lazypadawan | Why it's hard to write a good book about Star Wars

One of my favorite sub-hobbies is reading stuff about SW from a variety of angles. It ranges from official sources like the behind-the-scenes material to books about the mythology of SW to books about SW from a Christian standpoint. When the books are good, they make for fascinating reading. You not only learn new things about a very familiar story, you can also learn new things about stuff like Taoism or Buddhism.

I try to be selective about these things which is why most of the books I've actually bought and read have been worthwhile to some degree. I'm looking to get another one soon called "Star Wars Jesus" (another Christian book) and at some point I plan to get "Droidmaker," which was written by a former Lucasfilm employee. The official "The Making of Star Wars" comes out in May.

The truth is though for every "The Dharma of Star Wars" or "Star Wars: The New Myth" there's a half dozen books that I've passed on or left on the shelf. I avoided Garry Jenkins's "Empire Building" like the plague after friends told me about its tabloid content. I steered clear of Will Brooker's "The Force of the Fans" after I found out it basically leaned toward a basher's viewpoint. Unfortunately, a few disappointments slip through into my hands. One recent example was "Star Wars On Trial," where David Brin and Friends use SW as a whipping boy for every conceivable problem. Then there is "Finding The Force of the Star Wars Franchise: Fans, Merchandise & Critics," which I've just finished reading. It's a collection of essays about a whole lot of aspects of SW with no real sense of cohesion and if you're either a fan of the whole series or lean anywhere to the right of Karl Marx, it will often make you want to pull your hair out. You can only imagine the teeth-grinding it induced in me.

Not all of it threatened to induce a coronary. The essay on the Jedi and religion was actually quite interesting; the author touched on a subculture of people who view "Jedism" as a real religion. That alone would be worth a book even if I have a big issue with that sort of thing (according to the essay, the Jedism religionists seem to have their own issues with SW fans). There was a short piece on collecting that was rather nice. But the rest of it? Eeeek! A couple of essays were so caught up in academic/ideological jargon, they were boring to read. Others are seriously hung up on identity politics. Can you believe there's a piece about CGI and "the white man's perspective?" There's the de rigeur piece about those wretched gender roles and because it is after all 2007, there's an essay about all of the gay subtext. Slash fans might like that one, but I kept hearing in my head that song from "The Producers": keep it gay, keep it gay, keep it gay. One moron actually quoted the notorious Supershadow as a source. Another guy who apparently didn't like Joseph Campbell wrote about how Lucas must've been personally disappointed with Campbell, even though the author admits he has no proof other than Lucas taking on politics in the saga (something Campbell shied away from in his role as a professor). The most infuriating chapter is written by a chap who cannot differentiate between homages paid in pop culture or the SW Fan Film Awards or fan fiction and the outright insults of say, "The Phantom Edit."

A couple of days ago I heard about a 400-page PDF "book" about SW, written by a TFN poster supposedly exposing the "secrets" of how the movies were made, but seemed to me little more than cut and paste of conveniently culled interviews to prove that Lucas is some sort of malicious liar.

All of this made me wonder...just what would I, as a fan, tell someone who wants to write a book about SW that doesn't stink?

1. It helps if you actually like SW and are somewhat knowledgable about the phenomenon.

2. It helps if you have a respectful attitude toward the material, the folks who worked on it, and the fandom. A book doesn't have to be hagiography to be good (in fact, it's annoying in its own way), but writing a hit job on Lucas or berating the fans for their devotion to the series won't win over the only people who are likely to be your readers.

3. Don't use SW to push your agenda. Writing from a particular perspective is fine, but don't try and twist SW into something it isn't just to pimp a cause.

4. If you're going to write "behind-the-scenes" material or "the true story" of SW, it helps if you have first-hand access to those who worked on the films and documentation on the making of those films.

5. If you're going to write about SW from a psychological, religious, political, social, etc. perspective, it helps if you are knowledgable about that perspective.