Q & A with David Spencer, author of The Novelizers
Interview conducted by Daniel Marcus
Q: You say you wrestled with the title of your book. The Novelizers. How so?
A: Because it’s not only about the history and writers of novelizations, per se, but of original novels set in the borrowed universes of established franchises—especially TV series. And writing an original is a completely different task than writing an adaptation. Unfortunately, there’s no simple term for it. And “novelization” has become a colloquial catch-all for both, so for the title, I gave in to the term simply being catchy and concise. But the actual book always makes the distinction and devotes discreet chapters to each category.
Q: Can you make the distinction, here, between a novelization and an original tie-in novel?
A: Sure. Typically a novelization is the transposition of a dramatic work—play, screenplay, teleplay—into novelistic prose. But transposition is a very loose word for it, for there are as many ways to adapt a script into a novel as vice versa. It depends upon many factors, but the primary ones are, as with any adaptive work, the sensibility and artistry of the writer doing the adapting.
And an original novel borrows the characters and concepts of an established storytelling universe toward the creation of an all-new tale. Ideally one that has the aesthetic of an episode, but that can, of course, explore things in novelistic depth, offer more complex plotting, and do it all with the unlimited budget of the imagination.
But whatever the task is, my contention is that good tie-in writing is literature as legitimate as any other, and that the writers of it are due that appreciation.
Q: You’ve spend the last 40-plus years of your life working in the musical theatre, and spending most of that time as a composer-lyricist and lyricist-librettist. You also have for many years written an online theatre column; a well-read website for people interested in (or in) the theatre. So after these decades writing for and about the theatre—why this subject? Why this book? And why now?
A: This subject because these kinds of books have fired my imagination and fueled my creative life since I discovered them—and realized what a fantastic gateway they were to some substantial writers—pulpsmiths, literati, mainstream bestsellers, genre specialists, journalists, you name it—whom I might never have come across otherwise. Many of whom had as much influence on my voice as the greats of musical theatre. And it always pissed me off that these books were often looked down on or dismissed as hackwork, when they’re anything but—proportionately no more nor less than in any other category of writing—and I always rose to defend them, and the astonishing authors who wrote the best of them, because they clearly cared about the work they were doing.
Then I had my own adventure as a tie-in writer. I’m skipping over a ton of discursive anecdotal backstory, but in the early ’90s I read a press-release story about Pocket Books’ plan to release a series of eight novels—three adaptations of unfilmed teleplays, five originals—based on the combo cop/science-fiction TV series Alien Nation, which I adored. It had been canceled after only one season, but the Pocket editor, Kevin Ryan (then head of their dedicated Star Trek department) thought it was “too good to let die”; and he was right—so I wrote three chapters and an outline for one of the original slots. Which, ironically was also the de facto novelization of a story I’d worked on to pitch to the actual show…and made the sale. Writing it was one of the most exhilarating experiences I’ve ever had—took about six weeks—and it was published as Alien Nation #6: Passing Fancy. It got a couple of good reviews—the editor hadn’t expected any reviews at all, not for the sixth book based on a canceled TV series—and it was a very popular entry.
But as importantly, it was my entry, my de facto membership card, to the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers (IAMTW), which was co-founded and originally led by award-winning, bestselling novelists Lee Goldberg (who was also a teleplay scripter and showrunner) and Max Allan Collins—who had written many dozens of tie-ins between them. And via things like email discussions and Facebook posts, I quickly became known as the answer man about vintage-era paperback tie-ins (the particular vintage being late ‘50s through the ‘90s).
Not long after, Lee was soliciting contributions for an anthology of essays he’d be editing, called Tied In—about professional tie-in writing. Most of the pieces centered on personal experiences and viewpoints, but I decided to dive into a part of the history I loved most—and delivered a lively essay about original TV tie-ins from the ‘50s through the ’70s …and Lee was so taken with it that he began a ten-year-long campaign to get me to write the definitive book on tie-in writing. (That essay, mildly revised, is now Chapter 7 of The Novelizers and is the seed whence everything else sprang.)
Q: Ten years? What made you resist for a whole decade?
A: Well, that kind of brings us to “why now?”
At first, the history of tie-in writing seemed too niche a subject, despite my passion for it…yet during that time, I slowly amassed a number of individual essays I’d been asked to write (in one case, volunteered to write) on the subject.
Then Ben Ohmart, publisher of Bear Manor, also a member of various book groups Lee and I were in (I think also IAMTW), just volunteered that if I wanted to write the book, he wanted to publish it. And I thought, Well, I’ve already done a substantial amount of work that could form the nucleus of a book, so as long as I can devise a thematic spine and a structure for it…okay, why not?
And this was buttressed by a development that was only in its nascent stages ten years previously—the fact that ebooks (legit and fan conversions) have made so much of the classic stuff available anew—and have so much potential to bring back more and more. That, in addition to the rest, made the notion of a book feel much more alive and “now” to me. The timing and the universe were in sync for it. And of course so was I.
Q: When did you catch the tie-in bug? How and with what book and I’m curious to know if you still have it?
A: At first, the tie-in bug bit me via originals. (And yes, I still have most of them and most still in mint condition.) The Addams Family by Jack Sharkey may have been the first; then the Get Smart! series by William Johnston, overlapping with the I Spy series (my favorite of all time, still) by Walter Wager as “John Tiger.”
I’m not sure I can remember the first script adaptations I loved, but I think I got to them via the original writers who also novelized: William Johnston, Michael Avallone, Lou Cameron…but by then the train was roaring out of the station—if there was a tie-in, most of the time I wanted to own it and read it.
But it was always as much about getting more of authors I loved or discovering new ones. And in writing The Novelizers, I got back in touch with that, with what it meant to me to make discovery upon discovery. Lee Goldberg gave me the loveliest blurb, in which he said that I’d “written the definitive book on the subject, one that's as entertaining (and surprisingly, unabashedly personal) as it is deeply informative.” And what he observed was, on my part, entirely intentional—it became the foundation for the theme and structure I mentioned earlier.
Q: Common author question whose answer is seemingly very specific to each writer. Do you have a readership (or a particular kind of reader) in mind when you write?
A: Let me work backwards from the punch line, which is that I very consciously want The Novelizers to be for everybody, not just people interested in the subject. I saw it as an opportunity to shed an enthusiastic, celebratory, intimate, candid—and absolutely, deeply human—light on a major aspect of popular culture that had never before received that kind of attention.
But to answer your question as to whether I ever have a target audience in mind. Yes and no. It depends on the project. My theatre stuff is obviously not for reading, per se, but it has to communicate, whether it’s the stuff I wrote for Theatreworks, who specialize in shows for younger audiences, or the quote/unquote “adult” material. Musicals are very complex and there’s too much to particularize in this Q & A about how they’re built (or should be)—but the bottom line is that you have to keep the audience not only interested but concentrating.
And it’s the same with prose. Daniel, you were maybe the first to read an early draft of The Novelizers, and in a sense, you and a few others I call my Cadre of Merciless First Readers were akin to the workshop, preview or out-of-town audience that might attend a musical in development. When you cited places where you “checking out,” I took all that very seriously—especially because you were able to tell me why. In fact, you gave me one of the key notes, because it shifted a paradigm for. In my fervor to make my case, I had been frontloading so much data that the very intro was bogging down. I think your exact comment was, “That’s all back-of-the-book stuff.” Whereupon I realized that what I had written as my intro was in fact my conclusion. And it was liberating. Embracing that notion gave me permission to—as musical theatre director Tommy Tune used to say about routining a production number to a big finish—“deal it out slow”…because knowing where I would finish let me draw a straight line backwards to the beginning. And “all” I had to do was follow that path toward my destination.
But you, Daniel, as a test reader brings me back to the punch line. This book is for everyone. You had no particular prior interest in the genre or its history, notwithstanding particular tie-ins you liked growing up, and it was very important to me to keep a reader like you as engaged as the reader who comes to the book loving the stuff as much as I.
I recently heard newsman Keith Olbermann say something very key in one of his recent Countdown podcasts. A master of broadcasting told him, when he was just starting out, that radio commentary is not effectively aimed at listeners plural. What you as broadcast pundit should do, the master said, is bring the single listener in, tell the story as if you’re speaking just to him. I can’t say I did that altogether consciously in The Novelizers, but the book, for me, is indeed an act of literary intimacy. And my mission is to make each reader a fellow traveler, walking uniquely alongside me.
Q: There was a moment when John Le Carre’s books crossed the line from being considered simply espionage/spy thrillers to being thought of as mainstream modern literature. The earthquake in modern literary crossovers may have happened in 1992 when Art Spiegelman won the Pulitzer in biography for Maus, his long-form graphic novel about his father as a prisoner of the Nazis in the death camps; using what was considered a trivial format to tell the most serious possible tale. Are you likewise writing to pull the tie-in genre out of the niche category and into the mainstream?
A: After a fashion, very much. But after a fashion, it’s already mainstreamed in terms of popularity and its millions of fans. I’m writing to blast away the shadow of illegitimacy that still hovers over it. Tie-in writing is as an important force in English language letters, whose thousands of spectacularly gifted authors—who range from the obscure to the ultra-famous, the pulparific to the astonishingly literary—are worth knowing about and caring about; and whose work in the field is worth consideration, reconsideration and preservation. And, not to put too fine a point on it—what am I saying, fine-pointing is exactly what I’m doing—whose work is not only entertaining to its lay audiences, but brilliantly instructional (by way of example) about all aspects of craft—for aspiring and pro writers alike.
Q: How long did it take you to do the writing? Did you find in the process moments when you had to “kill your babies” and throw out wonderful stories or some of your best pieces of writing for the good of the book? If so, how did you make those difficult decisions?
A: That didn’t really apply here, save for the restructuring and re-examination I referenced above. In fact, The Novelizers kept growing. The British Book of the Film series featured in it, was originally just an along-the-way reference in what is now chapter 3. But the detour kept getting longer and longer and I finally realized it had a rich history that deserved its own examination—and a chronicle of Book of the Film became chapter 2.
Likewise, just when I thought I was done with the whole thing, I realized I ought to have a chapter on writing tie-ins for younger readers, since that’s so much a part of the landscape…and as I was in the center of that, I realized I should also have a chapter on novelizing the miniseries. Which was, I think, the final piece of the puzzle
The biggest challenge was making the whole thing of a piece. Most of that centered on massaging three essays of the pre-existing material. The profile of Stuart James (of the early ‘60s, not to be confused with the current popular novelist) is the only one in the book that examines a full career beyond the author’s tie-ins. However, in the original version of the essay (for The Stuart James Reader, a three-book omnibus), I was constrained from excerpting his novelization work; I could only allude to it; but in the revision of his profile for The Novelizers, I could celebrate it—which strengthened its core purpose and provided the balance.
Harder, though, was Chapter 9, on British tie-ins and the Powys Media Space: 1999 series—originally written as an afterword to one of their releases—whose background build-up covered much of the same ground as the top of Chapter 7, my Tied In historical essay. I couldn’t cut all of the overlap or the chapter wouldn’t make sense. So I had to figure out how much cutting I could get away with and how to revise the “getinta”—the point of entry.
I think as well that The Novelizers kept growing because I wasn’t telling my stories. I was telling the history of the books and the practitioners and their methods of approach—their stories. Telling it my way and with my passion for it, but to honor them. And I felt compelled to be comprehensive.
What kept me additionally on track—which hearkens again to your “back-of-the-book” diagnosis…was the realization that any sidebar becoming discursive or pulling focus could be reconceived as an endnote. Which gave me a nice little end section of focused sub-essays, that the reader could take in at his leisure or not at all, with no harm to the full experience of the ride the book takes you on.
Q: I imagine that there are those in the literature biz who in hearing about your subject say “Novelizations?? TV novels?? Tie-ins?? That ain’t writing!” I felt in reading your book that one of the driving forces underneath it is quashing such attitudes once and for all. Anything in that?
A: Not just anything but everything. The very first two sentences in the book are: “Media tie-in writing is literature. Real literature.” That’s the sum total of the thesis. And the book’s beating heart.