Welcome my guest, Justin Murphy, as he shares a writing tip.
Be sure to check out his Unsung Hero books!
After a two-year lag in my book sales, Gene L. Coon: The Unsung Hero of Star Trek revived them, and they’ve slowly increased ever since. He’s the lesser-known creator behind aspects of the original Star Trek. While so much is available on Gene Roddenberry, including five biographies, not much was known about Coon’s life outside the franchise, aside from tidbits here and there. I needed to go to Newspapers.com and dig through archives of his hometown publication, The Beatrice Daily Sun, and The Los Angeles Times, among others, to piece together his story.
For my subsequent books on Leslie Stevens, Jack Kirby, and the upcoming release dealing with the legendary TV Series Playhouse 90, there were more facts online to cull from and build something around these topics. Yet the concept remains and these figures are still somewhat lesser-known, since Stevens is the more obscure creator behind The Outer Limits and Battlestar Galactica. As opposed to each show’s more publicized counterpart, Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano (the former series’ more well-known creator) and Glen A. Larson (the latter’s better-known equivalent). Jack Kirby also served this function in developing and designing many of the superheroes for Marvel Comics while Stan Lee was the public face of the company.
However, my upcoming book on Playhouse 90 presents a different take on the concept, as it’s a long-forgotten TV Series and not a person. Rod Serling is best known for creating The Twilight Zone, but not for his work on earlier live anthology dramas such as the example in this paragraph. Here, he wrote the teleplays for live broadcasts like Requiem For A Heavyweight, The Comedian, and A Town Has Turned To Dust. On this series and many others, he battled sponsors and network censors for control of his scripts. This necessitated his creation of the latter series and allowed him to put into practice the idea of cloaking social issues within a genre or science-fiction context.
But you’re probably reading this thinking, ’’These sound like non-fiction examples, what do they have to do with my fiction writing?’’ Well, if you’re ideas sound like others that have been done a million times, look at your story from a different perspective. Maybe there’s a spark with a supporting character the leads aren’t displaying. By moving said supporting role to the front, you might develop something better. In fact, the biggest movie franchise in film history may have provided the impetus to approach my books in this way.
Disney built The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s success around the fact it didn’t have the film rights to the comic book brand’s more well-known characters, such as Spider-Man for Sony Pictures or The X-Men for 20th Century Fox. They erected film trilogies around lesser-known heroes – Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor allowing them to interlock these with a few films based around The Avengers. A group of superheroes including all three and The Incredible Hulk, thus starting the studio on the path of success they still enjoy today.
Justin Murphy has written both works of Fiction and Non-Fiction, many of them can be found on Amazon Kindle and Audible. A Dothan, Alabama native and longtime Central Florida resident whose best-known release, Gene L. Coon: The Unsung Hero of Star Trek, was featured and discussed at an event in the subject’s hometown of Beatrice, Nebraska. Now working on his upcoming book, Playhouse 90: The Unsung Live Television Drama, he is also developing works of crime and detective fiction, Saving Rosemary and The Alana Harrell Mysteries, each featuring characters dealing with disabilities. He hopes to find publishing outlets for these works soon.
Two Sentence Promo for Playhouse 90: The Unsung Live Television Drama:
Many know of Rod Serling’s works on The Twilight Zone but have never been exposed to his earlier material. The era of televised live anthology dramas is often forgotten yet made such a legendary series possible.
Check out Jason’s book: Jack Kirby: The Unsung Hero of Marvel.
Here are the links to Jason’s eBooks and Audiobooks.