It would seem this next section is going to be another multiparter to go through, but it is the final section of the season two writer’s guide for the original Star Trek. Last time we finally finished the terminology section, so now I have a whole new way to pad out the intro.
I’m not sure why there’s a “Some Questions And Answers” section. Maybe they were anticipating questions from new hires, especially the ones for whom this was the first science fiction gig. Maybe it’s questions asked by writers after earlier revisions of the writer’s guide. Remember this is the third revision, from April 17th of 1967, that I’m working from. That would make this something of an early FAQ (frequently asked questions, if you ever wondered what that acronym stood for), trying to answer as much as they could going into the second season. Whatever reason, there will be some new ground covered and possibly more clarification for that old ground in previous sections of the guide. I noticed one asking about the transporter, which was already gone over in the terminology section. That means my fingers will have more chances to misspell “transporter” as “transfporter” because for some reason my fingers keep hitting the “f” despite not being close enough to the “s” or “p” to happen EVERY @#$%$#%$# TIME I TRY TO WRITE TRANSPORTER! Sorry, it’s getting on my nerves and I was hoping I was done writing that world for this series.
This first batch of questions is a bit generic, going over writing science fiction in general for newbies to the genre and getting a better handle on the script writing processes specific to this show. We have eight pages total and we’ll be covering a page and a half just for this set of questions. I’ll try to keep this interesting, but even the terminology section was feeling long to me after a while. This is more about making a good writer’s guide, which is why the site I got this from posted it, but I do get to complain about modern storytelling. That’s always fun, right? So, how do you lay out an acceptable script for this series?
How about story outlines? How long? Any special format?
Most important. The Star Trek production staff needs them for proper pre-planning of episodes, keeping production values high by getting multiple use of redressed sets, effects, opticals, etc. A few suggestions:
We don’t consider how much of writing involves more than telling the story. Writers also have to think about the creative process. They’ve mentioned a few times in this guide how they want to keep costs down by reusing sets, limiting outfits and costumes, and as limited locations as possible. This keeps costs down, but also helps maintain continuity for the continuity director, who needs to make sure any shots in a new location has them in the same outfit in the same condition, and production time as the more places you have to go to, the more time you need to shoot. Location shooting outside of a controlled soundstage also means hoping the weather gives you the atmosphere you want and nothing goes wrong. Let’s see these suggestions.
A) Feel free to send or bring in a rough outline for discussion before nailing it down. With every week, we begin to know our situation and characters better, learn what works and what doesn’t, and can thus save the writer a lot of trouble at this early stage.
It should also keep reshoots down (Marvel Studios take note) and time for rewrites, which for a weekly series is a smaller window than a movie. Knowing what you can do makes it easier to work it into the story without having to change so much your story loses focus. I’ve seen complaints about stories that clearly forgot to change something from an earlier draft, leading to confusion of narrative cohesion later.
B) To help our production people plan, please indicate in outlines each change in set or location. Some writers have done this by beginning new paragraphs with the set description underlined. We appreciate it.
Scripts often contain scene locations so I don’t know why this is enforced. I always thought it was normal. “Scene–Bobby’s dressing room” or the like.
C) If in doubt about production practicality of a new planet surface, alien life, or some kind of future machinery, a general description or a “to be described later” will suffice. Take advantage of our Star Trek staff; they might be able to suggest to you standing sets which can be redressed and other available items, allowing us to switch that money to other values in your story.
Glad to hear they actually had people working on this that the writers could go to for help in selecting designs for various worlds, stations, and non-Constitution class starcrafts. I should look up that episode that takes place on a fake backlot because aliens wanted to kill the crew with an OK Corral reenactment…because that’s the right punishment for just showing up on a world they didn’t know had life. On to our second question.
In your early stories and outlines, have any general areas of problems shown up?
I may not know where these questions come from, but this is a good one to ask. Learning from others writer’s mistakes if you’re either new to the show or weren’t paying attention last season as you worked on your own episode is always a smart move. Kind of like in life. Also, being science fiction doesn’t mean you can wave something off because “the future”. A lot of sci-fi up to this point did something cool and brushed it off as futuristic, but coming off more like magic than science.
A) Unbelievability in characters or motivations. Somehow, in the process of putting characters into the future, some writers tend to leave credulity behind. Science fiction is no different from tales of the present or past–our starship central characters and crew must be at least as believably motivated and as identifiable to the audience as characters we’ve all written into police stations, general hospitals, and Western towns.
The butt monkey and the always right girl (who is still a total @#$%#$) respectively.
Really, the only difference between a science fiction show and other genres, and this goes for fantasy as well, is the setting and what you can get away with. Aliens don’t have to be like us, but they need to have a reason for doing things that makes some kind of sense the audience can at least follow, even if they and the hero(es) reject that point of view and perspective. The joke for something like space police is “it’s like the police…but space” has a certain level of accuracy in how a writer should approach the work.
B) Illogical situations. For example, it is swallowing quite a bit to believe a present day naval cruiser would be full of renegades and mutineers. Or that a present day U.S.N. Captain would imperil his vessel and crew over a philosophical disagreement with some foreign country. We want the exotic, the inexplicable, the terrifying–but not in the U.S.S. Enterprise, its organization and mission. The ship and characters are our audience’s tie to reality.
“Realism” as currently used is a crock of bull. So much of the Star Trek universe is not realistic. What you should go for is believable. Within the rules established, do we believe your world exists. You can make Looney Tunes a believable world, and that’s not even consistent what a gun does to someone. It is consistent that nobody wants to get shot and rarely does Bugs Bunny get shot, and it’s usually non-lethal for everyone involved. If Elmer Fudd actually kills something it would be weird. For Star Trek shows it follows close to real world rules while something like Macross follows different rules, and Josie & The Pussycats In Outer Space follows even less real world rules. We believe those worlds while watching because they form a reality that we can follow and accept. None of the aliens in either show exist, technology is based on conjecture and lies, and nobody ever complains.
C) Intellectual rather than physical or emotional conflict. It’s hard to get a good story out of philosophical conflicts. We’ve had some interesting analyses of possible alien civilizations, socioeconomic speculation which seemed brilliant to us. But the characters were “sitting and talking” rather than “feeling, moving and doing”. They fail what we call our “GUNSMOKE-KILDARE-NAKED CITY Rule”–would the basic story, stripped of science fiction aspects, make a good episode for one of those shows? Don’t laugh, try it.
“Spock’s Brain” anyone? I don’t know how that will work for Doctor Kildare. I don’t think “Balance Of Terror” would technically fit either show, but I’ve never seen Naked City. Its inspiration was two submarines searching for each other in the water and also explored a bit of post-war racism. My friend was just telling me the other day about how his grandfather, who fought the Japanese in World War II, carried a hatred for the “Japs” all the way through his life, so the navigator with a hatred for Romulans was understandable but not condoned by the story. That could easily be a story about a US and Japanese sub doing this dance, maybe learn their Chinese passenger was part Japanese, and how they would react to that. Or something more modern with the reverse, trusting a Japanese crewman in the 2020s wasn’t secretly Chinese because the Chinese government killed his family. A basic plot should fit more than one genre, though not all genres. Then again, Macross has fit love stories into their space war shows…let’s just get to the final question of this installment.
Do the science fiction pro’s have any helpful hints for us?
Obviously a question for anyone coming from other genres to Star Trek as their first sci-fi offering.
Two: Beware getting too wrapped up in The Wonder Of It all. Keep the story tied to people, their needs, fears and conflicts; remain a story-teller at all times–the quality of an sf tale is always inversely proportional to the pretentions a writer brings to it.
I think I mentioned earlier in this series that a Buck Rogers radio play has Buck and Wilma taking a rocket monorail thing to visit Dr. Huer and Wilma, the one from the future remember, was in awe in how fast they were going. It would be like a grown adult being surprised at the speed of a modern bullet train, which has been around long enough to be interested but not as shocked as she was…or at least make it Buck, who hadn’t been around that long and would be more amazed by something futuristic. There was also episode one in the Superman radio dramas where Lara was talking about taking a huge bound to her friend’s place like it was nothing, and Jor-El (Jor-L?) stating that Earthlings couldn’t do that according to his research. For us it would be fantastic, as most of Superman’s powers are, but for her–even in these days when Superman couldn’t fly through space without a rocket and what powers he did have were either Kryptonian normal or a result of the differences in gravity–were just like if we walked down the street. The fantastic should be fantastic to us but in some cases normal to the people in that world.
Also, we again see the writer is being told not to be pretentious in their stories. Someone should tell modern Trek that. When they did try to preach to the audience…
As a proud American I agree with the sentiments…but how the heck does an alien planet recreate the Constitution, and the Pledge Of Allegiance, and the American flag despite not having states or an England…or really a United States? This is another planet, not an alternate universe Earth where things went worse than the Fallout game universe. Is that what happened to the monkeys who were supposed to be writing Shakespeare? Modern writers make even less attempts to keep from preaching. They have a message and you will hear it and support it or you will be mocked and written as the baddies in the most laughably exaggerated way possible…even if they’re not writing a comedy. Again, I agree with this one, so it’s just that I disagree with the modern worldview of Star Trek. It should leave us to decide who is right or at least present both sides honestly.
That was also a lot of season 1’s problem for The Next Generation, and I feel like I’m rambling and not quite following the same point as the guide correctly, but it’s what it makes me think of. Season one’s crew seemed kind of smug in their beliefs. When they met a group of people from before the “enlightenment” they found them annoying or amusing, especially the financier who now was in a world without money and no use for his skills, which he prided himself on. The crew didn’t seem to care. Who was the bigger jerk in those conversations? You decide but my…money…is on the crew. Season two fixed a lot of those problems.
Again, not sure if that’s what the guide is going for when it talks about pretentious writings, but it’s what I think of, and they aren’t good moments for the franchise.
This seems a good place to stop as the next set of questions involve the show itself and it’s lore and approach. Next time we’ll get on with that.
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