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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.