Inspired by a blog post of Wil Wheaton I very recently put pen to paper, or more accurately hand to keyboard after many years of procrastinating. For me the choice of which world to write in was already made by my abiding love of the 40K universe and yet I also realised that though I would be posting the story to my blog in parts it would likely be largely inaccessable to most of the people who stumbled upon it. I attempted to overcome this issue by linking key words to websites that explained them in more detail but I suspect that this strategy will be largely ineffective and will disturb the flow of the story.

I don’t think a book should be judged because it is a tie-in. I think it should stand on its own merits but for reviewers with limited time and many books to read they will likely focus their attention on easily accessable fiction that doesn’t require reams background information to enjoy. Many, well written, reviews often appear on fan blogs and it is to them that I turn for opinion as to whether the latest release is worth my time. It has long been my feeling that mainstream reviewers are unlikely to really understand the worlds I’m reading in, unless they themselves are fans, which limits the usefulness of their opinion.

I do agree that really well written work will appeal to those outside of the fold but for me the devil is the details that they will miss out on because I haven’t the skills to get it all in there.

My way of doing it – and I can’t speak for anyone else – is to make sure that the novel I’m writing is a self-contained story. That is, it has a beginning, middle, and end, and all the characters are properly introduced, so that whether the reader fully understands the background or not, they will at least understand what is happening to the heroes and why they care. I tend to just let the background take care of itself, doing as much description of places and people as I would in a regular novel. If my bosses have asked that something particular be mentioned or used in the novel, I try to make it new to my characters too, so that they and the reader discover it together and it seems as natural as possible.

As far as I’m concerned, no book should require the previous reading of other books to be enjoyable. Of course, this is not a problem that is unique to tie-in writers. Any writer who writes a series has to worry about the reader who picks it up at book seven and doesn’t know a thing about the universe or the story so far. And as far as being creatively limited by the rules of the property, any world, whether invented by the author, or by a game company, toy company, or movie, is going to establish rules about what can happen within the world and what can’t. Do you feel the same way about writers who are writing episodes for a series you like? They are bound just as we are, sometimes even tighter. Every TV show has a ‘bible’ that tells you what you can and can’t do when you write for them. I couldn’t go nuts and kill the lead characters on CSI for instance, or let the characters on Lost get off the island.

In my view, creativity comes in finding ways to do something different and exciting within the confines of the rules – kind of like writing haiku.

I have almost bought Abnett’s books many times, but always worry that a tie-in for a franchise I’m not familiar with will be harder to access than a ‘traditional’ novel because the franchise has a huge set of things that are known to the fans that might not be established for those not familiar. How do the writers of those “shared world” novels handle that?

Speaking of meeting the Moorcock challenges…

I think it speaks volumes that he says, “I’ll be doing a new Doctor Who novel (not a tie-in) for appearance, I understand, by next Christmas.” Clearly Mr Moorcock sees a difference between writing a novel in a universe created by someone else and a ‘tie-in’. I wouldn’t want to put words into his mouth, but here’s a thought – is there a difference between a direct novelisation of story told another medium (such as Alan Dean Foster’s alien) and new stories and characters created within an existing universe? As an example, I have the graphic novelisation of the Time Burton Batman movie. Is this just another Batman graphic novel like Arkham Asylum or The Killing Joke, or has it crossed over into ‘tie-in’ fiction?