Fan Fiction

I started writing a new Star Wars story (fan fic) last week. I got the gist of it down on paper and now I've hit a brick wall. I am not sure how to develop it further beyond setting up the characters and opening with a situation that needs somehow to be resolved.

I got the idea for doing a story from Derek who suggested that I could do a piece about Carlist Rieeken as he said that he didn't know much about the character. As it happens some research on the Internet shows that Rieeken's back-story is heavily and well detailed despite the fact that he only appears on screen in The Empire Strikes for I guess about two minutes or thereabouts. So that idea was out unless I was going to make up my own idea of his back-story but as you might have guessed from my previous rants about continuity in the Star Wars universe that idea wasn't going to happen.

In the end I plumped for a character just barely mentioned in the Imperial Sourcebook published by West End Games, called High Colonel Theol Drost. A search on Wookieepedia turned up the character and a couple of reasonable pictures and a brief resume of the piece from the Imperial Sourcebook. The character is also mentioned, again briefly in the Thrawn Trilogy Sourcebook and I am luck to have both these publications to refer too. Great, so there is not other material published on this character as far as I can ascertain so I have a relatively blank canvas to work from.

I decided that using such an obscure character on his own wasn't going to be particularly interesting to anyone but the most hardened of Star Wars fans, so I need some hook to connect him with the wider known 'universe.' Still thinking about The Empire Strikes Back, Veers struck me as a great character to be in my story, particularly as I found a reference to the fact that Veers was promoted to a General over many equally-competent High Colonels, so what if Drost had been one of those overlooked for promotion? Did he and Veers have a back-story? If so, what was it? And how could I fit it in with the events of the films (and books) without contradicting the continuity?

So that was my starting point and I wrote a reasonably brief synopsis of the plot of my story, which I will not disclose here as it will spoil the end result. I always write a synopsis when I am going to do a fan fic as I need a framework to work within. Not always do I follow it strictly and sometimes I will rewrite the synopsis as I am composing the story. Normally, I'll go through about three or four drafts of the story before I get to a version that I am content enough with to publish or submit to a fanzine etc.

I am talking about all this in the present tense but truthfully the last fan fic I did before my current effort was back in 2003 and I think that maybe in the intervening years I have become a bit rusty. Still I do have the main piece of this new fan fic written. I just need to decide on a suitable resolution, which doesn't spoil the continuity and ties-in with The Last Command, where Drost is next mentioned. Once that is finished, I just have the small task of choosing a title... from experience the title is the thing that comes last. It is easier I find to choose one when the piece is completed. All being well this fan fic should be finished by the end of the week and I will be posting a link to where it will be hosted. Watch this space...