Question for writers here

[David cgc]

That's interesting. I would have thought that there was some other software suite specifically tailored to book authors.

There are such programs. No idea if it would get you yelled at by an editor for trying to use it (probably not, because everything exports to Word format) but, for instance, I've been looking at Scrivener for Baby's First Overly Ambitious Fan-Fic, which I've been making notes on for a little while (along with Aeon Timeline to keep events straight in parallel plots), both of which are used by tech-writer-turned-novelist Dan Moren for his series of sci-fi spy novels.

 

[Damian]

I've had a few part-time jobs, but have mostly managed to get by as a full-time writer thanks to my regular Trek work. Unfortunately, that's been much less the case in the last few years, and I've been off the job market so long that I'm having a hard time finding additional employment. It's not a choice I'd recommend to anyone else.

That's one thing that would be a downside for me, the uncertainty. I imagine there are a lot of rewards involved with working with something that you love in the entertainment industry I also imagine it comes with a fair amount of stress.

The purpose of tie-ins is to promote and supplement the original series. If you're the owner of the series and you license a publisher to do your tie-ins, then you want and expect the people hired to do the work to be skilled professionals.

Yeah, makes sense. It does seem back in the early days maybe they weren't as, um, insistent on quality. Particularly in the early Bantam days. Reading some of those old Bantam novels I can't imagine at least half those books would see the light of day in this day and age.

Now in fairness, times were different then and Star Trek was a much different entity at that time, most of it even being before the movies came out.

But even some of the early Pocketbooks back in the 80s into the 90s could be a bit uneven at times. I think the quality did improve with Pocketbooks, but there were still a couple clunkers. For the last 20 years though I've seen much more consistent quality in the novels. Honestly it's probably been at least 20-25 years since I've seen a book published that wasn't at least of average quality. And most I'd rate as above average or better.

 

[JD]

In some ways I think it might be more difficult to write fiction because you basically have to make everything up as you go along, make it at least somewhat believable AND entertaining. With tie-ins I guess it might help in the sense that you at least have a framework to work from. You have a basic structure and you don't have to create everything from scratch.

I've been working on my own original urban fantasy novel off and on for a while now, and after trying my hand at an original novel, I'm thinking tie-ins would actually be harder. With an original novel have complete freedom to do whatever you want, but with tie-ins you have very specific rules you have to follow, and all sorts of other material you have to try to be consistent with. I've often thought about trying my hand at writing some Trek, Marvel, or DC stories, probably just as fan fiction I'd post here, but I'm so nervous about trying to accurately recreate other people's characters that I haven't ever gotten beyond a basic idea.

 

[Christopher]

I've been working on my own original urban fantasy novel off and on for a while now, and after trying my hand at an original novel, I'm thinking tie-ins would actually be harder. With an original novel have complete freedom to do whatever you want, but with tie-ins you have very specific rules you have to follow, and all sorts of other material you have to try to be consistent with.

Well, yes and no. There are ways in which I have more freedom in my original work, certainly, but consistency with a series canon isn't that different from any other kind of research you do to make a story plausible, whether researching science for writing hard SF or researching history for a Western or researching poisons and police procedures for a murder mystery or whatever.

And having pre-existing characters and concepts to work with makes things easier too, because a lot of the work has already been done for you. You're given the board and the pieces and just have to decide how to play with them. For original fiction, you have to make your own board and pieces first.

 

[Damian]

Well, yes and no. There are ways in which I have more freedom in my original work, certainly, but consistency with a series canon isn't that different from any other kind of research you do to make a story plausible, whether researching science for writing hard SF or researching history for a Western or researching poisons and police procedures for a murder mystery or whatever.

And having pre-existing characters and concepts to work with makes things easier too, because a lot of the work has already been done for you. You're given the board and the pieces and just have to decide how to play with them. For original fiction, you have to make your own board and pieces first.

Yeah I can see advantages and disadvantages to both

 

[KRAD]

One is neither easier nor harder than the other. You still have to write a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end with compelling characters that you have to make the readers give a damn about.

 

[James Swallow]

I don't feel like this tracks with how people actually become "Star Trek writers." I certainly didn't do this. And of all the currently working Star Trek writers I can think of, most had no novel sales before writing a Star Trek book as far as I can tell:
<snip>
James Swallow had a series of original novels from Scholastic before doing Warharmmer 40,000 and Doctor Who tie-ins, and then Star Trek, so he's the one who actually did it how John claimed.

Well...kinda... Reading this sent me back to check my own chronology! Here's how it actually played out: I first approached John Ordover at Pocket about writing for the Star Trek line in 2000, and while I was writing my Sundowners steampunk westerns for Scholastic, they hadn't been published at that point - I think it probably was my success selling a couple of story premises to Star Trek: Voyager that got John to take a look at me.

Over the next few years I pitched some ideas for the Starfleet Corps of Engineers series, but it wasn't until '04 that Marco Palmieri accepted a short story for the Voyager anthology Distant Shores and I got my first Treklit gig. By then I'd written the four Sundowners books, some Warhammer 40,000 short stories and a movie novelization - but it wouldn't be until late '06 that Marco offered me the chance to write a full-length Star Trek novel.

Yes, people underestimate the degree to which different people can independently come up with the same basic idea, and especially so when you're dealing with such well-trodden ground as Star Trek, vampires, cozy mysteries, spy novels, westerns, or whatever.

Oh yeah, this has happened to me more than once! I distinctly remember pitching a story to Enterprise inspired by the Apollo 13 crisis and being told "We got this script called 'Shuttlepod One', we're gonna shoot that next week." Obviously they had telepaths working at Paramount...!

 

[Christopher]

One is neither easier nor harder than the other. You still have to write a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end with compelling characters that you have to make the readers give a damn about.

I do find it easier to come up with initial ideas for stories when there are established characters and background I can build on, whether it's tie-in or original. I mean, I've had an easier time coming up with ideas for additional stories in my Troubleshooter and Hub continuities than in some of my original universes that I only have one story in or only a general idea for. You may recall me telling you at Shore Leave last year that I have a concept which I think could be a really rich and interesting universe, but for some reason I can't decide on an actual story to tell within it, probably because I'm having trouble settling on viewpoint characters.

Once you have the idea, of course, it's all the same, as you say. But for me, getting those ideas in the first place is often difficult. It's easier to do with a pre-established series, whether it's my own or someone else's.

 

[David Mack]

I distinctly remember pitching a story to Enterprise inspired by the Apollo 13 crisis and being told "We got this script called 'Shuttlepod One', we're gonna shoot that next week." Obviously they had telepaths working at Paramount...!

John and I also a pitched an Apollo 13-inspired story to Voyager around that time, and got the same response.

 

[Greg Cox]

In college, with no idea how such things worked, I mailed a comic-book script into Marvel, over the transom as it were. As I recall, I never heard back from them, but, not too long thereafter, Marvel ran a similar story. I raised an eyebrow, but had to concede that both stories were building on the same preexisting bits of Marvel lore. (Basically, the idea was to link two different pre-established races of cat people.)

Do I think Marvel ripped me off? Absolutely not. I can hardly imagine that I was the only writer to think that, gee, wouldn't it be cool to link this lost race of cat people to that lost race of cat people.

Ditto with STAR TREK. After nine TV series, thirteen movies, 800-plus novels, comics, games, and so on, it would astounding if different people didn't independently come up with the same ideas regard Romulans, warp drives, transporter beams, the Prime Directive, etc.

 

[Little_kingsfan]

You probably got farther than I did. I started with the idea that I wanted it to be post TFF, because that's always an era I thought was underserved by novels (or at least there hasn't been a lot of stories in that era). Then I thought it would be interesting, though not unprecedented or even uncommon, to start from the end before picking up at the beginning of the story and going from there.

But that's basically as far as it got. I had a broad outline of the story I wanted to tell but after page 2 it really read like a newspaper column.

Well my so-called storywriting style reads more like a Wikipedia/Wikia (Fandom) article than a story - all that information about the character (hobbies, likes & dislikes, romantic, familial, and education history, career path, etc.) but when it comes to the more "he said this, she did that, the sunrise over the wheat fields of Oklahoma (taken from the Garth Brooks song playing in the background) took [the character]'s breath away" stuff, I completely blank.

 

[Greg Cox]

Well my so-called storywriting style reads more like a Wikipedia/Wikia (Fandom) article than a story - all that information about the character (hobbies, likes & dislikes, romantic, familial, and education history, career path, etc.) but when it comes to the more "he said this, she did that, the sunrise over the wheat fields of Oklahoma (taken from the Garth Brooks song playing in the background) took [the character]'s breath away" stuff, I completely blank.

Possibly helpful tip: It's good for the author to know all that stuff--complete character bios, family trees going back four generations, maps, world-building, etc.--because it helps you to write more confidently and convincingly about your characters and their environment. The trick is to remember that not everything in your notebooks has to go out into the actual book or story.

Or, of course, it could just be that your talents lie more toward journalistic, non-fiction type writing. Nothing wrong with that, depending on the project.

(I remember that, after I graduated from college, I had to make a deliberate effort to shake the academese out of my writing and adopt a less formal tone.)

 

[David Mack]

(I remember that, after I graduated from college, I had to make a deliberate effort to shake the academese out of my writing and adopt a less formal tone.)

When I first started writing, I had to overcome the double deficit of what John Ordover called "screenwriters' disease" and "reporters' disease". The former is a tendency to fixate on visual and auditory details and to forget to write to the other senses; the latter is a tendency to try too hard to fit in all of one's research whether or not it serves the story. (This one-two punch came to me because my first professional training in fiction writing was as a screenwriter, and my day job through my twenties was as a freelance journalist/reporter and magazine editor.)

 

[Greg Cox]

Confession: Back when I was reading slush (i.e. raw, unsolicited submissions), I would sometimes cringe if the cover letter mentioned that the author's day job was as a newspaper reporter.

This was blatantly unfair of me, since many great reporters can also write great fiction as well, but it got to be a bit of a red flag since they're very different approaches that, in some ways, run counter to each other.

 

[Therin of Andor]

I never heard back from them, but, not too long thereafter, Marvel ran a similar story. I raised an eyebrow, but had to concede that both stories were building on the same preexisting bits of Marvel lore...

My very first piece of ST fanfic was published in an Australian fanzine that had a circulation of about 300 copies. Not long after the zine materialised, along came the licensed ST novel, "Black Fire". There had had been quite a hiatus in original novels at the time, so "Black Fire" was eagerly awaited!

Reading that book was so eerie. The "B" story of that novel matched elements of my story on at least thirteen points, right down to the destruction of the bridge module of the Enterprise in the "teaser", and Mr Spock's replacement by a new first officer: Therin (in mine) and Thorin (in Sonni Cooper's novel).

I'm sure Ms Cooper's manuscript would have been submitted and edited long before my story was conceived and published - but, as my story had won a local amateur writing contest before it was published, it was certainly in limited fannish distribution, and thus beyond my control as to who read it early. (There's no way Sonni Cooper needed my help to pad out her novel. My paranoia grew a little when I heard that Sonni Cooper had fannish connections; she used to run Bill Shatner's fan club, IIRC.) I was young, and very new to fandom, but the coincidences were quite extraordinary. It's not as if I contemplated accusing Ms Cooper, Paramount or Pocket of anything, though.

Some time later, I was on a Peter David listserv, which had the same "no sharing story ideas" rule as here. At the time, PAD's "New Frontier" novels were teasing us about Mark McHenry's mysterious superbeing powers. The books seemed to be suggesting that Mark was... a Q? Someone posted a very elaborate argument to the listserv as to why McHenry was not a Q, but an El-Aurian, and PAD replied, "Thanks a lot. Now I have to toss out that idea and come up with something else."

We never knew if he was joking or not. In the end, though, Mark was neither.

 

[Greg Cox]

Some time later, I was on a Peter David listserv, which had the same "no sharing story ideas" rule as here. At the time, PAD's "New Frontier" novels were teasing us about Mark McHenry's mysterious superbeing powers. The books seemed to be suggesting that Mark was... a Q? Someone posted a very elaborate argument to the listserv as to why McHenry was not a Q, but an El-Aurian, and PAD replied, "Thanks a lot. Now I have to toss out that idea and come up with something else."
.

Marion Zimmer Bradley famously trashed a Darkover novel she was working on because somebody published a Darkover fanfic that used pretty much the same idea.

This is why I pretty much steer clear of Trek fanfic. Not, I emphasize, as a matter of taste or principle, but just because I don't want to have to worry about discovering that somebody has beat me to the punch on some notion--or, worse yet, be accused of stealing some fan writer's ideas.