Klink: From Spec Script to Executive Story Editor
2 min readBack in the day of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the open submission policy for writers lead to Lisa Klink deciding to pursue writing instead of directing.
“When I first came to L.A., I wanted to direct movies,” she said. “Then I wanted to write movies. Then I went to a writing panel at a Trek convention and heard about their policy. TNG was on the air at the time, and one of my favorite shows. I thought it might be fun to write a script for that. So I did.”
Her story about Geordi La Forge led to an invitation for Klink. “I still remember the story,” she said. “It was about Geordi. His visual implants made him the only crew member able to telepathically communicate with an alien race. He had to deal with a constant flood of emotions, which was way out of his engineering comfort zone. That’s the script which got me in to pitch to DS9. By the time I went in to pitch, I’d fallen in love with TV writing and had written two more specs – a DS9 and a Lois & Clark.”
Klink became an intern on Deep Space Nine. “I got to spend six weeks in the writing offices, sitting in on pitches and story breaks, going to the set, soaking everything in,” she said. “At the end of the internship, I pitched to them again. They liked one of my stories, which led to a brainstorming session that changed it completely, but I still made the sale. And because they’d gotten to know me for six weeks, I got the chance to write the episode. Usually, the show would buy the premise from a pitch and a staffer would write the script. This time, I won the lottery. That was Hippocratic Oath. I wrote the first and second draft, and then Ron Moore did a great polish. I got full writing credit anyway.”
A call from Star Trek: Voyager’s Jeri Taylor led to Klink’s next Star Trek job. “She asked if I wanted to be on staff at Voyager,” said Klink. “Total brainlock: all I could stammer out was ‘really?’ Yes, really. I must have said something coherent because I started work on Monday…after calling everyone I knew in the world with the news.”
Klink wrote Deep Space Nine‘s Hippocratic Oath, and thirteen Voyager episodes. She no longer writes for television, but works for the Red Cross, Klink is also writing a novel for a book series.
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