I wouldn’t say that Forbes would be daily reading for me, but when Google tells me I’ve been namechecked there, I pay attention. Here’s the article:
Fifty Shades of Green: How Fanfiction Went From Dirty Little Secret To Money Machine
…Granted, I’m still trying to figure out how to make the money machine part work. But it’s nice to be mentioned in the same breath as Bujold and Moffat.
Every now and then over at the Tumblr I wind up chatting with people about various aspects of writing, the writing business, and technique — usually under the “writing advice” tag. Some weeks back (don’t ask me when, it’s been busy around here) a question came up about outlining, and various people suggested that they’d like to see what one of my outlines looked like. So I made a note to myself to find an outline at some point and post it for those who might be interested.
Today I was going through one of the smaller portable expansion drives we keep around the house for temporary data storage, with an eye to cleaning it out so it could be used in updating my old laptop to run Windows 7. While I was sorting through the directories (and again and again muttering “Why the hell have I been hanging onto this…?!”) I came across what appears below. This is the outline for the Star Trek novels Swordhunt (later subdivided into Swordhunt and Honor Blade) and The Empty Chair.
This is an example of one of the ways I outline. It’s not a “beat outline,” in which every scene is laid out in book-chronological order and with considerable detail about action and sometimes even dialogue. I suppose it could be considered more of a “pitch outline”, intended to indicate both a story’s background and its foreground issues and action in broad strokes. It’s also intended for an editor already thoroughly familiar with my writing style and the way I handle a given license and its characters (in this case Star Trek).
One of the reasons I allowed myself to submit something so (relatively) relaxed in format is that I knew my editors — first John Ordover and then Marco Palmieri — were confident enough about what I would do with the actual novels to not mind an outline of this kind. It does however begin with a brief recap of previous work in the series for the benefit of anybody in the Trek offices (either at the book end in NY, or the licensing-and-approvals end in LA and elsewhere) who might need to be brought up to speed on the background; as Trek editors in general and the faithful and long-suffering Paula Block (routine overseer-of-things on the licensing side) always have so much other work on their plates that a reminder of the details might be welcome.
The outline weighs in at just under 3700 words, or about eight single-spaced 8.5″ x 11″ pages. Needless to say, if you have not read the Rihannsu sequence of Trek novels and you’re planning to, and you don’t want to be spoiled, then you should avoid reading any further….
It’s the best kind of day, and I barely know how to begin describing how I feel.
Star Trek is fifty, and I’m sixty-four… and I’ve been lucky enough to be able to watch this whole long story arc unfold from the start. More the point, beyond all dreams, all possibility, over the years I’ve become a little part of it. And that is so cool.
I remember when I first saw the description of this new show in the TV Guide in 1966. And for the quiet, geeky kid who grew up reading Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov and Andre Norton, it sounded almost impossibly good. When it was finally time for the show to come on, and the teaser ran, and the titles ran, I sat there completely spellbound. I can remember right here and now exactly what I felt then: amazement, and delight, and so much excitement… because there was going to be more of this. I didn’t know how much more—but I couldn’t wait.
The next three years brought their ups and downs, especially when the series was almost canceled, came back, and then didn’t last beyond its third season. But the dreams it left in its wake were more than enough to keep me going for a long time. I started writing Star Trek fanfic before I knew there was such a thing. (Rarely, from now till then, have I been happier to be able to say that all that fiction is gone forever. Believe me, some things are better lost.)
And though the series had died, it refused to stay quiet in the grave. First came the miracle of syndication, of reruns… for which we have to thank the foresighted Lucille Ball, Star Trek’s too-often unsung fairy godmother. And then, with the reruns, came the people who loved Trek too much to let it die, and decided to stand up and do something about it.
Sheer luck—the happy accident of being in the right place at the right time in the early 1970’s— meant I was able to be at those first great New York Star Trek conventions. At those cons I met so many terrific people, and forged connections that were about to start having a profound effect on the rest of my life. Because of Star Trek I found a skilled and endlessly committed mentor for my writing (and a good friend too). Because of Star Trek I started finding my voice as a writer. Because of Star Trek, I got published and was nominated for awards. Because of Star Trek… I started writing Star Trek.
And that was genuinely kind of unexpected. But I still bless the day when (while reading someone else’s Trek novel) I got so annoyed with what they were doing that I threw the poor book at the wall and declared, in the full of my writerly arrogance, “I could eat a ream of typing paper and barf a better Star Trek novel than this!”
And if something like this actually happened eventually—without my even having to actually eat the paper—it was because I wasn’t at all concerned about looking better than that other writer, but seriously concerned with doing better Star Trek. In retrospect, judging from my mailbag, it seems like I may have succeeded at this at least once or twice (or maybe more). That’s honor enough for me. I’m delighted and humbled to be counted among the number of the many gifted people who find serving the same purpose—making better Star Trek—to be both privilege and pleasure.
Many amazing things have happened along this journey. I met my husband of (now) thirty years because of Star Trek. I co-wrote a Star Trek novel with him on our honeymoon. More or less accidentally, I ascended to possibly the peak of achievement for a nursing professional and cured Dr McCoy (or, all right, DeForest Kelley, just as you prefer…) of a sore throat. I’ve heard Leonard Nimoy speak words I’d written for him. I’ve seen George Takei eat my husband’s cooking (and go back for seconds, and thirds: but then George is a perceptive guy).* I’ve had the honor to be walked through other people’s Star Trek books, specifically and especially one by the wonderful John M. Ford—one of the best of all Star Trek writers, and taken from us far too soon. Over the years I’ve met and been befriended by amazing names, both people who’ve written for the shows or the films, and people who’ve acted in them—open and warmhearted people all endlessly devoted to bringing joy to the viewers and readers who’re also in love with this particular universe. They know how lucky they are to be able to contribute again and again to something so big, and so loved, and so meaningful.
Such contribution isn’t always easy, and doesn’t always go the way you wish it might. Naturally Trek hasn’t always been perfect. Crass reality has more than occasionally gotten in the way of the storytelling. Trek’s been jerked around by interoffice politics and all-too-human blindness and people besotted by money and power, and has been beset by plain old misunderstanding of the basic concept—exploration, discovery, diversity, delight in the different. Sometimes something goes wrong with the storytelling, and parts of the puzzle just don’t quite fit together, or look bad when viewed later. In the Star Trek universe as in the real one, entropy is running and no matter how you try, you can’t win ‘em all. But the times when Trek does get it right (in my opinion) far outnumber the times when it doesn’t, because the people working on it are aware that they have a certain level of excellence to match, and a well-established, much-loved vision to evoke and sustain.
In this regard, over the years I’ve been asked as often as anybody else working in this universe, “What is it that makes Trek so special, and why is this particular vision so evocative? Why does it appeal to people so?” There are a hundred possible answers, but mine is simple and clear. I’m a member of the last US generation that was asked to believe, as kids in school, that hiding under your desk would actually protect you in some way from a nuclear bomb. The aura of hopelessness and terror that hung over the Cold War period for many of us was powerfully opposed by what Star Trek seemed to be saying from the very beginning: that humanity would get through this, that we would get past it—and that human beings were, actually, better than this, if we would just allow ourselves to act as if we were.
And this message seems still to work for subsequent generations introduced to Trek. Despite the terrors of the present— which are by no means to be dismissed—Star Trek did a lot in its earliest generations to dispel some of the terrors of the past. I firmly believe that if Trek is written with what Harlan Ellison calls “clean hands and composure”, it will continue to do the same in the future. Storytellers who come to Trek meaning to serve the vision of human exploration and compassion honestly will, in my opinion, do so even more successfully than they might expect.
It’s my sense that the longer story lasts, the stronger it gets. Well-loved universes and the stories told in them, I think, have a way of furthering and protecting themselves. From the very beginning there has always been so much love and hope and enthusiasm surrounding Star Trek, the stories it tells, the people who tell the stories, and the people who act the stories, that it has become much stronger with time than it was when it started—tougher to kill and quicker to bounce back from failure, and not just because of the financial opportunities involved.
Every new generation of Star Trek will inevitably have its own difficulties, its own exigencies, its places where things go very wrong or seem to. But I strongly believe that there is something about this particular vision of the future—of a future, of a future that works because people are consciously working on making it work—that means it will just keep on coming back. The power of the vision and the stories that have lasted this long and keep getting refined and expanded is not to be dismissed, not to be discounted. Yes, story can sometimes wither and die young if its roots don’t delve deep enough. But there is something about Star Trek’s roots that seems to have delved very deep.
Since everybody else will probably be saying better, smarter and more clearly articulated things about Star Trek today than I’m likely to be able to, I want to wind this up and go read what they’re saying. But backtracking briefly to the personal end of things, I can say there are very few parts of my life—professional, personal, emotional—that Star Trek has not touched and will not continue to. For those who were going to ask the inevitable question: yes, I do have one more Star Trek novel in me. I have my own universes to tend to at the moment, but I really do need to get in touch with whoever’s handling Trek at Pocket Books and see if they can work me in sometime in the next year or three. Because some of the very best times of my life have been spent standing (in imagination) on the bridge of that starship… working out what happens next, and what the person sitting in that center seat will do. And the next-best times have been spent seeing Enterprise pass by low overhead—on the home screen or in the theater—and feeling that old familiar shiver of awe and hunger and delight go down my spine. To me she will always be Star Trek’s biggest character, and of all of them, my favorite.
In the meantime, to all the many friends and acquaintances—there are so many of you, too many to name—whose paths have crossed mine in the service or enjoyment of Star Trek, I just want you to know that I’m thinking of you today, with affection and so much gratitude. You’ve made my life, as Trek has, a better and happier place. Without Star Trek I couldn’t be many things I am. And I can’t wait to see what comes of all our work next, and where it goes now. That particular frontier—not all that final, after all—just keeps stretching out further and further ahead of us, and looking more and more interesting all the time.
Fifty years… Early this morning I thought, “You know, with medicine being what it is these days, it’s not completely beyond belief that I might see Trek turn one hundred.” But whether I do or not, some of you will see it. I wonder what those celebrations will look like, a bit; and (just a little) I envy you.
…But only a little. My job as a Trek writer is after all to look ahead—one of my favorite parts of the job (besides keeping company with one of the most extraordinary casts of characters ever devised). So for the moment, let’s concentrate on enjoying and celebrating the first fifty years of Star Trek. The next half-century can wait… but only until tomorrow.
*BTW, will somebody please have George tweet me at @dduane? I just remembered that I promised him that recipe. 🙂
The US Naval Research Laboratory announced a major breakthrough in materials science on Thursday. After decades of research and development, the NRL has created a transparent, bulletproof material that can be molded into virtually any shape. This material, known as Spinel, is made from a synthetic powdered clay that is heated and pressed under vacuum (aka sintered) into transparent sheets. “Spinel is actually a mineral, it’s magnesium aluminate,” Dr. Jas Sanghera, who leads the research, said in a statement. “The advantage is it’s so much tougher, stronger, harder than glass. It provides better protection in more hostile environments — so it can withstand sand and rain erosion.”
Source: Fark.com
If the above (and below) images look a little bizarre, well, they should. They’re from long-ago German editions of My Enemy, My Ally and The Romulan Way into which the publisher inserted soup ads.
Yes, really.
The story came up again briefly in a series of posts over at the forums at Mark Reads, and I thought I’d store the images here now that I’ve got the scanner seeing sense (short version: disagreement between new printer and old legacy TWAIN driver, never mind the long version, too annoying, solved now).
To quote the original posting:
…It was in or near this chapter of the German translation [of Terry Pratchett’s Pyramids (“Pyramiden“) that Peter ran into something that made our conjoint blood run cold: a soup advertisement.
Maggi Soups were at that time in some kind of pestilential relationship with Heyne Verlag (then the German publisher of Terry’s books, BUT NOT FOR LONG), and Maggi had taken to inserting little soup ads into the plots of books Heyne were publishing. I knew this because they had stuck one into the middle of the German edition of The Romulan Way (a.k.a Die Romulaner.* One minute things are normal on the Bridge… the next minute, Mr. Sulu is wishing he had a nice cup of soup. GOD I wish I was not making this up. …The altered passages were instantly identifiable by page-wide black spacer bars inserted into the text to make them fit into the flow of the printing.
So we picked up this copy of Pyramiden as we were passing through Zurich, and we were on our way to the Jungfrau, and in the hotel that night in Interlaken Ost, Peter was paging through the book… and there were the Black Lines. And so he called the Pratchett residence, and Terry was out, but he got Lyn.
And Lyn, being a sensible woman, didn’t believe him at first. Because who would dare pull crap like that with Terry? So Peter read the altered text to her, translating as he went. And Lyn’s mouth fell open, audibly. She said, “I’ll tell Terry when he gets home.” And when Terry got home, he straightway called Colin the Agent of Doom, and Colin called Heyne, and shortly Terry was not with Heyne any more. AND SERVED THEM RIGHT.
It was a pleasure to do Terry that service, but a pain in the butt that it had to be done. Seriously: SOUP??
…We no longer have that copy of Pyramiden, alas: it was sold long ago at a Discworld convention charity auction. But we still have the Rihannsu books in question, so now you can see what the pages looked like. Behold: one of the more sordid yet somehow mean and small and pitiful examples of corporate greed you’re likely to see.
*I keep thinking the “a” here should take an umlaut. …Never mind.
That’s my year made.
phaser, n.
2. Science Fiction. A weapon producing destructive laser or similar beams (of variable phase); spec. a (usually hand-held) device whose output can be varied to produce different effects on a target (as stunning, annihilation, etc.). Also in extended use and in figurative context.First used in the U.S. television series Star Trek.
1966 G. Roddenberry Memo 26 Apr. in S. E. Whitfield & G. Roddenberry Making of ‘Star Trek’ iii. i. 272 Reference the mating of various components of the phaser weapons..when the hand phaser is mated to the pistol, they should appear as one weapon.
1967 Pop. Sci. Dec. 73/2 The main weaponry of the Enterprise is its banks of ‘ship’s phasers’,—artillery-size versions of the hand phasers and phaser pistols carried by the crew. These weapons are, of course, refinements of today’s familiar lasers.
1978 D. Bloodworth Crosstalk xxxiii. 256 The USAAF had brought down the first unmanned plane with a laser, and..had..been thinking in terms of light, chemically-operated versions that could be phased together… ‘Phasers?’ ‘Phasers. Right.’
1984 D. Duane My Enemy, my Ally vi. 85 Mr. Chekov, arm photon torpedoes, prepare to lock phasers on for firing.
1995 THIS Mag. July 21/2 His oddly reserved nature stands out… Whyte sets his phaser on stun, not kill. In print and in person, he usually gives a nod to his opponents before letting fly.
2000 Personal Computer World Dec. 481/2 The phaser rifle..easily vaporises most opponents in a spectacular orange echoey screaming fashion with a single shot.
There is a moment in Sherlock‘s second-season episode “The Hounds of Baskerville” in which the world’s first and only consulting detective is attempting to get to grips with the fact that his senses, the tools of his trade, utterly reliable for all his past life, have apparently turned on him and are no longer to be trusted. As have many other artists in similar situations — painters who suddenly can’t paint, sculptors who can’t find the shapes hidden in the stone any more — Sherlock briefly comes a bit undone under the pressure of the untoward circumstance.
[scrippet]
INT. CROSS KEYS — NIGHT
Sherlock sits by the fire in the pub. His breathing is labored as he stares into the fire, and he’s squeezing his eyes shut and opening them again as if his vision’s giving him trouble. This behavior continues while John sits down with him and briefs him on Henry Baskerville’s condition —
JOHN
Well, he’s in a pretty bad way. Manic. Totally convinced that there’s some mutant superdog roaming the moors. And there isn’t, is there? Because if somebody knew how to make a mutant superdog, we’d know. They’d be for sale. I mean, that’s how it works….
John shares a little more info about what may or may not be clues to the present mystery, but Sherlock isn’t engaging with him. His face works a bit bizarrely as he tries to hang onto his composure. And after a moment’s pause he says something that costs him a great deal:
SHERLOCK
Henry’s right. I saw it too.
JOHN
What?
SHERLOCK
I saw it too, John.
JOHN
Just a moment. You saw what?
SHERLOCK
A hound. Out there in the Hollow. A gigantic hound.
He blinks again, the trouble-with-my-eyes expression: but the trouble they’re giving him is that they’ve shown him something he cannot possibly believe. John too is having trouble believing what he’s hearing from the 2012 finalist for the title of Earth’s Most Rigorous Thinker.
JOHN
Um. Look, Sherlock. We have to be rational about this. And you, of all people, can’t — Look, let’s just stick to what we know. Stick to the facts.
SHERLOCK
Once you rule out the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be true.
JOHN
What’s that mean?
Sherlock picks up the glass of whisky sitting beside him and stares at it: stares in horrified fascination and loathing at the shaking of the hand holding it.
SHERLOCK
Look at me. I’m afraid, John. Afraid.
Sherlock takes a big swig of the whisky.
JOHN
Sherlock —
SHERLOCK
(another swig)
Ought to be able to keep myself distant. To divorce myself from feelings.
He holds up the glass. His hand shakes worse. John’s eyes rest on it, on his friend’s desperately working face as Sherlock struggles for control.
SHERLOCK (CONT’D)
But look. You see? The body’s betraying me. Interesting, yes? — emotions? The grit on the lens, the fly in the ointment —
JOHN
(concerned but gently ironic)
All right, ‘Spock,’ just take it easy. You’ve been pretty wired lately. You know you have. I think you’ve just gone out there, got yourself a bit worked up…
SHERLOCK
Worked up?
JOHN
It was dark and scary —
SHERLOCK
Me? There’s nothing wrong with me!
[/scrippet]
…Sherlock then veers into a fairly emphatic anxiety attack with a side order of unusually driven and angry off-the-cuff deduction. But I had to roll the recording back to get back into sync with it, for the narrative had unseated me at the word “Spock” and kept right on running, leaving me sitting there a bit dazed. I’d expected a lot of things from this episode, but seeing two of my favorite fandoms cross the streams with such flair left me shaking my head and grinning.
Sherlock and Spock. I’ve been a friend of the one since my teens — maybe earlier — and an off-canon chronicler of the other for twenty or thirty years. As such, the confluence of the two universes was hardly news to me: Star Trek (and Star Trek writers) have had the hots for Holmes for a long time, and dialogue references and outright cameos are commonplace. Nick Meyer, the director of arguably the single best of all Trek movies until the Great Reboot, is probably the best-known of the Holmes fans to become involved in Trek’s newer, younger Canon. Data routinely goes sleuthing in the original Holmes’s gaslit London on the holodeck (and Moriarty has escaped from it, creating the predictable mayhem). There’s even the line referred to in the tumblr gif below — which, since all Trek film is canonical, makes the connection concrete: either Spock and Sherlock Holmes, or Spock and Arthur Conan Doyle, are (it says here) related. But whether or not you accept that last statement as gospel truth or a Vulcan “exaggerating”, there’s no denying that 1701/1701A and 221B are thematic and spiritual neighbors. The Trek universe has been nodding amicably toward Doyle’s creation for many years.
But this was the first time the other universe, in mass media at least, had ever nodded back. I don’t know how other Trek fans felt, but I was seriously tickled: as if in some obscure and very satisfying way, a circle had closed.
And of course early in January news got out that Benedict Cumberbatch will have a major role in Star Trek 2. And by all reports, he’s settling into the new job nicely. So as one circle is closed, another one opens. What a world…
(Over here, by the way, is the clip referenced in the script extract above.)
…It’s nice to see the two universes on mutual nodding acquaintance, though. For the great core relationships at the heart of each of them have resonances to each other that may or may not be entirely accidental. The correspondences naturally aren’t exact (and it’d be boring if they were), particularly because in Trek the core relationship is a triad and in Holmes’s world it’s a dyad. But the strength of the similarities is striking.
In both worlds, you could make a case that it’s the rational, logical creatures inhabiting them that give the Enterprise and the upstairs flat at 221B Baker Street their spice and potential drama… for acting reasonably and rationally isn’t normally a favorite occupation of human beings. Though logic is unquestionably a good thing, years and years of Star Trek episodes and many of the Holmes stories remind us that in either past or future, unless tempered by human qualities, the logic becomes a serious pain in the butt and occasionally a stumbling block, or even a liability. So in each world, the most committed humans/”normal people” slowly educate the local logician in the usages and usefulness of the human heart; and along the way, the logician normally manages to teach the humans something about how to really think. Everyone benefits from this arrangement… assuming that they don’t kill each other first. (Cue the iconic music from “Amok Time” here.) But the meat and drama of the stories arises mostly from this learning process, and the ways it goes wrong, or right.
I hardly need to get into the Kirk/Spock/McCoy dynamic very deeply at this late date: the way the characters interact is so well known. Outside of fiction, I’m sure endless reams of material have been written about the putative relationships between the characters seen as id/ego/superego or parent/child/adult or Moe/Larry/Curly or Roddenberry-only-knows what else, mostly as attempts to explain where the Logician fits in and how the others manage to affect him. Some of these theories may actually have some application. On my own time I’ve normally felt that all three characters are too complex to reduce to such simplistic formulae. But there are certainly themes that recur when Kirk is interacting with Spock (in terms of looking past the rigidity of logic toward ways to push out the boundaries of the envelope, or break some otherwise deadly paradigm to save everybody’s lives) and when McCoy is interacting with him (in terms of forcefully putting the emotional/ethical side of a situation and getting up in Spock’s face, sometimes quite rudely, until the message gets across to best effect). And if anything, these tendencies have become stronger and more effective in the reboot, with the reincarnation of Kirk, Spock and McCoy in the personas of younger characters making it plainer that they’re all in the same learning experience together — a three-part work in progress, but with the foundations of a lifelong friendship now firmly laid.
In Sherlock’s boot-forward into the 21st century from the 19th, the same situation obtains, with serious benefits. For example, the unnerving scene above would never have played with a middle-aged Holmes and Watson: to make it work you need two younger men who’re still learning the extent of their powers and settling into their roles. These might at first glance look simpler than those of the Trek core team, since this team’s built for two rather than three — but it actually makes their dynamic even more complicated. Watson, as both doctor and military man, combines the opportunities and challenges of the Kirk/McCoy roles… and winds up being able to affect his opposite number in two entirely different ways.
His own complexities aren’t to be dismissed. Here you have a man disciplined and tough-minded, deeply wounded by his experiences in Afghanistan but not conquered by them — a crack shot possessed of what Sherlock quickly (and almost inopportunely) identifies as “strong moral principle” and “nerves of steel”. But perfectly balancing this is Watson’s slight, charming diffidence, unfailing kind-heartedness, and gentle bedside manner. (Close inspection of the DVD makes available some useful and rather diagnostic background information on him, including his interest in a career in advanced A&E with an emphasis on laparoscopy and other associated styles of “bloodless surgery”. Click here for screencaps with some light clinical commentary.) John’s underlying compassion positions him perfectly to understand and support his scary-smart, “high-functioning sociopath” roommate day by day. Yet he’s both willing and able to kick Sherlock’s butt physically if circumstances require, or to administer him a succinct no-holds-barred tonguelashing that would do McCoy proud. This is no mere sidekick: this is a teammate, well along in the process of being/becoming a rock-solid friend.
And John’s presence and qualities point up another of the resonances between the Starship and the upstairs flat. Just as you could make a case that the real narrative of James Kirk’s greatness in Starfleet doesn’t get started until he and Spock meet, realize each other’s strengths, and come to initial terms, you could also say that Holmes is just an Annoying Incredibly Smart Guy until Watson’s transformative influence starts having its effect — tempering that awesome intellect and processing ability with more regularly expressed humanity, taught the best way: by example. In all these characters’ cases, the temptation to employ the way-overused line about “they complete each other” has to be resisted at all costs, because any “completing” in the case of these two teams of characters is decades away… if it can ever happen this side of all their graves.
In particular, the Holmes and Watson story, as it’s been reframed, isn’t about completion at all. It’s about growth, and what each of these men has to teach the other over time. It’s equally tempting, in service of this theme, to reach for the old no-brainer mind/heart-duality model and say that each man brings one half of a whole to the table. But there’s nothing so simplistic about this character dyad, who come to us with many layers of history and complexity laid on in various media over the last century, like a much-loved painting that the artist just can’t stop working on. It’d probably be more accurate to say that John has as much to learn from Sherlock about the arts of thought and observation as Sherlock has to learn from John about the uses of concern and compassion. Each man is going to make the other whole — though there’ll be the usual missteps and kicking and screaming along the way. But this is what makes for great and satisfying drama: characters who change each other and are changed themselves — not running together like two drops of water into one, but each growing more perfect in the exercise of some unique gift — say, the conduction of light or the reception of it — simply because of the other’s continued and reliable presence in an otherwise unreliable world.
Maybe that’s a clue to why both these worlds have rebooted so cleanly into this century (besides the fact that both have good solid writing teams, hard at work and intent on taking the time to get it right). Both Star Trek and Sherlock’s world still speak on a very basic level to people who — besides a little adventure and excitement — want and need stories about how friendship and intelligence, working in tandem, have a fighting chance at conquering the world and making a difference, on the small scale or the very large. In both cases you may hear the usual noise about old wine in new bottles. But this presupposes an audience that still thinks the old wine’s worth drinking… and who’re willing to take the chance to see if the new bottles might actually make it taste even better this time round. For such people, it looks more and more like there’ll always be somewhere to beam up to: and a door on Baker Street that, when they knock, will always be answered.
There are just a couple of things on my mind that (in light of earlier posts and responses) I want to share before I get back to the various pieces of work I need to be doing today.
Re whatever might have been going on in the ST:TNG offices as the first season got underway: I suspect the full story would probably take nearly as long to tell as it took to unfold. I’ve only heard bits and pieces of the story from those who were there, and I got a sense at the time that the people involved were trying to put it all behind them and didn’t want to go into tons of detail.
This I’ll say, though — and it must be clearly understood to be just my theory, one for which I have little concrete evidence, but am basing on gut feeling and later experience elsewhere. I have this feeling that all the trouble boiled down to money, one way or another, and the influence that given amounts of the green stuff have on any given project in Hollywood.
The more money is involved in something, the more people start to have a say in what’s happening to it and where it goes (since often they’re the sources of the money to begin with), and the more people start mixing in and trying to wrest the context in which the money’s being used into shapes that will serve their own agendas, whatever those might be. For the first time, I think, (televised) Trek was perceived as being about to have truly serious amounts of money thrown at it. (I leave the films out of this equation at the moment, as film and TV hold two very different and separate niches of importance and power in Hollywood.)
This being the case, and Trek having the (even then) considerable effect on popular culture that it’s had, the scrum and scramble for power and influence over the unfolding project would have started very quickly — as inevitable as the jostling and clambering-over-each-other in a bucket of crabs. I have seen this elsewhere since then, from the inside, in other productions; and always the cause of the trouble (or the cause of the lack of it) has been the amount of money involved. The more money, the more severe the agida. From this end of time, this realization leaves me suspecting that the same thing was going on in the ST offices, at root. For details of who did what to whom at the time, and why, and how, those interested are probably going to have to look elsewhere: I have only my one data point to contribute…and a certain reluctance to stir the pot.
But the money thing… Let me suggest a backwards diagnostic that I’ve found useful from the writer’s point of view. You can always tell how much money is being spent on a project, and how hard people are fighting over where it goes, by how many notes you get, and from whom, and how hard they are to deal with.
For those who may have missed the definition in an earlier post, “notes” is the code word for the suggestions (read “mandatory corrections”, usually) that the production staff above the writer in the food chain hand back to that writer after reading the submitted material. (This is not like writing a book, where you don’t have to do what your editor tells you. Notes carry more weight.) Sometimes you get notes as a memo or an e-mail, sometimes (in more informal settings) as literal notes scribbled in the margins of what you’ve turned in. Sometimes you’re given them in a meeting, or a phone call, during which you either scribble them down at top speed and hope not to miss anything, or else record the session (if your story editor or producer doesn’t mind) and play it back later. Then you rewrite your material, taking into account the notes that you’ve been given: doing what they say, insofar as your creative instincts allow you: arguing about the stuff you don’t think works, or can’t be made to work as the notes suggest: sometimes ignoring one point or another in hopes that the person(s) who gave you that note will just forget about it. (It happens. There are people who give you notes Just Because They Can: notes are their power trip, their assertion of their “rightful” position higher up in the creative food chain than yours.)
Then you turn your rewritten work back in, and inevitably, there are more notes on that draft. And so it will go from beginning to end, from premise to final draft script.
(Brief joke here: I very occasionally “dream true” — predicting some minor thing that’s going to happen, rarely anything of interest to anyone but me. These dreams have a specific feel to them, one I’ve learned to pay attention to: and when someone gives me advice in one of these dreams, I’ve learned to work hard, on awakening, to remember what that was. It usually pays off. In this regard, a number of years ago I had one of these dreams, and into it walked the much-missed, much-loved Filmation producer and story editor, Art Nadel — mentor and friend to a lot of the younger animation talent who were working in LA in the early 80’s. I was surprised that he should turn up, because Art had died some time earlier, and in the dream I remembered this. “Art,” I said, “I’m really glad to see you!” “I’m glad to see you too,” he said: and he smiled. “And now I have some notes.” …I woke myself up laughing out loud: first of all because Art was always fun to be around: and secondly, because I knew the dream had to be a “true” one, because Art was going to give me notes.)
You get used to the notes over time, truly: and to dealing with them. (Or, if you’re smart, you get out of TV and film before you are driven completely loopy.) Sometimes the notes infuriate you, and you fight as hard as you can to avoid doing what they say. Sometimes you acquiesce to what they require of you as gracefully as you can, because you realize — sometimes very belatedly — that the person giving you the notes was really right. Sometimes you acquiesce as gracefully as you can because, though the other person is incredibly wrong, there’s nothing you can do about it: that person outranks you, and you and your job will be toast in minutes if you rock the boat too hard. In this regard I have a few (until now) unwritten rules which have served me fairly well so far.
Unwritten Note Rule 1: The more money made by the person who gave you the note, the more attention you have to pay.
UNR 2: The more highly placed in the production entity the person is who gave you the note, the more attention you have to pay.
UNR 3: when notes given you by separate people are at odds, you follow the lead of the more highly positioned / better paid of the two, and let them fight it out if they need to.
It’s always a tightrope walk…or maybe better thought of as a gauntlet that you have to run through with every draft. Or, if you’re lucky and your production staffers and higher-ups are good people who’re genuinely trying to improve something which they want to turn out well, it’s a dance: everyone moves through patterns of agreement or civil disagreement, alliances form and shift from day to day as new people are added to the project or drop out of it. Your co-story editor may agree with you that one of your executive producers is insane, and you may band together to make sure that you only get notes from the other one, the sane one. Or you and your producers may agree that there are some of another producer’s notes that you don’t need to pay attention to, they’ll sort that person out themselves. But at all times…the money talks, and you have to listen to it. The more money is being spent, the harder you listen when dealing with the notes.
And another thing: you always get notes. Not to get notes suggests that you are on another planet. Or possibly working for the BBC in some dim and golden past.
I had this happen while working on an educational show called “Science Challenge”, in the early 1990’s. I had it happen repeatedly, to the point that I began to doubt my sanity. I would turn in a script, and my producers would say “Fine, let’s go.” They seemed to have this weird idea that a writer could be trusted to, you know, write. Sometimes the phone would ring and my producer would say, “You know, we’re shooting episode six this afternoon, and it looks like we’re going to come up three minutes short: can you fax us over a few more pages?” “Sure,” I would say, and I’d write three more pages, and fax them over, and they would shoot them. Very, very unreal. After years of working in Hollywood on and off, I would pinch myself. Planet BBC was a very different place from Planet Hollywood. (I understand this has changed, alas.) But at the bottom of this unusual behavior was, you guessed it, the money. Or lack of it. BBC productions were famous for being run on a shoestring: why do you think the old Dr. Who always ended up in the same gravel pit in Wales (or wherever) when they needed a ravaged alien landscape? (When I first started working for the Beeb, I spent some time walking around the neighborhood of the building where my producers were, and laughed again and again as I recognized background after background from Monty Python. Why go any distance to shoot when you have perfectly serviceable suburbia three blocks away? Waste of money…)
The notes are always about the money. The other end of the dear-Ghod(dess)-they-shot-what-I-wrote spectrum is the OMG-how-am-I-supposed-to-reconcile-all-these-idiotic-ideas?! end: the situation you get into when you’re involved with a multimillion-euro multiple-co-production-partner operation like Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King (aka Die Nibelungen, aka many, many other names in many many markets). Some of the notes that came down from our coproduction partners were beyond surreal…yet they all had to be dealt with somehow, because they were giving us the money to make the thing in the first place. Peter and I were lucky in that our producers at Tandem Communications, Rola and Tim, were smart and sane people, good friends, genuinely committed to making something worth watching. They were our lifeline on that project (and will be again some day, I’ll bet).
But at the end of the day, when you’re working in film or TV, it boils down to this: you’re part of a really big committee. And the heads of the committee are the ones who give you the money.
And we all know what art by committee looks like. It’s amazing when it works at all. Every time you get involved, you run the risk of finding your name on something that looks nothing, nothing whatsoever, like what you initially wrote. And them’s the breaks. You pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start looking around for the next project. Or, if you’ve had enough, you get the heck out of Dodge. (“What? And give up show business??”)
…Now I have to go to work on another piece of committee stuff. Right now it’s all mine. Right now it’s still at that pristine stage where there are, as yet, no notes.
But there will be. There will be….
I just want to take a moment to link to this, in which the excellent Wil Wheaton gives us an in-depth analysis of the episode.
While reading it I had to stop several times to clean the tea off the keyboard, and (since Peter is still snoozing upstairs, having had a late writing night) restrain myself from yelling “How goddam true!” about fifty times. You go, Wil!
(Absolutely, what an utter arsewipe Kosinski was! — which wasn’t the way we wrote him originally, alas. And yes, the Traveler was a desperate case! But then he wasn’t our idea. Neither was sticking the poor guy in pajamas. The targ wasn’t our idea either, though I kind of wish it had been.)
Some one of these days I’ll blog much more fully about the writing of that episode. Update: see below. A long story. (Short in real time, long in fallout.) If it had a moral, it would be: “Never pitch to a production team which is in the middle of a serious political struggle with itself.” …Not that you can always choose not to do this, of course.
Yet…a lot of good things came of it. And you can’t argue the buzz of seeing your name on a prime-time property for the first time, regardless of how terribly you got rewritten. And the episode was pretty. And writing it taught both Michael and me a lot about the challenges inherent in writing for a series so new that no one knows what most of the primary characters even look like. (We wrote the script some weeks before Patrick Stewart had been cast as Picard.)
Ah, memories.
***
So herewith — because I forgot I already had at least some of it written down — a bit more of the story from the writer’s point of view.
Like (it seemed) everybody else in Los Angeles, when the word came out in early 1987 that there was about to be another series of Star Trek, my old friend Michael Reaves and I both got to work on ideas to pitch. At first, the ideas were very different: and I knew from the start that Michael had a much better chance of ever getting inside the front door at TNG than I did, for the simple reason that, at that point, Michael had live-action TV credit and was a member of the Writer’s Guild. At that point, those were basic prerequisites for pitching to Trek, and I had a lot of animation, but no live action, and no Guild membership.However, after about a week’s work, Michael told me that he thought he had a good idea…and he wasn’t sure it hadn’t been influenced by my ST novel The Wounded Sky. He asked if I wanted to collaborate with him, and pitch jointly.
This was wild generosity (and utterly in character for Michael). I was happy to oblige. We started work on Michael’s basic idea, and as usual, working on it together, it changed nature again: but we were both quite happy with it. (I would upload that initial document, but unfortunately it was preserved only in Michael’s computer, which suffered a disastrous disk crash some years back and destroyed various of our original files — along with the original first-draft script.)
David Gerrold, who was still in the TNG offices at that point, listened to our pitch and then had us come in to pitch to Gene Roddenberry. We came better equipped than one needs to for a pitch — with what was ostensibly a premise, but was more nearly the equivalent of an outline, in hand. Gene liked the basic story a great deal, and suggested some changes. We went home and made them: and the result, a second-draft premise, is here for your perusal. (This is my version of it: after this, the file went to Michael for his input and formatting. You’ll see some of my notes to him in this draft.)
At that point we were told to go to outline. The first-draft outline is lost: but there were, as always, “notes” (the euphemism for changes that the producer or story editor wants made), and the second-draft outline shows the result of those changes.
Memory tells me that there were notes on the second-draft outline as well, but they were not incredibly extensive, and the first-draft script which we turned in resembles the second-draft outline pretty closely. The alert reader will note some interesting oddities. Tasha’s name had become Macha at that point (or had relapsed to Macha — there were several back-and-forth swings of this kind): children on board wore “bracelets” which functioned the way the communicator badges do now, as locators: and so forth. Bear in mind that we were working at a very early stage in TNG’s development: our episode was only the sixth one shot, and a lot of things were in a state of flux. As I remember, Patrick Stewart had not yet even been cast when we were writing: we had no idea what Picard was going to look like.
At any rate, we turned in the first-draft script and waited a couple of weeks for the notes — heard nothing, called the TNG office, and discovered that we had been “cut off” at first draft, and the script given to someone else for rewrite. This happens sometimes in TV, but rarely when everybody in the office is so enthusiastic about the story in its earlier stages.
We were unclear about the reasons for this particular cutoff for a long, long time — nearly ten years. The excuse originally given us was “time considerations” — meaning that the production office was under enough time pressure that it was felt easier and quicker to fix the script in-house rather than giving it back to us. But ten years later we found out that this hadn’t really been the issue: instead, we’d unwittingly become caught up in interoffice politics. One member of production staff got up another one’s nose, and as a result was chucked out — and (though they weren’t told what was going on) so were all the writers associated with that production staffer. Our script was then handed to another person for rewrite (and it became a source of considerable amusement to us when it turned out that a script which took us two weeks to write, took the replacement “writer” six weeks to rewrite…and the job he did was considered to be so slow and poor that it was later cited as a reason that he should be fired.)
At any rate, after the rewrite, in the shooting script for the episode, only two elements of our original (besides the general idea) remain: the scene with Picard and his mother (which was Michael’s), and the shot of Picard almost falling out of the turbolift into open space (which was mine: other alert readers will probably have recognized an idiom from the “Door” books there — in this case, Picard having an intimate and scary run-in with the Door into Starlight).
When Michael and I did see the shooting script, while our families were vacationing together in England in the late summer of ’87, our reactions were, uh, mixed. We thought we’d had a pretty fair story without the addition of aliens in pajamas and genius children. (Also, please note that neither of us had anything against the Wesley Crusher character.) However, at that point both of us had enough TV work under our belts, of one kind or another, to (after the initial reaction) sigh, shrug, say “Oh well, they paid us…”, and move on. Michael got busy with other projects (many of you will now have seen or heard of his work on BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, GARGOYLES, and various movies-for-TV: I went on to live-action on the European side, for the BBC among others, and just had a miniseries come out.
Nonetheless, I think Michael and I still wonder sometimes: what would it have looked like if they’d shot what we wrote?…
(A few more thoughts about behind-the-scenes events during that first season, and a discussion of what else the word “notes” means to a TV writer, are here.)
I thought this had been removed from YouTube. So happy to be wrong. 🙂
Or it’s corny this year, anyway. From Reuters:
A British fan of the cult TV show “Star Trek” has boldly gone where no man has gone before and created a giant maize maze dedicated to the program.
…I foresee many, many such strange things happening this year to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Trek. (Such as the last of the Rihannsu books coming out.) 
Now playing: Christopher Cross – Ride Like The Wind
