Between 1990 and 2005, when Doctor Who wasnt on TV, the show mostly existed as original novels. When Russell T. Davies, Julie Gardner and Jane Tranter brought it back in 2005, several of the shows new screenwriters were chosen from the writers of those spin-off books, including Davies and future showrunner Steven Moffat. While they both had plenty of TV experience by the mid-90s, their first official Doctor Who commissions were in prose.In 2025, the pattern returned. Of the four new writers announced last month as having contributed episodes to the new TV season, one novelist Juno Dawson started out writing official Doctor Who prose fiction. Might this mean that, if we see more of this version of the show after the second season airs this spring, newly announced Who novelists Emily Cook (Fear Death By Water) and Hannah Fergesen (Spectral Scream) could follow in Dawsons footsteps, or is it now more of a closed shop? Lets retrace the journeys of previous writers who made the leap from Doctor Who page to screen.Russell T. DaviesDavies had pitched ideas, since adapted by Big Finish, to Doctor Who in the late Eighties, but his first story was the 1996 novel Damaged Goods. Unlike his TV Doctor Who, it is astonishingly bleak. As part of the New Adventures line, it had to feature the then-current Seventh Doctor, and Davies emphasises the melancholy in the character rather than his Machiavellian scheming. Familiar elements include a family called Tyler in a London housing estate. Less familiar to Doctor Who was the cocaine tainted by an ancient Time Lord superweapon.Steven MoffatMoffat contributed a short story Continuity Errors to the 1996 Decalog 3 anthology, containing several ideas he would later re-use: the setting is a planet-sized library, he considered calling it The Curse of Fatal Death (which he would later use for his Comic Relief episode in 1999), the Doctor is referred to as a complicated space-time event and the story revolves around time-travel, with the Doctor changing a librarians past to make her more amenable to lending him a book, and uses a framing device of a university lecture (one entitled Doctor Who: Nice guy or utter bastard? the central thrust of Moffats entire time on the show).Moffat didnt have to use the Seventh Doctor and Bernice Summerfield for this story, but given that incarnations scheming nature, it works for a story where the Doctor manipulates people and events for a greater good, but its also because Moffat loves Paul Cornells work (Moffat was reportedly Cornells best man, theres a character in Continuity Errors called Orcnell).Paul Cornell and the New AdventuresBack in 1989 nearly every televised Doctor Who story had been novelised, and once the TV show had been cancelled, Virgin Publishing were given a licence to publish original novels. Noting that the audience for these books would be adults who had grown up with the series, the New Adventures line allowed writers to be more explicit in terms of sex, language and violence. They were advertised as being Too broad and deep for the screen.For these (and latterly the BBC Books Range which still has an archived FAQ page online) open submissions were encouraged. Peter Darvill-Evans, the first editor of the range, noted the desire and knowledge present in fanzines and had been encouraged by the fourth novel in the series Timewyrm: Revelation by Paul Cornell.Cornells novels helped shape the New Adventures line, telling stories that were adult in content without being brazenly childish (several novels, revelling in the freedom to describe sex and violence, gave the series a reputation for gratuitousness) and taking the Seventh Doctors characterisation as dark as it could go (writing the only good version of Aces departure so far) and adding new companion Bernice Summerfield (an archaeologist who is still appearing in Big Finish stories to this day).Cornell also delved into the past, exploring past Doctors as they appeared in the Sevenths mind, expanding background events in Inferno and Planet of the Spiders to the extent that some fans consider these additions canon. Russell T. Davies praised Timewyrm: Revelation, in the 2013 non-fiction tie-in The Vault, as follows: Paul bloody Cornell gave us Doctor Who, but he made it real. I mean, real people, laid bare, exposing all their anger, passion, and, damn it, nobility.So you can see why Cornell was chosen to write Fathers Day for the 2005 series, and to adapt his 1995 New Adventure novel Human Nature for series three. A lot of what carried over from the New Adventures to the revived television seriesechoed the style and content of Cornells novels. While he was far from prolific in terms of TV scripts (moving into comics in his later career), hes probably the most influential writer of Doctor Who in the Nineties.Cornell ended up trying to bring back Doctor Who with the Scream of the Shalka project, an animation which was for two months in 2003 going to be the official continuation of the show before Davies relaunch was announced. He wasnt the only writer who tried. Mark Gatiss, Gareth Roberts and Clayton Hickman also pitched a full reboot.Join our mailing listGet the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!Mark Gatiss and Gareth RobertsGatiss and Roberts debut New Adventures novels were their first professional writing credits. Gatiss wrote Nightshade, published in 1992, with Roberts The Highest Science out the following year. The latter featured the Chelonians, mentioned on screen in The Pandorica Opens, bulky and aggressive turtle-creatures, who would appear in multiple books but never on screen.Gatiss had the higher profile as a writer/performer: he wrote and appeared in several Direct-to-Video features for BBC Productions (Reece Shearsmith appearing in two). Their eventual success as writer/performers in The League of Gentlemen (first as a live show, then radio, then on television). Roberts regularly worked on soaps for ITV and Channel 4. Both wrote for Charlie Higsons reboot of Randall and Hopkirk in 2001. While Gatiss made no secret of his affection for the Pertwee era, Roberts was a huge fan of Season 17 (the one script edited by Douglas Adams) and wrote a trilogy of books featuring the Fourth Doctor and Romana evoking that era.Both writers contributed popular stories, with Roberts also writing the Tardisode preludes that accompanied series two and contributing regularly to The Sarah Jane Adventures. Gatiss called time on his involvement with the TV show when Steven Moffat stepped down as showrunner, but is still occasionally acting in Big Finish productions. Roberts fell out with the production team after season eight, and began tweeting gender critical views in 2017, which led to him being dropped from a 2019 Doctor Who story anthology when other writers withdrew from the project due to his involvement.Juno DawsonDawsons first official Doctor Who story was 2018s novel The Good Doctor, a Thirteenth Doctor adventure with echoes of The Ark (1966) and The Face of Evil (1977). She was also the lead writer on Doctor Who: Redacted, a two series audio story, and is rumoured to have written an episode based around Eurovision in Space (which also formed the basis of a 2002 Big Finish story Bang-Bang-a-Boom!, co-written by Gareth Roberts). This makes her the first writer to make the move from tie-in novels to TV Who since 2007, when The Shakespeare Code was written by Gareth Roberts.A Closed Shop?Dawsons journey from book to screen is a reminder of the positives of the so-called Wilderness Years, when the show wasnt on television. The open submissions policies of spin-off producers led to, of course, some patchy stories, but also meant that Doctor Who could be pulled into new and interesting shapes, influenced by a wide array of voices. The notion of what Doctor Who could be was expanded.Fan Fiction is still around, of course, but the shows success since returning in 2005 puts a question mark on whether there will ever be similar opportunities for aspiring writers; the period in the Nineties where writers could pitch their vision of Doctor Who and get it published was messy and flawed, but revolutionary.