AustLit
Shelly Shapiro is Editor at Large at Del Rey, responsible for the Star Wars Universe tie-in books. She is also a writer of speculative fiction in her own right, and an illustrator of note, having drawn the maps for the original editions of David and Leigh Eddings’ The Belgariad and The Malloreon as well as dozens of other fantasy novels.
This conversation took place between Shelly and Kim Wilkins via email on 1st August, 2017.
(I: Interviewer. SS: Shelly Shapiro)
I: You had a background in editing fantasy, and also map drawing for David Eddings, is that right? How did you find yourself as the editor of The Force Unleashed tie-in?
SS: Actually, I wasn’t the editor on The Force Unleashed tie-in. I let my then-assistant (now-boss!) Keith Clayton take point on that one, as I felt it would be fun for him and a good learning opportunity. I started working with Sean on Star Wars earlier, back in 2002, I think, when I hired him and his then-cowriter to write a trilogy for our huge The New Jedi Order series of novels.
To answer the question of how I went from editing fantasy to working on Star Wars... Well, first of all, I was actually a science-fiction editor, not a fantasy editor. In those days, Del Rey kept the two genres quite separate. When the Star Wars franchise returned to Del Rey in 1998, I was asked to take over the Star Wars fiction line, and so I did.
I: How did your role as an editor differ when working on an authorized tie-in, versus working with an author-originated project? Did you feel conflicted loyalties, or did you feel a different relationship to the creative process?
SS: The two roles can actually be quite different. With an authorized tie-in, the author owns nothing and has a lot of boundaries to respect in all areas, from character development and world-building, all the way to vocabulary and capitalization. The story exists—in this case, in the form of a game—and the author’s job is to bring that story to life in a book. My role in that case is to help the author make it the best book it can be within the provided parameters. With an author-originated project, usually I come into the picture at the manuscript stage, at which point I read, comment, make suggestions for rewrites, and finally edit the rewrite. So, not that different, except that I could follow my own instincts in giving authors advice and suggestions, always keeping in mind that the work was the creation of the author alone, and not mine.
Interestingly, with Star Wars there has been kind of a middle ground. For example, when Sean wrote the first tie-in novel to the huge online game The Old Republic, there was no actual story to tell, just a milieu to fit into, for lack of a better way to put it. He got the opportunity to come up with his own characters and story to a large degree, and it was my job to help him end up with a novel that Lucasfilm and the game designers felt best represented the game. As for conflicted loyalties, sometimes I wished the author could be free to do more of what he wanted in a tie-in novel, but overall, I always understood that the primary loyalty had to be to the movie or game that was being novelized.
I: Did you ever have to act as an intermediary between Haden, Star Wars and Sean as author?
SS: I didn’t on The Force Unleashed, as I wasn’t the lead editor, but I worked with Haden on other game tie-in novels over the years. Part of my job as Star Wars editor was always to be an intermediary.
I: Was the fact that Sean was in Australia of any significance? That is, did it make the work more difficult? Did it add something unexpected? Or was it just business as usual?
SS: Thanks to the Internet, it was mostly business as usual. The only issue was timing the occasional phone calls between time zones.
I: Do you think that books, movies and videogames are drawing together in terms of craft? Is it more important for books to be cut together in fast pace, cinematically described, hitting those cues we all know so well from visual media? And are games, perhaps, becoming more narrative-driven? I guess I’m trying to find out your opinion on writers of SF in the future, and if they might need to be fluent across a range of media. Any thoughts?
SS: I think that there is definitely an area where books, movies and videogames are drawing together, but not everywhere. There will, I hope, always be novels that shine, through their use of language and deep character development, for example. And there will also continue to be plenty of games that are not narrative-driven. I definitely think it would help for an author who wants to write tie-ins to be fluent across the relevant range of media, just as I think a game designer who wants to develop a narrative-driven game had better be familiar with books and movies. But there doesn’t have to always be that overlap.
I: Is working within a big media franchise such as Star Wars limiting, or does it bring its own freedoms and joys that aren’t initially visible?
SS: Good question! It’s both. I found it huge fun to be such an intrinsic part of the story brainstorming on the fiction that wasn’t strictly tied in to a game or movie—something, as I said earlier, that was rarely part of my work with original fiction. And it could certainly be frustrating when I felt a Star Wars story could be improved by taking a direction or directions that for whatever reason we were not allowed to pursue. But overall, I feel that as long as there are challenges to be embraced, it can all be very satisfying.
This interview was undertaken as part of the Genre Worlds project. Genre Worlds is an ARC-funded research project undertaken by Professor Kim Wilkins, Professor David Carter, Associate Professor Beth Driscoll, and Professor Lisa Fletcher.
For more information on the project, go to the home page.