Writing ‘Star Wars’ — how to fall into it
Alphabet Squadron By Alexander Freed Del Rey 416 pages, $28.99
Alexander Freed is a bestselling author. It says so right on the cover of his latest book, near the bottom, under the exhaust of an illustrated X-wing fighter.
It’s a big deal, being a best-selling author. But if we’re being honest, the list of best-selling writers is much longer than most of them would care to admit, not that Freed feels like the kind of guy who would worry about such ego-boosting details. In some ways, it seems like he’d rather talk about one of his other passions, like roller skating.
This lack of off-putting self-importance could be due to another fact, one that’s quite a bit more interesting: Freed is a self-taught, selfmade writer.
The San Francisco author with the shoulder-length hair sits in a Chronicle office and talks about how he didn’t attend a prestigious university writing program — he didn’t attend university at all. He isn’t the scion of some noted intellectual, using the family DNA to secure a book deal. And of all the things that vaulted him onto the best-seller list, it was a career writing video games that afforded him the opportunity to put his name on a popular hardcover. Yes, video games.
Yet here he is, penning the newest trilogy in the everexpanding and still cherished “Star Wars” canon.
“Alphabet Squadron,” the first book in his trio, comes out Tuesday, June 11, and its setting is also interesting — the void of power in the universe shortly after the events of “Return of the Jedi,” the 1983 film that showed us how the plucky Rebels defeated the seemingly unbeatable Galactic Empire. Here, Freed latches our focus onto Yrica Quell, a pilot who is recruited to join a band of Rebels, and also trying to wash away the guilt of her actions when she followed the orders of the Emperor.
In typical “Star Wars” fashion, the nuances are plentiful and satisfying. There are torture droids turned helpful therapists, spaceships flying through flammable atmospheres and alien origin stories that feel like the myth-building fodder of George Lucas’ original films. But what makes Freed’s book so captivating aren’t these canon details, but rather the mood and uncertainty that colors every decision in a universe that is suddenly without the grounding qualities of defined good and evil.
“We are Emperor-free for the first time in decades,” Freed says. “What do you do now? You’ve lived in this world for decades so all that informs your experiences. Suddenly there is not an absolutely evil puppet master directing all the harm in the galaxy. But, you know, if you’ve been working for that evil puppet master for 20 years, you don’t just shake that off. What does that mean? What do you do with it? If you’re on the side of the good guys, if you’re a rebel for the last how many years, what happens when you’re no longer the underdog? How do you adjust to that? What do you do?”
In some ways, those last two questions might be Freed’s subconscious describing himself as a writer. When Freed was a kid growing up in the Philadelphia area, he’d come home after school, fix himself a snack and pop a “Star Wars” tape into the VCR. This was a daily ritual for him, watching George Lucas’ beloved trilogy over and over again in 30-minute installments day after day.
He’d view the familiar scenes from the space opera and think about the stray creatures in the background — curious about their histories, their traits, their desires. It sounds like the type of childhood a man destined to write “Star Wars” novels would experience. But it’s rare when a ritual lasts forever.
“I loved ‘Star Wars’ as a kid,” Freed, 38, says. “I sort of left it behind a little as I became a teenager and young adult, not out of any disdain, but I had never really gotten into the assorted video games and novels and that sort of thing. They never really came my way. So I fell out of the franchise.”
Like most kids of his era, Freed was taken by the spell of video games, spending his weekends staying up late trying to complete the next level of whatever game he was playing. And like a lot of kids with interests in games and science fiction or fantasy, Freed was captivated by pen-and-paper role-playing games — the “Dungeons and Dragons”-type constructs that rely on a user’s imagination and endurance as much as anything else.
What he wasn’t into was school.
“I had not had a good (high school) experience, and I knew I didn’t want to go off and do school for another four years,” Freed says. “I left high school early and had a summer job of setting up (the school’s) computer network, which turned into a full-time job for a number of years. I started doing that at the same time I started doing the writing stuff.”
He’s talking about the typical kindling for aspiring authors: short stories, magazine submissions and, for him, crafting his own pen-and-paper role-playing games. The games are where his career saw some early traction as Freed’s first paid writing gig came from them. It wasn’t much money — not enough to live on — but that experience allowed Freed to segue into writing video games, where the same type of writing logic is appreciated.
His first full-time job as a writer was for BioWare, a video game development company in Austin, Texas, where Freed moved for the gig. And it was at BioWare that Freed was thrust back into the “Star Wars” universe, as a writer on “Star Wars: The Old Republic,” a multiplayer online game that had considerable hype and a lot of praise after its 2011 release. It was a hit, but it also meant Freed was pulled back into the “Star Wars” franchise as the game spawned sequels and opportunities for him to write “Star Wars” comic books and even the novelizations of a “Star Wars” video game and the “Rogue One” film.
He had become an integral part of one of the most iconic intellectual properties on the planet. Those hours watching the original “Star Wars” trilogy had paid off. There’s a blessing and a curse to writing “Star Wars” novels. Let’s call it the Light and Dark side of the job.
The Light is rather obvious: There’s a large audience of people just waiting to read the thing you’ve written. It’s the kind of scenario most authors fantasize about but rarely realize.
The Dark side is the bias prompted by writing about “Star Wars.” Because while these books are popular, they’re also ghettoized by some in the literary community who refuse to view them as anything more than science fiction genre work. Or, in another derogatory term, as glorified fan fiction.
“Does that bother me personally? Sometimes. It doesn’t affect the work, though,” Freed says in his smiling, peaceful tone. “I write for an audience. I write because I want to communicate to people. I write because I have pretentious, artistic ideas that I then want to share with the world. So I’m writing to get ideas out there. And I have an audience.”
And those readers are there. Recent “Star Wars” novels have sold more than 50,000 copies — and that doesn’t include e-book numbers. Those are similar to sales numbers by many of the “literary” books celebrated by the media. Yet “Star Wars” books are virtually ignored by the same publications. And, despite his polite discourse, that kind of bothers Freed.
“If someone comes and writes a new literary take on ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ no one says, ‘Oh, that’s just Hyde fan fiction. It doesn’t require any creative juices,’ ” Freed says. “Artists work from the pieces available in the culture. And if some of those pieces are still under copyright and being licensed, the process that it involves is not necessarily a different one.”
Of course, the fans show him the love the media might not.
“‘Star Wars’ fans are so passionate, and they love the franchise, and they want just good material. Yes, there are people out there who get angry at whatever. But that’s the vast, vast minority. For the most part it’s just people who want to keep getting stories in this world that has captured their imagination,” Freed says. “I think that’s why I’ve been able to keep coming back to ‘Star Wars.’ I like writing about ‘Star Wars.’ There’s a lot to be done there. But if it hadn’t been such a receptive audience, I might have been reluctant to spend so much time in that world.” There’s a passage in “Alphabet Squadron” when Freed is describing Yrica Quell’s perspective inside the cockpit of an X-wing fighter. What makes it so effective isn’t the detail about what her eyes see or the tightness of her quarters. It’s comparing the sensations to how she felt when she sat in the cockpit of a TIE fighter, her ship when she was a pilot for the Empire.
These are the moments when Freed adds so much to the “Star Wars” universe, these human considerations about how a real person would interact with intellectual property that’s been obsessed to death by die-hard fans. It’s because Freed doesn’t write as a person who grew up watching “Star Wars” every day; he writes as an author trying to unlock a story.
“I figure if you’re a ‘Star Wars’ fan and you’re coming to this material, let’s give you something you can’t get from the movies or the comics or anything else, and that is what it actually feels like to be in this place,” Freed says. “I know what excited me as a fan, but I need to look at it from more of an editorial perspective. What works in this franchise; what doesn’t? What’s exciting? What’s under-explored, what’s over-explored? And find a way into it as a writer.”
Two years ago Freed moved to San Francisco to work for Fogbank Entertainment, writing video games for the company. That’s during the day, collaborating with a team of creators to construct stories for these virtual worlds. At nights, and mostly during weekends, he’s at his keyboard, filling in the details of another imaginary world, this one created by George Lucas. He’ll write up to 5,000 words a weekend working on the follow-up to “Alphabet Squadron.” He’ll pen the third installment of the trilogy, too.
He does it because he’s a writer. That’s what writers do. But there’s more to it for Freed. He wants to ensure the legacy of this franchise. He wants to ensure that the fans have something to read that they’re proud of, that they enjoy reading.
“I really don’t want to disappoint them.”