What sort of rules and restrictions do you have to bear in mind when writing a media tie-in novel?
Most media tie-in novels suck This is because too often the writer doesn’t really attempt to present the characters as three dimensional. If you attempt to replicate what you’ve seen, then you’re only going to get two-dimensional characters. As I say to my frequent collaborator Tom Sniegoski all the time, "it’s one thing to know how a character is supposed to act or react in a given situation, it’s another thing entirely to know why."
So, that’s the number one rule for me.
There are a lot of writers who wouldn’t touch media tie-ins with a ten foot pole; who think it’s beneath them. What they don’t realise is that in many ways it’s another discipline completely. It’s as different from writing a regular novel of your own as writing a comic book is different from writing a screenplay. They’re similar but also very different.
In Buffy, interestingly, the was no writers Bible. There was our instinct, editor Lisa Clancy’s instinct and what Fox and Mutant Enemy would say yes or no to.
I think that to this day, I’ve never seen the bible. I know there is one, I know it exists, but I’ve never seen it. I think I’ve been really fortunate in that there are things that they’ve let me do that I know that they wouldn’t let other people. At the end of the day, however, Fox has to say yes, Mutant Enemy has to say yes. I doubt Joss really looks at the stuff all that often, but he has the ability to say no if he really wants to as well
Do you think that the publisher’s trust in you allowed you to get away with some of the stronger content in your Spike and Dru novel, Pretty Maids all in a Row?
Absolutely. The fact that that book was a hard cover still amazes me. It was only the second hard cover they’d done and it didn’t have Buffy in it, it didn’t have any of the main characters in it. It was a period horror novel.
But it was very exciting and I really do appreciate the trust that both Pocket and Fox put in me by letting me do that book. But yeah, that’s a prime example of something that might not have been as easy to get approved had somebody else pitched it.
I want to make it very clear I’m not claiming to be better than anybody else, but Nancy and I were in on the ground floor and so I think she and I both get away with things that other people might not.
