Daniel José Older talks to StarWars.com about his latest release Race To Crashpoint Tower, his excellent Star Wars: The High Republic Adventures series, folding in the different threads of The High Republic storylines together and writing characters that are recently created by Project Luminous.
StarWars.com: I think there’s lots of Star Wars authors who say to themselves, “I can’t believe they let me keep it.” What is it like working, not just on your own, but with other Star Wars writers on this team for The High Republic?
Daniel José Older: It’s really fun. It’s challenging but it is fun — a dream project in a lot of ways. I really love the collaborative aspect in general. In comics, for instance, there’s working with artists and working with colorists. It’s very interesting and different to do it with writers. Basically, when it comes to characters and different people come up with them and play with them. You’re always doing that in Star Wars. By its very nature, you’re playing with someone else’s tools in someone else’s sandbox. But in this situation, we’re doing a lot more in creating the sandbox and creating the tools, but also we’re a lot more in intimate in collaboration with each other. A lot of times when you write Star Wars, you’re writing a character or a scenario or a planet that was created forty years ago or thirty years ago. That’s very different than when you’ve got someone coming up with characters a couple months ago, when you were coming up with your characters. You can call them and talk about what might happen. I think we take full advantage of that. We collaborate and connect all the dots we can.
StarWars.com: So how does that work? Do you all just call dibs?
Daniel José Older: Like with the Vessel [crew], I’ll just jump on the [authors’ group] Slack, and see what they are doing at this point. It’s like having kids and seeing if they can play together. You call up the parents and ask if they are available on a particular date in galactic history, and Claudia [Gray] will be like, “Nope, they’re not doing anything.” It’s all very informal. Because we are all responsible for the larger story, we do have to check in with each other. For the scripts for the comics issues that I do, I’ll send them over to Claudia and ask if I did her characters right, and she’ll say absolutely. Sometimes for a character like Geode — Geode is a complicated character to write. He’s a rock. It’s complicated! You have to figure out how other characters will play off him. But I’ve been wanting to have Qort from IDW Adventures and Geode hang out ever since I read Into the Dark. I was really happy to have the chance to have them in the same room together.
- Hardcover Book
- Older, Daniel José (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 208 Pages - 06/29/2021 (Publication Date) - Random House/Star Wars (Publisher)
