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Star Wars vs. Star Trek: The two key differences in writing for the franchises, from someone who has been doing both for over a decade
Science fiction author John Jackson Miller explains how editors and authors approach Star Trek books differently than Star Wars
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What’s the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek? The answer will be different depending on who you ask. Your next-door neighbor or elderly aunt might not know the difference between the Enterprise and the Millennium Falcon, but you might have a cousin or work colleague who could give you a 10-hour speech on the differences between each franchise. For writers, it means something else entirely.
John Jackson Miller is a best-selling science fiction author who has written licensed novels for both Star Wars and Star Trek, including the 2013 novel Star Wars: Kenobi. Miller notes that with Star Trek, there is usually an initiative to tie the books to whatever project is going on at the time.
“Star Trek changes halfway through, because I did four novels before the streaming series and four novels for the streaming series,” John Jackson Miller tells Popverse. “The four novels I did for the streaming series, we all worked with Kirsten Beyer. She was one of the other authors of the line. She wrote the Star Trek: Voyager novels. She's in the writers' room on Discovery, she's the co-creator of Picard, and she's one of the executive producers of Strange New Worlds.”
As Miller explains, working alongside Beyer made a huge difference and allowed the Star Trek projects to have a more cohesive feel.
“Every one of those projects would start with a phone call to her to find out where the place we can actually set our story, where we can draw upon something that might be coming up in one of these series, but also not collide with anything. Because she's actually one of the fellow authors, she had a lot more involvement in the crafting of the narrative in a way that working with editors it's not quite the same way.”
The rest of it, according to Miller, comes down to having a feel for what makes a Star Trek story different from a Star Wars story.
“In both cases we have teams that are in place to try to make sure that everything fits, and everything sort of presents the brand and the characters correctly. The actual writing part of it is very obvious what kind of a story will fly as a Star Trek story, and what kind of story will work better as Star Wars. In Star Trek, the science is a plot point half the time. In Star Trek, I can draw upon the history of Earth and famous figures and famous quotations without having to come up with an equivalent in the Star Wars universe.”
So, what’s the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek? It’s not lightsabers vs phasers, it’s all about editors and instinct.
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