 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
'This is what we're going to do,' Lester told me. (Notice that 'we'. He
didn't really mean'we'; he meant me.) 'We're going to break it up into
five books instead of three.'My original game plan went out the
window. I choked and went on. The chess-piece titles, incidentally,
were Lester's idea. I didn't like that one very much either. I wanted to
call Book V In the Tomb of the One Eyed God. I thought that had a nice
ring to it but Lester patiently explained that a title that long wouldn't
leave any room for a cover illustration. I was losing a lot of
arguments here. Lester favored the bulldozer approach to his writers,
though, so he ran over me fairly often.
I did win one, though - I think. Lester had told me that 'Fantasy
fiction is the prissiest of all art-forms.' I knew that he was wrong on that
one. I've read the works from which contemporary fantasy has
descended, and 'prissy' is a wildly inappropriate description (derived., no
doubt, from Tennyson and Tolkien). I set out to delicately
suggest that girls did, in fact, exist below the neck. I'll admit that I
lost a few rounds, but I think I managed to present a story that
suggested that there are some differences between boys and girls,
and that most people find that sort of interesting.
All right, 'Time Out'. For those of you who intend to follow my path,
here's what you should do. Get an education first. You're not qualified
to write epic fantasy until you've been exposed to
medieval romance. As I said earlier, there are all kinds of medieval
literature. Look at the Norse stuff. Try the German stories. (If you
don't want to read them, go see them on stage in Wagnerian operas.)
even China or
Look at Finland, Russia, Ireland, Iceland, Arabia
India. The urge to write and read High Fantasy seems to be fairly
universal.
Next comes the practice writing. I started on contemporary novels
High Hunt and The Losers. (The publication date of The Losers is
June 1992, but I wrote it back in the 1970s. It's not strictly speaking a
novel, but rather is an allegory the one-eyed Indian is God, and Jake
Flood is the Devil. Notice that I wrote it before we started the
Belgariad.) If you're serious about this, you have to write every day,
even if it's only for an hour. Scratch the words 'week-end' and
'holiday' out of your vocabulary. (If you've been very good, I might let
you take a half-day off at Christmas.) Write a million or so words.
Then burn them. Now you're almost ready to start
This is what I was talking about earlier when I suggested that
most aspiring fantasists will lose heart fairly early on. I was in my
mid-teens when I discovered that I was a writer. Notice that I didn't
say 'wanted to be a writer'. 'Want' has almost nothing to do with it.
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