At San Diego Comic-Con, Hypable had the opportunity to talk about the upcoming Star Trek book, The Autobiography of James T. Kirk with author David A. Goodman.

About ‘The Autobiography of James T. Kirk’

The Autobiography of James T. Kirk chronicles the greatest Starfleet captain’s life (2233–2371), in his own words. From his birth on the U.S.S. Kelvin, his youth spent on Tarsus IV, his time in the Starfleet Academy, his meteoric raise through the ranks of Starfleet, and his illustrious career at the helm of the Enterprise, this in-world memoir uncovers Captain Kirk in a way Star Trek fans have never seen. Kirk’s singular voice rings throughout the text, giving insight into his convictions, his bravery, and his commitment to the life — in all forms — throughout this Galaxy and beyond. Excerpts from his personal correspondence, captain’s logs, and more give Kirk’s personal narrative further depth.

David A. Goodman Interview

Tell us five interesting facts about yourself.

Five interesting facts? Uhhh. I’m not that interesting, that’s the first fact.

Five interesting facts… no one has ever asked me that before. Well, I’m a huge Star Trek fan, that’s a big fact about myself. I think it’s interesting.

I’m from New Rochelle, New York, which historically is the home of Rob Petrie, the character that Dick Van Dyke played on The Dick Van Dyke Show — and as such, I grew up in the town and then became a sitcom writer, like Rob Petrie. Although I never had any intention of doing that. I’ve been a comedy writer for 27 years. I never intended to be a comedy writer.

When I was in high school I wanted to be President of the United States. I was disabused of that pretty quickly.

I’m going to come up with one more… My Uncle worked on the Atomic Bomb. There we go!

Which do you find easier, writing the first line or writing the last?

Always writing the last line. Starting work is always the hardest thing for me. To sit down and write, and sort of facing the terror of a blank page is always really difficult. One of the things that I’m best at is procrastinating.

To finally sit down and do it, I have to reach a level of panic that I’m not working to finally work. And it really is just about finding that — giving yourself that permission to write, so that by the last line, I’m usually so behind schedule that I’m rushing the entire time, and I never have any trouble writing the last line. The first line is very tough.

What was your first introduction to ‘Star Trek?’

When I was a kid I had two cousins. One in particular was an older cousin of mine who was a bit of a mentor to me as a kid and he liked Star Trek. And that was really it. The fact that he mentioned liking Star Trek got me interested in trying to watch this thing. Then I had another cousin who was the same age that I was and he was a big science fiction geek, and I wanted to do the stuff that he wanted to do. That was how I found my way in.

When I was a kid in the ’70s, Star Trek was on every night. I could eat dinner in five minutes. For some reason my mother always served dinner at five to six, and I ate dinner in five minutes because we didn’t have VCRs.

I started watching Star Trek, probably in junior high school, sixth grade. I tried to watch every episode. It became very important to me to watch every episode.

How differently did you approach writing this book to ‘Star Trek Federation: The First 150 Years’?

There was a similarity in the way I approached the book in that I’m dealing with years of canon, the TV shows, the movies. You start there, from a place of ‘what information is out there,’ and then I’m going to be filling in the blanks.

Star Trek Federation was much more mechanical, figuring out this piece of information or history needs to be filled in, and I’ve got to connect it to this piece of history. And I was always trying to make it interesting — bringing up quotes of people, famous people, or whatever.

With the Kirk book, I had to find a way to make a character that people already love have human depth. That was the hardest part, because there are all these events and William Shatner plays the role so well, he embodies it, you’ve seen it. You’ve seen this guy. And so the really hard thing to do is how do I add details that are going to be interesting, that are going to make him more human, that aren’t going to contradict this very strong presence of this character — this character that we’re so familiar with.

And the thing that I found, that was my first way into the book, was a realization that for the entire three seasons of The Original Series, if we look at Wrath of Khan, James Kirk is an absent father. He has a child off somewhere that he’s not seeing, and there are all these father-son moments in The Original Series — between Kirk and young officers, or Kirk and children on planets. And suddenly you see this possibility of ‘Is this thing weighing on him?’ Because, as a father and a son, you understand the power of that relationship.

I think that adds a power of character to James Kirk that we haven’t seen. What was that experience for him? And then, what led to it? How did it get there? And then it was the fun of populating it with characters that have been mentioned, characters that have been seen — like Ben Finney, who is his friend from the Academy, who eventually tries to kill him, what was that relationship like?

But it was really about finding a humanity that hadn’t been found before, that also didn’t contradict this character. That enhanced it.

Did you work as closely with CBS on this book, or did you have a little more creative freedom?

Both times I was pretty independent, in the sense that CBS understands that they’ve hired, if not the biggest, one of the biggest Star Trek fans who works professionally as a writer. So I talked to John Van Citters a lot at CBS, who is also a big Star Trek fan, and I would always run things by him if I wanted to try something that might be risky.

But they really trusted me, because when I handed them the finished product they didn’t really have any problems with it. They may have questions, but my goal is to service Star Trek, to service the fans, because I’m one of them. I don’t want to write something that would piss me off as a fan if I read it.

Did writing ‘Star Trek Federation: The First 150 Years’ help as a reference point for this book?

It did. A lot of the work I did in Federation definitely helped me with this book. There was this mention in The Original Series of this disaster on a planet called Tarsus IV, and for Federation I had to figure out Tarsus IV in a way that made sense. Because that episode makes no sense in its description of Tarsus IV.

There’s this Governor on the planet and only nine people know what he looks like. Now, think about that for a minute. It makes no sense. It served the story of that episode, “The Conscience of the King,” but I had to make it make sense from a science fiction standpoint. What is a world where you can have the leader of the world, in the future, and people wouldn’t know what he looks like? That helped create that character. And that character that I created in Federation, you see in more depth in Kirk’s book. Because he’s a kid experiencing this tragedy first hand.

Are you glad that you did it that way around? That you wrote ‘Federation’ first?

Yes. I had never written a book before. With Federation I’d never written a book, and I kept saying to everybody, ‘You guys know I’ve never written a book, right?’ That was a good first book because it was in pieces, and I had to figure out a narrative, but I didn’t have to figure out a story in the same way as Kirk’s book.

Here I had to figure out what is Kirk’s story, and it was a big undertaking and I’m very glad I did that one. Because in Federation I was figuring out a lot of little stories, that created kind of a tapestry, whereas in this book I wanted a sense of who this guy was at the beginning of his life, who was he at the end, and how does that make sense for Star Trek fans watching the show?

On Page 2: Starfleet Academy, the relationship between Kirk and McCoy, and the legitimacy of fanfiction

What inspired you to tell Kirk’s story in particular?

You know, this book was not my idea. It was the idea of a friend of mine, Dave Rossi, who worked at Star Trek: Enterprise with me. I think that Kirk is sort of this great hero character. I mean, one of the things that people don’t really think about in terms of the popularity of Star Trek is that Kirk’s a real hero in the traditional sense. So, he lives for a lot of people. Like Sherlock Holmes, like Superman. It’s an iconic character, as is Spock.

Kirk is a good character to take on because he didn’t live that long, and his life is defined already time wise. But for me, Captain Kirk has always been my favorite character on Star Trek, and I loved the idea of trying to make him a more ‘full’ human being.

Which aspect of Kirk’s past did you especially enjoy expanding on?

I think, probably, the thing that I spent a lot of time on, because I thought it was really important, was Starfleet Academy. It was mentioned a lot in The Original Series, and it was clear that Gene Roddenberry was really drawing from experiences that he’d had of the police academy. He had written for a show called West Point, which was about West Point, which I got a hold of and I was just watching episodes.

Then I read a lot of military biographies, of guys who’d gone to West Point, or the naval academy — Generals like Norman Scwartzkopf and Dwight Eisenhower. Because whenever I’d seen Starfleet Academy portrayed, either in books or even Star Trek: Next Generation, I’d always been a little disappointed. Because clearly Roddenberry’s view of the Academy was that he had a warts-and-all kind of feel to it.

Kirk was bullied at the Academy by Finnegan, and I wanted that idea that this was an Academy that says, ‘Okay the rest of the Federation is a paradise, but we need the people that are going to be in Starfleet to be able to follow orders.’ So I wanted to create this place where you could believe it existed within the Star Trek universe, that it wasn’t such a negative place that you couldn’t believe existed, but it had a purpose. An education for Kirk, to go from this farm boy to the man he becomes when he leaves the Academy.

That was probably the thing I took most seriously as a writer. I want Starfleet Academy to feel like it exists. Because, as a fan, I’ve always been disappointed in its portrayal. How does Starfleet Academy work, was my question, and I was trying to answer that question. And I think I have.

Were there any relationships that you loved exploring between the characters?

The relationship with Kirk and McCoy was a relationship I enjoyed, and I found a connection that I feel like no one else had found. Because, as I said before, Kirk for his whole Starfleet career was this absent father. Anybody that knows anything about The Original Series knows that part of McCoy’s backstory is he’s an absent father. And the moment where these two men find that connection is, to me, a great moment in the book and a great moment that I found. Here are these two guys, serving together, they don’t really like each other, there’s a bit of conflict between them and then through a series of happenstances they discover this connection and have this moment.

The other thing that I’m very proud of is how Kirk came up with the name Bones. It’s not how it is in J.J [Abrams]’ movie, because in my mind Bones was a shortening of Sawbones, which is an Old West name for a doctor. I wanted something to happen in these guys’ experience where Kirk would coin that nickname, and I’m very happy with that as well, in what I came up with. It involves Gary Mitchell, and it’s a fun sequence.

And then, I had a lot of fun with exploring Kirk and Spock together, in the past, in the 1930s. The thing about “City on the Edge of Forever” is that it’s never clear how long they’re back there. It’s a few weeks at least, maybe a couple of months, and I read Harlan Ellison’s original draft, and I think emotionally he got to something a little truer than the episode — which is Kirk would not want to let this woman die. So I took a little from that, and make the point that this is going to be the regret for the rest of his life and it’s going to affect how he has romantic relationships for the rest of his life. That’s another thing I had fun with.

Do you think books like this being published professionally will open the door to more understanding and respect for fanfiction?

Well, there have been these kinds of books all the time. Fanfiction, to me, is connected to the licensed Star Trek books that have been out since the show went off the air.

I think Twilight is the best example of the legitimacy of fanfiction. You know, writers are writers and the good ones rise to the top. I don’t read a lot of fanfiction, but I do think that anybody out there trying to write these characters, and finding original fiction, may find their way to doing it professionally.

It’s really about the individual writer. Because I don’t think CBS, or whoever owns the licensing for Star Trek, is against these fan created things. There’s fan productions of Star Trek all over the web. CBS doesn’t sue, doesn’t say shut it down. They let it go, and I think they’re happy that there’s this community that explores this stuff, and then the people who’ll be professionals will find their way to be professionals.

What character would you like to see a fictional autobiography written about?

That’s a good question.

There’s a biography of James Bond, written by an author called John Pearson. It’s a British book. It’s a great book. It’s as close to that, but that was written a number of years ago. The idea of someone trying to, now, in the modern age, a modern author doing the autobiography of James Bond, I think would be pretty cool.

Thinking about could you possibly say that one guy is the same guy in Dr. No, that’s in Skyfall. Is that possible? And that, to me, the author that cracks that, I would love to see that book.

Because that was the other thing that I took on in this book was that I have a sense of humor about a lot of stuff. There’s stuff that doesn’t make sense, and I call it out, without breaking the fourth wall of the book. Because there’s a lot of stuff in Star Trek that doesn’t make sense.

How I deal with Star Trek V in the book is also a personal triumph. It’s a very funny take on it, and it’s very subtle. You might miss it if you go past it. But Star Trek V is a Star Trek movie — Kirk, Spock, McCoy, they’re all in it. So I have to address what is Star Trek V. And I do address it, and I think I’m very clever about it.

About the author

David A. Goodman is an American writer and producer and a graduate of the University of Chicago. He was one of the executive producers of Family Guy, beginning its fourth season, joining the show as a co-executive producer in season 3. He was also a writer for several television series, such as The Golden Girls (his first job), Futurama (where he was also a co-executive producer, and writer of the famous Futurama Star Trek parody episode “Where No Fan Has Gone Before”) and Star Trek: Enterprise.

You can follow David A. Goodman on Twitter. The Autobiography of James T. Kirk will be released on September 8, 2015. You can pre-order it from Amazon now.