• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Are Any Star Trek Writers English Majors?

Though not a Trek lit writer, I spent 20 years as a writer and editor after leaving UEA... where I did Maths. I don't know of any of my EAS contemporaries who'vs made it as a writer ( some have as actors: one's in Gotham).
Don't take writing courses if you want a career as a writer. Do other things, learn English in passing because it's as useful as solid arithmetic in a load of careers, try writing in your spare moments, and maybe do something like the UEA creative writing course as a post-grad, particularly if you're already selling a few things and want to improve.

The career path for writer isn't the same as it was then. Ebooks, self publishing, the borderline closed shop of the publishing industries have changed all of that. It's like the music industry. It's having its garage band punk and grunge stages all at once. Because at the moment, if you don't get blind luck or know the right people socially, you need an agent to get an agent to get picked up by a small publisher, who re sort of just agents hoping they can sell you on to a bigger publisher, where a different bunch of agents turn up...then they hope you get a media deal.

At the moment, Creative Writing classes are like punk bands learning to actually play their instruments, with all the fan fiction, blogging, self publishing (not vanity press) of the past decade or two basically being that early punk stage. Or early blues or rock and roll if you go back far enough.
 
Though not a Trek lit writer, I spent 20 years as a writer and editor after leaving UEA... where I did Maths. I don't know of any of my EAS contemporaries who'vs made it as a writer ( some have as actors: one's in Gotham).
Don't take writing courses if you want a career as a writer. Do other things, learn English in passing because it's as useful as solid arithmetic in a load of careers, try writing in your spare moments, and maybe do something like the UEA creative writing course as a post-grad, particularly if you're already selling a few things and want to improve.
What is UEA?
 
Correct. EAS= English and American Studies, the literature and drama school.

As a Uni of Essex alumnus (MA Film Studies) I think I'm supposed to consider you my nemesis? Probably a good job Trek taught me about getting along with each other.... :p
 
As a Uni of Essex alumnus (MA Film Studies) I think I'm supposed to consider you my nemesis? Probably a good job Trek taught me about getting along with each other.... :p
If you're Essex, then you're Colchester, where my grandad moved after retirement. He was Valentine Drive, between Ipswich and Harwich road, the uni was... further along on Ipswich?
 
If you're Essex, then you're Colchester, where my grandad moved after retirement. He was Valentine Drive, between Ipswich and Harwich road, the uni was... further along on Ipswich?

I finished in 2012 and moved back to the west country straight after. Can't remember road names, but the campus was to the east of Colchester, between Colchester and Wivenhoe.
 
Ah. Grandad Tom died at 88 in 95, so we sold his house after that. Lots moved to my then flat in Bath.
Think you were probably off Ipswich Road, the big Sainsbury has been built on the corner.
 
Ah. Grandad Tom died at 88 in 95, so we sold his house after that. Lots moved to my then flat in Bath.
Think you were probably off Ipswich Road, the big Sainsbury has been built on the corner.
Don't remember a Sainsbury's but there was a Tesco just outside campus...
 
This would be on the corner of Ipswich and Harwich road, close into town (by the garden centre off cowdry ave). Haven't been back since 2011, so hazy memories.
 
This would be on the corner of Ipswich and Harwich road, close into town (by the garden centre off cowdry ave). Haven't been back since 2011, so hazy memories.
Lol, sorry but you've completely lost me there. I lived in Wivenhoe, so didn't venture the other side of campus that often.
 
Lots moved to my then flat in Bath.

Bath is a wonderful city, myself and the now Mrs-Dimesdan met in Bath while she was studying at Bath Spa and we lived in Odd Down and the city centre for a while before moving across the boarder into Wiltshire and then across the water to Dublin.
 
My bachelor's is in journalism and my master's is in Soviet Studies. I'd have gotten a doctorate but the Soviet Union collapsed on my dissertation.

Journalism helped the most, getting me to write for an audience and on deadline (plus it led to a job in publishing, which led me to writing comics and fiction). But I always say it was all the other non-writing courses that give me something to write about. I've plumbed Russian history for plot points in a half dozen works.
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top