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charactersketches gave us our people. The dialogue grew,out of the actual
writing. I'm sure you noticed a certain amount of bickering among
the troops. Grand and noble companionship sounds sort of nice, but
both my wife and I have been in the military' so we know how
unreal that notion is. Part of our aim was to create an epic fantasy
with a heavy overlay of realism. The immediacy - that sense of
actually knowing these characters which many readers have noticed
derives from that realism in dialogue and details. We can blame my
wife for a lot of that. I'd be trying for 'grand sweep', and she'd jerk
me up short with such things as, 'It's all black and white. It needs
color.' or 'They haven't eaten for three days.' or 'Don't you think it's
about time that they took a bath?' Here I am trying to save the
world, and 'Polgara' is nagging me about bathing!
Women! (Does that sound familiar?)
I'd also frequently run into that stone wall named, 'A woman
wouldn't talk that way.,That's a male expression. Women don't use
it.' I'd grumble a bit and then surrender and do it her way. My
personal writing strategy is 'Blast on through and get the story in
place, and then go back and clean and polish it.' She wants it done
right in the first place, and I've learned not to argue with the lady
who runs the kitchen - unless I want boiled dog-food for supper.
Now let's answer all the critics who proudly announce that they
find our work derivative. What else is new? Chaucer was derivative.
So was Shakespeare. The literary value of any story is in its
presentation. Any plot-hne can be reduced to absurdity if one chooses to do
so. There's a story, probably apocryphal, which tells us of an early
movie producer who simplified all movie plots down to 'Cinderella'
and 'goldilocks'. He'd buy 'Goldilocks', but he wouldn't buy
'Cinderella'.
Back to work. We'd completed the Belgariad, and now we were
ready to take on the Malloreon. Most of what we needed was
already in place. We had our main characters, our magic
thingamajig, and our cultures of the western kingdoms. Now we needed a
new 'Bad-Guy' (or Girl), and a new quest. (I'd also had enough of
adolescents by now, and I wanted to see if Garion and Ce'Nedra
could function as adults.) Oh, by the way, if anyone out there ever
calls those two 'teenagers', I'll turn them into a toad. 'Teenager' is a
linguistic abomination devised by the advertising agencies and the
social worker industry to obscure an unpleasant reality. The proper
term is 'adolescent', and the only good thing about it is that
everybody gets over it - eventually. (Or most of them, anyway.)
We extended the geography in our new map, and then it was time
to correct the injustice we'd done to the Angaraks. Just because
Germany produced Hitler doesn't alter the fact that Germany also
produced Kant, Goethe, Beethoven, and Niebuhn No race or
nationality has a monopoly on either good or evil. Perfection in either
direction simply doesn't exist in the real world, and it doesn't exist
in our world either. On one occasion Belgarath simplified the whole
thing by discarding theology entirely and identifying the
contending parties as 'them and us'. You can't get much more to the point
than that. We humanized the Angaraks by humanizing Zakath and
by stressing the significance of Eriond. The Christ-like quality of
Eriond was quite deliberate. Torak was a mistake. Eriond was the
original 'Intent of the Universe'. (Deep, huh?)
The tiresome History of the Angarak Kingdoms was handed off to
the scholars at the University of Melcene, who are just as stuffy and
wrong-headed as their counterparts at the University of Tol Honeth.