Want to Write for Star Trek?
Star date 7.9.2014, Captain’s Log – Content marketing: a growing primary marketing platform to educate, inform, advocate and persuade. Rightly developed and applied with discipline, content marketing creates memorable stories and images that fashion power brands, change minds, create brand disciples, and move product and services.
So what does that all have to do with writing for Star Trek? 
First aired in 1966, the original Star Trek was promised by creator and visionary Gene Roddenberry to be a “wagon train to the stars.” Amazing in retrospect, its first pilot, a majestic and but incredibly expensive and off-target production about thought control, led to the series being cancelled before it even began. Breaking tradition, a second pilot was ordered by NBC, the series acquired its fabled characters, and a legend was born. But instead of a galactic wagon train, a 23rd century Horatio Hornblower took on a five-year mission through the galaxy.
The show still had rocky travels, reflecting what Variety magazine confidently predicted in 1966: Star Trek “won’t work.” It was cancelled again after its third season, but mirroring the TOS “Tribbles,” it grew dramatically and relentlessly in syndication to spawn a multi-billion-dollar franchise.
So why are the original late 1960s programs – now dubbed “The Original Series” (TOS) – still best sellers on DVDs and online movie platforms like Netflix? How did the franchise command an astonishing $2 million production budget per episode for the Next Generation series (more than $356 million in total)?
Red alert – shields up! Perhaps the answer in part lies in an unswerving content roadmap for the original series. Every scriptwriter coming, ahem, aboard in 1966-1969 was given a copy of the Star Trek Guide. The Guide had seven laws that out-weighed the Prime Directive. More powerful than anti-matter, they ensured that Star Trek episode content would be timeless. Judging by the millions of devoted fans, multiple-millions of dollars in revenue, scores of awards and recognition, they obviously worked.
The esteemed “Seven Rules” are as relevant today as they were nearly 50 years ago.
So what are they? As related in the 1968 book The Making of Star Trek (Stephen Whitfield/Gene Roddenberry) and warping out of the near-sacred Star Trek Guide, here are seven gold-plated rules of 23rd century content development (in excerpted form):
- Build your episode on an action-adventure framework. We [Star Trek scriptwriters] must reach out, hold and entertain a mass audience of some 20,000,000 people or we simply don’t stay on the air.
- Tell your story about people, not about science and gadgetry…
- Keep in mind that science fiction is not a separate field of literature with rules of its own, but, indeed, needs the same ingredients as any story…jeopardy of some type…climactic build, sound motivation, you know the list.
- Then, with that firm foundation established, interweave in it any statement to be made about man, society, and so on. Yes, we want you to have something to say, but say it entertainingly…we don’t need essays, however brilliant. [nobody did this in a prime time television show in the 1960s]
- Remember always that Star Trek is never fantasy; whatever happens, no matter how unusual or bizarre, [each episode] must have some basis in either fact or theory and stay true to that premise…
- Don’t try to tell a story about whole civilizations…
- Stop worrying about being a scientist. How many cowboys, police officers, and doctors wrote Westerns, detective and hospital shows?
Does your 21st century content tell compelling stories of human drama? Is it memorable? Does it reflect the above incredibly successful model? Does it go where no one has gone before?
By Michael Snyder, Managing Principal, The MEK Group