star trek writing style

Star Trek Minutiae: Exploring the Details of Science Fiction

If you’ve ever tried to faithfully recreate the graphics seen on Star Trek , you know that the distinctive typography requires just the right fonts. I’ve found quite a few useful ones at various websites over the years. Whether it’s a movie title, a computer interface, or an alien script you’re looking to illustrate, there’s probably a font here to get you started. The fonts collected below aren’t supposed to be a complete archive of every font available, but rather a source for the best and most useful versions that are out there.

I’ve used many of these fonts to create various graphics for Star Trek Minutiae over the years, from the You’re the Admiral! maps to that time this site was assimilated by the Borg . I hope you find these useful, too!

Archivist’s Note: These fonts have been obtained through various free download websites. All fonts are copyrighted by their original creators.

Title Fonts

Download All

Alien Fonts

External Links

Memory Alpha’s list of Star Trek fonts
Star Trek Fonts from FontSpace
Star Trek Fonts from MyFonts
Typography: The Final Frontier from FontShop

Star Trek Font: A Guide to Its Origins and Usage

Star Trek, the iconic science fiction franchise that has captivated audiences for over five decades, is popular for its innovative and futuristic storytelling and distinctive visual style. One element contributing to the show’s unique aesthetic is its font, commonly called the “Star Trek font.” This bold and futuristic typeface has become synonymous with the franchise and is instantly recognizable to fans worldwide. However, this font’s origin has been a debate among Trekkies.

We will delve into the history of the Star Trek font, exploring its creation, evolution, and the controversy surrounding its use. From its early appearances in the original series to its prominent role in modern adaptations, we will uncover the truth behind this iconic font and its enduring impact on the Star Trek universe.

Table of Contents

What Is Star Trek Font?

Star Trek Font refers to the typography used in the iconic Star Trek franchise. The font is popular for its futuristic and sleek appearance, reflecting the sci-fi theme of the series. Clean lines, sharp angles, and a modern aesthetic often characterize it.

The Star Trek Font has become popular among fans and designers, who use it to create various Star Trek-themed graphics, merchandise, and promotional materials. Whether you’re a die-hard Trekkie or simply appreciate the unique style of the font, incorporating it into your designs can add an extra touch of intergalactic flair.

History Of The Font

The Star Trek font has become iconic in popular culture and instantly recognizable to fans of the beloved science fiction franchise. The font used in the Star Trek logo and title sequences is popular as “Helvetica Inserat” and was chosen for its futuristic and sleek appearance.

Created by Swiss typeface designer Max Miedinger in 1957, Helvetica Inserat is a bold and attention-grabbing font that perfectly captures the spirit of exploration and adventure that Star Trek represents. Over the years, the font has undergone minor modifications to enhance legibility and maintain its modern aesthetic. Today, it continues to symbolize the enduring legacy of Star Trek and its impact on popular culture.

Creative Steps To Incorporate The Star Trek Font In Design Projects

The Star Trek font is a beloved and iconic typeface that instantly evokes feelings of adventure and exploration. If you’re looking to incorporate this iconic font into your design projects, there are several creative steps. Incorporating the Star Trek font into design projects can add a touch of sci-fi and nostalgia. Remember to use the font sparingly and ensure it complements other design elements for a cohesive and visually appealing result. Here are some creative steps to use the Star Trek font in your designs:

1. Logo Design: Use the Star Trek font to create a logo for a sci-fi-themed event or business. The bold and futuristic look of the font can instantly convey the theme and attract attention. 2. Poster Design: Incorporate the Star Trek font in poster designs for sci-fi conventions or movie screenings. It can help capture the essence of the Star Trek universe and appeal to fans. 3. Website Design: Use the Star Trek font for headings or titles on a website dedicated to science fiction, space exploration, or technology. It can give a futuristic vibe and enhance the overall visual experience. 4. Social Media Graphics: Create eye-catching graphics using the Star Trek font to promote sci-fi-related content, events, or products.

The Font Used In The Star Trek Wordmark

The Star Trek wordmark’s font is “Star Trek Font.” This font was specifically created for the Star Trek franchise and is designed to resemble the lettering used in the official Star Trek logo. It features angular, futuristic letters that convey a sense of technology and adventure. The Star Trek Font has become iconic and instantly recognizable to the series’ fans.

Many graphic designers and Star Trek enthusiasts enjoy using this font to create their own Star Trek-inspired designs, whether it be for fan art, merchandise, or promotional materials.

How To Download And Use The Font

If you’re a Star Trek fan and want to add a touch of sci-fi to your design projects, you might be interested in using the Star Trek font. Remember to check if there are any usage restrictions or licensing requirements associated with the Star Trek font before using it commercially or for public distribution. Enjoy adding intergalactic flair to your designs with the iconic Star Trek font. To download and use the font, follow these simple steps:

1. Search for a trusted website that offers free Star Trek fonts. There are various websites where you can find and download font for free.

2. Once you’ve found a reliable source, click the download button or link to start the download process. Make sure to save the file in a location on your computer that is easily accessible.

3. After downloading the font file, locate it on your computer and open it. You may need to extract the files from a zip folder before proceeding.

4. Install the font onto your computer by double-clicking on the font file and selecting “Install” when prompted. This will add the Star Trek font to your system’s font library.

5. Now that the font is installed, you can use it in various design software applications such as Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Word, or any other program that allows you to select custom fonts.

Repurposing Fonts For Commercial Purposes

Repurposing fonts for commercial purposes can be a creative and cost-effective way to enhance your branding and marketing materials. However, ensuring that you have the appropriate licensing rights to use the font in a commercial setting is important. Many fonts are protected by copyright laws, meaning you may need permission from the font creator or purchase a license to use the font commercially.

Additionally, it is important to consider the terms of use for the font, as some creators may have specific restrictions on how their fonts can be handy. By knowing these considerations and obtaining the necessary permissions or licenses, you can confidently incorporate repurposed fonts into your commercial endeavours.

How To Design Your Font

Designing your own Star Trek font can be a fun and creative project. Whether you’re a fan of the iconic Star Trek series or just looking to add a unique touch to your design work, creating a custom font can help you stand out. Here are some steps to help you get started:

1. Research Star Trek fonts: Before designing your font, it’s important to familiarize yourself with existing ones. Look at different variations used in TV shows and movies to get an idea of the aesthetic you want to achieve.

2. Sketch out your ideas: Start by sketching out different letterforms and symbols that reflect the essence of Star Trek. Experiment with different shapes, angles, and proportions to find a style that resonates with you.

3. Digitize your sketches: Once you’re happy with your hand-drawn designs, it’s time to digitize them using graphic design software such as Adobe Illustrator or FontForge. Create vector outlines of each character and refine them until they match your vision.

4. Test and refine: After digitizing your designs, testing them in various contexts and sizes is crucial to ensure legibility and consistency. Make any necessary adjustments or refinements until you satisfy with the result.

5. Convert into a usable font file: To use your custom Star Trek font, you’ll need to convert it into a usable font file format such as TrueType or OpenType. There are online tools and software available that can assist with this process.

Remember, designing a font requires patience and attention to detail. Experiment with different styles and iterations until you achieve the desired outcome for your Star Trek-inspired font. May the font be with you.

Copyright And Legal

Being aware of copyright and legal considerations is important when using the Star Trek font. The Star Trek font, or “Starfleet,” is a proprietary font owned by CBS Studios Inc. and can only be used with proper permission or licensing. Unauthorized use of the font can lead to copyright infringement and legal consequences.

If you plan on using the Star Trek font for commercial purposes. It is recommended to seek permission from CBS Studios Inc. or explore licensing options to ensure compliance with copyright laws. It is always best to consult a legal professional for guidance on the appropriate and legal use of copyrighted material like the Star Trek font.

Tips For Using The Star Trek Font Effectively And Legibly

Using the Star Trek font can be a fun and creative way to add a touch of sci-fi to your designs. However, using the font effectively and legibly is important to ensure your message is clear. Here are some tips for using the Star Trek font:

Choose the right size: Make sure that your font size is large enough to be easily read, especially if you’re using it for headings or titles.
Use appropriate spacing: Give your text enough breathing room by adjusting the line and letter spacing. This will help improve readability and prevent the text from appearing too crowded.
Consider contrast: If you’re using the Star Trek font on a background image or pattern, make sure there is enough contrast between the text and the background to be easily readable.
Keep it simple: Avoid using excessive special effects or decorative elements with the font, as this can make it difficult to read. Stick to clean lines and simple designs to ensure legibility.

By following these tips, you can ensure that your use of the Star Trek font is effective, legible, and adds just the right amount of sci-fi flair to your designs.

The Star Trek font is a unique and recognizable typeface that has become iconic in popular culture. It is instantly associated with the beloved science fiction franchise and holds a special place in the hearts of fans worldwide.

Whether you’re creating fan art, designing a Star Trek-themed website, or simply wanting to add a touch of sci-fi flair to your projects, the Star Trek font will make a bold statement. Embrace the spirit of exploration and adventure with this distinctive typeface, and let your creativity soar among the stars. Live long and prosper.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the star trek font, and what does it look like.

The Star Trek font is a modified typeface of Futura that was first used in the episode “The Naked Time.” People typically use it to represent futuristic technology in the show.

How Did This Font Come About, And How Long Has It Been Around?

The font “Star Trek” was created for the show in the 1957s. However, developers have used it in various movies, books, and other media.

Recently, Star Trek fans have started to resurrect the font’s usage on various online platforms like Tumblr and deviantART.

What Is The Font handy In The Star Trek Wordmark, And Why Is It Good?

The font used in Star Trek’s wordmark is Futura. From books to ads to movies. In 1966, the TV show Star Trek used this typeface as its main wordmark.

What Is The Font Handy In The Star Trek Wordmark?

The font used for the wordmark for Star Trek is called Futura and was created by Lucida Grande. It was originally designed for movie posters and advertisements in the 1960s. But its popularity led to its use on television series like Star Trek and Doctor Who.

How Did The Star Trek Font Come To Be handy In The Show?

The Star Trek font was for a movie poster and later handy in the show. Its creators, Roger Linn and Michael de Castro, wanted to create a typeface that would be “iconic” and reflect the futuristic nature of Star Trek. The font has since been widely popular with both believers and non-believers of the show alike. You may have even seen it on products like T-shirts or stickers in your home.

David Egee, the visionary Founder of FontSaga, is renowned for his font expertise and mentorship in online communities. With over 12 years of formal font review experience and study of 400+ fonts, David blends reviews with educational content and scripting skills. Armed with a Bachelor’s Degree in Graphic Design and a Master’s in Typography and Type Design from California State University, David’s journey from freelance lettering artist to font Specialist and then the FontSaga’s inception reflects his commitment to typography excellence.

In the context of font reviews, David specializes in creative typography for logo design and lettering. He aims to provide a diverse range of content and resources to cater to a broad audience. His passion for typography shines through in every aspect of FontSaga, inspiring creativity and fostering a deeper appreciation for the art of lettering and calligraphy.

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Star Trek fonts

View history

The following is a list of fonts used in the different Star Trek series categorized by the companies that hold the rights to them.

1 Bitstream
3 Mark Simonson Studio
4 MicroProse
6 Further reading

Bitstream [ ]

Horizon font sample

Galaxy font sample

Millennium font sample

Sonic font sample

Swiss 911 Ultra Compressed font sample

There were at least two Li'l Bits packages released by Bitstream , one for Star Trek: The Original Series and a second for fonts from Star Trek: The Next Generation .

Linotype [ ]

Mark simonson studio [ ], microprose [ ].

With the game Star Trek: The Next Generation - Klingon Honor Guard by MicroProse , the company offered a couple of Klingon -like fonts from the game:

Jefferies Extended font sample

The following is a list of fonts that can be used to achieve lettering as used in the series.

Punch It: Writing in Star Trek The Nerd Party

TV & Film
5.0 • 40 Ratings
JAN 9, 2020

Punch It 134 - Our Last Indulgent J/C Story

What if J/C was canon? In our last episode of Punch It: Writing in Star Trek, we tackle something near and dear to our hearts. Janeway and Chakotay are in love and you can't convince us otherwise. What if those cowards in the writer's room pulled the trigger and made it canon? We make up the relationship on the fly and figure out how the show would change if it was revealed they have been in an intimate relationship. Thank you all for listening.

DEC 5, 2019

Punch It 133 - Stranded in LA

What if the Voyager crew got stranded in LA when they went back in time? In Star Trek: Voyager's "Future's End" the crew got taken back to 1990s LA. They had to find their way back and of course, they did. But what if they didn't right away? What would happen? Would they get jobs? Would they move on? Would they stay together? We answer these questions and a whole lot more.

NOV 21, 2019

Punch It 132: Survival Training

22nd Century Short Trek This week we tackle Short Treks once again but this time within the 22nd century. Enterprise showed a great relationship between Trip and Archer. We wanted to expand on that and talk about their survival training together in Death Valley. What type of Enterprise short trek would you guys like to see from Star Trek?

NOV 14, 2019

Punch It 131: Give Me the Tour

24th Century Short Treks This week we take a fantastic listener suggestion and develop 24th century Short Treks that bridge The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. We took a stab at two and an interesting theme came up that is revealed in the title. What are some Short Trek ideas you would have liked to have seen in the 90s?

OCT 31, 2019

Punch It 130 - Animating the Future

What stories could be explored if Star Trek leaned heavy on animation? We've had Star Trek: The Animated Series and now we're getting Lower Decks. But what if an executive came into a room and said "We're starting a new initiative with a lot of animated Star Trek projects. Pitch me some ideas." This week, we discuss that scenario and explore what kind of stories could be told.

OCT 24, 2019

Punch It 129 - Eating Tribbles

Punching Up "The Trouble with Edward" Char didn't like the latest Short Trek and Tristan thought it was fine. Regardless of your opinion on the quality of the episode, there are more than a few things that stand out as puzzling. This week, your Punch It crew takes the episode and figures out how they can punch it up and have it appeal to a wider Star Trek audience.

Customer Reviews

Live long and punch it.

Excellent podcast! Tristan and Char have a unique dynamic I’ve loved since TTJ. I enjoyed their episode rewrites before, and now they’ve combined two of my favorite things; writing and pop culture (specifically Star Trek). They do it so well! I have a blast listening to their comments and analysis. Definitely been a morale booster in quarantine. Great job Team Lizard Babies! Much love from a loyal fan 😊

My Favorite Star Trek Podcast.

I like this podcast for the same reason that I love Star Trek in general, and that is the positive attitude with which they deliver thier opinions and writing creations. So many podcasts focus on what they like least about the shows that they are supposedly fans of, but Tristan and Char spend more time dwelling on the aspects of the show that they enjoy and then expound on them in thier writing. Their collaborative writing creations are drafted with respect and kindness for each other, and it is entertaining to listen to the process as it happens. I have listened to them from thier time on To The Journey (and also am a huge J/C shipper), and thier creations just seem to get better and better.

Trek Fiction Writer’s Room?

Tristan and Char are a great team going back to their “To the Journey” days. Their similar thoughts on a lot of matters make this such an entertaining show! Only criticism is that I get so caught up in their stories, I find myself wanting to see the finished product on screen!

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Do You Have What It Takes To Write For Star Trek?

Self-Reflection : Re-Evaluating your Failures and Successes

Before we talk about agents and publishers, lets go more in-depth about just what type of Trek material will get you noticed in the publishing or television world. Step Two: Finding Your own Voice and Step Three: Selling the Idea will be in the next installment of this five part series.

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ARTS & CULTURE

An oral history of “star trek”.

The trail-blazing sci-fi series debuted 50 years ago and has taken countless fans where none had gone before

Interviews by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman

It was the most wildly successful failure in television history. First shown on NBC 50 years ago this September, the original “Star Trek” lasted just three seasons before it was canceled—only to be resuscitated in syndication and grow into a global entertainment mega-phenomenon. Four live-action TV sequels, with another digital-platform spinoff planned by CBS to launch next year. A dozen movies, beginning with 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture and resuming this July with the director Justin Lin’s Star Trek Beyond . It finds Capt. Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) in deep space, where they are attacked by aliens and stranded on a distant planet—a plot that may make some viewers glad that at least the special effects are new. Over the decades “Star Trek” merchandise alone (because who does not need a Dr. McCoy bobblehead?) has reportedly brought in some $5 billion.

This is quite an outpouring for a concept that its creator, the Los Angeles police officer-turned-TV-writer Gene Roddenberry, pitched to producers as a “space western” and once described as a “‘Wagon Train’ to the Stars.” There’s much, much more to the appeal of the original “Star Trek” than gunplay in the wilderness, of course, as countless articles and dissertations have tried to explain, but in one key respect Roddenberry’s notion was right on target: People everywhere, especially Americans, are fascinated by the frontier, whether final or not. And fans are still intrigued that Roddenberry, a World War II veteran, set his 23rd-century multiracial epic in a universe that seemed to be moving beyond bigotry and petty conflict, a cold war-era imagining of the future that was reassuringly counter-dystopian. Plus, you’ve got to love the gadgets—mobile communicators, videoconferencing, diagnostic scanners, talking computers—which have had an uncanny habit of turning up in real life lately, a tribute to the wit and ingenuity of not only Roddenberry but also the show’s designers and writers.

The richness and persistence of the original vision are what make an extensive oral history of “Star Trek” so compelling. (The same cannot be said of “ The Newlywed Game ,” for instance, another TV show that debuted in 1966.)

For more than 30 years, Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman have made it their mission to document the creative process underlying “Star Trek” in all its iterations. In tens of thousands of hours of interviews conducted everywhere from Gene Roddenberry’s Bel Air mansion to movie set camper trailers, the writers recorded virtually anyone who put his or her stamp on this pop culture monument. The result is The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek : The First 25 Years , excerpted here. (Volume 2 is in the works.) “What I loved about the oral history format,” says Altman, “was that it was like getting 500 people in a room and telling the story in a linear fashion.” It was, adds Gross, a “genuine labor of love.”

The Fifty-Year Mission: The First 25 Years

Gene Roddenberry (creator and executive producer, “Star Trek”) I remember myself as an asthmatic child, having great difficulties at 7, 8 and 9 years old, falling totally in love with Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle and dreaming of having his strength to leap into trees and throw mighty lions to the ground.

There was a boy in my class who life had treated badly. He limped, he wheezed. He was a charming, intelligent person. Because of being unable to do many of the things that others were able to do, he had sort of gone into his own world of fantasy and science fiction. He had been collecting the wonderful old Amazing and Astounding magazines, and he introduced me to science fiction. I then discovered in our neighborhood, living above a garage, an ex-con who had come into science fiction when he was in prison. He introduced me to John Carter and those wonderful Burroughs things. By the time I was 12 or 13 I had been very much into the whole science fiction field.

In World War II, Roddenberry served in the U. S. Army Air Corps as a B-17 pilot. He joined the Los Angeles Police Department in 1949, and wrote speeches for Chief William Parker as well as articles for the LAPD newsletter, The Beat. Resigning in 1956, Roddenberry provided scripts to the screenwriter Sam Rolfe, for “Have Gun Will Travel,” the TV western starring Richard Boone. Roddenberry had his first pilot produced by MGM in 1963, for the short-lived NBC series “The Lieutenant.” The studio turned down his pitch for a new series called “Star Trek .” But his agents contacted Desilu Studios, which was looking to produce more dramas after years of success in comedy.

Gene Roddenberry I was tired of writing for shows where there was always a shoot-out in the last act and somebody was killed. “Star Trek” was formulated to change that. I had been a freelance writer for about a dozen years and was chafing at the commercial censorship on television. You really couldn’t talk about anything you cared to talk about. It seemed to me that perhaps if I wanted to talk about sex, religion, politics, make some comments against Vietnam, and so on, that if I had similar situations involving these subjects happening on other planets to little green people, indeed it might get by, and it did.

Dorothy “D.C.” Fontana (writer, “Star Trek” story editor) Gene asked me to read the very first proposal for “Star Trek” in 1964. I said, “I have only one question: Who’s going to play Mr. Spock?” He pushed a picture of Leonard Nimoy across the table.

Gene Roddenberry Leonard Nimoy was the one actor I definitely had in mind—we had worked together previously. I was struck at the time with his high Slavic cheekbones and interesting face, and I said to myself, “If I ever do this science fiction thing, he would make a great alien. And with those cheekbones some sort of pointed ear might go well.” To cast Mr. Spock I made a phone call to Leonard and he came in. That was it.

Leonard Nimoy (actor, “Mr. Spock”) I went in to see Gene at Desilu Studios and he told me that he was preparing a pilot for a science fiction series to be called “Star Trek,” that he had in mind for me to play an alien character. I figured all I had to do was keep my mouth shut and I might end up with a good job here. Gene told me that he was determined to have at least one extraterrestrial prominent on his starship. He’d like to have more, but making human actors into other life-forms was too expensive for television in those days. Pointed ears, skin color, plus some changes in eyebrows and hair style were all he felt he could afford, but he was certain that his Mr. Spock idea, properly handled and properly acted, could establish that we were in the 23rd century and that interplanetary travel was an established fact.

Marc Cushman (author, “ These Are the Voyages ” ) Desilu came into existence because Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz owned “I Love Lucy.” It was the first time someone owned the rerun rights to a show. Seems like a no-brainer today, but back then no one had done it. Eventually CBS bought the rerun rights back from Lucy and Desi for a million dollars, a lot of money back then. Lucy and Desi take that money and buy RKO and turn it into Desilu Studios. The company grows, but then the marriage falls apart and Lucy ends up running the studio and by this point, they don’t have many shows. Lucy says, “We need to get more shows on the air,” and “Star Trek” was the one she took on, because she thought it was different.

Herbert F. Solow (executive in charge of production, “Star Trek”) I had so many people at the studio, so many old-timers trying to talk me out of it. “You’re going to bankrupt us, you can’t do this. NBC doesn’t want us anyway, who cares about guys flying around in outer space?” The optical guy said it was impossible to do.

Marc Cushman Desi wasn’t there anymore. So Lucy is asking herself, “What would Desi do?” because she really loved and respected him. “Desi would get more shows on the air that we own, not just that we’re producing for other companies.” That was her reasoning to do “Star Trek”—and she felt that this show could, if it caught on, rerun for years like “I Love Lucy.” And guess what? Those two shows—“I Love Lucy” and “Star Trek”—are two shows that have been rerunning ever since they originally aired.

In the teleplay for the first pilot, “The Cage,” starring Jeffrey Hunter as Capt. Christopher Pike, Roddenberry described the establishing shot in detail: “Obviously not a primitive ‘rocket ship’ but rather a true space vessel, suggesting unique arrangements and exciting capabilities. As CAMERA ZOOMS IN we first see tiny lettering ‘NCC 1701- U.S.S. ENTERPRISE . ’”

Walter M. “Matt” Jefferies (production designer, “Star Trek”) I had collected a huge amount of design material from NASA and the defense industry which was used as an example of designs to avoid. We pinned all that material up on the wall and said, “That we will not do.” And also everything we could find on “Buck Rogers” and “Flash Gordon” and said, “That we will not do.” Through a process of elimination, we came to the final design of the Enterprise .

Gene Roddenberry I’d been an Army bomber pilot and fascinated by the Navy and particularly the story of the Enterprise , which at Midway really turned the tide in the whole war in our favor. I’d always been proud of that ship and wanted to use the name.

Roddenberry’s attention to detail even extended to the ship’s computer at a time when computers were punch card–operated behemoths that filled entire rooms. In a memo on July 24, 1964, to production designer Pato Guzman, Roddenberry suggested, “More and more I see the need for some sort of interesting electronic computing machine designed into the USS Enterprise , perhaps on the bridge itself. It will be an information device out of which the crew can quickly extract information on the registry of other space vessels, spaceflight plans for other ships, information on individuals and planets and civilizations.”

Gene Roddenberry The ship’s transporters—which let the crew “beam” from place to place—really came out of a production need. I realized with this huge spaceship, I would blow the whole budget of the show just in landing the thing on a planet. And secondly, it would take a long time to get into our stories, so the transporter idea was conceived so we could get our people down to the planet fast and easy, and get our story going by Page 2.

Howard A. Anderson (visual effects artist, “Star Trek”) For the transporter effect, we added another element: a glitter effect in the dematerialization and rematerialization. We used aluminum dust falling through a beam of high-intensity light.

Though the network had warned the studio not to make the pilot too esoteric— “ Be certain there are enough explanations on the planet, the people, their ways and abilities so that even someone who is not a science fiction aficionado can clearly understand and follow the story,” a 1964 memo said—the network wasn’t satisfied. NBC commissioned another pilot—a rare second chance at being picked up for a series.

Gene Roddenberry The reason they turned the pilot down was that it was too cerebral and there wasn’t enough action and adventure. “The Cage” didn’t end with a chase and a right cross to the jaw, the way all manly films were supposed to end. There were no female leads then—women in those days were just set dressing. So, another thing they felt was wrong was that we had Majel as a female second-in-command of the vessel.

Majel Barrett (actress, "Number One,""Nurse Christine Chapel") NBC felt that my position as Number One would have to be cut because no one would believe that a woman could hold the position of second-in-command.

Gene Roddenberry Number One was originally the one with the cold, calculating, computerlike mind. When we had to eliminate a feminine Number One—I was told you could cast a woman in a secretary’s role or that of a housewife, but not in a position of command over men on even a 23rd-century spaceship—I combined the two roles into one. Spock became the second-in-command, still the science officer but also the computerlike, logical mind never displaying emotion.

Leonard Nimoy Vulcan unemotionalism and logic came into being.Gene felt the format badly needed the alien Spock, even if the price was acceptance of 1960s-style sexual inequality.

The network’s objections to Roddenberry’s Spock included taking exception to the character’s pointed ears, perceived as imparting a vaguely sinister Satanic appearance.

Gene Roddenberry The idea of dropping Spock became a major issue. I felt that was the one fight I had to win, so I wouldn’t do the show unless we left him in. They said, “Fine, leave him in, but keep him in the background, will you?” And then when they put out the sales brochure when we eventually went to series, they carefully rounded Spock’s ears and made him look human so he wouldn’t scare off potential advertisers.

Work on the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” began in 1965. The show aired on September 22, 1966, and featured William Shatner as Capt. James T. Kirk, replacing actor Jeffrey Hunter.

Gene Roddenberry At that time, TV was full of antiheroes, and I had a feeling that the public likes heroes. People with goals in mind, with honesty and dedication, so I decided to go with the straight heroic roles, and it paid off. My model for Kirk was Horatio Hornblower from the C.S. Forester sea stories. Shatner was open-minded about science fiction, and a marvelous choice.

William Shatner (actor, “James T. Kirk”) I talked to Gene Roddenberry about the objectives we hoped to achieve, and one was serious drama as well as science fiction. I felt confident that “Star Trek” would keep those serious objectives for the most part, and it did.

Scott Mantz (film critic, “Access Hollywood”) I’d follow Kirk in a second. Shatner’s performance as Kirk is the reason I became a “Trek” fan.

Leonard Nimoy Bill Shatner’s broader acting style created a new chemistry between the captain and Spock.

William Shatner Captain Kirk and I melded. It may have been only out of the technical necessity; the thrust of doing a television show every week is such that you can’t hide behind too many disguises. You’re so tired that you can’t stop to try other interpretations of a line, you can only hope that this take is good, because you’ve got five more pages to shoot. You have to rely on the hope that what you’re doing as yourself will be acceptable. Captain Kirk is me. I don’t know about the other way around.

James Doohan (actor, “Montgomery ‘Scotty’ Scott”) [A few days] before they were actually going to shoot the second “Star Trek” pilot, the director, Jim Goldstone, called me and said, “Jimmy, would you come in and do some of your accents for these ‘Star Trek’ people?” I had no idea who they were, but I did that on a Saturday morning. They handed me a piece of paper—there was no part there for an engineer, it was just some lines, but every three lines or so I changed my accent and ended up doing eight or nine accents for that reading. At the end, Gene Roddenberry said, “Which one do you like?” I said, “To me, if you want an engineer, he’d better be a Scotsman,” because those were the only engineers I had read anything about—all the ships they had built and so forth. Gene said, “Well, we rather like that, too.”

George Takei (actor, “Hikaru Sulu”) The first time I talked to Gene about “Star Trek,” it was for the second pilot and it was an exhilarating prospect, because almost every other opportunity was either inconsequential or defamatory, and here was something that was a breakthrough for a Japanese-American actor. Until then any regular series roles for an Asian or an Asian-American character were either servants, buffoons or villains.

Alexander Courage (composer, “Star Trek”) When Lucille Ball bought Desilu, Wilbur Hatch came in as head of music. When “Star Trek” came on the scene, Wilbur suggested me to Roddenberry and I turned out a theme. Roddenberry liked it and that was it. He said, “I don’t want any space music. I want adventure music.”

The second pilot became a monumental achievement: It persuaded NBC to greenlight the series.

Gene Roddenberry The biggest factor in selling the second pilot was that it ended up in a hell of a fistfight with the villain suffering a painful death. Then, once we got “Star Trek” on the air, we began infiltrating a few of our ideas, the ideas the fans have all celebrated.

Robert H. Justman (associate producer, “Star Trek”) On the last day of production when we were a day over, we did two days’ work in one day. That’s the day that Lucy came on the stage, because we were supposed to have an end-of-picture party and we were still shooting, so in between setups she helped Herb Solow and me sweep out the stage. I think she just did that for effect, because she wanted to get the party started.

On March 6, 1966, Roddenberry dispatched a Western Union telegram to Shatner at the Hotel Richmond in Madrid: “Dear Bill. Good news. Official pickup today. Our Five Year Mission. Best Regards, Gene Roddenberry.”

Not long after “Star Trek” was launched, the audience embraced Leonard Nimoy’s Spock, and the stoic Vulcan science officer soon threatened to eclipse Captain Kirk. Nimoy came up with a list of demands that resulted in the possibility that the character would be replaced. In the end, Nimoy’s demands were met, and the scripts began focusing on Kirk and Spock as a team. But the sense of competition continued.

Marc Cushman They almost didn’t have Spock for the second season of “Star Trek.” The fan mail got so intense during the first year, sacks and sacks of mail every day. His agent said, “He’s getting only $1,250 a week and he needs a raise.” But Desilu is losing money on the show and the board of directors was thinking of canceling it, even if NBC wanted to continue, because it was bankrupting the studio. The one that broke the stalemate was the one that didn’t want Spock in the first place: NBC. “You are not doing the show without that guy. Pay him whatever you need to pay him.”

David Gerrold (writer, “The Trouble With Tribbles”) The problems with Shatner and Nimoy really began during the first season when Saturday Review did this article about “Trek” which stated that Spock was much more interesting than Kirk, and that Spock should be captain. Well, nobody was near Shatner for days. He was furious . All of a sudden, the writers are writing all this great stuff for Spock, and Spock, who’s supposed to be a subordinate character, suddenly starts becoming the equal of Kirk.

Ande Richardson (assistant to writer Gene L. Coon) Shatner would take every line that wasn’t nailed down. “This should be the captain’s line!” He was very insecure.

Herbert F. Solow The last thing we wanted was to have the network, the sponsors or the television audience feel that it was not a wonderful, marvelous family on “Star Trek.” We didn’t want anybody to see a crack in this dam that we built.

If push came to shove, and we had to recast both characters, it would have been easier to recast Bill’s part than Leonard’s, so you tell me: Who’s the star of the show?

William Shatner Occasionally, I’ll hear something from an ardent fan of mine who’ll say, “So and so said this about you.” And it bewilders me because I have had no trouble with them. We have done our job and gone on and I have never had bad words with anyone.

On August 17, 1967, Roddenberry addressed an ultimatum to Shatner and Nimoy, with DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy) thrown in for good measure:

“Toss these pages in the air if you like, stomp off and be angry, it doesn’t mean that much since you’ve driven me to the edge of not giving a damn,” Roddenberry wrote in that letter, excerpted here for the first time: “No, William, I’m not really writing this to Leonard and just including you as a matter of psychology. I’m talking to you directly and with an angry honesty you haven’t heard before. And Leonard, you’d be very wrong if you think I’m really teeing off at Shatner and only pretending to include you. The same letter to both; you’ve pretty well divided up the market on selfishness and egocentricity.

“ Star Trek began as one of the TV productions in town where actors, as fellow professionals, were not only listened to but actually invited to bring their script and series comments to the production office. When small problems and pettiness begins to happen as it happens on all shows, I instructed our people that it should be overlooked where possible because we should all understand the enormous physical and emotional task of your job .... The result of Gene Roddenberry’s policy of happy partnership? Star Trek is going down the drain.

“. . . I want you to realize fully where your fight for absolute screen dominance is taking you. It’s already affecting the image of Captain Kirk on the screen. We’re heading for an arrogant, loud, half-assed Queeg character who is so blatantly insecure upon that screen that he can’t afford to let anyone else have an idea, give an order, or solve a problem. You can’t hide things like that from an audience.

“And now, Leonard. I must say that if I were Shatner, I’d be nervous and edgy about you by now, too. For a man who makes no secret of his own sensitivity, you show a strange lack of understanding of it in your fellow actors.

“For as long as I stay with the show, starting Monday,” Roddenberry decreed, “there will be no more line switches from one to anothe r . No more of the long discussions about scenes which lose us approximately a half day of production a show—the director will permit it only when there is a valid dramatic story or interpretation point at stake which he believes makes it necessary. The director will be told he is also replaceable and failure to stay on top and in charge of the set will be grounds for his dismissal.

“All right, my three former friends and ‘unique professionals,’ that’s it. In straight talk.”

David Gerrold All the episodes hold together because Shatner holds it together. Spock is only good when he has someone to play off of. Spock working with Kirk has the magic and it plays very well, and people give all of the credit to Nimoy, not to Shatner.

Leonard Nimoy During the series we had a failure—I experienced it as a failure—in an episode called “The Galileo Seven.” The Spock character had been so successful that somebody said, “Let’s do a show where Spock takes command of a vessel.” We had this shuttlecraft mission where Spock was in charge. I really appreciated the loss of the Kirk character for me to play against. The Bill Shatner Kirk performance was the energetic, driving performance, and Spock could kind of slipstream along and offer advice, give another point of view. Put into the position of being the driving force, the central character, was very tough for me.

Thomas Doherty (professor of American studies, Brandeis University) At the core of “Star Trek” is something profound, which is teamwork and adventure and tolerance. That’s why it’s a World War II motif in the space age. It really is a team; you’re making a heroic contribution by doing your bit.

At the beginning of the second season, several changes greeted viewers. Not only was DeForest Kelley’s name now added to the opening credits, there was a new face at the helm: Navigator Pavel Andreievich Chekov, played by Walter Koenig.

Gene Roddenberry The Russians were responsible for the Chekov character. They put in Pravda that, “Ah, the ugly Americans are at it again. They do a space show, and they forget to include the people who were in space first.” And I said, “My God, they’re right.”

Walter Koenig (actor, “Pavel Chekov”) They were looking for someone who would appeal to the bubblegum set. All that stuff about Pravda , that’s all nonsense. That was all just publicity. They wanted somebody who would appeal to 8- to 14-year-olds and the decision was to make him Russian. My fan mail came from 8- to 14-year-olds who weren’t that aware of the cold war. Getting fan mail was so novel to me that I read every single letter I got. I was getting about 700 letters a week.

Robert H. Justman We had another problem in the second season. We were cut down on how much we could spend per show by a sizable amount of money.

Marc Cushman Lucille Ball lost her studio because of “Star Trek.” She had gambled on the show, and you can read the memos where her board of directors is saying, “Don’t do this show, it’s going to kill us.” But she believed in it. She moved forward with it, and during the second season she had to sell Desilu to Paramount Pictures. Lucille Ball gave up the studio that she and her husband built, it’s all she had left of her marriage, and she sacrificed that for “Star Trek.”

Ralph Senensky (director, “Metamorphosis”) Desilu was like a family. Herb Solow [the production head] used to come down and talk with you on the soundstage. Herb went out of his way to help you. Can you imagine a studio working like that? When Paramount bought it, a kind of corporate mentality took over. That’s why I resent Paramount having such a hit in “Star Trek.” If they had their way, they would have killed it off. It survived in spite of them. Now they have this bonanza making them all of this money.

Marc Cushman Lucy’s instincts were right about “Star Trek,” that it would become one of the biggest shows in syndication ever. The problem was that her pockets weren’t deep enough. They were losing $15,000 an episode, which would be like $500,000 per episode today. You know, if she could have hung on just six months longer, it would have worked out, because by the end of the second season, once they had enough episodes, “ Star Trek” was playing in, I believe, 60 different countries around the world. And all of that money is flowing in.

She had no choice but to sell. She actually took off and went to Miami. She ran away because it was so heartbreaking to sign the contract. They had to track her down to get her to do it. There’s a picture of her cutting the ribbon after they’ve torn down the wall between Paramount and Desilu, and she’s standing next to the CEO of Gulf and Western, which owns both studios now, and she’s trying to fake this smile for the camera, and you know it’s just killing her.

Among the now-classic episodes in Season 2 of the original are “Amok Time,” in which Spock is driven to return to Vulcan to mate or die and finds himself in a battle to the death with Kirk.

Joseph Pevney (director, “Amok Time”) What made the fight in “Amok Time” dramatically interesting is that it took place between Kirk and Spock. During this episode, Leonard Nimoy and I also worked out the Vulcan salute and the statement “live long and prosper” together.

Gene Roddenberry Leonard Nimoycame into my office and said, “I feel the need for a Vulcan salutation, Gene,” and he showed it to me. Then he told me a story about when he was a kid in synagogue. The rabbis said, “Don’t look or you’ll be struck dead or blind,” but Leonard looked and, of course, the rabbis were making that Vulcan sign. The idea of my Southern kinfolk walking around giving each other a Jewish blessing so pleased me that I said, “Go!”

Joseph Pevney “The Trouble With Tribbles” was a delightful show. I had a lot of fun with it, went out and shopped for the tribbles. My biggest contribution was getting the show produced, because there was a feeling that we had no business doing an outright comedy. Bill Shatner had the opportunity to do the little comic bits he loves.

Season 2 also featured visits to a number of Earthlike planets, including one where the society mirrored the Roman Empire.

Ralph Senensky Gene Roddenberry is a very creative man. When we did “Bread and Circuses,” we were doing the Roman arena in modern times with television. We didn’t want to tip that we were doing a Christ story from the word go. Originally when they were talking about the sun, you knew right away that they were talking about the son of God.

Dorothy “D.C.” Fontana Certainly there was a nice philosophy going on there with the worshiping of the “sun,” and then the indication that it was the son of God, that Jesus or the concept had appeared on other planets.

The series was not a ratings powerhouse. Indeed, it seemed that Season 2 could very well be the show’s last. The future was in the hands of the fans.

Bjo & John Trimble (longtime fans) Cancellation was certain at the end of the second season. We wrote up a preliminary letter, ran it off on our ancient little mimeograph machine, and mailed it out to about 150 science fiction fans. We didn’t have enough money to have a letter printed, so we used the Rule of Ten: Ask ten people to write a letter and they ask ten people to write a letter, and each of those ten asks ten people to write a letter.

NBC was convinced that “Star Trek” was watched only by drooling idiot 12-year-olds. They managed to ignore the fact that people such as Isaac Asimov and a multitude of other intellectuals enjoyed the show. So, of course, the suits were always looking for reasons to cancel shows they didn’t trust to be a raging success.

Elyse Rosenstein (early organizer of “Star Trek” conventions) Do you realize how many pieces of mail NBC eventually received on “Star Trek”? They usually got about 50,000 for the year on everything, but the “Star Trek” campaign generated one million letters. They were handling the mail with shovels—they didn’t know what to do with it. So they made an unprecedented on-air announcement that they were not canceling the show and that it would be back in the fall.

Gene Roddenberry The letter-writing campaign surprised me. What particularly gratified me was not the fact that there was a large number of people who did that, but I got to meet and know “Star Trek” fans, and they range from children to presidents of universities.

John Meredyth Lucas (producer; writer, “Patterns of Force”) Some of the most fanatic support came from Caltech.

Gene Roddenberry We won the fight when the show got picked up for a third season. NBC was certain I was behind every fan, paying them off. And they finally called me up and said, “Listen, we know you’re behind it.” And I said, “That’s very flattering, because if I could start demonstrations around the country from this desk, I’d get the hell out of science fiction and into politics.”

“Star Trek” concluded its second season on a high note, with NBC essentially acknowledging the success of the fans’ letter-writing campaign by announcing that the series would be returning.

Gene Roddenberry I told NBC that if they would put us on the air as they were promising—on a weeknight at a decent time slot, 7:30 or 8 o’clock—I would commit myself to produce “Star Trek” for the third year. Personally produce the show as I had done at the beginning. About ten days or two weeks later, I received a phone call at breakfast, and the network executive said, “Hello, Gene, baby . . .” I knew I was in trouble right then. He said, “We have had a group of statistical experts researching your audience, and we don’t want you on a weeknight at an early time. We have picked the best youth spot that there is. All our research confirms this and it’s great for the kids and that time is 10 o’clock on Friday nights.” I said, “No doubt this is why you had the great kiddie show ‘The Bell Telephone Hour’ on there last year.” As a result, the only gun I then had was to stand by my original commitment, that I would not personally produce the show unless they returned us to the weeknight time they promised.

David Gerrold Roddenberry, rather than try and do the very best show possible, walked away and picked Fred Freiberger [as the producer]. I wish Roddenberry had been there in the third season to take care of his baby.

Marc Cushman NBC didn’t like Gene Roddenberry, and they didn’t like the type of shows that “Star Trek” was airing. It was too controversial and too sexy, and they couldn’t get Roddenberry to tone it down. So they move it to Friday night—they didn’t even want to pick it up, but there was the letter-writing campaign that made them cry uncle. They put it in the death slot. And they knew when they picked it up that they were determined that Season 3 would be the last year.

Robert H. Justman If your audience is high-school kids and college-age people and young married people, they’re not home Friday nights. They’re out, and the old folks weren’t watching. So our audience was gone.

Margaret Armen (writer, “The Paradise Syndrome”) Working with Gene was marvelous, because he was “Star Trek” and he related to the writers. Fred came in and to him “Star Trek” was “tits in space.” And that’s a direct quote. Fred had been signed to produce and was being briefed. He watched an episode with me, smoking a big cigar, and said, “Oh, I get it. Tits in space.” You can imagine how a real “Star Trek” buff like myself reacted to that .

Fred Freiberger (producer, “Star Trek,” Season 3) Our problem was to broaden the viewer base. To do a science fiction show, but get enough additional viewers to keep the series on the air. I tried to do stories that had a more conventional story line within the science fiction frame.

Marc Cushman You had some of the most talented people from “ Star Trek” that were leaving. You didn’t have Gene Coon, Gene Roddenberry or Dorothy Fontana finessing the scripts. It’s like having the Beatles and taking away John Lennon and Paul McCartney. “OK, we still have George and Ringo. We’re still the Beatles.” No, you’re not. You’re still good, but not as good.

James Doohan Fred Freiberger had no inventiveness in him at all. Paramount bought Desilu and here was this damn space show as part of the package and they couldn’t care less about it.

William Shatner There was a feeling that a number of Fred Freiberger’s shows weren’t as good as the first and second season, and maybe that’s true. But he did have some wonderfully brilliant shows and his contribution has never been acknowledged.

Bjo & John Trimble The third season ground down, show after show being worse than the last, until even the authors of the scripts were having their names removed or using pseudonyms. To be fair, there were a few good scripts in the third season, but in the main those few seemed to be almost mistakes that slipped by.

While the third year of “ Star Trek” has largely been dismissed as a creative failure, several notable episodes were produced. “Spectre of the Gun” is a surrealistic western in which Kirk, Spock and McCoy find themselves reliving the shootout at the O.K. Corral. “Day of the Dove” focuses on an energy force that feeds on hatred. In “Plato’s Stepchildren,” aliens with telekinetic abilities torture Enterprise crewmen for their amusement—and Kirk and Uhura share television’s first interracial kiss.

Bjo & John Trimble The last third-season episode, “Turnabout Intruder,” was very good; it might have won an Emmy for William Shatner. But all TV shows got rescheduled for President Eisenhower’s funeral coverage. So the episode missed the Emmy-nomination deadline.

Scott Mantz That’s how production ended. There is something somewhat apropos about the last words of the last episode, “Turnabout Intruder”: “Her life could have been as rich as any woman’s. If only...If only.” And then Kirk walks off.

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Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman | READ MORE

Both considered "Treksperts" with years of experience writing about Star Trek, Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman are the authors of The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek: The First 25 Years .

OngoingWorlds blog

By David Ball

12 tips for writing Star Trek fanfiction & roleplaying

Category: Character Development , Inspiration for writing , Writing tips Tags: Fanfiction , star trek 2 Comments

Star Trek fanfiction is as old as Star Trek itself, and heavily dominates the world of online roleplaying. There’s many giant Star Trek roleplay clubs, like Starbase 118 and Star Trek: Borderlands . We’ve even got Star Trek games running on OngoingWorlds ( see here ). Here’s some tips for anyone who wants to write fiction in the Star Trek universe:

Don’t stereotype the races

SEE ALSO: Infinite diversity in… you know the rest, right?

Star Trek has many great alien species to choose from, each with their own traits. Klingons like fighting, Romulans are sneaky, Ferengi are out for a profit. But your characters don’t have to follow these traits exactly. People are individuals, and not everyone from a planet is exactly the same. Not all science officers have to be Vulcan, not all Tactical officers have to be Klingon. Mix it up a little bit!

There’s an entire universe out there

Even though Star Trek does have some great alien races, it’s also a show about exploration and discovering the unknown. Invent a new type of species every now and again that your characters meet. Your main characters can also be new and different types of aliens that you’ve made up, which is a great way to explore an interesting new type of species.

Also don’t be afraid of playing a Human character. Even though there’s a lot of exciting aliens, Humans are pretty special too .

Avoid too much technobabble

Actually it’s not the technobabble that’s the problem, it’s overly-complicated situations based on a scientific theory that make your story waaay too difficult to understand, and too complicated for your other players to keep up with. Keep your plots simple, running with one out-there theory at a time, so it doesn’t get too insane.

Do your research

A series as long-running as Star Trek gives you a lot of starting material, but make sure you’re not writing anything that contradicts something that’s already canon. That being said, don’t let canon handcuff you, there’s plenty of exceptions to any rule made up by the show if you give a good explanation.

Avoid characters that are related to characters we know

It might seem a good way to legitimize your character by relating them to an existing character, like Kirk’s cousin, or Picard’s long-lost nephew. But it can also be tacky, especially if everyone does it. Also, remember the point above about doing your research , Picard’s only nephew died.

Give your characters goals

SEE ALSO: Characters who give you quests

This isn’t related specifically to Star Trek fanfiction or roleplay, it’s just good advice. Make sure your characters are well-rounded and have goals, and ways of achieving those goals ( more about character goals here ).

Go easy on the hybrids

Many people like to make their characters a hybrid of different races. Spock was half-human, half Vulcan, so this is in Star Trek’s very nature to explore this concept of a character being from two worlds, but never really fitting into either. But I’ve seen people make characters with such a mixed and complicated heritage that it becomes ridiculous. If you want to write about a Hybrid, it’s probably best to keep it simple and leave their grandparents out of it. The galaxy isn’t ready for a Trill-Klingon-Bajoran-Cardassian yet.

Also think about whether the species can actually breed first, as aliens might have very different mating and birthing practices. For example you’d better have a very good explanation of how a Vulcan/Tribble hybrid even happened!

Avoid Q-like characters

We’ve got many articles about why an all powerful character is a bad idea. Here’s a list:

All-powerful characters are boring
Godmodding: The Q effect
What is godmodding and why is it annoying?

Use the vastness of space to your advantage

Space is BIG. And you can use this to your advantage in certain situations. Star Trek is mostly about exploration so you’ll probably have situation where your crew are out on the frontier and unable to call Starfleet Command for advice or backup. This means the tough decisions will be forced upon your Captain and crew, who will have to stand by any decision they make.

Put realistic limits on sensing devices

The idea that a character can look at his magic sensor display or tricorder and learn everything about a situation, down to the DNA of the aliens aboard an approaching ship that’s thousands of miles away, has robbed many a Star Trek story of the mystery and danger of space exploration from which the franchise theoretically derives much of its appeal. Don’t let this happen to you. So what if it happened on Enterprise or Voyager? Don’t let yourself be bound by other people’s lazy writing choices. And don’t feel obliged to “explain” via technobabble infodump why your ship’s sensors can’t instantly tell what color underwear the people on an approaching vessel are wearing. Figure out the parameters in your head and then simply have the story abide by them without overexplaining.

Use parallel universes/time-travel/cloning etc to your advantage, but don’t overdo it

There’s a lot of scifi concepts in Star Trek that you can use to create fantastical adventures, but don’t rely on this every single time or it’ll soon get boring.

Don’t get caught up in the technicalities

Star Trek is a geek’s dream because of all the exciting technology and gadgets, but it’s important not to get bogged down in all of this. At it’s core, Star Trek is a show about people. Gene Roddenberry’s original pitch heavily stressed this , which is why you should continue this in your own fanfiction.

Technology like tricorders, ship’s scanners and phasers are useful tools, but your characters still need to make the important decisions to get them out of a scrape.

Some of the tips were inspired by comments from this comment thread on Trekbbs.com .

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David Foster Wallace : juxtaposition of informal abbreviations and slang with incredibly esoteric words , words which originally seem incredibly esoteric but end up being made up (usually somehow derived from Latin), the odd continued use of &c. instead of etc. (again with the esoteric Latin thing), compulsive use of footnotes (sometimes useless footnotes, sometimes carrying out entire storylines within footnotes), scenes which are both hilarious and heartbreaking (or disturbing but usually both), obscure connections which are absurd and profound and also pretty funny, &c. And the word "peripatetic," which he seemed to like as much as this wiki likes the word egregious .
J. K. Rowling seems to like every trope related to Chekhov's Gun . If a character, object, or place is mentioned in passing in an early books, it's almost guaranteed to show up later, usually in a role of vital importance. She also seems to like killing off characters just to show that death is harsh. She also seems fond of semicolons. Stephen King once commented snarkily that she "never met an adverb she didn't like."
He's quite fond of incredibly drawn-out, horrible puns (for example, in Sir Apropos of Nothing , taking a full page to explain why a group of crazy bird-men descended from harpies are called the Harpers Bizarre) and Ironic Echo Cut chapter breaks. He's also very fond of the adverb "nattily": if his work is set in modern times, expect everybody to be "nattily dressed."
David also enjoys the Running Gag . One notable example from one of his Star Trek novels had a Vulcan character simply trying to go from one part of the ship to another and constantly running into a string of people, from fellow crewmembers to an alien ambassador, who all insisted on telling her their current personal problems. She finally blows a gasket and demands to know why everyone was telling her . (Well, the closest to gasket-blowing a Vulcan usually gets, anyway.)
Another aspect of his Star Trek writing is a very thorough knowledge of the show, with in-jokes, Shout Outs , and obscure references everywhere. This is epitomized in Morgan Primus , who is, effectively, Majel Barrett Roddenberry. Primus has been mistaken for, compared to, or otherwise tied to each of the characters Majel has played in the Trek universe: Number One in the original pilot, Nurse Chapel, Lwaxana Troi...and so on. She eventually has her mind downloaded into the ship's computer. It takes a while for the crew to realize it, though, because guess who voices Federation computers on the show?
He also seems to be able to work in a throwaway reference to Alexander the Great somewhere in many things he's written.
Robert Rankin's style makes it obvious that he's making it up as he goes along , as he lampshades in one book, pointing out plot threads that don't go anywhere. Sometimes it works, and sometimes... it just doesn't.
Tom Holt has incredible fun with metaphors, cliches and truisms; if the book is full of metaphors taken to extremes, it's probably him. He also tends to feature mopey, nerdy males and rock-hard, super-efficient females. His stories also have an extremely cynical view of love, which is often portrayed as more of a nuisance or a disease than anything actually good .
He's fond of irony, wordplay, humorous similes and puns.
He likes justifying the natural laws of his worlds as being governed by tropes and clichés , which people can use to their own advantage if they're Genre Savvy enough. The fact that his characters can usually predict what happens later in the story via recognition of tropes and cliches actually makes the stories less predictable .
His books also very rarely use conventional chapters.
His earlier works in particular like to play with the idea of unearthly eyes, and particularly the idea that the eyes are the only thing that no magic can disguise, providing a window to the true nature of the soul.
He is also well-known for his use of comedic footnotes , even requiring a Footnote character in the play version of some books, and one of his compilation books is titled Once More* With Footnotes . And he seems to love the words 'strata' and 'apologetic'.
Pratchett is inordinately fond of characters who immediately try to describe why a certain thing is funny before other characters could even react to the joke.
He also loves Painting the Medium by using different font sizes, types, or capitalisation, to render the speech of unusual entities. Many of his characters with otherwise normal speech patterns are also noted as being somehow able to pronounce font types or punctuation.
His female characters are usually very strong-willed, independent, and more than a little snarky.
A recurring theme, particularly in his Young Adult novels, is a character or group of characters discovering that the world is much larger or complex than they thought at first, and vastly broadening their mind as they come to terms with how limited their view originally was.
His main characters are often particularly skilled in their line of work, or exceptionally gifted in a specific area.
He has a great love of wordplay and cliche. His Xanth series, in particular, is one great big Hurricane of Puns after another, but his other works can be similarly blunt and heavy-handed at times.
He makes nearly every protagonist a moral paragon who never does anything wrong and never fails at anything.
Another reoccurring theme in Anthony's works is nudity and sexuality, even in his young adult / teen series, Xanth . Anthony is pretty frank about his beliefs — he doesn't believe human nudity is harmful or shameful at all, and he remembers that most of the people of his target audience's age are actually quite curious about sexuality, despite what their parents may think. His works are never outright pornographic, but it skirts the boundaries enough (mermaids turning into humans and not knowing about clothes, princesses having to trade their clothes for a magic sword, that kind of thing) that he's been accused of being a pedophile on several occasions.
And also the use of children/extended family of characters he's already used, to the point where the Royal Family of Xanth is on something like its fourth generation.
He likes the words "demesnes" and "proffer."
Especially prevalent in the early Xanth novels is the use of the dialogue tag "...he/she cried."
Douglas Adams always has a narrator that goes off into tangents, Insane Troll Logic actually working and Contrived Coincidences . And Lampshading the ridiculousness of it all. His heroes are an Unfazed Everyman or a hypersavvy slacker. His works tend to have a lot of absurd humor that often correspond satirically with modern culture.
Another Mercedes Lackey signature: taking a character who has grown up living in serious misery without family, usually without real pleasures or more than one or two friends, then having them get swept up, as in a Changeling Fantasy , and taken to somewhere with good people and comforts, where there is hard work and good food. Said character never brings along the optional friend, nor do they ever go back, and they always turn into Standard Lackey Hero characters, who are all uniform in their goodness. There is a long period of adjustment where the character makes friends, and towards the very end there is a rushed conclusion. Seriously, this happens in very nearly every book, more often now than in her earlier work. It's alleviated significantly when she collaborates with different authors, though the book she wrote with Piers Anthony was cringe-worthy.
A key Lackey trademark is her standard protagonist development sequence, which has been summarized as "make the readers love and adore the hero, and then tear said hero's arms off."
Also, all of her villains are rapists or otherwise sexually deviant. All of them . Van Rothbart, from the Black Swan, is never described or depicted as raping, molesting, or otherwise sexually harming anyone. But he does VERY MUCH seem to enjoy controlling and punishing women, especially strong-willed ones.
Neal Stephenson 's main characters are always incredibly smart, with a breadth of technical and practical knowledge. Often their friends are even more brilliant. The narrative will include meticulous analysis of wide range of subjects that Stephenson finds interesting, from the outright arcane to the humorously mundane. Some of these factor into the plot, and others are simple digressions. The writing style features quite a lot of dry humor, including the pet phrase: "X would like nothing more than Y. Which is too bad, considering he's Z right now." His novels, especially his early ones, are also notorious for having unsatisfyingly abrupt endings.
H. P. Lovecraft writes with Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness . Most of his stories are horror stories about eldritch abominations that humanity cannot fathom . Women don't come off very well in his stories, and overtly racist themes against dark-skinned people are common. Cats, however, are always treated with respect. Lovecraft also loved his home town of Providence. His plots often placed The Reveal at the end of the story. Often the climax would be the character discovering The Reveal, and at the end they would recall/ponder it for the reader. Also, his stories are almost always narrated in first person by male characters, and are often precisely dated. His stories are often written as if they are journals or reports written by the narrator, sometimes because he can no longer stay silent about the things he has witnessed.
Edgar Allan Poe also used Antiquated Linguistics , and if he wasn't writing a C. Auguste Dupin story, he usually featured a skeptical and normally problematic narrator that tried to face the supernatural reasonably, but ended engulfed by madness. His stories generally ended in a very abrupt, anti-climactic way. And there'd be a beautiful woman who had died or is dying.
He seems to love Wacky Wayside Tribes , rhyming prophecies , intense description of food, and making damn sure none of his heroes ever die. This last element has only slid in over time; while the earlier Redwall books were willing to let heroes die ( Martin the Warrior and Outcast of Redwall most notably), the later ones have the "hero shield" at full power.
This doesn't apply in Castaways of the Flying Dutchman , which hasn't suffered the Redwall series's cumulative decay: the fisherman in the first book, the French captain in the second book, and Serafina in the third book all died rather horribly .
He also has a thing for giving characters names beginning with the letter M.
He is quite heavy on the Black And White morality (the number of ambiguous characters being counted on one hand), with tons of Always Chaotic Evil and Always Lawful Good Funny Animal species in the Redwall series.
Redwall features copious Food Porn in each book.
He also likes references to classic rock and folk music and to classic fantasy and science fiction, love triangles where the main man does not get the girl, manipulators that make other parties fight each other while staying out of the conflict themselves, and protagonists that are broken or different in some way.
R.A. Salvatore has described his combat scenes as "Crouching Panther, Hidden Dark Elf". They would not look out of place in anime or a Hong Kong martial arts flick. Including the over-the-top-ness.
He's known for frequent use of a distinctive ( Stream Of Consciousness ) writing style which incorporates the character's thoughts into a paragraph, typically ( through parenthetical insertion) breaking the standard paragraph structure as he goes along.
When he wrote using the pseudonym Richard Bachman, people suspected it was him based on his style.
The endless describing of daily life inconsequentia. This even extends to simple actions the character performs. For instance, when a character kneels down, King will often point out that the character's knees cracked like gunshots as he did so.
He also tends to write stories featuring protagonists with similar characteristics to himself. In his early career, he often wrote about lower-class teachers. After his rise to success and car accident, his heroes often had great wealth, were a writer, and/or suffered a horrific injury with an agonizing recovery.
If the book is taking place in one of his many small towns in Maine, he has to have at least one chapter where he takes the reader out of the main narrative, and on a bird's eye trip around town to see what the minor characters are getting up to.
His characters tend to have very detailed back stories, which either fit (directly or indirectly) into the main plot of the book, or provide the characters with metaphors/stock phrases that will be used frequently when they're the viewpoint character. He also likes to tell you that a just-introduced character is about to die, and then give you the character's back story.
He likes using animals as viewpoint characters.
King also likes mentioning brand names often, not just genericized trademarks like "Kleenex" or "Aspirin" . It gets to the point the reader might wonder if this is Product Placement . Brand names show up more often in his novels than his short stories.
Michael Moorcock loves the initials J.C. . He did this quite deliberately, to show that they represented aspects of the same archetype.
Similarly, Philip José Farmer used the initial PJF to refer to his stand-ins , according to him. Given one was a sci-fi author who was defrauded by a publisher this clue was perhaps overkill.
To the point of reportedly getting quite upset when people kept asking him why all he wrote were transformation stories. His answer was "Nobody bought the non-transformation books." Reputedly, he got used to it when he realized every author with a shtick got asked the same thing.
He often fills his books with a number of interesting tidbits of knowledge as well as factoids that sound real but aren't.
Sentence fragments with no verb in them.
Dialogue with no quotation marks.
He's also very fond of Arc Words .
Gene Wolfe writes all of his stories in first person. With all the detail he adds, it gets really easy to trust the narrator. Don't .
Neil Gaiman also likes to throw in a Magnificent Bastard who may or may not have a heart of gold . Theological references, too.
Also loves to have stories within stories within stories , and blurring the lines between them. An obvious example of it would be the World's End Sandman story, in which travelers stranded by a freak storm (caused by the Meta Plot ) are passing the time by telling each other stories, in the style of The Canterbury Tales or Boccaccio 's Decameron . One of the stories is about a ship journey, during which, to alleviate boredom, one of the tale's character (Hob) tells another tale. Hob being an important character in the Meta Plot , we've come full circle and back again.
Another, subtler trope in Gaiman's work is the theme of false hospitality, typically shown between female characters: the Other Mother in Coraline is the most obvious example, while others include the Dark Queen in MirrorMask (which is thematically very similar to Coraline ) the inn scene in Stardust , and the characters of Media and Bilquis in American Gods .
Also, there will be Nightmare Fuel . And in all likelihood eye trauma . Lots of eye trauma.
Also, there will be Anthropomorphic Personifications . Abstract concepts , stars , the TARDIS ... everything is free game.
James Joyce : All of his work is set in Dublin. He's also fond of epiphanies. Some consistent features of his work (which varied radically over his career) are musicality of prose, extremely efficient packing of meaning into as few words as possible (in the Dubliners story "Eveline", which is only about 1800 words long, he manages to convey the protagonist's socioeconomic status and level of education through a very brief, minimalist description of her going to the theatre; Finnegans Wake is almost entirely based on applying this concept to nearly every single word of the text), very uncompromising depictions of characters' sexual thoughts and fantasies, and accurately conveying the natural rhythms of people's internal monologue.
Djuna Barnes loves her statements that aren't nonsensical so much as they don't make sense. And she always makes blanket statements. And supremely illogical cultural references. And loads of sex, happening in the most absurd places.
This comes from her background as a journalist reporting on military actions during the Blair Administration. Also, expect very tight 3rd person narration, where perspectives are skewed by the particular character's lack of information.
James Michener writes books where almost every plot follows a family that lives in a particular place through the generations, the title of the book simply being the setting.
The aforementioned overt masculinity also carries over to his homosexual characters; see Now the Cats with Jewelled Claws and A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot (Williams himself was gay).
Diane Carey's Star Trek novels take Space Is an Ocean to almost absurd heights. She has worked on sailing ships in Real Life .
Diane Duane 's novels are full of Starfish Aliens with unpronounceable names , amazingly detailed and justified Techno Babble , gleefully subverted Planets of Hats , and (in her Star Trek novels) Doctor McCoy being awesome. She also has a distinct tendency to have sympathetic secondary character make a Heroic Sacrifice at the climax of the story, then bring them back for a curtain call (either through Bizarre Alien Biology or just seeing them in Heaven ) to avert a Downer Ending .
Dean Koontz' supernatural works, at least, tend to feature some combination of dogs, Catholicism, California, and little kids. And, regardless if they're supernatural or not, sex. Quite a bit of sex. Also, the word "indefatigable."
William Shakespeare is fond of references to falconry, gardening, and hunting with dogs. He likes crossdressing themes, which was common in his day due to all female characters being played by crossdressing boys. He enjoyed pornographic innuendos and double-entendres. Twins pop up in a lot of his plays. Many of his plays are set in Italy.
Thomas Pynchon loves silly pop-culture references, names that sound meaningful but aren't, and not giving you any idea what's going on . Sophisticated as Hell terminology is not uncommon either.
The articles of Hunter S. Thompson tend towards a rambling stream-of-consciousness style, with many digressions and interjections from Thompson himself. He involved himself so much in the stories he reported that he became a central character in them - if not quite a hero. Much of his work was published unedited, pioneering the style he later dubbed "Gonzo journalism".
Strictly Formula .
He's also big on large casts and glowing jewels that drive the plot.
Lots of snark. The oceans and oceans of snark...
And the tendency for absolutely everyone to be paired off by the end.
And the dodgy fake accents . And blue is good, red is bad . And the occasional joke at the expense of conservatives .
Generally, an Eddings series will also include a bad guy harming or attempting to harm someone the heroes like, at which point the heroes stand around for a while coming up with ever more unpleasant ways to persuade them not to do that any more.
Tom Clancy 's novels tend to feature certain politically incorrect characterizations: liberals tend to be scheming and drug-using, while conservatives tend to be hard-working, honest, and red-blooded members of the American military. Every book ends with an " America Saves the Day " moment, as well.
Anything by Laurell K. Hamilton is almost certain to have a tiny, beautiful female main character who's a good little Catholic girl that has to deal with shameful shameful sexual urges and has lots and lots of sex that's treated as if it's the kinkiest thing since the Marquis de Sade, but is actually rather tame in comparison to almost anything you could see on Playboy TV. Oh, and random powerups. And mournful observation of religion/faith falling into decline.
Multiple murders committed by different people.
Characters revealed to have been impersonating other characters.
If a person repeatedly survives attempts being made on their life, you can bet that that person is the killer .
Whoever is most likely to be the killer will naturally be innocent. This is logical, since a straightforward murder mystery wouldn't be much of a mystery . Still, the number of clues speaking to someone's guilt are often inversely proportional to that person's guilt.
Characters accusing themselves of being the murderer in order to protect the person they know or believe to be the real killer. Subverted in Murder in the Vicarage, where both Lawrence Redding and Anne Protheroe frame themselves for the murder of Colonel Protheroe and admit, in turn, to being responsible (in an unusual ploy to actually shift blame from both of them) .
The (supposed) Vamp is actually a Brainless Beauty who is too stupid to attract any man for long and, more often than not, gets killed off for no fault of her own.
Often, in a secondary-character romantic couples, one person would be revealed to have committed a crime. As long as it's not murder, the person would be Let Off by the Detective for the sake of the couple's love .
He had a habit of peppering his stories with references to far-away bygone people and places drawn from his own mythos that had nothing to do with the plot but made the setting feel more lived-in and natural .
He also LOVED describing landscapes. He could go on and on for pages and pages of purple prose, saying nothing more than "Gosh, look at these trees!"
He was also a big fan of Love at First Sight , since that was how he fell in love with his wife Edith, who is also directly responsible for the prominence of gray eyes among his characters.
He's also somewhat self-referential. Characters from one story will often reappear in the background of another. Perhaps the most obvious example is (fictional) science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, who tends to be referenced everywhere .
Anton Chekhov had a habit of ending his short stories in a way that doesn't really resolve the plot at all. The protagonist is usually a normal Russian man who Chekhov characterizes mostly through his flaws.
Ben Elton novels tend to have large ensemble casts and at least one, usually brutal, death or attempt on someone's life. They also tend to be overtly critical of one aspect of society, and achieve this criticism through sarcasm and exaggeration (Dead Famous and Chart Throb — reality television; Gridlock — society's dependence on cars and oil; Stark — big business in the 1980s; This Other Eden — DAMN NEAR EVERYTHING).
John "A PC" Hodgman writes his books in a perfectly deadpan, neutral tone, and just happens to drop the occasional incredibly humourous comment into his rhetoric. A Long List is quite likely, too. He also enjoys occasionally breaking into ALL CAPS.
He also likes "cruel" as an adjective to describe people's looks, most commonly Bond's mouth, jaw or overall look.
She also tends to give her fictional cultures a detailed and unique culture, customs, traditions, idioms, and so forth, often sewn together from real-world parts. Probably not surprising, given that she used to be an anthropologist and turned to art "because the pay was better, which should tell you something about anthropology."
Lolwhut aside, her usual art also involves the combination of normal concepts (for example, a painting of grazing wildlife) with bizarre objects or characters (the wildlife is fruit), with at least a paragraph's worth of backstory on the art piece itself (a nature-book-esque description of the fruit's habitat and behavior in the wild).
Well-described camping and expeditions, including equipment. She's a birder, but that, oddly, doesn't turn up much.
Terry Goodkind 's characters are always angry, tired, confused or otherwise affected; there is rarely a scene where everybody present is in a balanced state of mind. He also has a tendency to have at least one character present in most serious discussions who's holding the Idiot Ball for the duration of the scene and has to have things explained to them plain and simple.
Andre Norton tended to have female characters orphaned as babies and raised by animals or other nonhumans who improvised clothing for them early on, despite generally not wearing clothing themselves. She also liked cats.
Aaron Allston , one of the writers of the X-Wing Series , has a very distinct sense of humor which manifests in absurd or mocking bits of dialogue. Every character with more than a couple lines has some kind of quirk, which at least means that when anyone dies the reader's response is never "Who?", and his writing is intensely character-driven. He's also got a tendency to put in background female characters who are very muscular.
James Patterson italicizes everything of any importance. Also, half-page chapters, and switching POV from first-person to third-person.
He also opens the majority of his chapters with a three or four word sentence, beginning in Magician with "The storm had broken.".
Larry Niven writes about Giant Space Structures (the ringworld, the smoke ring), sex between different alien species, and really long alien names with lots of a'postr'oph'es in them, and most 'long ago' times are "half a thousand years".
Cormac McCarthy doesnt use many apostrophes when writing speech and he doesnt use speech marks to indicate dialogue and the Deep South or the west are common settings and he frequently uses 'and' a lot in a sentence. Furthermore, he's partial to esoteric word choices as well as run-on sentences, and sentences of unusually long length, one example being a page-and-a-half long sentence in Blood Meridian . Also, he often has a character repeat what someone else has said. Character One: Like how? Character Two: Like this. Character One: Like this. Character Two: That's right.
Twilight : Stephenie Meyer is fond of portraying human/nonhuman romances, with all of the main characters being implausibly gorgeous (and described with lots and lots of Purple Prose ). She also has a thing for the word "chagrin," as well as "dazzled" and "perfect", and the color beige. She describes characters' daily lives in a highly detailed manner, which drags her books out to borderline Door Stopper lengths. Most of these are traits that could be considered a stereotypical Signature Style of teenage girls writing fanfiction .
Well, her heroines, for the most part, do tend to (at least try) represent strong, yet still feminine women.
The final book in any Tortall Universe quartet will be a bloodbath, where Anyone Can Die . The most likely candidates for the chop are roguish, quick-thinking, highly competent characters who often have friendly rivalry with the protagonist, such as Faithful, Liam and Alan { Lioness ), Rikash { Immortals ), Gilab Lofts ( Protector of the Small ) and Tunstall ( Provost's Dog — with a particularly cruel twist) . Bring hankies for the finale.
John Green really likes his well-spoken and well-read teenagers and deconstructing the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (or guy) trope. And driving, too: His characters will be spending a considerable amount of time on the road.
Michael Crichton books inevitably share the same plot: "Scientist discovers or creates something. Protagonist warns the scientist that he hasn't considered the consequences. Discovery and/or creation Goes Horribly Wrong . Protagonist saves the day. Protagonist says " I told you so " and scientist maybe or maybe not learns his lesson that Science Is Bad , or at least misapplied. The end." Also, the "going horribly wrong" part is usually not because of a single glaring error, but several smaller mistakes or accidents that compound one another. If it's mentioned casually that something isn't optimal, but it shouldn't be an issue because of all the other security precautions ... trust us, it will turn out to be an issue.
Doctor Who . Lawrence Miles' input on the Expanded Universe novel makes your brain feel like it was shoved in a blender set to "puree" , and features people doing exceptionally odd things to Time .
Jim Butcher of The Dresden Files and Codex Alera fame really, really likes political intrigue, characters with ulterior motives, complex and out of the ordinary strategies in battle, characters playing Xanatos Speed Chess , unique and unexpected application of magic, sleep deprivation and soldiering on in the face of massive physical trauma . There's also non-human psyches, the idea of most supernatural creatures being like predators and being "less likely to attack if you don't show fear", and the whole idea of creating ice by pulling the heat out of the air or water. Other traits include strong female characters, emotionally intense scenes of all kinds, Mood Whiplash between scenes, and justified Rule of Cool , particularly of the Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot and Cool Versus Awesome varieties.
James Clavell liked to write large novels set in or around Asia, featuring massive casts and intricate, interwoven plots from both the protagonist's and antagonist's sides of the stories. His books are usually divided into shorter "books" or chapters that encompass a period of time (from three years in King Rat to ten days in Noble House ). Also, at least one main character will die at the end of each of his books (except for King Rat , where the death was merely figurative, rather than literal).
David Wong of John Dies at the End and Cracked fame tends to have work that is very cynical, heavy on the pop culture and full of Sophisticated as Hell , often explaining complex concepts with monkeys, kittens, and the aforementioned pop culture references. His Cracked articles tend to revolve around achieving happiness.
Charles Bukowski's work could be summed up as thoughtful insights using mundane metaphors for some of the most mundanely depressing situations done in the plainest of text. Also, lots of alcohol, sex, gambling, self-deprecation and jokes worthy of a 14 year old kid.
Lord Dunsany 's signature style is a dreamy prose filled with Antiquated Linguistics . Think a Lighter and Softer Lovecraft, particularly early Dream Cycle Lovecraft (unsurprising since he was a major influence on the crazy Yankee), though he was quite capable of putting an edge into his stories. His later fiction loses some of this style, leading to a They Changed It, Now It Sucks! reaction from some fans.
He likes pulling an As You Know by mentioning X, then having a different character say "Oh, that's [rough explanation], right?"
And the phrase "...said the other" and variants in a two-person conversation.
This is true of Zahn's non-Star Wars novels as well. The Conqueror Trilogy is a good example of this; neither side of the conflict is bad, and both sides include the sort of multiple factions that you'd actually find in a society at war.
He's one of the best at complicated plotlines with several protagonists who go in separate directions , have their own plot-important actions and multiple subplots, and come together and separate again as part of the larger plot. Seriously, all of his multi-protagonist books have these.
Zahn really likes coolly intelligent, calculating characters, both villainous and non, and has confessed to favoring enhanced soldiers and also criminal types who have redeeming features, like Karrde , Car'das , and one of the protagonists of the Dragonback series.
K. A. Applegate , in the series that she's written ( Animorphs , Everworld , and Remnants ), always uses a choppy first-person, in which sentences are short. They're about this long. And are often fragmented. With pop culture references. And slang. And lots of expies . She likes to send her characters into facsimiles of Hell, and make it the sort of experience that horrifies, nauseates, and mentally scars even the bravest of them. (And in the case of Animorphs , they must've had to go down there about a dozen times over the course of the series.) Also, expect her to create really awesome female characters and then kill them off towards the end.
Frederick Forsyth is extremely well known for his obsession with correct details, intense amounts of research, and almost journalistic approach to writing.
The typographical experimentation, with text reading vertically on the page and what have you.
Ditto for any short story or chapter that ends with a one-sentence Twist Ending .
Also, Ciaphas Cain did NOT know the horror that he would soon be facing, and if he did he would have ran screaming to the nearest shuttle off-world.
Similarly, if you see the words "Tenebrous" and/or "Cyclopean" used to describe a structure then you will be reading a Horus Heresy novel, and if someone "threw his red Sudenland cloak over his shoulder", enjoy your Gotrek & Felix .
And he ends. Every chapter. With a Declarative Statement. Even when that means a character goes from planning/introspection to talking to themselves.
Homer used elaborate similes that go on for several lines, often for feasts, epithets like "swift-footed Achilles", and recurring lines and phrases like "wine-dark sea" and "winged words".
E. E. Cummings uses Punctuation and (in a very, unique) way capitalization (disturbed he did crazed he do) with up so floating many bells down
Gertrude Stein certainly had a quite distinctive style. Gertrude Stein had a certainly quite distinctive style. Gertrude Stein had a quite certainly distinctive style. Gertrude Stein quite certainly had a distinctive style.
Iain M. Banks 's science fiction novels, both in The Culture and the stand-alone ones, often feature a lot of snarky humor, especially at cocktail parties or something similar. There will sometimes be a Wacky Wayside Tribe scene with some other culture or species which tends to overlap with another feature, a scene of outright Gorn (e.g. the way the protagonist of Consider Phlebas stops cannibals from eating him). The novel may or may not end with the deaths of the cast and many other unfortunate people .
Incidentally, his author commentary for Seven Deadly Wonders mentions that he got sick of the callsigns. He didn't call the characters by their names, though. He called them all by nicknames ascribed to them by the Token Mini-Moe . (Pooh Bear, Big Ears, Wizard . . . One gets the impression of self-parody.)
Also, if anything is mentioned, it will come into play. Documents, weapons, people, buildings, the landscape itself , everything will play a part at some point. Usually by being spectacularly demolished.
Lemony Snicket. He often defines obscure words, writes about odd side topics, uses many of the same phrases, and hints at some sort of side story involving himself . Very odd guy.
Also, nobody simply does anything, any action performed, they have to do so bearing in mind the many intracacies of interstellar politics and warfare and espionage and shared backstory and precocious six-legged alien telepathic cat-weasel-beings that affect such weighty things as answering a phone call.
It's extremely unlikely for someone in the Honor Harrington series to describe someone else in a negative manner (even jokingly) without using three verbose, polysyllabic, and educated-sounding words to describe them, regardless of the character's background or educational level or how sputteringly upset they supposedly are.
Daniel Pinkwater 's protagonists are usually fat, dorky kids (who willingly describe themselves as such), often Jewish, with funny names and dull but harmless parents. They hate school and instead spend a lot of time having adventures with suspiciously weird friends. Other recurring themes are the state of New Jersey; Eastern mysticism; aliens, monsters and chickens.
Expect to see Show, Don't Tell violated almost every page. Also, his characters can often be found wishing their situation was different, and then remarking that the situation remained exactly as it was regardless of how much they wished it wouldn't. Phrases like "It would be funny if only it wasn't true" also make frequent appearances. He also likes to point out a character's hypocrisy by saying "It never occurred to him/her that X," with X being something the character was complaining about that they're also guilty of.
Most of his works include large casts, usually spread across the landscape, most of whom never encounter each other. These works will also include large heaping helpfuls of As You Know conversations and Internal Monologues where they character reminds him/herself of how they got where they are now, since it's generally been several chapters since we last saw that character.
Andrey Lazarchuk loves unrepentant mindscrewery . More specifically, he has parallel universes with bizarre interdimensional mechanics, ( multiple ) conspiracies ancient and government aimed at manipulating said mechanics and Blue-and-Orange Morality . As for the narrative itself, it has plenty of internal narration to the point of stream of consciousness and lots of flashforwards and perspective shifts, presumably aimed at confusing the reader further. And everything is probably symbolic in some way, though half of it is probably the critics' fault.
Will Leicester appears to be obsessed with fitting as many Queen references as possible into his word, to the point of naming minor deities after the band members and, on one memorable occasion, including what is quite possibly the first offensive use of ''Stone Cold Crazy'' in history .
If the novel you're reading is set in Scotland, involves time travel romances, ghosts, and giant swords, has Love at First Sight and incredibly intense emotion, is PG-rated, is titled after a song or song lyric, mentions "funny spots on the ground" and "faery rings" and stars a character with the last name "MacLeod" or "de Piaget", it's a Lynn Kurland novel.
James Ellroy : Short, declarative sentences. All the bullshit trimmed away. Prose pared down to its bare essentials. Shakedowns. Schemes. The secret history of America. The Big Picture . Bad men and the women they loved. Violence, drug abuse, Grey-and-Grey Morality and occasionally redemption.
Reviewers also note her sense of humour (no matter how heartbreaking the story, there will always be details and moments of her exceptionally wry wit), true-to-life dialogue, and her ability to create something new in an over-saturated market. If you're reading a short story and it seems like it's going to be indistinguishable from the mainstream but instead it stomps your heart out, you're reading Lorrie Moore. She's often said to be a 'writer's writer.'
Oscar Wilde really liked writing about wealthy people and their lives (possible exception: his children's stories) but that's because, as has been acknowledged, it allowed him to realistically insert the lengthy dialogues he really loved writing. (Because only the wealthy would be idle enough to be able to spend a long time chatting with each other, see.)
The novels and short stories of Bret Easton Ellis always use first-person narrative, about wealthy, shallow and selfish people and often contain meticulous descriptions of incredibly violent events.
John Donne is fairly easily recognized if you've studied any of his poetry. He enjoys grand metaphysical imagery involving the sun and religious symbolism, and poems about great love that you couldn't possibly imagine because it's just that amazing (my love is deeper and more moving than yours, etc.).
In the stories of the Polish writer Marcin Wolski, the protagonist will always have sex with several women throughout, and there will be a hitman who may or may not be after the protagonist and will inevitably die before the end of the story.
Vladimir Nabokov ’s stories often feature a male Russian or Eastern-European expatriate protagonist who's an Unreliable Narrator and who is fond of elaborate descriptions and wordplay. Nabokov's unique twist was to have a protagonist who thinks he is The Hero of his own story, but who in fact (on a second or third reading) is at best an Anti-Hero , and at worst ( Lolita , Pale Fire ), and sometimes unknown to the character himself, a Villain Protagonist . Look for lots of references to butterflies, chess, other works of literature.
John Irving's novels often involve some kind of gruesome injury or accident, a teenage boy having an affair with an older woman, an elite New Hampshire prep school that is never actually called Exeter, and (more frequently than one might expect) a bear riding a bicycle.
A lot of Jack McDevitt 's novels deal with a decades-old mystery revolving around a person who acted bizarrely out of character. The alien Mutes only attacked military targets during their war against humanity — except once when they attacked a civilian city of no strategic value which had already been evacuated ( A Talent For War ). A man spends his entire life searching for a hidden cache of pre-apocalypse books, only to throw them into the sea when he finds them ( Eternity Road ). A popular author doing research for her next book decides to have her mind wiped and restart life with a new identity ( The Devil's Eye ). Someone devotes their life to the search for extraterrestrial life, then abruptly quits and claims they didn't find anything despite evidence to the contrary ( Infinity Beach and Echo ).
Stories by Transformers: Timelines author team Greg Sepelak & Trent Troop generally involve Continuity Nods , Mythology Gags , and References galore, with the latter always involving at least one They Might Be Giants nod.
Ayn Rand unapologetically uses her works as vehicles for the transmission of her Objectivist philosophy. Her good characters represent what she feels humanity can be at its greatest moments, and most of her plots tend to revolve around the protagonists trying to accomplish extraordinary things in the face of villains who twirl their mustaches and tie women to railroad tracks.
Ryohgo Narita (of Baccano! and Durarara!! fame) is particularly fond of huge casts of unstable characters. All his stories also take place within the same universe .
Matt Stover is a real-life martial artist and will happily write intensely detailed fight scenes dozens of pages long . Other trademarks of his include erudite narration that drops into goofy terminology (like the abrupt appearance of the word "bazillion" during a serious scene in Shatterpoint ), Bond One Liners and Deadpan Snarkers , philosophical musings about the nature of the Force, badasses of every stripe, people dropping dead all over the place , and never allowing the triumph of despair even when that seems the only option left. His primary plot-making method is to grind his main character relentlessly down to their very marrow, take away everything about them that they thought was important, drive them to the brink of oblivion, then have them re-evaluate themselves, back up, stand up and show everyone what they're really made of. Typically, it's whoopass. However, while his novelisation of Revenge of the Sith follows the formula to the letter, the spirit is given a cruel twist : Anakin's fate is a life of absolutely hellish torture because when stripped of his delusions all he becomes - is himself.
With two series, Suzanne Collins has established quite a few - young protagonists who have already been through the wringer, younger siblings they would do anything to protect, war as hell , deadpan snarkers , world-weary mentors who use sarcasm and put-downs in their training , authority figures who later turn out to be evil, a balance of good and evil to both sides , beloved characters dying suddenly , and villains somehow connected to white . She also likes to end chapters (and sometimes books) with a Wham Line .
Paul Stewart loves to make up words, for one thing. He also has a talent for names, all of his works taking place on the far side of Aerith and Bob . Probably the most immediately noticeable quirk, though, is that he never ever says "around." It's always "Twig spun round" or "they came round in the end."
Incredibly long but grammatically correct sentences are another feature of her work, although you're unlikely to notice that you've yet to come to a period on first read; Woolf was very fond of the semicolon as a way to join a paragraph's worth of thoughts and observations into one sentence, which, in the interest of not starting a war over the proper use of the semicolon, let it simply be said that Woolf was very familiar with the intricacies of structure and frequently nested clauses within clauses, and while not writing in true stream of consciousness style, her flowing style allowed her to capture the consciousness of her characters and immerse her readers in such without resorting to line breaks or other obvious quirks; the long sentences, then, are not so much an error as a manifestation of style.
J.D. Salinger writes about teenagers or young adults, most of whom are either geniuses or at least very intellectually gifted. Also expect gratuitous swearing and conversations that never reveal what anyone is actually thinking.
Flannery O'Connor's work is always set in the South and usually culminates in an epiphany of some kind, often religious in nature. Many characters also suffer from some kind of disability or disfigurement.
Raymond Carver writes in short, simple sentences, and characters will probably spend most of the story talking.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's stories are always about upper-class people, usually alcoholics, who self-destruct spectacularly in beautiful and occasionally flowery prose.
Ernest Hemingway 's stories often feature hunting, fishing, war or bull-fighting. He writes in famously short, direct sentences using simple language so that the style does not distract from the content. Themes of masculinity are prevalent, though the themes of his stories are never stated.
He is into Powergaming. Said magic systems will almost always be used in unusual, game breaking ways, and any seemingly 'useless' abilities will always be proved extremely effective and plot important before the end.
In each new world he creates, expect an early scene with an experienced (usually male) character on a solo mission. The scene will have little dialogue, if any, and will contain a great deal of detail about the local magic system and its use.
Damon Runyon uses anonymous First Person Peripheral Narrators with Present Tense Narrative and a mixture of period slang and Delusions of Eloquence : If I have all the tears that are shed on Broadway by guys in love, I will have enough salt water to start an opposition ocean to the Atlantic and Pacific, with enough left over to run the Great Salt Lake out of business. But I wish to say I never shed any of these tears personally, because I am never in love, and furthermore, barring a bad break, I never expect to be in love, for the way I look at it love is strictly the old phedinkus, and I tell the little guy as much.
If you've just read several pages of dialogue without a single "said Charname" to help you keep it straight, you may well be reading Roger Zelazny . Also, a superhuman or group thereof among normals is a staggeringly common theme.
We're sure almost everyone knows by this time: almost all Seuss books are written in rhyme.
Robert B. Parker strenuously averts Said Bookism by always describing characters as having "said" something.
A tendency to have fun with characters' emotional and physical relationships that's somewhat unusual for most science fiction authors. In fact, he seems to like talking about sex in general, whenever feasible. And often when it's not . He co-wrote a novel in The General Series which was a sequel to a book co-written by another writer (who was originally supposed to write the sequel) and one minor character with no discernible character at all became an infamous Dirty Old Man with an harem of nubile and willing slave girls. Other characters also have a lot more sex than they did previously.
At least one romance per book. Some of his co-writers have mentioned Flint shipping the characters the co-writer developed. He has even unabashedly shipped Historical Domain Characters that he thinks should have gotten together. Rather than any long term dating or engagement, many of his romances tend to be based on the rather old-fashioned notion of the protagonists first quickly making commitments, and then working out the details as they go along, such as Happily Arranged Marriage and Fourth-Date Marriage .
Heavy usage of Arc Words , often in the form of a Badass Boast , or an epiphet, such as " Deadly with a blade is Belisarius "., or " Hidalgo true and pure ".
A notable bantering style of dialogue between most of the major cast, especially in a "cheerfully grim" attitude towards fighting in wars.
A distinct tendency towards being able to make workable, interesting and entertaining omni-competent and plot-bending characters (examples: see Flavius Belisarius , Michael Stearns and Victor Cachat ).
Flint has co-written a few books in the Honor Harrington series. Seeing him try to mix his usual breezy banter with Weber's signature verbosity may be considered a surreal experience by some.
Flint really, really likes metaphors and analogies. In the Belisarius Series , it is rare to find even a single scene without one of them.
R Scott Bakker of Second Apocalypse will always - always - have characters immediately repeat a word or phrase for emphasis.
P. G. Wodehouse : Light comedy in which clueless rich people and Servile Snarkers enact Zany Schemes .
Robert A. Heinlein : Nearly all of his characters are prodigies or geniuses, and a good number are redheads. Expect his science and math to be detailed and as accurate as humanly possible. His later, more adult works, delved heavily into casual nudity, free-love, and cats.
Sofia Prokofieva : There is always a kindhearted plucky girl (child or adult) who has Puppy Love with a nice boy if she’s a child (in a Standard Fantasy Setting , he is often a servant or page) or a Nice Guy love interest, usually a Distressed Dude , if she’s an adult. If there are any siblings, they will either be twins with alliterative names or Practically Different Generations . All the heroes have bright, clear eyes. Expect a Non-Human Sidekick (at least one, usually more); Nice Mice are especially frequent. The villain has piercing eyes and employs a soft-spoken Evil Chancellor . If the villain is a magician, they are defeated with the help of their own magical artefact and/or via Holy Burns Evil . If the villain is a king, he is overthrown by an Angry Mob , and the queen, if she exists, barely does anything. If the villainess is a queen, she is a Lady of Black Magic whose actual domain only consists of a single (admittedly very large) castle.
Kushiel's Legacy , the longest running series, as a setting is built from the ground up on exploring fantasy sexual freedom, sometimes verging into deconstruction , and this is even before we get into what individual characters bring to the mix.
While light on actual sex, The Sundering is built on inverting Tolkeinesque good-versus-evil mythology while invoking Sex Is Evil at the root of the conflict.
Downplayed with Santa Olivia , which merely features a Queer Romance , albeit devoting plenty of fun time to it .
Agent of Hel follows a heroine that has to deal with a half-demon heritage and Unwitting Instigator of Doom tendencies mixed tightly into her emotional and physical relationships.
Miranda and Caliban is a Perspective Flip of The Tempest , and befitting a Shakespeare tale, takes full advantage of Alternate Character Interpretation to take Star-Crossed Lovers to its natural heart-wrenching conclusion.
Her preferred strokes include: young heroes with younger siblings they would do anything to protect ; deadpan snarkers , world-weary mentors who use sarcasm and put-downs in their training , authority figures who later turn out to be evil, a balance of good and evil to both sides , beloved characters dying suddenly , and villains somehow connected to white .
Also, war is definitely a nightmare .
She also likes to end chapters (and sometimes books) with a Wham Line .
An In-Universe case in " Dreaming is a Private Thing " by Isaac Asimov . According to Weill, each professional dreamer has his own pattern of "overtones" (dream associations, like a cloud being a pillow, or snow being ice cream), and no way to hide it. Every dreamie is literally and unavoidably signed by its creator.
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Jeff Greenwald

Write for Star Trek

You too can sell a script to the most influential TV show in the world - if you know the formula.

Let's pretend it's your job to watch Star Trek.

You start on the morning of New Year's Day. You've got to sit through every episode ever created - the 80 produced for the original series, seven seasons of The Next Generation, and the latest episodes of Voyager and Deep Space Nine. You've also got to watch the seven movies, half a dozen specials, and 22 morning cartoon episodes.

Working 9 to 5, five days a week (holidays off), you'd be punching a clock for 10 weeks - until mid-March.

Still going strong with more than 400 hours in the can, Star Trek is an insatiable maw that devours scripts and eats story pitches like popcorn. From its first episode ("The Man Trap," aired September 8, 1966, on NBC) to the current run on the Paramount network, UPN, the franchise has produced a grand total of 16 seasons - surpassing the 14 of Ozzie and Harriet, the longest-running TV show in history. Unlike the all-American Nelsons, however, Star Trek's characters have an appeal that is universal. Two years ago, sailing on a ferry from Brindisi, Italy, to Piraeus, Greece, I caught Jean-Luc Picard on screen in the ship's rec room, dubbed in Greek. The same thing could have happened in Munich, Bombay, or Perth - the show is broadcast in more than 100 countries, worldwide.

What sets Star Trek apart from its classic TV counterparts is, of course, its otherworldly venue. Science fiction is a discipline demanding lateral thinking, techno-fluency, and a sense of the cosmic joke. It's tough to come up with fresh ideas, show after show, season after season. That's why in 1989 - the third season of The Next Generation - the producers decided to make Star Trek the only show on network television willing to consider unsolicited, or "spec," scripts.

What this means is that any of the program's far-flung fans - from Cyndi Lauper to the Dalai Lama - can pitch ideas to the producers and dream of seeing their name in lights.

That's the good news. The bad news is it's a hell of a lot harder than you think. Selling a story requires a working knowledge of where Star Trek fits into our collective consciousness: what it is, where it came from, what works, and what doesn't.

Stardate 49375.4: Making its way through the Delta Quadrant, the United Federation of Planets Starship Voyager encounters a grim situation. The denizens of a double-planet system, inexorably linked by the grip of gravity and millennia of conflict, are locked in a religious war. The population of the smaller world, lacking advanced technology, is about to be mercilessly crushed. Voyager can even the balance of power, but any interference, Captain Janeway insists, would violate the Prime Directive. First Officer Chakotay, recalling how his Native American ancestors were massacred five centuries ago, violently disagrees. The two struggle for control of the bridge, and Chakotay knocks Janeway out. He then races through the ship to enlist the help of his lover - the half-Klingon chief engineer, B'Elanna Torres - but finds her in the arms of Tuvok, the Vulcan security officer. As the two men face off we cut to sick bay, where Kes - the wily Ocampa medical intern - is reprogramming the holographic doctor to synthesize a stash of highly addictive Sikarian pollen....

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What's wrong with this picture? To anyone familiar with the basic tenets of the Star Trek universe, the cognitive dissonance is as jarring as seeing Nancy Reagan with a nipple ring.

That this is so testifies to how completely Star Trek and its icons have gotten under our skin. More than a prime-time fantasy, it's our fin-de-millennium mythology: a vivid and indelible tattoo upon the modern American psyche.

"I can't think of a bigger phenomenon than Star Trek," says Lolita Fatjo, the spunky, gap-toothed preproduction and script coordinator whose desk serves as a receiving platform for the more than 1,000 spec scripts that flow into the Hart Building on Paramount Pictures's Hollywood lot every year. "Sitting in an airport, a hotel lobby, wherever, if someone sees that I have anything to do with Star Trek, it's instant recognition. There are a lot of avid fans out there, and some of them are completely extreme."

Is that a good thing?

She tilts her head. "If you're going to be fanatical about something, this is a positive thing to be fanatical about."

It's an easy obsession to fall into. Touring The Next Generation stages a few years back - standing on the bridge, in Captain Jean-Luc Picard's "ready room," and behind the pulsing control panels of the transporter - I felt the giddy rush of awe and reverence that one experiences in the ruins of the Acropolis or on the corner of Haight and Ashbury: here was the spawning ground from which an entire mythos had sprung. But unlike the monuments of the Greeks or the Freaks, this one still flourishes. The Star Trek gestalt, with its credo and its characters, is infinitely more popular today than it was in 1969, when NBC - within weeks of Neil Armstrong's tentative stroll on the Moon - canceled the show after three lackluster seasons.

That strange bit of timing might hold a clue about why the original series withered - and why The Next Generation and Voyager (which premiered in 1987 and 1995, respectively) have flourished. In the 1960s, exploring the cosmic frontier was an integral part of America's destiny. We had the genuine article: from those breathless first steps at the Sea of Tranquility to the nail-biting heroics of Apollo 13 and the wacky lunar roadster rides of later missions. But the Apollo program ended in 1972, and the last dreams you and I might have nurtured of visiting outer space - at least the Moon, for chrissake - exploded with the Challenger in 1986.

One year later, Star Trek: The Next Generation - with its elegant new Enterprise, enlightened crew, and Congress-proof mission - became our surrogate manned space program.

Rick Berman, executive producer of various Star Trek shows since 1987, puts a populist spin on it. "Star Trek deals with a sense of awe. It deals with a hopeful future. And it deals with a family of people - whether they're on a space station or on one of the Enterprises or on Voyager - from all different races. Men and women who work together, who love each other, and who explore together." He nods toward his desk, a tip of the hat to the ironically blindfolded bust of Gene Roddenberry perched near its edge. "That's pretty cool stuff."

It was Gene Roddenberry, of course, who created the original Star Trek, and who ruled over The Next Generation franchise with a velvet fist. Roddenberry died in October of 1991. Today, he's spoken of with a dry reverence that indicates he might have been both a visionary and a total prick. (For 20,000 words on that theme, see the preface to sci-fi maverick Harlan Ellison's new book, The City on the Edge of Forever.) Berman ultimately received the Star Trek mantle from the man called Great Bird of the Galaxy - a moment he recalls well.

"It was a Thursday morning," Berman says, "and Gene knocked on my door carrying this huge mantle. I had no idea what he was doing in here; he just passed it to me and left."

The facts of the matter are only slightly less strange. Roddenberry took notice of Berman - then a fresh young vice president of development at Paramount - at their first formal meeting in 1987. Roddenberry liked him enough to ask him to lunch the following day. During that second encounter, Berman remarked that he'd done a lot of traveling. Roddenberry, an inveterate wanderer himself, smirked.

"Oh yeah? So what's the capital of Upper Volta?"

Berman smirked back. "Ouagadougou," he replied.

That did it. Twenty-four hours later, Roddenberry invited Berman to leave his post at Paramount and produce the new incarnation of Star Trek. It was a risk, since everything about the show (a syndicated, hour-long sequel to a failed science fiction show) spelled disaster. But Roddenberry had the last laugh - and he's laughing still.

"Gene's ghost is my greatest inspiration, and my greatest limitation," Berman admits.

"Star Trek is a formula. It's not my idea, it's not your idea, it's not Paramount's idea. It's Gene Roddenberry's idea of the 24th century, and it's very important for me to remember that. Not because I'm 'faithful to Gene's legacy,' as people love to write; it's because that's what Star Trek is. To change that is to not be doing Star Trek anymore."

Roddenberry's creation is a hopeful, idealistic, and arguably absurd view of the future: an era in which racism and poverty have been vanquished, and mankind combs the cosmos with a smile and a shoeshine. This vision is the genome that has defined Star Trek for three decades.

It's a DNA string with an infinite potential for variation - but an unwavering premise.

The "limitation" Berman alluded to isn't some theoretical conception. Everything about the formula - from the Prime Directive to the do-good chemistry among the officers - limits the arena of conflict. It's a frustration that everyone who's ever written for the show has had to wrestle with. "Gene," Berman remarks, "had incredibly harsh rules. He believed - at least when he created The Next Generation, though he didn't feel this way with the original series - that Starfleet officers didn't squabble, that they were above all that shit. That sounds great, but it's terrible for writing drama."

After years of squeezing into Roddenberry's conceptual corset, something had to give. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the "evil twin" of the flagship show, provides a narrow escape valve for stories that don't fit the mold.

"When Michael Piller and I created Deep Space Nine, we said to ourselves, 'We gotta be able to generate some conflict from inside our cast.' We wanted that, but we didn't want to break Gene's rule. We decided that the conflict would come from within our characters - but not from the Starfleet humans. So we brought along Odo, a grouchy security officer, and we brought along Quark, a shifty Ferengi. And we put all these people on Deep Space Nine, which is an inhospitable environment.

"That was a way of bending Gene's rule without breaking it. And we do that every day. We do it with the language that's used, with the way stories are told, and with what stories we decide to tell. And if we find a story that's based on something Gene felt very strongly about, it becomes a big limitation." He sighs, glancing briefly at the Roddenberry bust. The blindfold is slipping.

"I don't know, maybe there is some loyalty to Gene in all this."

The Cliffs Notes version: writing for Star Trek, easy as it may seem, is one of the toughest gigs in television. Jeri Taylor, a Hollywood-tempered idealist who co-created Voyager with Berman and Piller and now inhabits Roddenberry's former office in the Hart Building, spells it out.

"Many, many writers and producers went through a revolving door here because they simply couldn't accept the limitations and kept trying to change the concept. And Gene wasn't about to have it changed. Finally, the group that became cohesive - that's still here now - worked within those limitations."

"When people show us that they can write this show," agrees Berman, "we embrace 'em, we pay 'em a lot of money, and we put 'em on staff. Because they're so hard to find. You have to know something about science, about astronomy and physics and all that shit. You have to write within the rules of Roddenberry. And you have to write in a style that's both modern and stylized at the same time. Star Trek's a period piece; you can't write in a contemporary fashion. If a person is capable of writing a 19th-century drama, that person is probably more able to do Star Trek than somebody who can write the greatest NYPD Blue."

So, will Star Trek's producers continue to look at unsolicited scripts?

"I would love to get rid of our freelance policy," Berman declares. "I would love to have enough quality staff writers who were bringing us great ideas and turning out scripts that were rewritable without major difficulty. But it's just not the case. So, if there are people out there who are interested in writing for the show, they should stay interested. Keep the cards and letters coming."

You wanna go to red alert in scene 68? OK, why don't we have Chakotay say, 'Red alert.' Shit, then we've got everyone saying, 'Red alert' ... from scene 73 through ... everything, it's just going to be 'red alert.' That's not a problem for you guys?"

Brannon Braga, a Voyager producer and much-decorated veteran of The Next Generation, is on the phone to the set. A huge fruit basket full of whiskey, gummy bears, and toy flying saucers - delivered that morning, when his Hugo Award for the final Next Generation episode was announced - rests on the floor.

There's no place to sit up straight in Braga's office, just a big fat sofa and the kind of chairs that swallow you whole. Disappearing into one seat is Kenny Kofax, a very nervous freelance writer waiting to deliver his pitches. Fifteen seconds later, Braga hangs up the phone and props his sneakered feet on his desk - waiting, dubiously, to be dazzled.

"OK, what've you got?"

Kofax begins talking. He's loud and he's fast. His first pitch is for an episode in which a bunch of vile Kazons infect Voyager with a computer virus that forces it to go faster and faster - much like the bus in Speed. Braga doodles space babes on a legal pad, nodding. He finally cuts Kofax off: too derivative. OK, no problem, the next idea is even better: Voyager stops at a planet for food supplies and comes across this weird object in a vegetable patch. It turns out to be the apparently lifeless carcass of Data's evil brother, Lore. The captain.... Braga shakes his head impatiently. How did Lore get out there in the first place? Impossible. Absurd.

Kofax is breathless and sweating now. Braga's leafing through his Handbook of Fish Diseases. One last chance. The warm up - the pitch.

"The crew of Voyager takes R&R on this M-class planet. Right? Really nice place. OK? Everyone has a blast. But as they're about to return to the ship, a native woman runs up and stops them, and it turns out that Lieutenant Tom Paris has gotten her pregnant...."

"Whoa, hold on." Braga swings his feet to the floor. "We didn't do a good job on Paris the first season. He came off looking like a sleaze; now we're trying to decreepify him."

"OK, say they were having, you know, a real relationship -"

"Sure, but how do we handle that? It makes Paris look awfully irresponsible if he gets an alien pregnant. He didn't use a condom?"

"Well, uh, she's an alien, maybe -"

"Of course. We could have him say, 'How was I to know that sticking my tongue in her anus would get her pregnant?'"

Ten minutes later, Kofax is out of there, older but wiser. His fate, Braga assures me, is not unusual. It's the rule rather than the exception for writers to slink out of pitch meetings with their tails between their legs. One problem, as Braga wryly puts it, is that "we've done everything." But the main stumbling block is that few writers intuit the ingredients of a great Star Trek story.

"The perfect Star Trek script," reveals Braga - who has authored or co-authored almost 30 episodes of The Next Generation and Voyager - "begins with a great science fiction concept that allows you to tell an exciting adventure, while at the same time serving as a metaphor for contemporary humanity. For instance: a Next Generation show called 'The Host.' Someone pitched a story about host bodies and worms, which was at first glance a repulsive idea. But it would turn out to be the best love story we ever did. Why? Because one of our characters is forced to confront the true nature of love. Is it the person? The body? Both? That's classic Star Trek, right there. The two-parter we did about the Borg - 'The Best of Both Worlds' - was another. A great villain, based on the concept of cyborgs with a collective mind. The Borg represent everything the future humans despise. Perfect. That's what we look for, what we strive to do week after week."

Jeri Taylor, whose Star Trek credits include such controversial, social-minded episodes as "The Outcast," expands on the theme. "Star Trek is very much a series about storytelling; at the heart of every episode, I think, is an intensely personal story. Something that shows character growth or development; some kind of emotional conflict for one or more of our people.

"Beyond that, we hope to have something that makes it uniquely 'Star Trekkian' - usually a presence or anomaly that gives it that science fiction spin. Finally, conflict being the art of drama, we need jeopardy of some sort. It's either bad guys, an anomaly that's threatening to crush us, or it can be, of course, inner jeopardy, emotional jeopardy. But I think our audience likes action, likes adventure, likes the idea of us out there against the unknown, the monsters, the evildoers.

"So, there are the elements that we look for. Not every show has all three. But when we listen to pitches, we're listening for one of those elements to emerge and knock our socks off."

The preproduction office has a sheaf of submission guidelines that are mailed to prospective writers of Voyager and Deep Space Nine. They're warned to steer clear of two-part scripts, avoid sequels, and never, ever use characters from the original series. But one thing that writers shouldn't shy away from is using the new characters in offbeat, imaginative ways.

"Contrary to popular belief, we have a pretty loose ship around here." Taylor waves her hand with a gesture that embraces all 15 decks of Voyager. "People think we know where we're going, that by the end of a season we'll have these character arcs, that this is going to happen, that's going to happen, et cetera. It's infinitely more haphazard. We sort of take a step and see where it takes us, and that leads us to another step. We let the characters evolve, we let the stories evolve, and I think it's much more exciting that way. It's a long journey - and we'll have to find the textures of that journey as we go."

"Chakotay out.... Fuck!"

At the Paramount studios on Melrose, the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Tattoo" is in production. Stage 16 has been transformed into a steamy alien jungle, and three members of the Voyager crew are scanning for humanoid life signs. But Robert Beltran, the actor who plays First Officer Chakotay, has dislodged his communicator pin. They set up the scene again - for the third time.

Production of each Star Trek episode takes seven to eight days, but the process starts with an idea that may take months to germinate. If the seed of the story is a spec script, it can take far longer. Lolita Fatjo has been in that loop for more than seven years.

"A few different things can happen with the scripts," Fatjo explains. "We have union readers who do a one- to two-page synopsis, or 'coverage,' for each script that comes in. When they return those to us, somebody on the writing staff reads them. From that a determination is made on whether or not we want to do anything with the script at all. Ninety-nine percent of the time nothing's gonna happen." She shuffles around her desk. "They're gonna get this letter back with my autograph, saying, 'Thanks, but no thanks. Please try again if you would like to.'"

Just five writers over the past eight years - Ron Moore ("The Bonding"), Melinda Snodgrass ("Measure of a Man"), Rene Echevarria ("The Offspring"), and Dennis Bailey and David Bischoff ("Tin Man") - have had their freelance teleplays bought and produced. (Three of whom, true to Rick Berman's claim, have at one time been on staff.) Somewhat more likely (a 1 in 100 chance) is that the producers will decide to extract a script's basic idea and rework it.

"We'll bring the person in," Fatjo explains, "and they'll get the chance to write the story outline. For that we pay anywhere from US$6,000 to $9,000 - and their name appears on the credits."

So why ask for scripts rather than story ideas?

"Because we'd be overwhelmed. We're already overwhelmed with scripts - and it's much harder for someone to sit down and write a 55-page script than it is to beat out a 6-page story outline."

One scenario seems to occur fairly often: A writer sends in a script and, though it misses the mark, the producers like the way he or she thinks. At that point, the writer will be called back in - a la Kenny Kofax - to pitch some new ideas. It's an oral process, and notoriously nerve-racking.

"All we're interested in hearing," claims Ron Moore, "is the beginning, middle, and end. We have so many things in development and so many things we've decided not to do that we can quickly tell you what is and isn't going to work. Once people have given us a quick, salable idea, we can then say, 'OK, tell us more.' But when they're pitching, we like them to be succinct."

Eric Stillwell was the freelance writer who dreamed up the story, but not the script, for "Yesterday's Enterprise," considered by fans and staff alike to be one of the best episodes of The Next Generation ever produced. He also pitched "Prime Factors," one of the better episodes from Voyager's first season. He and Fatjo now travel the world organizing Star Trek conventions and conducting writing workshops, where they offer their wisdom to the masses.

"The best thing in pitching," Stillwell advises, sitting on the corner of Fatjo's desk, "is if you can take your entire story down to one sentence - like something you'd read in TV Guide."

The summary of "Prime Factors"?

"Members of the crew mutiny in order to obtain a technology that can send them home. There it is; and that's the element that Michael Piller pulled out of the rubble."

But is it really that easy?

Stillwell, a beefy guy, shrugs. "We created the workshops because thousands of spec scripts come into this office every year. Most of them are awful because people don't follow the guidelines. A lot of times people approach writing for Star Trek with the idea that there's something they don't like, so they're going to 'fix' it. The bottom line is that it's not broken, and nobody needs to fix it."

That's one common mistake. Another is focusing stories on alien races to the exclusion of the principal cast. To work as an episode, every story has to challenge one or more of the main characters on a personal level. Putting their lives in danger isn't enough, Stillwell explains - that happens every week.

Back at Stage 16, the crew is breaking for lunch. Brownies and bowls of M&M's sit on a table near the electrical boards. Roxann Biggs-Dawson, Voyager's half-Klingon chief engineer, slices a bagel. Off by the makeup station, Tim Russ - aka Tuvok, the starship's Vulcan security officer - leafs through next week's script.

Russ, 39, is unusual among the cast in that he was a Star Trek and sci-fi fanatic since childhood. He accepts a peach, cuts into it, and offers some advice for would-be writers.

"Watch the show. See how it flows. If you can, transcribe an episode and follow that format. Also, keep in mind how much it costs to produce a show. The budget is an element some writers might not think of, but it's important. If you can come up with a good episode that doesn't cost a lot of money, it gives you a much better chance. An interesting story that takes place on the ship itself, for example, is something they'll snap up in a minute - if it hasn't been done before."

"Many of our choices do come down to money," Jeri Taylor later confirms. "Everybody in the audience is hoping, 'Wow, we're going to the Delta Quadrant! We're gonna see really weird aliens! There'll be cabbage people, and beast people!' The problem is, making those things believable is extremely expensive. We do not have a feature film budget; we cannot do the kinds of things that happen in Jurassic Park. Because of this, we end up with humanoids with bumps on their foreheads. That's not a limitation we ourselves have set; it's one we strive to get around and usually can't."

One thing to bear in mind, as you start in on draft number 47, is that even the old-timers have written their share of duds.

"My best episodes are highly complex, ambitious science fiction mysteries like

'Projections,' 'Phantasms,' and 'All Good Things,'" notes Brannon Braga. "My worst episodes are highly complex, ambitious science fiction mysteries that are poorly written. When that happens, they are incomprehensible." He emits a snorting laugh. "There's a Next Generation episode I wrote with Ron Moore: 'Aquiel.' A technical murder mystery combined with a lukewarm romance. At the end you find out the dog did it. It was terrible."

"It was a disaster," agrees Moore, now supervising producer of Deep Space Nine.

"I also did a rewrite on a Next Generation episode called 'Rascals.' It was an absurd premise. An away team comes back to the Enterprise, and they all turn into children.

I never liked the idea, I never thought it was going to work, and of course I was the guy who had to make it work. I still look back on it and cringe."

Brannon Braga grew up with his hippie mother alongside the canals in Venice, California, and his dark, hyperactive imagination has produced the show's most macabre episodes. Tales of his libidinous exploits circulate through the Paramount corridors like deuterium gas, creating a sort of mythos within the mythos.

"I'm very different from the people who created Star Trek," he states, stalking into his office at 9:15 a.m. and groping, red-eyed, for a mug. "I consider myself a profoundly flawed human being with deep-seated perversions. I think Star Trek allows me to explore what I wish I was like."

He gulps his coffee and orders breakfast. In 15 minutes, he's got to be sharp as a razor, ready to leap into the heart and soul of Star Trek's scripting machine: the biweekly "break" meeting.

It works like this. Let's say you pitch a script, and the producers bite. They call you in, knock the idea around for a while, and send you home to write up a new story outline. That's a quick study - focusing on the characters and action and not worrying too much about technobabble, or what the Space Anomaly of the Week is going to look like.

What comes next is the break - a fast-paced brainstorming session in which the pitcher, the producers, and the writing staff assemble in Taylor's office with a dry erase board. This is where the muscle work of the creative process gets done - where an episode is jackhammered into its component scenes.

"The break we'll be watching is for an episode called 'Prototype,'" says Braga as he walks down the hall. "It was written by a freelancer named Nicholas Corea. Eight days ago, Corea pitched the idea of robot wars; based on that concept Michael Piller gave him the assignment. After a couple of shots at an outline, he came up with something we could sink our teeth into."

The break begins at 9:30. Within 15 minutes, Corea's basic premise has been eviscerated, and a completely different opening, or "teaser," is up on the board. But Corea isn't phased; a veteran of Tinseltown, he takes inspiration-by-committee in stride.

What's most amazing is how democratic the process is. Everyone has his or her own point of view and, though Taylor drives the process, no one dominates.

"I have this image," Braga muses. "Act One. It's late at night, engineering, and the crew is standing around in pajamas -"

"It's $2,000 for a pair of pajamas," scoffs executive story editor Ken Biller. "So we'll get to the big space battle in Act Five and they'll say, 'Sorry, can't afford it; we blew the budget on pajamas.'"

"Well, Janeway and Torres could be in pajamas -"

"Why don't I want Janeway in on this?" Piller interjects. "It's a gut reaction; I just don't want her in the scene -"

Corea says little during this free-for-all. He's taking notes at warp speed. The whole thing is an education, a lesson in the kind of detachment a writer needs to survive the many-headed monster called Star Trek.

Late in the afternoon, when the break has ended, Braga returns to his office. He pulls a bottle of 12-year-old scotch out of his gift basket, leans back, and extracts a dog-eared biography of the Marquis de Sade from the shelf behind him.

Braga has been at Paramount for five years and has worked on more than 150 episodes, seeing his ideas shot down and reworked by half a dozen people. If he could write one show entirely on his own - total freedom, no one else involved - what would he do?

"That's easy." Braga grins, and slides the hefty tome into his satchel. "I've always wondered what people really do on the Holodeck."

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10 most prolific writers on star trek the next generation.

Star Trek TNG was known for its exceptional writing, these 10 writers wrote the most episodes of the classic Sci-fi show.

The adventures of the crew of the Starship Enterprise are legendary, and fans still enjoy the episodes nearly thirty years after the series ended. Star Trek The Next Generation took the ideas of the original series and expounded upon them, adding rich new layers to the Star Trek mythos.

RELATED: The 20 Best Star Trek TNG Episodes

TNG was known for its exceptional writing and the show employed some of the most talented wordsmiths of the day to craft the episodes. Over the years, the show saw many one-time writers, but it was the show's most prolific writers who contributed some of the best episodes.

Hans Beimler - 15 Episodes

Hans Beimler is mostly known today as a television producer but in the 90s he wrote and produced for both TNG and Deep Space Nine . Though he wore many hats during his time on TNG his writing contributions were a memorable addition to the show.

Many of his episodes were quite unusual for TNG and he often put the characters in unique situations or tried to work in stranger elements into the story. Some of his Star Trek episodes featured horror elements , such as the notorious "Skin of Evil" episode from the first season.

Melinda M. Snodgrass - 16 Episodes

Melinda M. Snodgrass has spent her entire career writing for sci-fi series and her first professional writing credits came on TNG . She wrote a wide variety of types of episodes for the show but her contributions were usually filled with heady themes.

One of her favorite subjects to write about was Lt. Commander Data and she penned several episodes that focused on the golden android. Perhaps her most memorable contribution to the show was her episode "Measure of a Man" which is not only a great episode about Data , it is one of the best episodes of the series.

J. Larry Carrol - 18 Episodes

J. Larry Carrol has a history as an editor, both of stories and within the actual editorial department of film and TV production. He contributed to TNG both as a writer and story editor and has done the same for dozens of films and TV shows in his career.

RELATED: The Best Character In Each Season Of Star Trek TNG

The episodes that Carrol took part in didn't subscribe to a particular theme which showed his versatility as a writer. One highlight of his tenure was his episode "Future Imperfect" which was a taut mystery story that centered around Commander Riker and featured a great twist ending.

David Carren - 18 Episodes

David Carren's tenure on TNG coincided with one of the best stretches of the entire series during the fourth season. He worked as both a story editor and writer and was a big part of some of Star Treks ' classic episodes during that period.

Character development was a large focus of his episodes and often characters were given heavy focus to grow and expand. "The Final Mission" was a particularly memorable contribution from Carren that saw both Captain Picard and the departing Wesley Crusher get a chance to build their relationship and grow as characters.

Tracy Tormé - 27 Episodes

Tracy Tormé's time with TNG actually started at the beginning of the series and carried through the first two seasons. He oversaw the writing process as executive story editor on top of his duties as a contributing writer.

Though the early days of TNG were a bit shaky, Tormé managed to contribute some of the most memorable early episodes of the series. "The Big Goodbye" was one of the show's first holodeck episodes and introduced the fictional world of Dixon Hill that Captain Picard would frequently revisit throughout the series.

Naren Shankar - 29 Episodes

Since his time on TNG, Naren Shankar has become a prolific producer on some of TV's biggest hit series. However, early in his career he was a frequent writer and story editor for The Next Generation and contributed some classic tales.

Shankar's time on the show coincided with the last three seasons and though the quality of the later seasons began to slip, there was still gold to be found. "The First Duty" saw the character arc of young Wesley Crusher come to fruition as the moral lessons he learned on the Enterprise paid dividends when he got to Starfleet Academy.

Joe Menosky - 33 Episodes

Joe Menosky is a frequent Star Trek contributor and even worked on Star Trek Discovery in recent years. Menosky has worked in a variety of capacities in the story department and wrote many great episodes of TNG.

His most memorable contributions to the Star Trek universe deal with a variety of topics and he rarely stuck to one theme or character when writing. The episode "Darmok" is Menosky's most memorable episode and is one of the best episodes that really showed what made TNG a great series. The episode is about communication and overcoming prejudices in order to solve a problem.

Brannon Braga - 39 Episodes

Brannon Braga made a career out of Star Trek and was involved with TNG, Voyager and Enterprise , as well as the feature films of the '90s. Braga started as a staff writer for TNG before graduating to story editor and finally to featured writing credits.

RELATED: Captain Picard's 10 Smartest Decisions In Star Trek TNG

Braga's contributions to the show are as varied as they are numerous and that ability to work was what kept him involved with Star Trek for so long. One of his most notable contributions as a writer was the classic two-part episode "Chain of Command" that added elements of intrigue and action to Captain Picard's character.

Ronald D. Moore - 54 Episodes

Ronald D. Moore is a Sci-fi TV writing legend and has contributed to not only Star Trek but several other great series as well. Notably, Moore continued his tenure into Deep Space Nine and helped to contribute some of the best episodes of that series as well.

Moore's writing is known for his innate ability to interweave complex storylines into one narrative and he excelled at developing characters. Moore was involved with TNG for years and he even wrote the memorable finale "All Good Things" which was the perfect way to send off the beloved show.

René Echevarria - 56 Episodes

René Echevarria saw his time in Star Trek The Next Generation through to Deep Space Nine and even contributed writing for other pieces of Star Trek media. He transitioned to mostly producing, but has continued to write sporadically for other series as well.

As a writer, Echevarria had a flexibility that made him perfect for a weekly TV series but he did specialize too. Echevarria contributed several episodes that focused on The Borg species including the two part episode "The Descent", and the classic episode "I,Borg" which explored the complexities of the Borg identity.

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STLV18: Ron D. Moore talks Star Trek, Franchise Fatigue, Writing Process, And More

| August 10, 2018 | By: Matt Wright 43 comments so far

The Star Trek writer from the “golden era” of Next Generation and Deep Space Nine and showrunner of his own successful TV shows returned to Star Trek Las Vegas this year. He spoke on a number of topics including being a showrunner, what makes a good story, the role of social media in today’s TV writing, and of course his time on TNG and DS9.

Ron D. Moore talks with Creation’s Adam Malin

Star Trek was ready for change after Enterprise

One of the best moments in Moore’s panel came at the end when a fan asked a question about the dreaded concept of Star Trek franchise fatigue.

When you say something like franchise fatigue it means that, to me, it means that particular flavor had run dry, essentially, to mix my metaphors, essentially that way of doing Star Trek, that way of telling story, and those kinds of stories had run its course. You could just see in the shows, it had fatigue, it was tired. It wasn’t really engaging any more or felt like it was just standing in place. Then it gets reinvented, and then you bring in new people, and you bring in new ideas, and you change up the parameters, and then it all gets reinvigorated again. So, it’s not so much about volume, it’s not really about how many shows there are, it’s really about are you able to still engage the audience and make it seem fresh and exciting. Once you’re in the same place and doing the same show time after time after time, which is what the Star Trek franchise started to feel like by the time that Enterprise ended, it just felt all the same and it didn’t feel new. Then it’s time for a big change, then it’s time to go fallow for a while and plant the ground all over again.

The Trek franchise today

Moore continued to address the fan’s concern that perhaps the news that CBS is interested in some form of Trek content on All Access year-round would lead to a new franchise fatigue:

Where you are now it’s like, Okay it’s all been reinvented, it looks completely different, the style is very different, the stories are different, so it doesn’t feel like you’re in danger of franchise fatigue just because there’s a lot of them coming out. If they’re all the same or if they just start becoming the same meal over and over again, then you’ll run into fatigue and they’ll have the same problems.

Piller fostered the writer’s room

Michael Piller was brought in during the third season of Next Generation to lead the writers’ room. His new blood and his willingness to take risks on young writers fostered an environment like no TV show before it. Piller went on to co-create Deep Space Nine and Voyager as well as write Insurrection .

Michael was an extraordinary guy, I’ve never met anyone quite like him. Michael was truly guileless, he really honestly had no agendas, had no secret things he was trying work you, he pretty much told what we told you is how he felt – sometimes you didn’t want hear how he felt. He was a mentor and really cared about bringing up inexperienced people like me, Brannon Braga, René Echevarria and Naren Shankar. Michael mentored all of us and he was always looking for ways to give people an opportunity to succeed. He was a sweet lovely man. He was a character, he always wore his LA Dodgers baseball cap consistently around the office.

Michael Piller and Rick Berman on the set of DS9

Proud Deep Space Nine pushed Trek’s boundaries

After writing the Trek film First Contact with partner Brannon Braga, the two went on to different Trek shows. Moore made his mark on Deep Space Nine, where he stayed until the end of the series.

It’s hard to believe it’s 25 [years old]. That was a tremendous experience. I always think that for me, The Next Generation was like going to college for television writing, and then graduate school was Deep Space Nine . Our determination on that staff to push the boundaries of Star Trek, to sort of challenge your assumptions of what Trek was and what it was not. To go serial as much as we could, to make the characters more complicated, to have more ambiguous storytelling, to do challenging things. We just really loved it, we kind of felt like “We’re the forgotten step-child of Star Trek and screw everybody else! Someday they’ll love us.”

A young Ron Moore with James Doohan during the filming of TNG “Relics”

Moore loves a good surprise

The panel started with a discussion about how Moore writes:

I write from a frankly very selfish place, I write stories I want to see or that engage me. I use my own internal barometer in terms of what I think a good story is. There’s a part of me that’s always imagining sitting at home watching it. If it surprises me, if there’s a twist in a character arc, or I thought the story was going to be about this and it turns out to be about that, that always makes me sit up. I think that the element of surprise is a very underrated quality of storytelling.

Social media a distraction from the creative process

Another hot topic that came up is how modern TV writers and producers can now get instant feedback from fans thanks to social media. The role of social media and fan interaction and its influence in the creative process is a contentious one, and Moore was asked to weigh in.

I don’t find it [social media] a particularly useful tool, I think it’s good for publicity of the show. I like that there’s an access point where you can engage fandom and you can talk to people about the show. But in terms of their impact on what we’re doing or their impact on the writers’ room, that I try to put a firewall up and just go “you know what, it ain’t a democracy, we’re not taking a vote on this.” …I just don’t think that’s how you do good creative work, is to sort of open it up to the democratic process, for lack of a better word. I think it is a very internal thing, artists have to decide what they want to do and you work very hard, and then you present it to the audience and you hope that they like it. But it doesn’t feel like a positive thing to try to engage them in the creative process beforehand. It’s hard because realistically, you’re looking at a couple of a million viewers at least, how many people can you actually listen to online? You’re talking about a handful compared to the real audience.

Ron D. Moore speaking at STLV 2018

Moore’s most satisfying writing experience

After his time with Star Trek, Moore was asked to reboot the ’70s sci-fi show Battlestar Galactica. He started work not long after the September 11 terror attack in America, and saw a chance to do things he couldn’t do on Trek, such as serialized storytelling in a grittier, less perfect world. He would ask tough questions about human nature and what constitutes being human with his critically acclaimed and reimagined Battlestar Galactica TV series.

A young fan asked an excellent question: “Out of all your writing experiences, which one of them left you most satisfied?”

Probably the work on Battlestar left me the most satisfied, and probably the first episode of the first season which was called “33.” It was a very satisfying creative moment, because to this day that was the only script that I sat down and just kind of wrote blind. Where I didn’t have an outline, I had a one-line idea, that was just the fleet jumps every 33 minutes and the Cylons keep chasing them. I just started with “Fade in” and wrote it in one straight shot. I’m very proud of that one.

All eyes on the 33-minute countdown from the Hugo Award-winning Battlestar Galactica episode “33.”

More STLV 2018

We still have a bit more content coming from Star Trek Las Vegas, so stay tuned for more. Click here to see all of our STLV coverage to date.

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Celebrity , Conventions/Events/Attractions , Shatner , Strange New Worlds , TOS

3 Kirks: William Shatner Greets Dan Jeannotte And Paul Wesley From ‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ At STLV

Always liked Moore as a writer

33 is such an incredible episode

It is one of my favorite episodes.

I love Ron Moore. If there was anyone I would love to do the Picard show it would be him in an instant.

And I agree with him about the fatigue issue. People weren’t tired of Trek, they were just tired of that style of Trek, which was true. But it went on for 18 years, you will get sick of anything that went on that long lol. So its nothing wrong to give it a little break and reinvent it. It doesn’t mean it will be good but yeah change it up a bit. DS9 did that but Voyager and Enterprise stuck to more traditional story telling of TOS and TNG.

And that is the one thing I give DIS points on because it’s clear they are trying to make it feel different and not the same routine as the others. But the other problem is how it was executed just wasn’t very good either IMO. Different is always good but isn’t always better either and that’s the rub with DIS for me. They may have taken it too far in some places. ;)

But I think if they make the shows vastly different from each other and put them in different time eras (Post-TUC, 24th-25th century, etc), settings, don’t have them all taking place on starships, etc they can do a wide range of shows. The Khan show in all honesty is sticking to that ideal but people hate it because it just feels like nostalgia sake. But I would be fine with a show where Starfleet officers stayed on one planet and built a new colony or something.

Star Trek is such a BIG idea you can do anything with it. That’s what is so great about it. Don’t just think small all the time or more fan service. We don’t need the next show where someone else is related to someone on the Enterprise. People just love the concept so think big!

@Tiger2 And the Picard show doesn’t feel like nostalgia sake to you?

It is the weaponization of white nostalgia so as to redress the grievances of white fragility, full stop.

This is utter nonsense.

that is every single one of his posts.

Well, I think we found the liberal arts major.

Or it’s just a new series featuring Picard to give All Access the shot in the armor it needs. With 2.5 million subscribers, Discovery isn’t enough.

If Discovery pulled in what they hoped we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation. They need something big to shake up the universe and get people interested in Trek again.

Enough with the anti-white racism.

Um, riigghhtt…

I agree with you regarding kudos to the STD people for wanting to do something kinda different. But just because it is different doesn’t mean it will still be good. I don’t think nostalgia is the reason for indifference towards a Khan show. I think it’s because it’s a storyline many don’t really find all that intriguing. If it were because it was just nostalgia for nostalgia sake the Picard show would be met with the same indifference. OK, a bit better received. But it still would not be as widely anticipated as it currently is at all if that were the case.

No I agree completely about Khan of course. The idea of a show set on Seti Alpha V bore me to tears just thinking about it.

But what I mean about nostalgia sake is that a Khan show could represent one of the worst concepts about prequels and just tun into another Solo and literally fill out the details to things we already know. A lot of call backs to stuff (‘Hey remember when Khan said he lost his wife, well now we get to see what happened!!!! Cool huh???’). That’s what bugged me about Solo, not the fact that they did it, but that they ALWAYS did it. Every five minutes of that movie felt like some easter egg or call back to something we learned about him from the other films. It was always ‘this is how he got his blaster, this is how he won the Falcon in the card game, this is how he became a scoundrel, this is how he got the gold dice, this is how he made kessel run, this is how he got his name (you didn’t even know you were getting that did you? BONUS ROUND!!!)’ and on and on and on.

And I liked the film, but it was waaaaay too much of it and it stretched belief after awhile because you have to believe most of these things happened in one week of his life. That’s my fear of what Khan would be and because we ALREADY know about his life its just there to reaffirm everything we already learned. That’s not telling a story to me, so much as its just connecting dots in a story.

The Picard show is a different thing in the sense its a continuation of a character. EVERYTHING we will learn about him will be new because it hasn’t been told before. This is why going forward is just more exciting. Yes we know who Picard is and we are well familiar with his exploits and yet everything about him post Nemesis is a complete blank slate. It doesn’t mean it will be good lol but it will at least be different and new. This is nothing like Khan, we know exactly how that character’s life turned out. Someone seems to think we want it retold to us because of how cool and popular Khan is. Remember, Solo was a cool and popular character too. ;)

Interesting to see RDM’s view on social media. He engaged fans in social media before it was a thing. His Q&A in the AOL forums which later moved to Q&A on the very early Trekweb (1996).

I used to listen to his BSG commentaries back in the day.

Yes,I engaged with him often on the “ Ask Ron Moore” boards on AOL back in the 90s. He was even accessible via IM as was Brannon Braga. But to his credit, he never altered his stories based on fan input, he just enjoyed answering questions about the show. We also talked about other things like history, astronomy, and Melrose Place, lol. I learned a lot about TV production from him

He is not criticizing social media but criticizing how writers allow it to alter their process. He has always used it for interaction with fans but usually as a Q&A forum, not as a way to gauge what fans want.

I loved the “Ask Ron Moore” board on AOL. Those were some good times. Were they archived anywhere?

Perhaps the most interesting thing he said had to do with the impact of social media compared to the “real audience”. With this in mind, I think writers of Disco have a very difficult job – perhaps paying attention to SOME of the complaints while they completely ignoring others. As he said, this isn’t a democracy. The “firewall” idea certainly has some merit so maybe the easiest thing to do is to hire talented, smart, creative writers with Trek knowledge, shield them from the plethora of social media opinions and trust them to properly steer the franchise into the future. Of course, we will still post comments both positive and negative just because it is fun and occasionally maybe the producers can pass something legit and valuable onto the writers room.

@DeanH — well one thing’s for sure, TOS was free from the influence of social media. Ratings were the only kind of feedback that writers got. If a show had good ratings then writers could give the audiences more of “that”, often guessing at it. By the time TNG came around, Trek fans were solidly organized, and even if social media was still decades away, their views were reflected solidly in print, and Trek has notably suffered ever since, at times becoming an echo chamber of fans desires being funneled on screen often at the expense of story.

was it? “social media” of the day would’ve been written correspondence, which is what saved TOS and got a season 3. it’s all relative my friend.

Yeah, it is hard to decipher the useful comments from those better left alone. In the end, I think it is best to leave the writing in the hands of those with creative talent who are paid to come up with innovative stories. Just look at the new Picard series. The writing team is obviously talented but there are already naysayers out there and the scripts haven’t even been written yet. Best to live behind the firewall!!

Loved his work on Star Trek. BSG, OTOH, is a very mixed bag for me. The seasons leading up to the colony planet were great. After that, not so much. The series, as a whole, is just was waaaay too dark – so much so that I find I have zero interest in watching that show again. It’s depressing, and the jerky camera work did not hold up well (as in, I find it very distracting/annoying).

DS9 is the exact opposite. I’ve watched that series, from first episode to last, at least 4-5 times now. And every time, it’s thoroughly enjoyable (minus the Sisko as prophet ending deal).

BSG is supremely depressing indeed, but still some of the best drama put to tape.

Fatigue comes from going into a movie/episode knowing the quotes/bits rather than coming away with fresh ones.

If all Trek is is a neck pinch, “highly illogical,” a phaser, and a tribble, I’ll pass. Let’s boldly go to new situations!

If I had a chance, I’d ask him about the “Equinox” episodes in VOY, which seem to have been the first incarnation of story elements that he reused in BSG in the Pegasus arc. The relationship of VOY to Equinox is basically the same as that of the Galactica to the Pegasus, in terms of the different attitudes of the two ships’ captains and crews. Also, if memory serves, he uses “Good hunting” in the Equinox episodes, too, a phrase which of course became a staple of BSG.

That’s true but isn’t the Pegasus storyline also a revamp from the original series? I can see how he married the two story elements

albatrosity

Yup, the Pegasus was in the original BSG, but it didn’t have the malevolent-vigilante theme associated with it. He added that theme with the Equinox and then applied it to the Pegasus for his BSG reimagining.

Piller’s writing room for TNG (along with TWOK script being a greatest hits compiled from previous independent scripts) is another good example of how having a broader pool of writers yields richer writing.

Thank you Ronald D. Moore….not only for your significant writing contributions to Star Trek TNG, BSG and more, but for being brave enough to continuously rock the mullet into 2018.

Best comment.

Love his points about social media. Art is not by committee. Writers should write good stories and hope that the fans appreciate it. That’s all you can ask of them. To do anything else, e.g. being held captive by virulent fans screaming on social media, and they would lose all credibility as an artist.

So, “The Orville” is a tribute to Trek franchise fatigue.

Any time their crappy show they slapped the moniker “Star Trek” on bombs, it’s back to the good old “franchise fatigue” argument. If you make a show that is actually good, well written, interesting character development (instead of the idiotic virtue signalling), your franchise might not get “fatigued”.

Greatest TV writer, given his excellent work on “Deep Space Nine” and “Battlestar Galactica.” I even enjoy “Outlander”, though not nearly as much.

I agree with him regarding Franchise Fatigue. Just that I think it set in upon the conclusion of Voyager. I do think Enterprise, while similar, was different enough to set that title aside. But still think it would have been a wise move to go one or two years before starting it.

If one man deserves a call up into the Star Trek fold, it’s Ronald D. Moore. I’m not sure if he’d be interested, but he would be a perfect candidate to join in with the writers in the New Picard show.

Fresh talent is extremely important I know, but one or two old faces may inject just a little bit of familiarity needed to entice back older fans.

But he’s already committed to another show. And I think one thing CBS learned with the Fuller debacle, you want someone who is going to be around full time, especially at the beginning of these shows and not when they are making several others.

Welcome to Independence Fleet Command! We’ve hosted top quality Star Trek online role playing since 2001. Regardless of what you call it–simming, play-by-post (PbP), play-by-email (PbEm), role play-by-email (RPbE), or even creative writing–this is the place to let your imagination run wild within the Trek universe.

Join one of our exciting adventures below and tell your Star Fleet tale of warping around the galaxy with other Trekkies from across the globe!

IDF Star Trek role play by e-mail

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IDF Star Trek creative writing / Star Trek collaborative writing

What does prose and script mean?

That’s simply the style of writing used for the particular game. Prose means it’s written in regular language like you would find in a novel or short story. Script refers to a specific role playing syntax:

Character: (Thoughts.) ::action:: “Dialogue.” =/\=Communicator dialogue.=/\=

Still don’t get it? Here’s the same line written in each format:

{Planet’s Surface}

John picked the communicator up from the table. He wasn’t sure what to do. “Here goes nothing,” he muttered before speaking into the device. “Bridge, this is John.”

John: ::picks up communicator from the table:: (I’m not sure what to do.) “Here goes nothing.” =/\=Bridge, this is John.=/\=

As you can see, the {Location} tag is frequently used in both formats. Also, the exact syntax will likely vary from sim to sim. Here’s an article from Ongoing Worlds that explains script format in more detail

What’s the difference between traditional and open role playing?

In traditional role playing, you only write for your own character without explicit permission or guidance from other players, generally speaking. This is how almost all Star Trek simming games usually work.

Open role playing differs in that everyone writes for everyone. All characters are at your disposal for use with every post. While this is uncommon in the role playing community, you’ll see a higher number of open role playing sims in Independence Fleet. Here’s an article from Ongoing Worlds that explains open role playing in more detail.

Independence Fleet = Excellence

Tournament of simulations, ongoing worlds.

*Awarded before he was a member of Independence Fleet

Legacy Simming League

Community events hosted.

One Of The Most Important, And Undersung, Figures In Star Trek History Has Passed Away

J ohn Trimble, longtime Trekkie and fan advocate, passed away on April 19, 2024. He was 87 years old. The world of "Star Trek" owes the man a debt.

Bjo and John Trimble were Trekkies from the very start. Indeed, the married couple were early adopters of "Star Trek," becoming enamored of the series before the word "Trekkies" had even become a part of the fan lexicon. Trimble met Betty JoAnn Conway through the fan networks first set up by genre-movie ultra-booster Forrest J Ackerman , having first conversed while hiding underneath a grand piano at Ackerman's house during a party. They were married for 64 years.

Back in the 1960s, sci-fi and fantasy fan networks were achieved solely through the mail, and Trekkies would communicate almost exclusively through letters columns printed in the backs of sci-fi magazines (a model first invented by Hugo Guernsback back in 1926). More enterprising fans would author and print their own fanzines, which they would mail to other fans, or drive around town and distribute by hand.

The Trimbles were among those enterprising fans. They loved "Star Trek," and had made themselves familiar with the goings-on in NBC production offices, just so they could keep an eye on their favorite show. When the Trimbles learned that ratings were flagging at the end of the show's second season -- in March 1968 -- Bjo and John launched a letter-writing campaign to keep the series on the air. They wrote a letter explaining the situation, printed out 150 copies on an old mimeograph machine, and mailed them out to all the most influential fans in their circle. Each one of them was asked, chain-letter style, to send out ten copies of the letter to ten others, those ten would print out ten more, and so on.

Read more: Lucille Ball Suffered Life-Changing Sacrifices For Star Trek

'There Ought To Be Something We Could Do About This'

Thanks to Trimble's efforts, "Star Trek" was renewed for a third season, and subsequently put into eternal syndication.

John's wife Bjo led the charge on the letter-writing campaign, but she credits John for first having the idea and helping to facilitate it . Talking to Sci-Fi Radio last year , Bjo said:

"The whole 'Save "Star Trek"' campaign was John's fault. We had visited the Trek set, about when word sifted down that the show would be canceled at the end of the second season. So we watched actors do their stuff beautifully in front of the camera, then slump off looking depressed. On our way home, John said, 'There ought to be something we could do about this!'"

Bjo and John instantly began formulating their plan, and called "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry as soon as they arrived home (naturally, they had Roddenberry's personal phone number). They asked Roddenberry if they should start a letter-writing campaign, and the Great Bird of the Galaxy gave a thumbs-up. The Trimbles had an uphill battle rescuing "Star Trek," as, to their recollection, only 12-year-olds and cretins watched "Star Trek." But the pair also knew that venerable authors like Isaac Asimov were fans.

When coverage of their campaign made it into newspapers, Bjo received most of the credit, she recalled, as 1960s news writers hooked into the "housewife makes good" angle, coloring it as a Women's Lib story. Bjo wanted to point out that John was just as instrumental in the campaign, and that he wasn't just "the husband."

There Would Be No Star Trek Conventions Without Bjo And John Trimble

"To my sorrow," Bjo continued, "John has seldom gotten even the fan credit he so well deserves for his part in making the 'Star Trek ' we know now a reality for all of fandom."

John sat on the board of directors of the Society of Creative Anachronisms, an early fan group, and his involvement in the community led to the commercial enterprise of the types of fan conventions that continue to this day. Sci-fi conventions were nothing new, as the World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon, had been held annually since 1939. But Bjo joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society in the late 1950s, and became involved with organizing elements of Worldcon, and in 1958, Bjo and John were responsible for putting together the Worldcon Futuristic Fashion Show, which became a very profitable costume presentation in the fan community. In the mid-1960s, the Trimbles displayed early versions of the "Star Trek" uniforms before the series premiered.

It was through the strength and activism of Bjo and John Trimble that sci-fi conventions would continue to flourish. By 1972, other sci-fi fans took their lead and began organizing conventions for "Star Trek" specifically . The very first Trek convention was held in New York on January 21, 1972. Bjo and John launched the ship, and a new generation of captains sailed them into the stars.

John was also enlisted in the Air Force, and performed helicopter rescues during the Korean War. In a letter posted on Facebook , Trimble's daughter Lara said that "One of his best memories was when the squadron rescued visiting US Boy Scouts stranded on a mountain in Taiwan. It took multiple trips to get all hands safely home." He was a hero for sci-fi fans, but he was already a hero in real life.

Rest in peace, John Trimble.

Read the original article on SlashFilm

IMAGES

Star Trek Alphabets
Star Trek Fonts Collection Great for use with Cricut
Star Trek Font Free Download
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FREE Star Trek Fonts To Take Your Designs To The Next Level and Beyond
Star Trek font download

VIDEO

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Star Trek: Strange New Worlds... uh, episodes from me! Do you agree?
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COMMENTS

Star Trek Font
Star Trek is a science fiction television entertainment franchise created by Gene Roddenberry and Its first series was seen on NBC in 1966. Its six most important TV series include: The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise. Various lettering styles were used for their title cards and below are fonts that resemble their lettering ...
Star Trek Fonts
Star Trek is a popular TV & movie series. Fans have created many free Star-Trek fonts for text used on the Enterprise, the Voyager, and the Next Generation. ... Final Frontier Old Style by Allen R. Walden. 100% Free 118.9k downloads. Skyzhi by Måns Grebäck. Personal Use Free 38040 downloads. Roddenberry by ...
Collected Star Trek Fonts » Star Trek Minutiae
If you've ever tried to faithfully recreate the graphics seen on Star Trek, you know that the distinctive typography requires just the right fonts.I've found quite a few useful ones at various websites over the years. Whether it's a movie title, a computer interface, or an alien script you're looking to illustrate, there's probably a font here to get you started.
Star Trek
Star Trek. by CanarySkye. Sep 9, 2021 2321 81. Download 13 fonts. Commercial-use. Sort by Popular ; Trending ; Newest ; Name ; Edge of the Galaxy by Quinn Davis Type. 100% Free Regular. 184.7k downloads. Sterilict by Chequered Ink. Personal Use Free 27151 downloads. Roddenberry ...
Star Trek Font: A Beginner's Guide
1. Logo Design: Use the Star Trek font to create a logo for a sci-fi-themed event or business. The bold and futuristic look of the font can instantly convey the theme and attract attention. 2. Poster Design: Incorporate the Star Trek font in poster designs for sci-fi conventions or movie screenings. It can help capture the essence of the Star Trek universe and appeal to fans.
Star Trek fonts
The following is a list of fonts used in the different Star Trek series categorized by the companies that hold the rights to them. There were at least two Li'l Bits packages released by Bitstream, one for Star Trek: The Original Series and a second for fonts from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Star Trek BT is the font with the original lettering from TOS and TAS; recently renamed to Horizon ...
Star Trek Fonts
Trek Arrowcaps by Pixel Sagas. Personal Use Free. 1 to 15 of 19 Results. 1. 2. Next. Collection of fonts for Star Trek Fonts.
Star Trek Font Generator
Star Trek is a science fiction television series that premiered in 1966 and follows the adventures of the crew of the starship USS Enterprise as they explore the galaxy, encounter new civilizations, and confront strange phenomena.. TV series title cards had unique lettering styles for different series, and here are similar fonts that you can download for free from the Fonts Used Section.
Star Trek
Star Trek. Typography: The final frontier. These typefaces boldly go where no one has gone before. Typefaces used for the television series and movies of the science fiction cult phenomenon Star Trek over the years. Read more about the history of Star Trek on FontShop News, and about the typography in the latest Star Trek films on the FontFeed.
‎Punch It: Writing in Star Trek on Apple Podcasts
The Final Frontier. - This show is about writing in Star Trek. We analyze writing style, rewrite old episodes, and sometimes write our own Star Trek stories. Follow us as we dive deep into what makes Trek so great. Punch It: Writing in Star Trek The Nerd Party TV & Film 5.0 • 40 Ratings; EXT. Space. The Final Frontier. - This show is about ...
PDF STAR TREK
Captain Kirk is at his command position, his lovely but highly efficient female Yeoman at his side. Suddenly and without provocation, our Starship is attacked by an alien space vessel. We try to warn the alien vessel off, but it ignores us and begins loosening bolts of photon energy-plasma at us.
creative writing
Star Trek uses naval terminology, specifically those terms used by the U.S. Navy and probably those closer to the Navy in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s... one notable reason for this is Trek lacks dedicated carrier classes in favor of ships that seem to be dedicated battleships (Battleship doctrine is largely obsolete in a Modern Navy, as Carrier doctrine is superior).
Do You Have What It Takes To Write For Star Trek?
Stranded innocents, no way out. A so-called expert comes to the rescue to save the day He turns out to be a phony, but somehow, the hero makes it all work out in the end. Jimmy simply 'turned the ...
The Art of Descriptive Writing in Star Trek
Describing the atmosphere is arguably a critical component of Star Trek online writing, because we lack the visual cues that TV shows benefit from. Scenes don't have to be described by the ...
An Oral History of "Star Trek"
The trail-blazing sci-fi series debuted 50 years ago and has taken countless fans where none had gone before. Interviews by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman. Helmo. It was the most wildly ...
I Wrote For Star Trek: The Next Generation
While writing for 'Star Trek: The Next Generation', I had to request the script writing guidelines from Paramount Pictures. This booklet gave the aspiring f...
How to Write a Star Trek Episode : r/writing
So even if you're doing a Sanderson style hard magic it may be best to start with the story first and then design a hard magic system that plays to your needs in the story. You can have a very well established magic system, but you can always play with how much you're gonna show the reader on how it works. Preach.
12 tips for writing Star Trek fanfiction & roleplaying
Give your characters goals. SEE ALSO: Characters who give you quests. This isn't related specifically to Star Trek fanfiction or roleplay, it's just good advice. Make sure your characters are well-rounded and have goals, and ways of achieving those goals ( more about character goals here ).
Literature / Signature Style
Another aspect of his Star Trek writing is a very thorough knowledge of the show, with in-jokes, ... Some of these factor into the plot, and others are simple digressions. The writing style features quite a lot of dry humor, including the pet phrase: "X would like nothing more than Y. Which is too bad, considering he's Z right now." His novels ...
Write for Star Trek
Star Trek's a period piece; you can't write in a contemporary fashion. If a person is capable of writing a 19th-century drama, that person is probably more able to do Star Trek than somebody who ...
10 Most Prolific Writers On Star Trek The Next Generation
Naren Shankar - 29 Episodes. Since his time on TNG, Naren Shankar has become a prolific producer on some of TV's biggest hit series. However, early in his career he was a frequent writer and story editor for The Next Generation and contributed some classic tales. Shankar's time on the show coincided with the last three seasons and though the ...
STLV18: Ron D. Moore talks Star Trek, Franchise Fatigue, Writing
Moore's most satisfying writing experience. After his time with Star Trek, Moore was asked to reboot the '70s sci-fi show Battlestar Galactica. He started work not long after the September 11 ...
The Fleet
The Fleet. Welcome to Independence Fleet Command! We've hosted top quality Star Trek online role playing since 2001. Regardless of what you call it-simming, play-by-post (PbP), play-by-email (PbEm), role play-by-email (RPbE), or even creative writing-this is the place to let your imagination run wild within the Trek universe.
One Of The Most Important, And Undersung, Figures In Star Trek ...
John Trimble, longtime Trekkie and fan advocate, passed away on April 19, 2024. He was 87 years old. The world of "Star Trek" owes the man a debt. Bjo and John Trimble were Trekkies from the very ...
'She always was writing poetry': Taylor Swift's elementary school
Taylor Swift's elementary school teacher says the pop star - whose 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, dropped this month - "always was writing poetry".