"By contrast, in dealing with a licensed property, you're necessarily playing by someone else's rules. No matter how much it would fit the story, the Enterprise is never going to sport 20-inch spinning rims and cruise down to the LBC. The secret, he says, 'is to find a meeting point between the IP and whatever it is that keeps you personally inspired, so that you're both honoring peoples' expectations of the work and giving them something new and fresh that comes from the heart. ... That's also the hard part. But all writing is hard.'"

Shannon Drake talks to Robin Laws, game designer and Star Trek novel writer.

All Writing Is Hard