Writer collaboration

[Sho]

Something I was idly pondering earlier today when reading Christopher's latest blog post: We know from their own statements that our esteemed writer's collaborate by commenting on each other's in-progress work (the blog post doesn't specifically make the referenced colleagues out to be other Star Trek novelists, but it comes up on the boards now and again), but isn't the process sort of stacked against this sort of collaboration occurring?

Obviously there's a shared interest in keeping the novel line healthy and just having it be good that counts for something (and then reflects well professionally on every author involved, in terms of reputation), but at the end of the day one needs to pay the bills as well, and writers compete for a limited number of book "slots" in the year. Helping improve someone's outline or manuscript may come at a cost then, both in terms of using up time that could be spent on one's own work, or by directly affecting the "horse race" submissions compete in if at the outline stage. To the writers, is that a quandary you ever struggle with, and do you ever wish the process or environment would reward collaboration more? Or maybe I'm committing some sort of fallacy and this isn't a real issue to begin with?

If it is an issue, however, what could be done about it? Obviously one way to compensate for it is to have strong editors, i.e. to put the onus of maintaining continuity on the editor's shoulders and having them dictate as fine-grained a set of plot points or continuity-related revisions to authors as necessary. I think that's partly how the more ambitious continuity of the Palmieri era was achieved (is that fair to say?), and his successors seem to have maintained that model. However, I've also read repeatedly that Palmieri succeeded in improving the cross-author communication - but hat did he do exactly to foster that environment that hadn't been done before?

 

[Christopher]

First off, I've never felt I was competing with my fellow Trek authors. It's more of a team spirit, and we often compare notes and solicit comments on each other's work. After all, in Trek work (unlike original fiction), we usually don't write the outlines until after we've already been commissioned and contracted to write them, so any "competition" for slots is already over by that point. Plus we're all fans and we want to see good Trek Lit no matter who writes it.

Second, though Marco's contributions to the modern era of Trek Lit were invaluable and far-reaching, he wasn't the first or only editor responsible for it. John Ordover really started the process of building the larger interconnected continuity, Margaret Clark contributed her share, and Keith DeCandido's work as a freelance editor on SCE/Corps of Engineers was a significant contribution to the sense of interconnection and brought several new writers (myself included) into the fold. The closest and liveliest collaboration I've been part of was the creation of Mere Anarchy under KRAD's editorial guidance.

Third, the "onus" of maintaining continuity is on the editors' shoulders by default; we authors are responsible for our own novels, but the editor is responsible for every novel he or she edits. But even editors as diligent about continuity as Marco and KRAD don't really "dictate" anything "fine-grained." They just give us a few key points we have to hit but leave it up to us how to get there.

 

[Sho]

^ Thanks for an enlightening response! In particular, I had no idea that contracts get signed before outlines are submitted; the more of the writing process happens in (job) security, the smaller this issue I conjured up becomes.

As for the other editors, I did not intend to diminish their contributions -- rather this is also me not being informed enough about the history of the line, so thanks again.

 

[Relayer1]

I think the list of Treklit authors has settled down into a fairly stable group now. I'm certainly not saying that someone new couldn't get a commission, but the core group keep getting books because they deliver.

There may be a finite number of slots to fill, but there's a finite number of proven authors too, which could actually shrink as they go off to do their own original fiction...

 

[Greg Cox]

Yeah, I don't see it as a competition. If there were only four slots open a year, I'm sure we'd all be hustling to sell our own books, but I can't imagine that we'd ever trying to sabotage each other's books or refuse to talk shop with "the competition."

Ultimately, it's about karma and social relationships. Maintaining good relations with our fellow Trek authors, and picking each other's brains when needed, helps out everyone in the long run. And Star Trek isn't the only game in town. I recommended Keith for a Farscape job years ago. He threw some X-Men work at me at one point. It all evens out in the end. Karma, like I said.

And, yeah, Trek authors have been chatting and trading ideas for as long as I can remember. Trust me, you don't want to know how many Trek books were plotted over lunch at the Malibu Diner on the 23rd Street . . . or in the bar at Shore Leave!

(And, incidentally, I know of at least Trek book coming up by an author who is new to Trek, although he's had a few original novels published. Not sure if that's public knowledge yet, though, so I'll be coy about the name.)