Notes: Weapon of a Jedi, Pt. 1
Welcome to another installment of author’s notes! (if you missed them for Servants of the Empire: Edge of the Galaxy, you can start here.)
WARNING: These notes will completely spoil The Weapon of a Jedi. If you haven’t read it, stop and go here.
The Weapon of a Jedi began with an email from Lucasfilm in August 2014. Did I want to tell the story of Luke Skywalker’s first lightsaber duel, and offer readers a little sneak peek at The Force Awakens?
That was an even easier “yes” than most invitations to tell a Star Wars story. The idea was that Luke and the droids would explore a ruined Jedi temple on a jungle planet, which immediately made me smile. Luke, C-3PO and R2-D2 were the first three Kenner action figures I’d bought as a nine-year-old on Long Island. How many times had I invented a similar story back in 1978, using those figures and terrain made out of couch cushions?
Still, I admit to being a bit nervous as we filled in the details for a book with the working title of Luke Skywalker and the Lost Temple. This was Luke Skywalker – one of the most iconic characters in Star Wars, and a tricky character to get right.
He also wasn’t a Star Wars character for whom I felt a natural affinity.
I’d always been a Han guy – as a kid, I thought Luke should have run off with Han and Chewie and become a space pirate, instead of worrying about a bunch of cosmic philosophy. (I would have been a terrible rebel.) It’s not that I disliked Luke – it was more that I felt I lacked a sense of the character despite decades of watching and reading his adventures. So I had to fix that, and quickly.
An amusing aside: I confessed the above at 2015’s New York Comic-Con while sharing a microphone with Greg Rucka, who wrote the Han Solo adventure Smuggler’s Run. No sooner had I said those words than Greg leaned over and admitted he’d always been a Luke guy.
(Amusing aside to the aside: Neither of us had shared this with our editor. Writers, man.)
Anyway, I enrolled myself in Luke Boot Camp. I started by watching the classic trilogy again, concentrating on Luke’s reactions – not just what he said but his body language. How did he respond when questioned by other characters? When learning from Obi-Wan and Yoda? When being pushed to do something he disagreed with?
Two things I read unlocked Luke for me. The first was in The Making of Star Wars, J.W. Rinzler’s terrific behind-the-scenes chronicle. Mark Hamill recalled shooting the scene where Luke and Threepio intercept Artoo. Hamill played the scene angrily, only to hear George Lucas call “cut.” His advice: “It’s not a big deal.” Disagreeing with his director, Hamill delivered a deliberately “small” take, figuring Lucas would see how wrong he was. The director thought it was perfect. After that, Hamill understood his character a lot better – and nearly 30 years later, so did I.
The other moment was a TheForce.net post written by a commenter named Jedi Princess: “Luke is gentle, in a way that so few action/adventure movie heroes are.” Yep – that’s it exactly. Luke destroys the Death Star by taking Obi-Wan Kenobi’s advice to “let go” and allow the Force to guide him. Two movies later, he defeats the Sith not by using his lightsaber, but by throwing it away and awakening his father’s love for him. It’s in Empire that Luke is most like a conventional action-movie hero, spurning his teachers’ advice and rushing off to confront Darth Vader. That turns out to be a disaster: he learns a terrible secret he isn’t ready for and the friends he tried to rescue must risk their lives to rescue him.
Those two lessons prepared me for the book. (Which was good, because I had about a month in which to write it.) I felt ready, but still knew Weapon would be a challenge. A big chunk of it would be introspective, with Luke limited to Force training and the droids acting as a Greek chorus. But the story’s the story. Thinking about how to approach that, I kept coming back to fairy tales.
The frame story is set shortly before The Force Awakens, and features Jessika Pava, one of the pilots seen in the battle above Starkiller Base.
The basic beats of the frame story – a pilot, droid duty, Threepio as storyteller – came from Lucasfilm, including the funny bit about Threepio being persuaded not to tell a story everyone had heard before.
I started writing Weapon of a Jedi before the Easter eggs for The Force Awakens had been worked out with Story Group, so I left placeholders for them. I originally named the pilot Draupadi Pava, changing her first name when Story Group chose an on-screen character who’d already been named Jess because she was played by Game of Thrones veteran Jessica Henwick. (In the credits she’s Jess Testor, a detail that slipped through the cracks.)
A funny thing: I hadn’t read the script for The Force Awakens, so I assumed Artoo was busy elsewhere on the base, off in an X-wing, etc. After a couple of false starts I was told just to avoid our favorite astromech. As you might imagine, I wondered what that could possibly mean.
More bits from the prologue:
On D’Qar, Threepio mentions a long-ago diplomatic mission to Circarpous with Luke and Artoo. Hey, a reference to Splinter of the Mind’s Eye! Well, sort of – Alan Dean Foster’s ur-Legends 1978 novel starts off that way, but inferring that everything that happened in Splinter therefore “really happened” would be a continuity bridge too far.
I now think I overdid it with the Legends nods in Weapon of a Jedi – they don’t demand special knowledge or distract the reader, which is good, but less would have been more. In my defense, I knew from the start that I wanted to pay homage to two Legends tales that could plausibly claim to be Luke’s “first” lightsaber duel, so I included a nod to Splinter very early. We’ll get to the other tale later.
Note that Threepio has updated his Tranlang database and is now fluent in nearly seven million forms of communication. Who says you can’t teach old droids new tricks?
The original idea for Weapon of the Jedi hewed pretty closely to the final story: while on a mission for the Alliance, Luke senses something in the Force and is called to the planet Devaron. Dodging an Imperial patrol, he reaches the planet, discovers the Temple of Eedit and trains there. He’s interrupted by the Scavenger, who’s there to loot the temple and sees Luke as easy prey. Stormtroopers arrive soon after that, beginning a three-way game of cat and mouse. With the Imperials out of the way, Luke duels the Scavenger and defeats him.
I wanted to simplify the three-way running battle, which felt a little more like Indiana Jones than Luke Skywalker to me. And I was worried about the idea of a call to a distant planet. If the summons was vague, how would Luke know where to go? Yet specificity felt like supernatural exposition, risking letting the reader hear the gears of the plot whirring. (Let’s be honest: the ghost-in-a-blizzard scene in Empire is pretty clunky storytelling.)
My solution was to have Luke on or near Devaron in the first place. A little convenient, maybe, but it eliminated the Where to Go problem – the Force’s answer would essentially be, “Right here, dummy.” And that would let me get away with a bit more supernatural aid elsewhere – a dream or a vision of what Luke was being called to do.
I also felt it was important for Luke to reject the Force’s call at first. That’s a basic element of the heroic journey, and would also show that Luke was torn between responsibilities and identities. The destroyer of the Death Star would be an Alliance hero and recruiter, encouraged to continue along that path. But Luke would also hunger to learn about the Force as his father had – a far more difficult path considering he no longer had a teacher.
That yielded my first pass as the opening of the book: While on a mission for the Alliance, Luke refuels his Y-wing at Devaron, shakes off a funny feeling in the Force and continues on to Giju, where he meets with a resistance group of Herglics. A Herglic elder remembers the Jedi, and tells Luke he should wear his lightsaber with pride but keep in mind that having one is a death sentence under the Empire. Stormtroopers break up the meeting and Luke escapes, but feels a prickle in the Force and turns to catch sight of a mysterious figure watching him. He then delays his mission to return to Devaron, accepting that it’s where the Force wants him to go.
Not a bad start, but it would have featured a lot of standing around and unneeded exposition – neither Luke nor the reader needed a big speech about the Jedi’s value or the Empire’s drive to destroy them.
My editor, Michael Siglain, felt we needed to get Luke to Devaron a lot more quickly, and he was right – a basic principle of storytelling is to start as late as possible. So I scrapped the meeting on Giju and replaced it with Luke and Wedge in X-wings, battling TIEs above the planet. Luke’s trip to Devaron and his rejection of the Force’s call now came after the initial mission, instead of before it.
Now we started with an action beat, one that showed Luke as a starfighter ace. That was a more exciting way of showing him caught between being a rebel hero and a Jedi apprentice. To quote George, it was faster and more intense – as well as cleaner and better.
A few readers told me I’d screwed up by making Wedge Red Three and not Red Two. Nope – that was a deliberate switch based on the fact that he’s Rogue Three at Hoth.
Commander Narra first appeared in The Empire Strikes Back radio dramatization penned by Brian Daley – his death at Derra led to Luke taking command of Rogue Group. That’s a Legends nod I’d keep – from the beginning Mike and Story Group suggested using the radio dramas for background lore, which as a big Daley fan I was thrilled to do.
I introduced the idea of Alliance pilots using “scatter protocols” to avoid Imperial capture – and of Luke being assigned a more complicated pattern because of his value to the rebel cause. That was a compact, logical way to confront him with special treatment he dislikes.
I had to switch Luke from an X-wing to a Y-wing so Threepio had a ride to Devaron. The designation of the Y-wing as Y4 is a really obscure Legends reference – Y4 is the Y-wing Luke uses in the Holiday Special’s Boba Fett cartoon. Credit Pablo Hidalgo for the suggestion.
It isn’t all Legends references in this section – the prequels shape the story too. Luke’s prophetic dream about practicing in the temple was meant to echo Anakin’s dreams about Shmi and Padmé. An important part of the prequels that’s easily missed is that Anakin doesn’t have superhuman reflexes, but uses the Force to see things before they happen. That’s why his nightmares about his wife are so terrifying – he knows they’re not mere dreams but glimpses of the future.
Note also that Luke remembers advice from Obi-Wan which is word for word the counsel Qui-Gon gave Obi-Wan in The Phantom Menace. I liked the idea of Obi-Wan and Luke sitting around a campfire on the way to Mos Eisley, with the older man telling his new student not to center on his anxieties.
I also wanted dreams and visions to guide Luke – though as discussed above, I knew I had to pick my spots. I imagine the Force often manifests itself in dreams, even for non-Jedi – people’s minds would be most open to the will of the Force while they sleep. Dreams and the tricky business of interpreting them are also common elements of fairy tales, which fit the tone I wanted during Luke’s time on Devaron.
An idea I dropped was to put Luke in a cantina on Devaron so I could show how much he’d grown since his wide-eyed trip to Mos Eisley. That was scotched to steer clear of Greg’s Han Solo book – and, I presume, the scenes in Maz’s castle. I replaced the idea with putting Luke in the depot in Tikaroo, which I depicted as more like a safari lodge than a dive bar.
Luke first used the alias “Korl Marcus” in Marvel #49, “The Last Jedi.” That’s one of my favorite tales from the old Marvel days, and was an appropriate Legends story to mine for a couple of reasons: a) it’s about Luke finding an unlikely source of Jedi wisdom and b) it also begins with a journey in a Y-wing.
Next: Visions of the Clone Wars! A mysterious guide! And a creature switcheroo!