Becoming An Author

[Andrew Davenport]

Hello.

I realise that this will be a question that has been asked many times, but I shall ask again anyway out of curiosity and ignorance.

I have had, for decades, a story idea covering partially, the time period between the end of the five year mission, and the motion picture.

In my dreams, I would love to get it published, or work in tandem with an established author.
I really feel it is a story that will sell, and be lapped up!
But I am not in it for the money, just to tell the story that I am sure many would like to see.

I don't come from a rich family, or a university background, etc.
I have a family, face the struggles that many others face, but we get by.

I know I would need an agent.
That would cost I presume.
I know I need to have a vast background of literary experience.
I have wrote articles for a trek website, published stories on here under my old username, (AndyBlue1975), and that's about it.

Is this a pipe dream or can I make it a reality?

 

[Christopher]

Being a professional author is like being a professional in any other field. It takes years of hard work, commitment, and training to become knowledgeable and skilled enough in the field to be competitive with all the other professionals. Publishers aren't in the market for single stories; they're in the market for people skilled and reliable enough to produce stories on an ongoing basis, and to adapt to the kind of stories the publishers have in mind. It took me five years of getting stories rejected and learning from the rejection letters before I raised my game enough to come up with a story that could sell. People rarely succeed on their first attempt at anything.

If you only have one story you want to tell, that's a hobby, not a career, and your best bet is to publish it on one of the many fan fiction sites. There's nothing wrong with doing something for love, but it's a whole different thing from pursuing a profession.

I don't come from a rich family, or a university background, etc.

That's got nothing to do with it. I can only think of one professional author I've personally known who was moderately rich, and I'm pretty sure he earned that through his long, successful writing career, not the other way around.

I know I would need an agent.
That would cost I presume.

Never, ever trust anyone who tells you to pay them in advance for their agenting or editing services. That's always a scam. Legitimate agents take a percentage (typically 15%) of an author's sales. They don't get paid unless you get paid, which is what gives them an incentive to work on your behalf.

 

[Tosk]

Produce something as well written as To Kill a Mockingbird.

...or something as horribly written as Fifty Shades of Grey.

 

[Andrew Davenport]

Being a professional author is like being a professional in any other field. It takes years of hard work, commitment, and training to become knowledgeable and skilled enough in the field to be competitive with all the other professionals. Publishers aren't in the market for single stories; they're in the market for people skilled and reliable enough to produce stories on an ongoing basis, and to adapt to the kind of stories the publishers have in mind. It took me five years of getting stories rejected and learning from the rejection letters before I raised my game enough to come up with a story that could sell. People rarely succeed on their first attempt at anything.

If you only have one story you want to tell, that's a hobby, not a career, and your best bet is to publish it on one of the many fan fiction sites. There's nothing wrong with doing something for love, but it's a whole different thing from pursuing a profession.




That's got nothing to do with it. I can only think of one professional author I've personally known who was moderately rich, and I'm pretty sure he earned that through his long, successful writing career, not the other way around.

I am presuming you are Christopher L Bennett.
If so you wrote one of my favourite books, Ex Machina.
A rare glimpse and insight into events set after the motion picture.
Another era untouched as the storytelling potential, set during the aftermath of the v'ger incident, is immense.

 

[Andrew Davenport]

Thanks for all your advice.

Christopher, you are a legend sir.

 

[Avro Arrow]

I am presuming you are Christopher L Bennett.
If so you wrote one of my favourite books, Ex Machina.
A rare glimpse and insight into events set after the motion picture.
Another era untouched as the storytelling potential, set during the aftermath of the v'ger incident, is immense.

Since you aren't able to edit your own posts yet, I have taken the liberty of fixing your quote tags in this post so that your reply is more readily visible.

 

[F. King Daniel]

But I am not in it for the money, just to tell the story that I am sure many would like to see

In that case write a fanfic?

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Write, or write not. There is no "becoming an author." Apologies to Yoda. And, if I remember, right, to David Gerrold, who said essentially the same thing, decades ago, in his Starlog column, in a lot more words.

 

[E-DUB]

If you think your story is that good, tell it. But don't make it a Star Trek story. (This is especially true now with the whole de-emphasis on the original timeline.) You'll never sell it as such. (This is especially true given the stellar competition you'd face from established Trek authors.) De-trekify it. (This is sometimes called "filing off the serial numbers".) Now, if you want to get it published, well, your best bet is to write a few short stories, and get them published in Asimov's or Analog or Interzone. Then when you've got a few credits under your belt, you can talk about a novel.

 

[Christopher]

De-trekify it. (This is sometimes called "filing off the serial numbers".)

And that's something you're not supposed to do, because editors get a million Trek-with-the-names-changed stories as a matter of course, and thus reject them without a second look. They don't want imitations; they want something original and fresh.

Of course, if the story and characters are worthwhile, that's what really matters, and they can be adapted to substantially different universes. My Trek novel Titan: Over a Torrent Sea was largely a rewrite of an original spec novel I never sold, so you could do the reverse. But it's better if you can build a universe of your own and devise stories and characters that arise organically from that universe and the things that make it distinctive.

The thing is, most of a writer's early stories are just practice. I wrote numerous stories and multiple spec novels that I never sold, and they're kind of terrible in retrospect. If anything, I'd have been better off as a writer if I hadn't tried to rewrite and salvage them so much, and had instead just let them go and devoted my energies to coming up with new ideas. The real goal should be to continue improving one's craft.

 

[Charles Phipps]

It depends on what sort of author you want to become as well. Just like acting, there's a lot of variations on what an author is and can be. You can try to be published with one of the "Big Six" and many people view that as the best route to be a "real" author but sometimes those people sell far less and make far less money in the long run than self-published or mid-tier and small press publications.

It's also a hard long road if you want to make it your business as there's no guarantees as to what will be a success or not.

I lucked out on the indie route but I know plenty of people who didn't who did make great books.

The thing is, most of a writer's early stories are just practice. I wrote numerous stories and multiple spec novels that I never sold, and they're kind of terrible in retrospect. If anything, I'd have been better off as a writer if I hadn't tried to rewrite and salvage them so much, and had instead just let them go and devoted my energies to coming up with new ideas. The real goal should be to continue improving one's craft.

Stephen King called these "Trunk Novels" and actually had the opposite opinion of you and suggests that you always keep them because even if you don't think there's any way to possibly salvage them now, you might want to revisit the concepts and characters years (or even decades) later.

The first novel King threw in the trash and was rescued by his wife? Carrie.

Okay it was just the first few pages but never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Mind you, I am one of those obnoxious fanboys who suggests "On Writing" to be the Bible for anyone who wants to become a professional author. That taught me almost as much as the professionals who kindly mentored me through some of my early years.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

And that's something you're not supposed to do, because editors get a million Trek-with-the-names-changed stories as a matter of course, and thus reject them without a second look. They don't want imitations; they want something original and fresh.

I will note that I've written two or three short stories (as exercises in a Short Story Workshop class at a local junior college) in a milieu I call the "First Contact Corps." It looks a lot like ST, but it also looks a lot like Humanx Commonwealth, and B5, and even the "United Galaxy" from Buck Henry's Quark sitcom (from 1977, starring Richard Benjamin as the captain of an interstellar garbage scow; anybody else here remember it?).

Which is to say, a democratic interstellar nation-state is going to look like a democratic interstellar nation-state, whether you call it the UFP or the Galactic Republic (I don't recall off the top of my head what I called mine; I just know they have a First Contact Corps, and it includes Humans, and tentacled people called Lozadians, among other sentients).

(And the novel I started writing many years ago [non-ST, non-SF] is, after being thoroughly trashed in another workshop class some years ago, undergoing a complete rewrite, mostly without looking at the original text.)

 

[Christopher]

Which is to say, a democratic interstellar nation-state is going to look like a democratic interstellar nation-state, whether you call it the UFP or the Galactic Republic

Yeah, but there's a recognizable difference between doing your own spin on the general concept and just writing a Trek story with the proper nouns search-and-replaced. That's what "filing off the serial numbers" implies. That phrase is a criticism of bad, derivative writing, not a recommendation for how it should be done.

For instance, there's a Federation-like Planetary Commonwealth in my Arachne-Troubleshooter Universe, but the one published story I have in that era so far is told from the perspective of a civilian diplomat/explorer rather than a pseudo-military starship crew. Also, none of my aliens are humanoid, and the species aren't as culturally monolithic as Trek species tend to be. Also, the overall history and galactic context are quite different. My SF universe started out in my teens as a Trek clone, and I imagined doing stories about an exploratory starship with a Starfleet-like structure. But over time, I chose to develop my own ideas and approach and make the universe more distinctive, and so the stories I've published in that universe have had a very different focus and style than what I originally imagined. Nobody would mistake them for Trek stories, though they have a lot of the same core values and ideas.

Like I said, editors want something fresh, not something derivative. They get thousands of submissions that are mostly rejected because they're mostly the same old things. To succeed, you have to bring something distinctive, something that stands out from the slush pile. And a lot of that slush pile is gonna be thinly veiled Trek fanfic.

 

[captainmkb]

i'm just in the process of having my first actual published work in a printed volume and it doesn't feel like a huge breakthrough of "i'm an author now".

the stories i might consider my best ideas remain hobby work at this point and i have something i rattled off to fill a roster in an anthology going to press.

i'm learning the nuts and bolts of it and went through the motions of contributing something i put a lot of work into for a bit of exposure.

i guess what i'm trying to say is that it is a process ^_____^

 

[Christopher]

i'm just in the process of having my first actual published work in a printed volume and it doesn't feel like a huge breakthrough of "i'm an author now".

I sold my first story in 1998, my second in 2000, and didn't start getting published regularly until my Trek writing began in 2003. I didn't sell my third original story until 2010, though I got four of them published that year.

Being an author means sticking with the work, no matter how little success you have.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I'm published, but for the most part, other than a regular column at the end of a newsletter for which I am typesetter, printer, and acting editor, my publications have been largely in the form of letters-to-the-editor.

And Mr. Bennett, while I suspect that my own "First Contact Corps" stories fall far short of your Arachne-Troubleshooter writings in terms of avoiding being derivative, I certainly aspired to what you're accomplishing, when I wrote them (and will continue to so aspire, if and when I write anything else in that milieu, but right now, I've got a story (about a child prodigy organist) that I really want to tell (and I've got her about halfway through her senior year of high school, for the second time).

Incidentally, regarding the first version getting shot down in flames when workshopped (the Novel Workshop class at the local junior college is, or at least was at the time, a somewhat less friendly environment than the Short Story Workshop class), the problems were (1) that I was alluding to things for which the readers either lacked, or had forgotten, an appropriate cultural referent, and (2) that scenes I had very specifically intended to build reader empathy for my protagonist (i.e., "protagonist kisses baby") were being read in ways that destroyed reader empathy (i.e., "protagonist kicks dog").

 

[Charles Phipps]

I feel like if you're going to write a Star Trek novel that isn't a Star Trek novel that you need to be doing a parody. The thing is that parodies are perfectly valid novels to write and an understated genre that I think people underestimate the fun of doing so. I am, of course, incredibly biased here as I am a comedy writer.

But a couple of years back, there was actually an interesting debate about a book I posted a review thread about with Redshirts by John Scalzi. Basically, there was the question of whether it should be discussed in the Star Trek Literature forum. It's not "official" Star Trek fiction, though, but it's blindingly ridiculously obviously about Star Trek.

And it's awesome.

Hell, my latest scifi books DO a lot of Star Trek parodying (Space Academy Dropouts) and they got picked up by Podium Audio with great enthusiasm.

However, I also feel like there's a middle ground between Star Trek influenced and Star Trek DERIVED. Mass Effect is a good example of what I think achieves this balance as it pretty much has all of the elements of Star Trek but puts its own spin on things. Its more serious and grounded tone makes it unique but it has all MOST of the UFOP as well as optimistic beliefs about humanity. Krogan are like Klingons but they're not Klingons and the same for Asari and Vulcans.

There's also the fact that you can start with a Trekkian idea and go your own way. I speak of Lois Bujold's fantastic VORKOSIGAN SAGA where the first book began as fanfic of a Klingon and Federation captain falling in love. It obviously went on its own way and became wholly unique as well as one of (in my opinion) the best science fiction series of the late 20th century.

Shards of Honor is amazing, btw.

 

[KRAD]

Hell, all space operas are just riffing on Lensman in any event....

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Hell, all space operas are just riffing on Lensman in any event....

Never heard of it. But after visiting Wikipedia, I think I may end up ordering Triplanetary through Alibris.

 

[KRAD]

If you like Star Trek, Star Wars, or pretty much any other space opera ever, you owe thanks to E.E. "Doc" Smith and Lensman.