The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction

by Philip Athans

  The Editor Is There to Help

  Remember that your editor is there to help you make your book the best book it can be. Take any constructive criticism from your editor very seriously. This is the time to address concerns, not after the book hits the shelves.

  THE IMPORTANCE OF THE AGENT

  Agents can be very helpful, but it pays to be wary. A minority of people who call themselves agents are either bad at it or are engaging in fraud. Organizations like the Association of Authors’ Representatives can help you weed out the bad ones.

  Warning signs of a bad or an unscrupulous agent include:

  The agent charges you “reading fees.” The only fee an agent should charge is a commission (usually between 10 percent and 20 percent of the advance and royalty they negotiate on your behalf).

  The agent tries to sell you “editorial services,” for which you will be charged. This falls outside the function of the agent. The agent should help you with your proposal, but it’s the editor’s job to help you with the manuscript.

  The agent sends out your manuscript to a large list of editors and publishers without bothering to find out if they accept this sort of material. If your agent can’t tell you who he’s sent your work to and why—if the agent can’t articulate a clear plan for getting your manuscript into the right hands—that’s a bad sign.

  Salespeople Versus Lawyers

  Agents come in two flavors: salespeople and lawyers. You want the former. (If you need a separate lawyer, get a separate lawyer.) Agents should be, like salespeople, knowledgeable and enthusiastic champions of your work, who know where the customers (the editors) are and know how to negotiate and close a deal. At the same time, agents should nurture and maintain their (and your) relationship with the editor and the publishing house. If an agent complains to you about the staff at a publishing company, that is not a good agent.

  Editors should never recommend agents. Don’t ask them to.

  Think of it this way: What if I was an ethically challenged editor who wanted to get your book for as little money as I could get away with? If you come represented by an agent I know is going to fight for you, I call you personally and tell you your agent is a big jerk and you have to get a “better” one, and I just happen to have a friend who I think would be perfect for you. But actually my “friend” is an agent I have some kind of under-the-table sweetheart deal with or who I know is easy to roll over for whatever crap offer I throw his way. Then we all pretend you’ve been taken care of when in fact you’ve been defrauded.

  Because I don’t do that sort of thing, and don’t want anyone to think I do, as an editor I won’t recommend a particular agent, and I won’t warn you away from a particular agent. If you have an agent I think is a jerk, I’ll still do my best to get your book, but I have corporate masters the same as any other editor and can’t just spend money willy-nilly, or change the corporation’s accounts payable system on one agent’s whim. So if you have an agent who fights for the wrong stuff and lets a good deal fall through, I’m disappointed, you’re disappointed, and I can’t really ever tell you why.

  CHAPTER 34

  EMBRACE THE TIE-IN

  Surely there is no form of published writing that is as misunderstood, by both its fans and detractors, as tie-in fiction. It’s constantly dismissed in the science fiction and fantasy community as bad writing. So-called “mainstream” authors make insulting presumptions, accusing tie-in authors of being glorified fan-fiction writers. On the other end of the spectrum are die-hard fans who take it a bit too seriously, climbing into the text in search of the tiniest mistake in continuity.

  Tie-in fiction (also known as shared world, game-related, media-related, etc.) is a story set in a world or universe of someone else’s creation. Most commonly the world was created first for a game, a movie, a television series, or a comic book series. There are huge lines of novels based on games like Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000, and World of Warcraft; movies like Star Wars and Terminator; TV series like Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Doctor Who; and a wealth of comic book superheroes. Some of these novels are novelizations, while others are tie-ins—more on the distinction to follow.

  WORK-FOR-HIRE

  Both tie-ins and novelizations are done on a work-for-hire basis. That means that the source of the novel—from a basic sketch of the world all the way down to a fully realized outline—is provided by the publisher or licensor (an entity, usually a corporation, that owns the property in question; for instance, Lucasfilm owns Star Wars and Wizards of the Coast owns Dragonlance). The author is hired to complete that novel.

  In many cases, the publisher or licensor is open to ideas from the author, and authors often enjoy wide latitude in creating new characters and inventing their own stories and situations set within an established world. Some properties are more rigidly controlled than others. Either way, if you’re contracted on a work-for-hire basis, the entity that holds the trademark and/or copyrights to the setting will retain all rights to your novel. That means if the novel goes out of print, you have no right to bring it to a different publisher. You have no control over foreign rights, reprint rights, film and television rights—any of that stuff. The licensor/publisher owns it, lock, stock, and barrel, and can do with it what they please—and the overwhelming majority of the time they’ll do right by you and your work, making it available for sale wherever they can and for as long as they can.

  This is not something open to negotiation. No matter how in-demand an author you may be, you will never own the rights to your Star Wars novel. Some publishers offer flat fees for tie-in work, but most pay advances and royalties just like any traditional publisher.

  NOVELIZATIONS

  A novelization is a novel that is written directly from someone else’s story. You may have read novelizations for movies such as Star Wars. Novelizations of video games are a more recent creation, and in some cases publishers have created novelizations of movies based on comic books. (HarperCollins even published a novelization of the movie Where the Wild Things Are, which was itself based on the children’s book by Maurice Sendak.)

  If you’re just starting your career and are offered a novelization, go ahead and do it. There is little risk of “typecasting,” and if the movie (or whatever else you’re novelizing) is well-received, the payoff—not just in royalties for that novelization but a subsequent halo effect for the rest of your career—can be substantial. If the movie is a flop, your novelization will probably disappear quickly, too, leaving you free to move on as though nothing ever happened. No one has ever blamed the failure of a major motion picture on the author of the novelization.

  Before you start writing, though, get the best, most complete information about the property you’re novelizing. Pay close attention to continuity—if you don’t and you get the story wrong, a good editor will demand revisions until you get it right. A not-so-good editor will let it just be wrong, then the fans of that property will be harder on you than you might imagine. Novelizations can be fun, an interesting storytelling and writing exercise for both new and established authors, but for goodness sake, please take them seriously.

  TIE-INS

  These borrow a setting from the source material, and sometimes characters, but the story, even the principal characters, are original to the author.

  Borrowing a setting means that quite a bit of that upfront world-building work will have been done for you. If you borrow characters (as you might if writing, say, a Star Trek novel) you’ve got that as well, so that means less work in the formative stages of the novel. Some authors and readers tend to believe that this makes writing tie-in fiction easier. But after fifteen years of direct experience, I can tell you this is not the case.

  It’s true that you don’t have to make up your own rules, but you have to follow—to the letter—someone else’s rules. Writing good tie-in fiction is as difficult as writing good historical fiction. You can’t ignore the “facts,” either to satisfy your crea
tive urges or your sense of what’s important and what isn’t. That means you have to study. The publisher is paying you to write a novel that supports some valuable property, and it’s not okay for you to do a slack job.

  Editors will—or damn well should—hold you to very high standards, because the fans of the property hold it to those same standards. If you can’t bring yourself to care that much about someone else’s setting, don’t ask to write a book in it. A hot intellectual property like Star Wars or HALO is far too valuable to be loaned out to people who don’t care.

  The Responsibilities of a Tie-in

  The author-editor relationship takes on a different cast when you enter the universe of the tie-in. Not only does the editor have the same responsibility to support you, to help make your book and your writing as good as it can be, but he or she also has a duty to the property itself. The owners of a valuable intellectual property are protective of it—and the more successful it is, the more protective of it they will be.

  Keep in mind—even when you feel as though you’ve been dragged into the literary salt mines to suffer over minute details—that if the owners of a property like Dungeons & Dragons, HALO, or Star Trek aren’t obsessing over the property’s integrity, they’re probably doing other stuff to alienate their fans, and all of you are in for a short and miserable literary existence.

  If you’re being held to setting continuity details, it means your editor cares. There are tie-in books that have sold millions of copies, backlisting for decades. The Dragonlance novel Dragons of Autumn Twilight by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, for instance, has been in print continuously for more than twenty-five years. There are tie-ins that are as good as any fantasy or science fiction novel ever written, even if they’re often excluded from awards and snobby Ten Best lists.

  Veteran author Kevin J. Anderson has written his share of tie-in work. “The advantages and disadvantages both stem from the same thing,” he says. “You are handed a familiar universe with familiar characters. I have a running start, in that the readers already know the property; they already love the characters and the situation (otherwise they wouldn’t be buying the book). As a fan myself, I get a thrill out of working in and expanding a universe that has meant a great deal to me—Dune, Star Wars, Star Trek. I can build upon something that is already great.

  “But because it is someone else’s playground, and because the rules are already established, I don’t have the same amount of creative freedom I would have in my own original creation. Sometimes, a story decision that seems obvious and necessary to me is not possible to include because the licensor has other priorities (an action figure design contradicts it, for example). And I don’t have the copyright or later control if the licensor wants to build upon what I’ve added.

  “But it sure is a lot of fun.”

  CHAPTER 35

  MOVE ON TO FILM AND TELEVISION (IF YOU CAN)

  I once attended a screenwriting conference in Los Angeles and talked with an agent from one of the major Hollywood agencies. He told me that one of his clients had had a really good day the week before. He’d sold a spec script for a million dollars and got a major studio assignment for another million.

  What the agent didn’t tell me was how long that writer had been banging his head against the Hollywood system before he had that two-million-dollar day, how many spec scripts he’d sold before that, for how much less money each, and so on.

  Hollywood is full of stories about huge paydays, about writers who go from obscure and impoverished to rich and famous in one day. Rumors abound of Hollywood writers who make a million dollars a year and have never had a script produced.

  Those stories of huge paydays, however fantastical, have moved a lot of the bad writers from the slush piles of New York publishers into the slush piles of Hollywood agencies. These writers are motivated by the belief that it’s easier to get rich in Hollywood now than in New York, and screenplays are “sexier.” Some people think they’re easier, and they are—kind of. But they are much harder to sell.

  IN HOLLYWOOD, THE AGENT RULES

  There may be book editors who will read your novel even if you don’t have an agent, but no serious movie or TV producer will. In the movie and TV business, an agent is essential. Screenwriting is also controlled by a union, the Writers Guild of America, which accounts for why movie and television writers are paid more than non-union novelists. But it also makes the Hollywood writing community more restricted.

  There is no shortage of books on how to write and sell a screenplay; refer to their good advice. You may need two agents, one in New York to handle your book deals, and one in Hollywood for movies and television. However, as Brendan Deneen, an agent and the author of the Flash Gordon tie-in novels, explains, “It’s most important to have a good publishing agent. If you write a great novel and get it published, the film community will find you.”

  They’ll find you, but they might not hire you. According to Deneen, “Hollywood doesn’t really care about novelists, in terms of screenwriting. If you have a good agent and a lot of interest in your book, you might be able to negotiate the first draft (or so) of the adaptation.” If not, a screenwriter will be assigned by the studio or production company to adapt your novel, and your involvement with the movie will likely end there.

  Deneen recommends you start with a novel before you try your hand at selling a screenplay. He adds, “If you sell your novel, there is a very, very good chance it will actually be published. If your screenplay is optioned, there’s still a pretty small chance it will actually get made.”

  Think of it this way: How many novels are published in the United States every year, and how many movies are released? In 2007, Hollywood released more than 400 movies. That same year, approximately 407,000 books were published—one thousand times as many books as movies. That means you stand a much better chance of publishing your novel than seeing your screenplay turned into a movie.

  You may want to try writing your next great idea as a screenplay first. A screenplay is basically an expanded outline with the dialog filled in. Then flesh out the screenplay into a novel. If you end up with both done and ready to show to agents, you’ll be covering both bases at once. But study screenwriting before you jump in. Though the basic elements of good storytelling are the same, there are peculiarities to that craft we can’t cover here.

  CHAPTER 36

  JOIN THE ELECTRONIC GAMING REVOLUTION

  Over the past few years, more and more fantasy and science fiction authors have gotten day jobs in the video game business. PC- and console-based games are now a bigger business in the United States than the movies. In 2008 the video game business topped $21 billion. That same year, 2008, was a record year for Hollywood, but the movies still brought in less than half that: $9.76 billion. Novelist Jess Lebow, whose video game credits include Guild Wars, told me that “there are some freelance opportunities for creative writers in the video game industry, but most companies want to have a team of writers on staff, especially if they are making an online game.”

  Lebow explains the writer’s role in game development: “Initially the writer is responsible for the building of the world and the creation of a narrative outline,” he says. “As the process continues, he or she will work with other departments to make sure the characters, environments, and design mechanics mesh with the story being told. As the game takes shape, the responsibility shifts to the generation and editing of text.”

  As the technology behind games becomes more and more advanced, games will tell increasingly complex and compelling stories. From their narrative-free beginnings in Pong, electronic games have advanced to spawn tie-in movies and novels of their own, creating surprisingly rich characters and game play that relies on moving through a story full of plot twists and supporting characters. This flows both ways, too, with a number of electronic games based on movies, or even other games, like the various Dungeons & Dragons or Warhammer 40,000 spin-offs.

  THE ADVANTAGES OF HIRING
WRITERS

  Storytelling in electronic games is still in its infancy. Many studios are starting to realize what a talented writer can bring to the table. They also recognize that writing is a craft, and the fact that you’ve read books or gone to the movies doesn’t make you a writer. Having a talent for coding or 3D modeling doesn’t mean you understand what makes a compelling character or an interesting story.

  At the moment, the video game business doesn’t place too much value on published authors. According to Jess Lebow, “It’s still somewhat of a struggle. Some game studios understand the value of good writing. Others not as much. They know that they need text and dialogue, but often they don’t fully understand the value of a well-told story. The good news is that this is changing, and that the fans are demanding that their games also have good stories.”

  That being the case, you could be well served by sending your writing to video game studios—if you’re also a fan of video games. Don’t try to convince someone that you’re the best choice to create a story for a video game if you’re not a gamer.

  TO SUM UP

  The publishing business is a tough one. It’s sometimes heartlessly unforgiving, and if you’re a new author it will seem closed off—especially when the whole industry is reeling from the recession—but editors and agents are still on the hunt for the next breakout book, and the next breakout author. Are you the next Stephenie Meyer or J. K. Rowling?