When I first tackled these studies, I began with The Holy Books, and the most important of these is The Book of Alorn. When you get right down to it, that one contains the germ of the whole story. After that, I added The Book of Torak. Fair is fair, after all, and equal time sounds sort of fair, I guess. The Testament of the Snake People was an exercise in showing off. (A poem in the shape of a snake? Gee!) The Hymn to Chaldan was supposed to help explain the Arends. A war god isnt all that unusual.
The Marags are extinct, but that equal time regulation was still in place, so I took a swing at the grief-stricken God Mara. I had fun with The Proverbs of Nedra a sort of theological justification for pure greed. Maybe Ill make a deal with the New York Stock Exchange, and they can engrave those proverbs on the wall.
The Sermon of Aldur was a false start, since it speaks glowingly of Unmaking Things, which UL prohibited in the next section. That section, The Book of Ulgo, was rather obviously based on The Book of Job. Note that Ill even steal from the Bible. Gorim came off rather well, I thought. Incidentally, UL was a typographical error the first time it appeared. I liked the way it looked on paper, so I kept it. (Would you prefer to have me claim Divine Inspiration?)
Im going to disillusion some enthusiasts here, Im afraid. Notice that the Mrin Codex and the Darine Codex arent included here. They dont appear because they dont exist. Theyre a literary device and nothing more. (I once jokingly told Lester that Id be willing to write the Mrin Codex if hed agree to publish it on a scroll, but he declined.) I used the Mrin as a form of exposition. Those periodic breakthroughs when Belkira and Beltira or whoever else is handy finally crack the code are the things that set off a new course of action. I catch hints of a religious yearning when people start pleading for copies of the Mrin. Sorry gang, Im not in the business of creating new religions. This is story, not revelation. Im a storyteller, not a Prophet of God. OK?
Once The Holy Books were out of the way, I was ready to tackle The Histories, and thats where all the ologies started showing up along with a chronology. When youve got a story that lasts for seven thousand years, youd better have a chronology and pay close attention to it, or youre going to get lost somewhere in the 39th century. The histories of the Alorn Kingdoms are fairly central to the story, but it was the history of the Tolnedran Empire that filled in all the cracks. Youll probably notice how tedious the Tolnedran History is. If you think reading it was tedious, try writing it. It was absolutely essential, however, since much of the background material grew out of it.
Most of the similarities between the people of this world and our imaginary one should be fairly obvious. The Sendars correspond to rural Englishmen, the Arends to Norman French, the Tolnedrans to Romans, the Chereks to Vikings, the Algars to Cossacks, the Ulgos to Jews, and the Angaraks to Hunnish-Mongolian-Muslim-Visigoths out to convert the world by the sword. I didnt really have correspondences in mind for the Drasnians, Rivans, Marags, or Nyissans. Theyre story elements and dont need to derive from this world.
By the time we got to the histories of the Angarak Kingdoms, we were ready to dig into the story itself, so the Angaraks got fairly short shrift. I wanted to get on with it.
There were footnotes in the original of these studies, but they were included (with identifying single-spacing) in the body of the text. These are the mistaken perceptions of the scholars at the University of Tol Honeth. The footnotes Im adding now are in their proper location (at the foot of the page, naturally). These later notes usually point out inconsistencies. Some of this material just didnt work when we got into the actual narrative, and Im not one to mess up a good story just for the sake of sticking to an out-dated game plan.
The addition of The Battle of Vo Mimbre was a sort of afterthought. I knew that epic fantasy derived from medieval romance, so just to re-enforce that point of origin, I wrote one. It has most of the elements of a good, rousing medieval romance and all of its flaws. Im still fairly sure that it would have made Eleanor of Aquitaine light up like a Christmas tree.
I wanted to use it in its original form as the Prologue for Queen of Sorcery, but Lester del Rey said, NO! A twenty-seven page prologue didnt thrill him. Thats when I learned one of the rules. A prologue does not exceed eight pages. Lester finally settled the argument by announcing that if I wrote an overly long prologue, hed cut it down with a dull axe.
Oh, there was another argument a bit earlier. Lester didnt like Aloria. He wanted to call it Alornia!!! I almost exploded, but my wife calmly took the telephone away from me and sweetly said, Lester, dear, Alornia sounds sort of like a cookie to me. (Alornia Doone?) Lester thought about that for a moment. It does, sort of, doesnt it? OK, Aloria it is then. Our side won that one big-time.
Im not passing along these gossipy little tales for the fun of it, people. Theres a point buried in most of them. The point to this one is the importance of the sound of names in High Fantasy. Would Launcelot impress you very much if his name were Charlie or Wilbur? The bride of my youth spends hours concocting names. It was and still is her specialty. (Shes also very good at deleting junk and coming up with great endings.) I can manufacture names if I have to, but hers are better. Incidentally, that Gar at the center of Belgarath, Polgara, and Garion derives from proto-Indo European. Linguists have been amusing themselves for years backtracking their way to the original language spoken by the barbarians who came wandering off the steppes of Central Asia twelve thousand or so years ago. Gar meant Spear back in those days. Isnt that interesting?
When the preliminary studies were finished, my collaborator and I hammered together an outline, reviewed our character sketches, and we got started. When we had a first draft of what we thought was going to be Book I completed, I sent a proposal, complete with the overall outline, to Ballantine Books, and, naturally, the Post Office Department lost it. After six months, I sent a snippy note to Ballantine. At least you could have had the decency to say no. They replied, Gee, we never got your proposal. I had almost dumped the whole idea of the series because of the gross negligence of my government. I sent the proposal off again. Lester liked it, and we signed a contract. Now we were getting paid for this, so we started to concentrate.
Incidentally, my original proposal envisioned a trilogy three books tentatively titled Garion, CeNedra, and Kal Torak. That notion tumbled down around my ears when Lester explained the realities of the American publishing business to me. B. Dalton and Walden-books had limits on genre fiction, and those two chains ruled the world. At that time, they wanted genre fiction to be paperbacks priced at under three dollars, and thus no more than 300 pages.
This is what were going to do, Lester told me. (Notice that we. He didnt really mean we; he meant me.) Were 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 Lesters idea. I didnt 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 wouldnt 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. Ive 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. Ill 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, heres what you should do. Get an education first. Youre not qualified to write epic fantasy until youve 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 dont want to read them, go see them on stage in Wagnerian operas.) Look at Finland, Russia, Ireland, Iceland, Arabia even China or 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. Its 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 youre serious about this, you have to write every day, even if its only for an hour. Scratch the words week-end and holiday out of your vocabulary. (If youve been very good, I might let you take a half-day off at Christmas.) Write a million or so words. Then burn them. Now youre 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 didnt say wanted to be a writer. Want has almost nothing to do with it. Its either there or it isnt. If you happen to be one, youre stuck with it. Youll write whether you get paid for it or not. You wont be able to help yourself. When its going well, its like reaching up into heaven and pulling down fire. Its better than any dope you can buy. When its not going well, its much like giving birth to a baby elephant. Youll probably notice the time lapse. I was forty before I wrote a pub-lishable book. A twenty-five year long apprenticeship doesnt 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 dont, youll 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 youre 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 arent any guarantees. You can work on this religiously for fifty years and never get into print, so dont 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. Hows 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 wed 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 wifes brilliant name) is Toraks heir as Child of Dark. She yearns for elevation, but I dont 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.
Ill 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, weve 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 storys complete as it stands. There arent going to be any more Garion stories. Period. End of discussion.
All right, that should be enough for students, and its probably enough to send those whod like to try it for themselves screaming off into the woods in stark terror. I doubt that itll satisfy those who are interested in an in-depth biography of their favorite author, but you cant win them all, I guess.
Are you up for some honesty here? Genre fiction is writing thats done for money. Great art doesnt 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.