SS: A template such as Campbell’s can be a very interesting reference for an author, a reminder of ways to keep a story exciting and keep it growing and developing. But I don’t advise writers to use it as a rigid framework for a story—in other words, following it slavishly would probably result in a stiff, unlifelike story. Stories need to grow, to at least some degree, organically, with elements developing out of what has gone before. If meeting the mentor really wants to happen before the call to adventure, for example, it should happen that way, instead of having the story forced into a mold it doesn’t want to fit. Fortunately, the hero’s journey model allows for a lot of flexibility, and is terrific as a reminder that stories move up and down, forward and backward, have climaxes and crises all along the way. Although frankly, this aspect of the series didn’t end up as well developed as I would have liked—probably due to the complication of using multiple authors. Individual books had it, like Matt Stover’s, but I would have liked to see the mythic dimension, the hero’s journey, evoked a little more, I don’t know, cohesively, in the series as a whole. On the grand scale.
JL: I’ve never before been involved in a project where the template was afforded so much conscious attention. I’m aware of the template when I write fiction, but I usually rely on my subconscious to provide archetypes, and most of the time I don’t recognize the mythic elements, the “heroic” elements, until I’ve reached the end of a book and can look at it objectively.
Star Wars is a unique blend of romance and pulp, but what works well on screen doesn’t always work on the printed page—especially when you’re dealing with a series of twenty or so books, and you feel duty-bound to have not only each book incorporate elements of the template, but also the series as a whole. Lord of the Rings succeeds in doing that, as does Harry Potter, though to a lesser extent. But in the NJO we lacked clear-cut archetypes, and those characters who were clear-cut—Luke, Han, Lando, Leia—had, in a very real way, already completed their journeys. That said, authors Elaine Cunningham, Matt Stover, Aaron Allston, and Walter Jon Williams made terrific use of mythic elements, regardless.
DR: Probably the single most controversial aspect of the NJO was the death—some fans would say the murder—of Chewbacca. How was this decision reached?
LW: In the Star Wars novels published by Bantam, no preexisting Star Wars character ever died. It was our policy that no author could kill anyone who originated first in a script written by George. However, we knew that for anyone to really take a new intergalactic war seriously, and to realize that the New Jedi Order was not just Star Wars fiction as usual, someone who mattered would have to die. This was a unanimous agreement. Who would die was the subject of much debate, however. Our first thought was that the death of Luke Skywalker would have the biggest impact on the readers. However, this was not okay with George Lucas! I think it was Randy Stradley from Dark Horse who said, “Kill the family dog—Chewbacca.” In our own emotional response to this suggestion (it made us unhappy just to come up with the idea), we knew Chewie’s death would generate the biggest reaction from the readers.
SR: As time went by, I had more than second thoughts about this decision! I came to think that Chewie’s death was a really, really bad thing. I remember going home and thinking about it and grieving even before Bob Salvatore submitted his outline. I couldn’t believe we were going to kill Chewie. He was so great. So much like the family dog that everybody loves, as Lucy points out. And here we were going to kill the dog! I remember my partner’s son telling me that the worst thing we ever did was to get him the book Old Yeller. How could we do that, have him fall in love with this dog, only to see him killed? And here we were doing much the same thing with Chewie. So I had misgivings about it at first.
SS: We didn’t get George’s permission to kill Chewie in particular: Chewie was simply not one of the characters George said we could not kill. But I think we made the best choice. Not because he wasn’t a beloved character, and only partly because he seemed a difficult character to utilize in the books. Mostly it was because his death would strongly affect every other major character in the series, so it would serve as a unique emotional catalyst. And it did.
JL: Right. We wanted to throw the major characters into immediate turmoil—to shanghai them into new spiritual journeys, replete with abysses, demons, dark nights of the soul, rebirths, what have you.
DR: Were you taken aback by the fan reaction to Chewie’s death? I mean, there were even death threats against the author of Vector Prime, Bob Salvatore!
SR: I talked with Bob often during this time. His brother had just died, with Bob at his bedside. Getting threats from fans was very upsetting for Bob, and for everyone here. It didn’t make me wish we hadn’t done it—Bob created the scene and wrote it with care and great insight. It was such a shock, though, that the readers had such emotion! But if you think about it, it shows the strength of Star Wars and of the publishing program that our readership is this invested in the characters.
LW: When Chewie died, people sat up and took notice that the NJO was going to be different from what had come before, and that the Star Wars galaxy was not necessarily a safe place anymore. I always felt very badly that Bob got the brunt of the criticism, however.
SS: I knew people would be sad and shocked, but I didn’t expect the anger. Bob was very upset at the anger directed at him, and I felt really bad about that. He shouldn’t have had to face such mean-spiritedness and nastiness. I didn’t worry that we’d made a mistake, though. I thought Chewie’s death was heroic and incredibly moving—exactly what the New Jedi Order needed as an emotional catalyst.
JL: I had gone through something similar when adapting Robotech, so I expected a flak storm. Bob, who was brought in late to launch the series, also expected as much. Regardless, he was terribly wounded by the fan criticism, and it’s something we still discuss to this day. Some readers wrongly assumed that Bob had taken it upon himself to kill Chewbacca, when in fact he had been instructed to kill Chewbacca. There was a kind of contract out on Chewie! So, by all rights, the criticisms and threats should have been hurled at Del Rey Books, or the NJO creative team itself. Um, maybe I shouldn’t have said that . . .
DR: Moving right along, how do you respond to fans who complain that they look to Star Wars for an escape, for entertainment, rather than for reality of this sort?
JL: I think it’s a valid criticism, as far as it goes. But the fact is that the Bantam books had taken these same characters through so many betrayals, kidnappings, and David-versus-Goliath strikes against superweapons that we had nowhere else to go. For that reason, we felt compelled to shake things up by undermining Luke’s ability to use the Force, testing the younger characters at every turn, having Chewbacca and Anakin die, sending Han and Leia into brief estrangement and grief, and even giving Threepio and Artoo something to worry about.
You know, what did surprise me was how much flak we took for having Han withdraw into himself after Chewbacca’s death. From the start, the NJO was conceived as darker, more “adult.” But perhaps this sometimes led to our being too realistic in our thinking—going beyond the sensibilities inherent in the films.
SR: Well, we wanted the NJO series to have more of the feel of reality, with conflict and emotion. By shaking up the universe, we felt we were adding an emotional depth to the stories that wasn’t there before, and we were confident that our readers were up to the challenge.
LW: Again, we go back to the original stories that George Lucas was telling in the films. Good things happen and bad things happen in the Star Wars universe—as in our own world. Since we wanted to model the books on some of the same themes and story elements George was drawing on in the films, we did not want to always play it safe and simply provide an entertaining escape in the fiction. Had we done that, I don’t think the novels would have had the same emotional response with our readers. We are always pushing the boundaries of Star Wars storytelling so as to not repeat ourselves or fall into a formula.
> SS: Sales for the Bantam Star Wars books were significantly down, the books weren’t hitting the bestseller lists the way they once had: clearly, readers were losing interest. One complaint that arose consistently was that it was nothing more than the same-old, same-old: someone gets kidnapped or a situation is saved by the superweapon of the month. Nothing is ever unpredictable. There were complaints that all Leia did was be a diplomat; that Han had become nothing more than a house-husband, and Chewie, a nursemaid; that Luke was so all-powerful, authors had to find some ways to weaken him to make any fight fair enough to be even interesting. Right or wrong, we were attempting to address these concerns. The death of a character close to all the other major players was a perfect way to give those other characters a natural and believable reason to reevaluate their lives and their roles—to change and (we hoped) to revert more to the characters we all knew and loved from the movies. It also gave us the chance to grow the characters of the Solo children, who seemed to be disliked by a lot of the adult fans.
I do understand the complaints about wanting an escape, not reality. But I don’t think that one major death—okay, two—is a sledgehammer of reality to an otherwise entertaining universe. Having your emotions challenged is, to my mind, part of a good entertainment. When George ended a movie with Han encased in carbonite, who knew what would happen to that character? We all waited with bated breath, truly worried. And we loved it.
I do regret the relentlessness of the war against the Yuuzhan Vong—and some of the grimmer aspects of their culture. I would have preferred to make them dark side Force-users: that would have kept their darkness in the arena of magic and mystery, which, oddly enough, would have made them seem less “dark,” I think. As for the war . . . Well, we had no idea when we started this series that September 11 would happen, or that we would go to war in Iraq. If we’d known that real life was going to take such a dark turn, perhaps we would have planned our story arc differently. I can’t say.
DR: On to the death of Anakin. Why Anakin and not one of the other Solo children? What was the reaction of the author, Troy Denning, to the angry fan response?
JL: Anakin was our first choice as the saga’s hero, not Jacen. When George nixed that idea, we were forced to rethink everything very quickly, as the first book of the series was already being outlined. For the same reasons we chose to devise dark moments for many of the characters, we wanted to have a personal tragedy accompany the fall of Coruscant. This was not something malicious on the part of the creative team, or especially manipulative, but yet another example of wanting to convey the sense that war has terrible consequences, and that no one is immune to those.
The book that became Star by Star was designed to be the nadir of the story arc. Like Bob Salvatore, Troy knew going in that he was taking a great risk and said as much at a story conference at Skywalker Ranch. And like Bob, Troy was bombarded by fans: all the more, perhaps, because Anakin had played such a prominent role in the Greg Keyes duology that precedes Star by Star. By then, though, a certain percentage of the readership had grown to expect tragic surprises, and those readers grasped that Troy shouldn’t be held personally accountable for Anakin’s death. My sense of it is that the fans were more forgiving with Troy than they were with Bob.
SS: The surprising thing was that Anakin had previously seemed to be a fairly unpopular character, at least judging by what a lot of fans were saying and writing. We did our best to grow him into a hero—I guess we succeeded!
DR: Which death was the most upsetting for fans?
LW: Chewie’s death had the biggest impact everywhere. A lot of people, even some internally at Lucasfilm who were not involved in the creative decision, would come up to me afterward and say, “How could you!” But to counter some of the criticism, we have encouraged more Chewie backstories in comics and other publishing since his death; in a way, it’s made him even more important than he would have been if he hadn’t suffered a fictional demise.
SS: There’s no question in my mind that Chewbacca’s death was more upsetting to fans. After all, he was one of the core characters—part of the basic mythos. But there were no confrontations at conventions or anywhere else. In person, the fans were great. A huge number of people were very supportive, saying they found the death very sad and moving, and they understood why it happened and could see that it was going to benefit the series.
SR: The fans at Celebration II were quite understanding of the process. I sat on two panels with Bob Salvatore, and the fans seemed to me to be polite and accepting of the decisions that were made, even if they didn’t agree with them.
JL: Even as irrelevant as he became in the Bantam novels, Chewbacca was a classic character and, more important, Han Solo’s sidekick. Anakin was relatively new to the Expanded Universe, but throughout the first eight books of the NJO, he was portrayed as the “strongest” of the Solo teenagers. Either way, when a reader invests that much time and emotion in a character, only to have the character yanked away—seemingly at the whim of the creative team . . . Well, anger and disappointment are bound to surface.
DR: You’ve talked a little about how the NJO series was plotted. Can you give us more details?
SR: Almost from the first, we knew two things: where we were beginning, and where we were ending. We knew our heroes would succeed at the end of the series, but we really didn’t know how they would overcome the Yuuzhan Vong. The hardcovers were plotted first, with major events slated for each hardcover. The mass-market paperbacks were initially designed to cover more minor events, but it soon became apparent that the paperbacks had as big a role in the series as the hardcovers. Del Rey and Lucasfilm worked hand in hand in all of this, and both sides meshed very well. There were a few areas of debate, however. The one that springs to mind is the character of Vergere. It was first decided that Vergere would give her life for her cause. Then, later, Lucy and I thought it would be better if she lived through the series. Shelly pointed out some very good reasons why her death was necessary to Jacen’s growth and Luke’s authority, so we agreed (after much angst). Sparks never flew—not that I can recall. We work very, very well together and have a deep mutual respect and trust.
LW: We had several creative sessions over the course of the NJO series development. The first one, which I mentioned earlier, took place in 1998 and (I believe) lasted two days. In this initial meeting, the major points of the entire story were plotted out. Subsequent creative meetings were set up in later years, each time with new authors, where more details for the individual stories were plotted out. The beauty of these meetings was that good ideas were voiced by a variety of people—discussed, enhanced, developed into even bigger ideas, and then fleshed out by each individual contributing author with his or her own voice. Not only were they fun, you could almost watch the ideas spill out and become great, which was a very energizing thing. So many authors ply a lonely trade of writing alone by themselves in a room. Having a forum to build on the ideas of a group of creative participants was, I think, very exciting for all concerned.
SS: We all meshed smoothly from the start—it’s a great group to brainstorm with. Over the course of the series, we averaged one creative meeting a year, where we’d get together with a couple of the next-in-line authors and plan the next year’s worth of books, continuing to develop the loose story line we’d begun with, tweaking it and adding to it—and sometimes completely changing it—based on what had actually ended up happening in the series. There was only one time I recall a serious disagreement, and I’d rather not say what that was. Suffice it to say that Lucasfilm won
JL: The story arc was little more than a blueprint. It summarized the principal action and underscored key plot points. For a time, I felt that because the NJO was shaping up to be such a collaborative effort, it would be best to plot each book and have one person serve as story editor. That had been my experience when working in collaboration with scriptwriters on various TV series, and I thought that—in lieu of George Lucas himself—some
one had to uphold the guiding vision. But most writers aren’t accustomed to teamwork, and who wants to do little more than connect the dots in any case?
Beyond that, carefully plotted outlines weren’t going to allow for enough individual creativity and were probably going to hamper organic growth—the unexpected discoveries writers make even when working from detailed outlines. Oftentimes characters refuse to do what you figured you had planned for them! The reaction you plotted suddenly doesn’t seem reasonable or consistent with the character that has emerged from the writing.
But that’s not to say that the members of the creative team were always of one mind about the changes that crept into the story arc, and as we approached the end of the series, we probably had too many voices weighing in with comments and criticisms, and perhaps too many authors, as well. Some outlines went through as many as nine drafts before they were approved. Some books were canceled before they were written, and others were canceled after they had been completed. Had there been time enough, a lot of inconsistencies and continuity errors would have been eliminated, and perhaps some plot points would have been jettisoned entirely. But all this seems part and parcel of ambitious sagas. Even when there is a “guiding vision,” it’s difficult to sustain the initial vision through five years of changes.
DR: How were the authors for each book selected? How much freedom did the writers have in terms of plot, character, setting, and invention of things like technologies, names, cultures, and aspects of the Force?
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