Hello, friends! Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writer’s Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Rebecca Douglass, Beth Camp, Liza @ Middle Passages, and Natalie @ Literary Rambles. Are you a writer? Do you feel insecure? Then this is the support group for you! Click here to learn more and to see a list of participating blogs.
Each month, the Insecure Writer’s Support Group asks us a question. The question is totally optional! IWSG member can answer it if they like, or they can talk about something else if that’s what they want (or need) to do this month. No pressure, no judgment. This month’s optional question is:
Describe someone you admired when you were a kid. Did your opinion of that person change when you grew up?
Oh boy… so I had an assignment in school once. I had to pick an American historical figure I admired and give an oral presentation on that person to the class. The teacher said we could pick anybody, so I picked Gene Roddenberry. Then the teacher said to take this seriously and made me pick somebody else. I’ve been bitter about that ever since, but now—finally!—I can satisfy little kid me’s dream and tell you why I admired Gene Roddenberry so much.
Truth be told, though, little kid me didn’t know much about Roddenberry. All I knew was that he created Star Trek, and I absolutely adored Star Trek. When I was happy, Star Trek was the most fun and exciting thing on television. And when I was no so happy, Star Trek offered hope and the promise that the future would be better than today. No matter who was bullying me at school, and no matter what I was dealing with at home, Star Trek reassured me that the future would be better.
It’s also one of the main reasons I started writing. Some of the first “books” I wrote as a kid were just Star Trek fan fiction. I then branched out into writing Jurassic Park fan ficiton, Aliens fan fiction, Star Wars fan fiction, Battlestar Galactica fan fiction, Doctor Who fan fiction…. Later, I created my own original characters and sent them off adventuring in my own original Sci-Fi universe. Meanwhile, I started reading Scientific American, Sky and Telescope, Universe Today… I tried reading more challenging, more technical sources of science info, too. I didn’t understand everything I read, but the more I learned about space and science, the more convinced I became that Star Trek got it right: the future will be better than today. Or at least, the future can be better, if we don’t lose faith in ourselves.
This isn’t a message unique to Star Trek. All Sci-Fi, regardless of how realistic or unrealistic the science may be, offers us hope for the future. Even darker, more dystopian visions of the future still offer hope, in their own way: hope that we may yet choose a different path forward.
As an adult, I’ve come to learn that Gene Roddenberry was kind of a jerk. He cheated Alexander Courage (the guy who wrote the Star Trek theme song) out of half of the royalties he was owed. He was wildly unfaithful to his wife. He had a notoriously short temper and created a toxic work environment on set. In short, Roddenberry was not the hero little kid me might have thought.
Still, Roddenberry had some good ideas, and (with the help of many other talented people) he made something that made a real difference in my life. Now more than ever, here on this blog and in all my other creative work, I hope I can pass on some of that Star Trek-ian optimism to others.
i-love-space.com 
People are imperfect. Just remember his amazing creations.
We share many of the same influences on our writing.
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🙂
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One of the podcasts I listen to, The Writer Files, always asks writers who are being interviewed a “fun” question at the end. If they could have dinner with any other author, living or dead, who would it be? I’m glad I’ve never had to answer it, because I’ve long been aware of the danger in meeting my heroes.
I wonder what your teacher would have said if you’d chosen Ernest Hemmingway or Mark Twain. If they were fair game, I would have thought Roddenberry would be too. Maybe it was TV or sci-fi that turned them off.
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I seem to remember other kids doing pop culture icons, like Elvis or Madonna, or sports figures like Babe Ruth. So yeah, I really don’t know what the problem was.
On the upside, I later had to do a presentation in art class on a famous artist, and the art teacher let me do Matt Jefferies. I remember that being a super fun project.
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Yeah, if Elvis and Madonna were allowed but Roddenberry wasn’t, I think I would have been bitter too.
The art teacher sounds like they were a lot more fun.
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Maybe your teacher didn’t know who Gene Roddenberry was and didn’t want to admit it!
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Maybe. Though if that were the case, I think my teacher’s response would have been “Who’s that?” rather than “No, pick someone serious.”
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Star Trek, the original series and movies to be exact, kept me going to during those dark isolating high school years. When all hope seemed to be lost at the end of the school week, ST would lift me up. It’s definitely been a modern day myth, as Joseph Campbell would put it, to live by! And I still do live by it.
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It wasn’t until much later that I was introduced to the work of Joseph Campbell and finally realized that my love of Sci-Fi had some academic merit after all.
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Happy New Year and thanks for stopping by my blog. I can totally believe that teacher said that to you. I’m still sorry it happened. I love your assessment of Roddenberry at the end of this post. I always look forward to your assessments and point of view.
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Thank you, friend! On some level, I do kind of get why my teacher did that. At the same time, though, he went out of his way to say we could pick anybody, and he allowed some other kids to do athletes or singers, like Babe Ruth or Madonna. So I felt like I was singled out, and it felt pretty unfair.
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Ha ha, way to right the wrong done to you by the teacher and now sing the praises of your childhood hero! I also started writing through fan fiction, which provided a nice structure of characterization to spin my own stories.
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I feel like a whole lot of people got into writing via fan fiction. It’s a good gateway drug, so to speak.
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Optimism and hope – yes! We need both so much in our turbulent present. Sometimes, the hope that tomorow will be better is all that sustains me in my problems-ridden today.
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I’ve read that it is best not to have heros. Growing up one of my biggest heros was John Wayne. But after growing up and learning of his real personality and intolerances, I can’t even bear to watch one of his films now. And I try to have hope for the future, but it is farther down the line than I like to think, because the immediately coming years look lilke they are going to be very tough going.
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Oof. Yeah, I’m sorry about John Wayne. That’s a rough one.
I do still have heroes, but most of them are fictional. It’s usually safer that way.
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