It’s either there or it isn’t. If you happen to be one, you’re stuck with
it. You’ll write whether you get paid for it or not. You won’t be able
to help yourself. When it’s going, well, it’s like reaching up into
heaven and pulling down fire. It’s better than any dope you can buy.
When it’s not going well, it’s much like giving birth to a baby
elephant. You’ll probably notice the time lapse. I was forty before I
wrote a publishable book. A twenty-five year long apprenticeship
doesn’t appeal to very many people.
The first thing a fantasist needs to do is to invent a world and
draw a map. Do the map first. If you don’t, you’ll get lost, and picky
readers with nothing better to do will gleefully point out your
blunders.
Then do your preliminary studies and character sketches in great
detail. Give yourself at least a year for this. Two would be better.
Your ‘Quest’, your ‘Hero’, your form of magic, and your ‘races’ will
probably grow out of these studies at some point. If you’re worried
about how much this will interfere with a normal life, take up
something else. If you decide to be a writer, your life involves sitting at
your desk. This is what you do to the exclusion of all else, and there
aren’t any guarantees. You can work on this religiously for fifty
years and never get into print, so don’t quit your day-job.
It was about the time that we finished Book Iii of the Belgariad
that we met Lester and Judy-Lynn del Rey in person. We all had
dinner together, and I told Lester that I thought there was more story
than we could cram into five books, so we might want to think about
a second set. Lester expressed some interest. Judy-Lynn wanted to
write a contract on a napkin. How’s that for acceptance?
We finished up the Belgariad, and then went back into
‘preliminaries’ mode. Our major problem with the Malloreon lay in the fact
that we’d killed off the Devil at the end of the Belgariad. No villain;
no story. The bad guys do have their uses, I suppose. Zandramas, in
a rather obscure way, was a counter to Polgara. Pol, though central
to the story as our mother figure, had been fairly subordinate in the
Belgariad, and we wanted to move her to center stage. There are
quite a few more significant female characters in the Malloreon than
in the Belgariad. Zandramas (my wife’s brilliant name) is Torak’s
heir as ‘Child of Dark’. She yearns for elevation but I don’t think
becoming a galaxy to replace the one that blew up was quite what
she had in mind. The abduction of Prince Geran set off the
obligatory quest, and abductions were commonplace in medieval romance
(and in the real world of the Dark Ages as well), so we were still
locked in our genre.
We had most of our main characters – good guys and bad guys
already in place, and I knew that Mallorea was somewhere off to the
east, so I went back to the map-table and manufactured another
continent and the bottom half of the one we already had. We got a
lot of mileage out of Kal Zakath. That boy carried most of the
Malloreon on his back. Then by way of thanks, we fed him to
Cyradis, and she had him for lunch.
I’ll confess that I got carried away with The Mallorean Gospels. I
wanted the Dals to be mystical, so I pulled out all the stops and
wrote something verging on Biblical, but without the
inconveniences of Judaism, Christianity~ or Mohammedanism. What it all
boiled down to was that the Dals could see the future, but so could
Belgarath, if he paid attention to the Mrin Codex. The whole story
reeks of prophecy – but nobody can be really sure what it means.
My now publicly exposed co-conspiratress and I have recently
finished the second prequel to this story~ and now if you want to
push it, we’ve got a classic twelve-book epic. If twelve books were
good enough for Homer, Virgil, and Milton, twelve is surely good
enough for us. We are not going to tack on our version of the Odyssey
to our already completed Iliad. The story’s complete as it stands.
There aren’t going to be any more garion stories. Period. End of
discussion.
All right, that should be enough for students, and it’s probably
enough to send those who’d like to try it for themselves screaming
off into the woods in stark terror. I doubt that it’ll satisfy those who
are interested in an in-depth biography of their favorite author, but
you can’t win them all, I guess.
Are you up for some honesty here? Genre fiction is writing that’s
done for money. Great art doesn’t do all that well in a commercial
society. Nothing that Franz Kafka wrote ever appeared in print
while he was alive. Miss Lonelyhearts sank without a ripple. Great
literary art is difficult to read because you have to think when you
read it, and most people would rather not.
Epic fantasy can be set in this world. You don’t have to create a
new universe just to write one. My original ‘doodle’, however, put
us off-world immediately. It’s probably that ‘off-world’ business in
Tolkien that causes us to be lumped together with science fiction,
and we have no business on the same rack with SF. SF writers are
technology freaks who blithely ignore that footnote in Einstein’s
theory of relativity which clearly states that when an object approaches
the speed of light, its mass becomes infinite. (So much for
warpdrive.) If old Buck Rogers hits the gas-pedal a little too hard, he’ll
suddenly become the universe. Fantasists are magic and shining
armor freaks who posit equally absurd notions with incantations,
‘the Will and the Word’, or other mumbo-jumbo. They want to build
a better screwdriver, and we want to come up with a better
incantation. They want to go into the future, and we want to go into the
past. We write better stories than they do, though. They get all
bogged down in telling you how the watch works; we just tell you
what time it is and go on with the story. SF and fantasy shouldn’t
even speak to each other, but try explaining that to a book-store
manager. Try explaining it to a publisher. Forget it.
One last gloomy note. If something doesn’t work, dump it – even
if it means that you have to rip up several hundred pages and a
halfyear’s work. More stories are ruined by the writer’s stubborn
attachment to his own overwrought prose than by almost anything else.
Let your stuff cool off for a month and then read it critically. Forget
that you wrote it, and read it as if you didn’t really like the guy who
put it down in the first place. Then take a meat-axe to it. Let it cool
down some more, and then read it again- If it still doesn’t work, get
rid of it. Revision is the soul of good writing. It’s the story that
counts, not your fondness for your own gushy prose. Accept your
losses and move on.
All right, I’ll let you go for right now. We’ll talk some more later,
but why don’t we let Belgarath take over for a while?
PREFACE: THE PERSONAL
HISTORY OF BELgARATH
THE SORCERER
* This first-person narrative was written to give us a grip on Belgarath’s character and we
wrote it almost twenty years ago. I always felt there was a story there. As it turned out,
there were two, Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress. After we’d finished the
Belgariad/Malloreon, we knew how the story ended, so we could then go back and write
the beginning. Most of Part I of Belgarath the Sorcerer is an expansion of this ancient
manuscript, which also dictated the first-person narrative approach.
In the light of all that has happened, this is most certainly a mistake.
It would be far better to leave things as they are, with event and
cause alike half-buried in the dust of forgotten years. If it were up to
me, I would so leave them. I have, however, been so importuned by
an undutiful daughter, so implored by a great (and many times
over) grandson, and so cajoled by that tiny and willful creature who
is his wife – a burden he will have to endure for all his days – that I
must, if only to have some peace, set down the origins of the titanic
events which have so rocked the world.
Few will understand this, and fewer still will acknowledge its
truth. I am accustomed to that. But, since I alone know the beginning,
the middle, and the end of these events, it is upon me to commit to
perishable parchment and to ink that begins to fade before it even