Writing over at Star Wars Interviews, Dennis Pellegrom discusses Star Wars with The Courtship of Princess Leia author Dave Wolverton.
Your first Star Wars book was The Courtship of Princess Leia. What was your inspiration while writing this book, and what directions did you get from Lucasfilm?
With this book, I had watched a goofy old comedy with my wife called Seven Brides for Seven Brothers just a couple of nights before I was asked to do the novel. I always thought that it was an interesting plot, and when I heard that Leia and Han Solo had gotten married in Zahn’s book, my first thought was, “Whoa, not so fast! There have to be some fireworks for something that significant. So I knew that I wanted to do a “romance.” I also felt that there was a lot of humor in the Star Wars movies, but I hadn’t seen it in the novels. I think that as a writer, when you get a job like this, you often start to feel pretty serious, and your sense of humor goes out the window. So I wanted to have some big, fun ideas.
As far as Lucasfilm went, they were really very generous with the franchise. They let me come up with my own plot, but they just wanted to make sure that I didn’t do anything that would cast the characters in too negative of a light. So they asked me to create and submit an outline. I had to write it very fast—almost overnight—because they were in a hurry. So I got some ideas, had a little brainstorming meeting with some of my other fannish friends, and really was able to come up with my storyline pretty quickly. Since I already knew the characters pretty well, it saved a lot of time over writing a normal novel, where you have to develop your own characters.
For the three ‘Tales of’ anthology books you wrote the stories about the Momaw Nadon, Tessek -which is my personal favorite- and Dengar. Did you get to choose the characters? And what made you pick exactly these characters?
In those tales, it was sort of “first come, first served” for us authors. There were a limited number of characters, and a limited number of authors. It was kind of luck-of-the-draw. I actually liked Momaw Nadon as a character, and so had a lot of fun. I felt as if I really lucked out. But Tessek was much harder for me to deal with. I do remember that with Dengar’s Tale, I really wanted to write about Boba Fett, but then everyone wanted him. So I took Dengar, and I ended up feeling like I really lucked out. Sine Dengar wasn’t a huge fan favorite, I got to create his background and fill it in pretty well, and it turned into one of my favorite stories.
