Some time back, I mentioned that I was writing a Trek novel. Many posters responded by telling me that it almost certanly would never get puplished, for the simple reason that story proposals that are solely the writer's don't get the green light.
As Dayton said, you completely misunderstood what you were told. Story proposals
are the writers' own ideas. Even when an editor tells me "I want you to do a book about Picard's missing years" or "I want you to do a book that resolves dangling threads from the last TNG book," I'm still the one who develops the specific proposal of what the actual content of the story will be. And sometimes the project originates entirely with the author.
Ex Machina was my own pet project; I asked Marco if he wanted to see a post-TMP novel pitch, he said sure, and I came up with it all on my own and sent it to him. And in the case of both my
Titan novels, the only input that came from the editor in the initial idea phase was essentially, "You wanna do a
Titan novel?"
The point is that a tie-in author's proposal has to be approved by the editor and the licensing department
before the author gets the go-ahead to write the actual novel. The idea is still yours every step of the way, but you need to do it in stages -- first you pitch the outline, then if the outline is approved, you get a contract to write the manuscript. There's no point in going ahead and writing the manuscript before you even know if you'll get paid for the work.
(It's different in original fiction, because if you aren't an established name, you need to have a finished book to show to agents if you want to convince them to represent you. Also, since it's your own idea, you don't need the licensor to approve an outline beforehand. But in tie-in fiction, the process goes, outline, contract, manuscript. Or outline, rejection, try again.)
Supposedly, Trek novels are born by a cooperative effort by the writers and the editors.
Yes, but not in the way you assume. The writers come up with the ideas and do the writing. The editors help us refine and focus those ideas. Think of it like the relationship between a player and a coach.
1. The guidelines seem to say that book proposals, if accepted, are given the go-ahead, and are allowed to be developed.
That's quite true, but the part you're missing is that the proposal -- meaning a short outline summarizing the story -- should be submitted and approved before you write the actual manuscript. Nobody's saying you're wrong to come up with your own
idea, just that you may be wasting effort by writing the actual
manuscript before the outline's been approved. Again, that's okay in original fiction, because if one publisher doesn't buy it, you can shop it to others. But if Pocket doesn't buy your
Star Trek idea, there's nowhere else you can sell it (unless you can rework it into a comic book for IDW, I suppose). So it's just common sense to wait until they buy the book before you actually write it.
2. So editors assign stories to writers?
No. At most, they suggest the general subject matter of the story, but we figure out the specifics.
Why can't good, established writers be allowed to come up with stories on their own? Is this an after-effect of the Richard Arnold era?
We
always come up with our own stories. That's our
job. That was true even in the height of the Arnold era. The worst thing that happened there was that authors came up with their own stories and then
later lost control over how they were rewritten.
Have any recent writers publish Trek books that were truly their own?
Yes. All of them.
