Pilots Wanted


 * Come you knights and come you pilots
 * with your ships and sabers shining,
 * come and stop your children crying
 * Come and join the Rebel Fleet!
 * Come with might and come with glory!
 * Set your dreams on wings a-soaring!
 * Hear the ancient hidden story
 * Come and join the Rebel Fleet!
 * —Come You Knights by Sheila Willis

Greet'ns. So Star Wars: Squadrons was unveiled a while back, and in the run-up to its release, I've imagined more than a few people have had notions of Rebel pilot characters forming in the backs of their minds. An identity behind the chosen face and suit; a history, an attitude, a reason for giving up the safety of conformity to fight the Galactic Empire. Problem is, once you have that character, what do you do with them? Well, I'm here in hopes of providing an answer.

Part of the fantasy of an X-wing pilot is being part of a squadron. A tight-knit unit like the Rogues, its roster full of characters with their own distinct personalities to play off of and struggles to help one another with. Trouble is, while doing one character bio is exciting, filling out a dozen who are going to go through the same events as part of the same squadron gets tiring real fast. So what do we do about this? My answer would be collaborate—work with other writers who contribute their characters and follow the same story. Then, beyond not needing to flesh out a whole list of characters by yourself, you've also got writers who will get invested in your stories if you get invested in theirs, and are reacting to the ideas they bring to the table which you might not have expected.

So how might we do this? Well, here's my proposal:

I'll volunteer to write a Squadron article. Flesh out the page a bit with data, perhaps create smaller stubs surrounding it (like a ship or base the Squadron is stationed on). The details of the article will be agreed upon by the interested collaborators through a vote: the Squadron's name, whether it's an X-wing or a Y-wing squadron, when they form, whether they'll be fleet or ground-based. Then, once we're set to start—maybe once participants have a sort of backstory up on their included characters' pages—I'll start doing a section a week on the Squadron article's History section.

These sections will be a little vague by design. They'll include general information like when and where the Squadron flew, what objectives they had and what challenges they found, whether it was a victory or defeat, and try to get the overall tone of the event down. Maybe their training mission goes awry when they're called upon to rescue a transport from pirates, or take heavy casualties escorting bombers to strike a heavily-defended Imperial target, or finally getting the chance to face down old rivals in a nemesis Imperial squadron.

Then, characters in the squadron can react in their own articles with what their characters did in these events. Maybe they were the one to strike the final blow against a cruiser, save their wingman from a TIE on their tail, or even met their end on one of these missions. Members could collaborate with one another directly to have consistent stories between different writers' articles, both remarking how X devoted all power to shields to screen the TIEs while their wingman made a last-ditch attack on the Imperial shuttle before it could jump to lightspeed.

The overall point is to have a rewarding collaborative experience and enjoy writing characters who participate in a Squadron environment, telling stories like the Rogue Squadron books of old. By collaborating, you can be sure your characters' actions won't just happen in a vacuum, but potentially effect other peoples' characters and their future decisions.

So, if I were to start up something like that, would you be interested? If we've got a significant number of people up for it, I can get a second blog going where we can start voting on details like Squadron Name, the ships they fly, and what shape the overall story might take. Then, once the ideas are agreed on, we can start making characters who'd join the squadron at about the right time, and once those are in place, the story can begin.

So what say you? Feel like you could take on the whole Empire yourself?