Star Wars Day
It’s Star Wars Day, and I’m a diehard Star Wars geek, so I thought I’d share a little bit about why I love this story so much. Star Wars came out before I was born, but I fell in love with it the first time I saw it as a young child. It’s been a relentless source of inspiration my entire life and one of the primary reasons why I’ve always wanted to be a storyteller.
Here are a few of the reasons why it’s always resonated with me.
The Story World
With Star Wars, George Lucas introduced us to a world so vast that more than one compelling story could be told in it. Just think of all the locations that the events in the original trilogy took place in, and these were only a tiny fraction of the locations in an entire galaxy.
A Deep Mythology
Writers are often told to keep backstory as invisible as possible in a story. Readers want to know what’s going on now; not what happened before the story.
What Star Wars did was make backstory something we actually cared about. A New Hope is built on the foundation of what happened before it. From that movie, we learn little details about something called the Clone Wars that happened in the past, a man named Anakin Skywalker that was the friend of Ben Kenobi and the father of Luke Skywalker, that the galaxy was once a republic before it became an empire, that a former Jedi named Darth Vader killed Anakin Skywalker, and that Vader was trained by Ben Kenobi.
Those details are the reason we wanted a prequel trilogy, though it would be nice to have a rewrite of that story.
Then, of course, there is the whole concept of the Force and the Jedi and the Sith. Even with the prequel trilogy, Lucas created more mythology that we care about. Why else would we be coming up with theories that Supreme Leader Snoke is Darth Plagueis?
The mythology of Star Wars is the reason the Expanded Universe (now relegated to little more than fan fiction as Legends) was created. We wanted to know more about the mythology that runs through this story world. It’s the reason why the Star Wars universe will continue to expand as Disney commissions more stories to be written within the Star Wars galaxy.
For a great new Star Wars story, I can’t recommend Claudia Gray’s Lost Stars novel enough.
The Characters
One thing George Lucas was really good at was creating multiple characters that we all love. The original film wasn’t just driven by one character. We had C-3PO, R2-D2, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, Grand Moff Tarkin, Obiwan Kenobi, Han Solo, Chewbacca, the Storm Troopers. And each of them was a win. Then he added Yoda and Emperor Palpatine.
Regardless if the prequel films were good, they did give us Qui-gon Jinn, Darth Maul, Mace Windu, and Chancellor Palpatine. More wins for Lucas.
Sure, Jar Jar Binks was awful, but he’s an anomaly in a series of great characters Lucas imagined. I think we can forgive him for that.
The Story
The story of a farm boy becoming a legendary hero that saves the galaxy. It’s a big story, perhaps not all that unique since it’s based on Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey.
And yet it is.
George Lucas took this mythological story paradigm and took it into space. And he blew our minds by telling us at the beginning that this futuristic story actually took place sometime in our past in a galaxy far away from us.
It spawned our imaginations of what is possible in the universe we inhabit.
Light sabers. The Force. A light and dark side. Villains with a past. The possibility of redemption.
Tom Farr is a writer, teacher, and storyteller. He loves creating and spending time with his wife and three children. Check out his fiction writing portfolio on Medium and sign up for his author newsletter.
