Spreading the Good Word
Melissa Good caused a stir earlier this year when she became the first Xena: Warrior Princess fan fiction writer to turn her hand to penning a televised episode of the show. Kate Barker caught up with the talented scribe on the set of the second episode she wrote, Coming Home, to find out what it's like to be envied by millions.
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 14
For every long-running television series there is bound to be a section of its audience that wishes a certain episode had ended differently. Some of its viewers may have wanted a couple of the lead characters to get together instead of going their separate ways at the end of an adventure. There may even be a web site, newsgroup or fan club dedicated to watching endless reruns and dissecting the subtle and hidden meanings behind the various characters' - and actors' - actions and motivation.
Fan clubs may come and go, but these days there is one phenomenon in the world of media 'fandom' that looks like it's here to stay. Whether it be Star Trek, Seventh Heaven, a cartoon or cult movie, the one thing tying them all together is the literary culture of fan fiction.
The idea behind fan fiction (or fanfic, as it is commonly known) is to take the characters of a well-known media series (usually television and most often science fiction) and write a story in which you want to see those characters involved. The practice of making the characters of Xena do what you want them to do - even if it’s only on paper - has spread across the legions of fans (known to each other as ‘Xenites’) like wildfire. One of the more popular settings for this fan fiction is a subgenre called über-Xena: the process of taking characters that resemble our heroes and putting them into a different place and time. (Of course, Pacific Renaissance has done this too, with episodes such as Yes Virginia, There is a Hercules, in which regular Hercules actors play the parts of the real-life Hercules production team, The Xena Scrolls, set in 1940s Macedonia, and Déjà vu All Over Again, a modern- day setting with the Xena cast playing descendants of their more well-known characters.)
Miami-based communications supervisor and network analyst Melissa Good is just one of the many Xenites out there furiously writing fan fiction featuring the characters (or people like them) of the Xenaverse. After several pieces of web-posted fan fiction, and having her uber-Xena novel Tropical Storm published, Good earned the respect (not to mention envy) of her fellow fan fiction writers by being invited to write two scripts of Xena’s sixth season: Legacy and Coming Home.
Good first became interested in Xena after watching the second season episode The Quest. “I was painting the wrought iron trellis in my house when it came on the television. I was covered in paint, and I couldn’t turn it off!
“I liked the blend of camp and action, and the humour,” she continues. “I’m not much for television; I mostly watch The Discovery Channel, The History Channel and those things. After I watched a few episodes of Xena, I got a story idea that stayed with a mental image of Xena and Gabrielle saving this creature that was being beaten to death and that’s how my interest in writing Xena fan fiction began.”
To date, Good has written 12 Xena fan fiction stories, totalling around 6,000 pages. “It’s mostly a cataloguing of the journey of my version of Xena and Gabrielle’s life together,” she reveals. “I’d classify it as romance with violence and subtext; sometimes it’s adult, sometimes it’s PG 13. It depends on the story. The subtext is main text (ie, they’re lovers/soulmates/partners), so it’s a part of their lives, but then so is fighting, rebuilding towns and battling warlords. So it’s just another facet.”
Good was approached by Xena producer Steven Sears to write her first script for the show. “I happen to know Steve through conventions and online chatting. He contacted me via email and said he needed to chat, so we played phone tag for half a day. Then I got hold of him at his production offices over at Sheena. He asked me if I was still a fan of Xena, and I said yes; he asked if I still watched the show, and I said yes; and then he said, ‘How'd you like to write an episode of it?’
“It was pretty amazing,” Good recalls. “Rob Tapert had gotten an idea that he wanted a fan to be involved in one of the episodes, and Steve gave him my name. I think I was caught somewhere between stunned and hopping up and down in insane excitement, and I was at work when it happened. You can’t exactly start screaming in the middle of a large office full of little cubicles. I floated home, though, let me tell you!”
Good was then required to submit samples of her writing to the show’s executive producer, Rob Tapert, so that he could determine whether her writing style would fit that of the show. “That was kind of intimidating,” she recalls. “I mean, what do you send Rob Tapert when he wants a sample of how you write his characters? What does he like? How do you know? I finally realized there’s no way I could know what he’d like, so I sent parts that I really liked, and hoped for the best.
“All the samples were Xena [i.e. not über-Xena]. Rob didn’t give me any specific feedback other than to say he liked them. He also went to my website [at www.merwolf.com] and read some more, but he didn't say which or how many.”
Once Tapert had established that he liked Good’s writing style, the next step was to decide on a storyline for her first scripted episode. “We had several phone meetings to decide on what the script would be about,” she says. “Once we’d done the background, they asked me to do a one-page synopsis, which I did. Several changes were made, then they asked me to do a beat sheet, which is a scene-by-scene breakdown of the four acts. During this process, I was working with R.J. Stewart, Rob, Mike McDonald and several others in the writing group. They really didn’t give me instructions as to a 'house style’, although they did send me several scripts and beat sheets so I could see what they looked like.
“I turned in the first beat sheet and we had several more meetings,” Good continues, “and then turned in a second beat sheet. That was all over the course of, I guess, two weeks or so. Then, after they gave me some additional notes, they told me to write the teleplay for the story. I had 10 days to two weeks to do that. I turned it in 10 days later, and we had another meeting. They gave me some changes and asked for several sections to be redone. I was asked to do two major writing changes between the first and second drafts, having to do with two pretty large plot points. They didn’t tell me how to write them, just what they wanted the outcome to be. Eventually I submitted a second, and for me, final draft of the script.
“It came out great,” Good enthuses of the final cut of Legacy. “It came out better than I could even have hoped it would. It’s a very powerful episode and I’m very proud of it.”
No doubt the producers of the show were also proud of Legacy, which prompted them to turn to Melissa Good again for another season six episode Coming Home. The episode was written and filmed in late summer, but was chosen to be the first episode of Xena’s sixth season to air in the States in early October, less than two months after shooting on the show had wrapped.
“Coming Home was an idea between Rob Tapert and I, and the original story idea is pretty much what’s ended up being filmed,” Good announces. “It’s hilarious, because it went through at least three revisions back home, then another three revisions here in Auckland, and then it went back to the original! That actually makes me feel good, because a lot of people had their fingers in it, and the fact that they eventually came back to what I originally put in the script.”
As Good had already written a Xena episode you might think that her work on Coming Home was a lot more straightforward. But the episodes are very different, and each one presented its own different challenges. “Legacy was basically a single-themed episode,” she says. “Coming Home was a combination of a lot of things. It had to combine certain elements that were required for other things that the characters were doing. Plus, at the last minute, they threw in a couple of new characters.
“Basically, we were trying to hook together a bunch of different things. It was a tougher script to get to the point where it was locked and sent. And some of the characters in Coming Home were not my characters. In Legacy, all the characters, with the exception of Xena and Gabrielle, were written by me. But Eve and Ares are in Coming Home. I left Ares completely alone and the Eve stuff to another writer because she was his character. So it was a totally different situation, and because it was a collaborative effort of pulling the show together, I never considered it my story, whereas I always thought of Legacy as my story.”
Good was required to make some additional changes to the script of Coming Home while the episode was actually being filmed. “Rob gave me some notes and had me rewriting two of the scenes,” she reveals. “But I don’t take any of that personally because so many people have had so much input into that particular script. Legacy was a little bit different; Legacy was basically 90 per cent mine and they left it as it was. So with that one they didn't ad-lib a whole lot, and basically did the script as written.”
Being on the set of Coming Home afforded Good the opportunity to get acquainted with members of the Xena cast. “I got to talk with Renee [O’Connor] for a couple of minutes,” she notes. “We talked mostly about her directing and a couple of characters that I introduced that interact with her. We had an American bonding moment, when we realised we were the only two people who put sugar in the tea cup before adding the tea!”
Good also enjoyed working with the Xena crew. “They’re the nicest people in the world to deal with,” she enthuses. “Everybody has been sweet and wonderful, from the people who fill the water jugs, all the way up to Rob. I couldn’t have asked for a nicer reception. Even from the initial stages, I was treated with the utmost respect.
“Here I am in New Zealand, living the honest-to-god dream of just about everybody that has ever been involved in fandom, and it’s been great,” she enthuses. “I get absolute joy out of writing, and writing Xena scripts and coming to New Zealand and meeting Lucy and Rob and everyone else has been a dream come true. I’m not going to lie; it’s been fantastic.”
However, Good admits that it’s a tough job being a television writer. “I’ll tell you something about this particular business: it’s a hard business. The way I got into it is unheard of. It’s unusual. It’s never happened before. I think if you want to pursue this, you really have to go to where the scene is: you have to go to LA and get an agent, and I don’t have that option at the moment. So I don’t know that I’d want to do that for a living.”
Nevertheless, Good is happy to offer some sage advice to fans who do hope to write for television for a living. “I would say to people who write, the fact that you do write is the bottom line. Eventually something will happen. If the best you ever do is write a story that makes you happy, that in itself is enough reward.”
As the conversation draws to a close, Good offers her own thoughts as to why Xena is such a successful phenomenon. “It allows different people to use it to represent what they think is their viewpoint,” she says. “It's fun and campy. It has good action and great looking actors and actresses, usually in skimpy clothing. What more can you ask for?”
While Good won’t give away any information she may have about what’s coming up in Xena’s sixth season, she can hint at the direction the show will take this year. “I think that the characters had a really rough year in season five. If people were expecting to see a season two relationship, I don’t think we’ll ever see that because the characters have gone through too much for them to ever be like that again. Will it be better this year than in season five I can say without a shadow of a doubt: yes.”
And what would Good herself like to see happen on the show? “Just once, I’d like to see both Xena and Gabrielle achieve a sense of joy. I’d like for them to both be happy, even if it’s just for the one episode.
“So many things have happened to both of them, it would be nice to see them laugh together for a change.”
Stronger Than Fiction
Melissa Good discusses the development of her über-Xena project Tropical Storm.
“I’d written Tropical Storm in a slight hiatus from Xena stories while they went through the Rift [a fan name for the intense plot line in season three of Xena], and I waited to see what they were going to do with themselves. I decided on doing an über that was really set in my personal world (Miami, technology), because it was a way of sharing my life and profession with others in a semi-entertaining way.
“Originally it was supposed to be a movie. I was contacted by LadyHawke Productions, who said, ‘We want to option Tropical Storm as a feature-length film.’ I said, ‘Okay - you want to do it, great.’ I signed this piece of paper, and I had figured my involvement with it would stop at that point. That’s usually what happens: they take the idea and go off to Hollywood and do whatever they do.
“But one day they called me and said, ‘We’d like you to write the script.’ I was like, ‘You want me to do what? I can’t write scripts! I’m a network engineer; what are you, nuts?’ They persuaded me to have a go, though, and we tried for a year and a half to put Tropical Storm into film format. But it requires more than two hours to tell the story, and there was no way in hell I could do it. So I said, ‘If you want somebody to do this, you’re going to have to hire a professional scriptwriter, because I can’t do it.’ So we went back and forth on that for a while.
“After I’d written Legacy for Pacific Renaissance, I went back to LadyHawke and talked about Tropical Storm again. I said, ‘You know what, we’ve been busting our asses trying to make this thing into a feature film. You’ve got these digitals optioned to a television network; why don’t we do this as a television series? I could do it in serial format; I write in serial format.’ It made a lot more sense for me to do scripts that way. Plus, since Legacy, I found out that I liked writing television scripts. So they said, ‘Well, let’s give it a stab; can you give us a pilot for Tropical Storm?’
“So I wrote a pilot for Tropical Storm and they loved it! We’re still working out some polishing on the script, but it was of good enough quality for them to be able to send out to publicists and people who could get it into production, which is something we were never at the stage to do with the movie version. But the pilot told the story enough for them to be able to use as a demonstration script. So it’s being marketed to Showtime and HBO for production starting in December.”
Good explains that despite being influenced by Xena, the characters in Tropical Storm - company executive Dar Roberts and manager Kerrison Stuart - have taken on a definite life of their own. “I was having a discussion with writers on the web not too long ago about what is über and what’s not über. For me, I would never say that my influence didn’t come from Xena, but that stopped influencing my writing of Dar and Kerry very early on. They stopped being über almost from the very start, but I would never deny what their source was.
“I’m not the person to ask what’s uber and what’s not. The best thing to do is to go to the ‘Whoosh!’ Xena site. It breaks down what über is and does a much better job than I could.
“For me, there’s no different process of writing. It’s all about the characters when I’m writing stories. So there’s no difference between writing Dar and Kerry and writing Xena and Gabrielle. It’s the same kind of experience for me.
“I have to use the same kinds of storytelling talents. Just because somebody else made up Xena and Gabrielle, that doesn’t make them any less my characters than Dar and Kerry when I write them. I do have more freedom when I write for my own characters - I can do whatever I want with them because their history is mine and I control everything. But the actual process of writing is the same. Some people say that it’s different, and I think it can be, depending on who you are and how you write, but for me, there’s no difference.”