upon overlapping ideas all the time, because a lot of ideas naturally follow out of a given set of circumstances or character dynamics, and thus a lot of people will converge on them independently.
Alternatively, an idea might be too expensive, or not visual enough, or not action-driven enough, or too action-driven, or too different from the producers' vision of the show and characters. (I once pitched Robert Hewitt Wolfe a DS9 plot in which Garak engineered an elaborate hoax on the crew just to stay in practice, because my theory of the character was that he was in it for the game above all, whether there was a tangible goal or not. But Robert felt Garak wouldn't do it unless there were some real gain.)
Or maybe it just didn't rise enough above the pack. These guys heard hundreds of pitches a week, and a premise really had to rise above the background noise and have some exceptional hook that grabbed them and excited them more than all the others. Talent gets you in the door, but you're competing with hundreds of other writers whose talent got them in the door, so it takes more than just talent.
An important part of the pitching process is learning how to calibrate your ideas to what the producers of a given show want, so you're likely to burn through a number of pitches just finding that out. When I pitched to DS9, my ideas were more plot- and idea-driven, and Robert Hewitt Wolfe's reactions were consistently about the need to make them more character-driven, to generate story from the basis of what motivates characters and how they're affected or revealed by the plot. So when I went on to pitch for VGR, I came up with a bunch of character-driven pitches -- only to be told that they were looking for more plot-driven, high-concept stories instead. And when this happened to me, I remembered that I'd once read someone else's account of pitching to those two shows in turn and having essentially the same experience.
So pitching is largely about trial and error. On my second VGR pitch, I got close enough that one of my ideas was actually brought up in the writers' room, though it never went farther than that. If I'd stuck with it beyond that, I might eventually have dialed in my approach enough to sell something -- just as it took me years of submitting stories to magazines and getting them rejected before I learned enough to make a sale. But I decided that pitching just wasn't for me and Hollywood wasn't a place I really wanted to work.
Well, Yesterday's Children started out as an adaptation of "Tomorrow Was Yesterday," but Gerrold got so invested in the original ship and characters he created to take the place of the Enterprise that he decided to veer off and tell an unrelated story about them before he even got to adapting the episode plot. So while it was an offshoot of the same project, it was a totally different story. (Indeed, the reason it was later renamed is that the title Yesterday's Children has absolutely nothing to do with the book's plot. It's left over from the plot it was going to have.)
Moore's? That was by Andy Mangels and Mike Martin, IIRC. I don't recall Moore getting a credit.
In my case, this was definitely after I'd written a bunch of Trek books, which is surely why I got invited to pitch in the first place.
You also have to consider that the process is very different. It's one thing to write up a detailed outline and submit it to an editor (as things tend to work in publishing) and something else to try to verbally pitch a plot to somebody over the phone or in person.
I'll be honest: I don't pretend that I ever really mastered the art of the verbal pitch, as opposed to putting my ideas down on paper and submitting them to an editor. Which probably counted against me.
Bottom line: Hollywood and New York are very different worlds. Just because you can swim in one doesn't mean you can't flounder in the other . . .. .
Right. I hate verbal pitches. I have a harder time articulating myself verbally, and I never mastered the art of distilling a story idea down to one or two pithy sentences. And I'm too shy to be comfortable with a face-to-face or phone presentation, and too emotionally vulnerable to deal well with rejection in those more direct circumstances. It's easier when it's just words on the page. The print medium is better suited for an introvert like me.
(The reason Hollywood pitches have to be verbal is because they're legally obligated to pay you for anything they actually ask you to write down for them, even if they don't use it.)
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