Starship Excelsior Script Submission Guidelines
We Want Your Vignettes
Starship Excelsior annually produces one or two vignettes, 5-15 minutes in length. These have included "Safeties Off," about a holodeck snowball fight, "I.O.U.," about the last-ditch effort to save Divitia from immolation, and "The Greatest Day of Every Year," about an April Fool's Day joke.
We are planning to increase the frequency of these vignettes, which gives us an opportunity. We've always loved Star Trek's tradition of accepting scripts from the general public, and we've tried to revive it in our 2009 and 2015 writing contests. Now, with our new vignette quota, we can make it permanent. Send us your script for a 5-15 minute Starship Excelsior vignette, and, maybe, if you're lucky and your script is good, you might just get to hear it performed and produced by the Excelsior team! What have you got to lose?
What We're Looking For
We want your short Starship Excelsior scripts! They should run roughly 5-10 minutes, with an upper limit of 15. (One minute per page is a good assumption with short scripts.) We're open to Excelsior-driven stories that are exciting, funny, moving, amazing, and everywhere in between.
Your scripts should be polished as well as they possibly can. There are not a lot of resources available to rewrite vignettes, even promising ones with cool ideas we'd like to pursue. If we can't slap a production number on your script and send it straight to actors, we're likely to reject it. Of course, we also reserve the right to edit vignette scripts at our discretion.
Your stories can be set in the show's current "present," or during past seasons, or before the series begins. We won't say no to stories set in Excelsior's future, but these run a high risk of conflicting with our future plans.
They can include all the members of the main cast or focus on one of them. (Or even none, as long as the story is ultimately an Excelsior adventure.) Please be aware that cast members who have not appeared in a long while may no longer be available. Michael Liebmann's Bev Rol is permanently unavailable. We have had great luck bringing other actors back to the show when invited, but we can't always count on it. If you write a vignette we want to do but it involves an actor we end up unable to bring back, we'll invite you to rewrite it instead of rejecting it outright as normal.
It's okay to make a "Bio Special" like the vignette we did highlighting Neeva's pre-Excelsior life. Be sure to have some kind of framing narrative, though. We would not run the Dr. Sharp bio special today (it was just Melissa reading her own bio aloud). It would also be fine to forget about giving a character's full bio and just tell the story of a single incident from their past.
If you go the biographical route, be sure to familiarize yourself with the old character bios that used to be posted on the site. We've deviated from those bios somewhat over the years, but they're still used internally as authoritative references.
The narrative constraints of vignettes are severe. You have very little time to tell your story, which means there's no time to dawdle, no time for more than roughly one good twist, no time for the characters to grab coffee after and talk things through. Whatever the climax of your story is, that's pretty much where your vignette should start... and end.
What We're NOT Looking For
We are not accepting incomplete vignettes or vignette pitches or outlines. We want finished scripts that can go directly into production with minimal revision and effort.
We are not currently accepting full-episode scripts. We are not currently accepting pitches for full episodes. If you want to someday write full episodes for Excelsior, your best bet is to start by knocking our socks off with your vignettes.
We aren't interested in stories that seem to be primarily about obscure continuity references. We love obscure continuity references (to canon, to novels, to other fan films, whatever), but only when they add to an already-good story and don't hinder the enjoyment of people who don't get them. Erin Horáková was crass but correct when she wrote, "I want to throttle whoever's dumbass idea it was to gamify continuity, trading the sense of a stable world necessary for the development of emotional and thematic through-lines for a facile 'spot the reference' game intended to glut media consumers with smug, masturbatory self-satisfaction because they can recognise tribbles or whatever." Continuity is about building a bigger world, not shrinking it in on itself in endless self-references.
By the same token, we aren't interested in stories where the primary purpose seems to be to tell the audience what happened to the Klingons or the Cardassians or the Voyager crew or B-4 since the end of canon Trek. The classic version of this trope is two people sit in a room while one of them narrates to the other about the last ten years like a history teacher reading straight out of Memory Alpha. Galactic politics are inherently boring. They're about fictional empires doing fictional things. Characters are interesting, and if galactic politics forms a backdrop for a character-driven story, so much the better. But it needs to be about the character, not the history lesson.
Starship Excelsior is a family program. Levels of sex, violence, and language must be held to a TV-PG standard. If it didn't appear on Star Trek: The Next Generation, it can't be on Starship Excelsior.
Submission Process
Like many modern audio dramas, Starship Excelsior scripts do not follow traditional radio play format. Instead, we use screenplay format. Dialogue should be indented one inch. Sound effects and other scene description should be flush with the left margin.
Here are two previous vignette production scripts you can use to study: "Greatest Day" and "Relief Op".
When your script is ready, send it to StarshipExcelsior@protonmail.com with "VIGNETTE: [preliminary title of your script]" as the subject line.
By submitting your script to us, you give us the right to edit or use it or any element of it, now or in the future, in whatever way we see fit. The reason Star Trek had to stop accepting fan scripts was one too many fans accused CBS of "stealing" their ideas, leading to lawsuits. We can't afford that, so, if you send us your script, you waive your right to accuse us of stealing your idea, now or in the future, even if we do something pretty similar in the future. (We've already had to reject several stories for being too similar to episodes that are already in production! This happens way more often than you'd expect.)
We will respond... eventually. As anyone who has auditioned for our voice cast can attest, our response time ranges from 24 hours to a year, depending on where we are in the production cycle and how many resources are available for reviewing submissions. Be patient, and we'll get to it eventually. Feel free to query us after four months if you don't hear back sooner.
When we respond, it will likely be either as an acceptance, in which case you'll be assigned a production number and a tentative slot in the production schedule... or a form rejection. We love every Excelsior story we read, we honor the work that goes into them, and want to give everyone a personal rejection explaining exactly why we aren't taking their lovely story. However, writing a good personal rejection note often takes an entire evening — an evening that needs to be spent on Excelsior production work. And the unhappy reality of production constraints is that most submissions will have to be rejected. There are lots of good ideas and too few slots to make them. So expect form rejections, with our apologies.
Some Random Ideas to Get Your Gears Turning
- The story of how Yubari (and a duck???) got flung 38 minutes back in time on a training cruise (as mentioned in "The Mapstone")
- I.S.S. Excelsior, flagship of the Mirror Universe's imperial remnant
- a bad day in Marine Country
- a visit to the Galactic Barrier
- more April Fool pranks
- the Iconian Gateway near Union does something weird
- Dovan goes home
...and that's all you need to know! We can't wait to see what you come up with! Email your vignette scripts to StarshipExcelsior@protonmail.com today!