Operating by trial and error mostly, we’ve evolved a tacitly agreed upon list of the elements that make for a good fantasy. The first decision the aspiring fantasist must make is theological. King Arthur and Charlemagne were Christians. Siegfried and Sigurd the Volsung were pagans. My personal view is that pagans write better stories. When a writer is having fun, it shows, and pagans have more fun than Christians. Let’s scrape Horace’s Dulche et utile off the plate before we even start the banquet. We’re writing for fun, not to provide moral instruction. I had much more fun with the Belgariad/Malloreon than you did, because I know where all the jokes are.
All right, then, for item number one, I chose paganism. (Note that Papa Tolkien, a devout Anglo-Catholic, took the same route.)
Item number two on our interim list is ‘The Quest’. If you don’t have a quest, you don’t have a story. The quest gives you an excuse to dash around and meet new people. Otherwise, you stay home and grow turnips or something.
Item number three is ‘The Magic Thingamajig’ – The Holy Grail, the Ring of Power, the Magic Sword, the Sacred Book, or (surprise, surprise) THE JEWEL. Everybody knows where I came down on that one. The Magic Thingamajig is usually, though not always, the object of the quest.
Item four is ‘Our Hero’ – Sir Galahad, Sir Gawaine, Sir Launcelot, or Sir Perceval. Galahad is saintly; Gawaine is loyal; Launcelot is the heavyweight champion of the world; and Perceval is dumb – at least right at first. I went with Perceval, because he’s more fun. A dumb hero is the perfect hero, because he hasn’t the faintest idea of what’s going on, and in explaining things to him, the writer explains them to his reader. Don’t get excited. I’m not putting Garion down. He’s innocent more than stupid, in the same way Perceval was. Actually, he’s fairly clever, but he’s a country boy, so he hasn’t been exposed to very much of the world. His Aunt Pol wanted him to be that way, and Polgara has ways to get what she wants.
Item number five is the resident ‘Wizard’ – Merlin, usually, or Gandalf – mighty, powerful, and mysterious. I scratched that one right away and went with Belgarath instead, and I think it was the right choice. I’ve got a seedy old tramp with bad habits – who just incidentally can rip the tops off mountains if he wants to. I chose to counter him with his daughter, Polgara, who doesn’t really approve of him. That sorcerer/sorceress (and father/daughter) pairing broke some new ground, I think.
Item six is our heroine – usually a wispy blonde girl who spends most of her time mooning around in a tower. I chose not to go that route, obviously. Ce’Nedra is a spoiled brat, there’s no question about that, but she is a little tiger when the chips are down. She turned out even better than I expected.
Item seven is a villain with diabolical connections. I invented Torak, and he served our purpose rather well. I even managed to give him a fairly believable motivation. Milton helped on that one. Torak isn’t exactly Lucifer, but he comes close. As usual, he has a number of evil underlings to do his dirty-work for him.
(Stay with me. We’re almost done.) Item eight is the obligatory group of ‘companions’, that supporting cast of assorted muscular types from various cultures who handle most of the killing and mayhem until the hero grows up to the point where he can do his own violence on the bad guys.
Item nine is the group of ladies who are attached to the bully-boys in item eight. Each of these ladies also needs to be well-defined, with idiosyncrasies and passions of her own.
And finally we come to item ten. Those are the kings, queens, emperors, courtiers, bureaucrats, et al who are the governments of the kingdoms of the world.
OK. End of list. If you’ve got those ten items, you’re on your way toward a contemporary fantasy. (You’re also on your way to a cast of thousands.)
All right then, now for a test: ‘Write an epic fantasy in no less than three and no more than twelve volumes. Then sell it to a publisher. You have twenty years.’ (Don’t send it to me. I don’t have a printing press, and I do not read in the field. It’s a way to avoid contamination.)
STOP!! Do not uncover your typewriter, uncap your pen, or plug in your computer just yet. A certain amount of preparation might help. It’s a good idea to learn how to drive an automobile before you hop into the family car and take off for Los Angeles, and it’s probably an equally good idea to browse through a couple of medical texts before you saw off the top of Uncle Charlie’s head in preparation for brain surgery.
Let me stress one thing at the outset. This is the way we did it. This is not the only way to do it. Our way worked out fairly well, but others, done differently, have worked just as well. If you don’t like our way, we won’t be offended.
Now, of necessity, we get into a bit of biography. This introduction is designed to provide enough biographical detail to answer students’ questions and to provide a description of our preparations. I hope it satisfies you, because it’s all you’re going to get. My private life is just that – private – and it’s going to stay that way. You don’t really need to know what I had for breakfast.
I was born in Washington (the state, not the city) in 1931. (Go ahead. Start counting. Depressing, huh?) I graduated from high school in 1949, worked for a year, and then enrolled in a junior college, majoring in speech, drama, and English. I tore that junior college up. I won a state-wide oratorical contest and played the male lead in most of the drama presentations. Then I applied for and received a scholarship at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and Reed turned out to be quite a bit more difficult. The college required a thesis for graduation, so I wrote a novel (what else?). Then I was drafted. The army sent me to Germany instead of Korea – where people were still shooting at each other. I’d studied German, so I got along fairly well, and when I wasn’t playing soldier with my jeep and my submachine gun, I made the obligatory pilgrimages to Paris, London, Vienna, Naples, Rome, Florence, and Berlin (before the wall). It was all very educational, and I even got paid for being in Europe. Then I came back to the States and was discharged. I had that GI Bill, so I went to the University of Washington for four years of graduate study. I’ve already told you about that, so I won’t dwell on it. During my college years I worked part-time in grocery stores, a perfect job for a student, since the hours can be adjusted to fit in with the class schedule. Then I went to work for Boeing, building rocket ships. (I was a buyer, not an engineer.) I helped, in a small way, to put a man on the moon. I married a young lady whose history was even more interesting than mine. I was a little miffed when I discovered that her security clearance was higher than mine. I thought ‘Top Secret’ was the top of the line, but I was wrong. She’d also been to places I hadn’t even heard of, since she’d been in the Air Force, while I’d been a ground-pounder. I soon discovered that she was a world-class cook, a highly skilled fisherwoman, and – after an argument about whether or not that was really a deer lying behind that log a hundred yards away late one snowy afternoon – she demonstrated that she was a dead shot with a deer rifle by shooting poor old Bambi right between the eyes.
I taught college for several years, and then one year the administrators all got a pay raise and the teaching faculty didn’t. I told them what they could do with their job, and my wife and I moved to Denver, where I (we) wrote High Hunt in our spare time while I worked in a grocery store and my wife worked as a motel maid. We sold High Hunt to Putnam, and I was now a published author. We moved to Spokane, and I turned to grocery stores again to keep us eating regularly.
I was convinced that I was a ‘serious novelist’, and I labored long and hard over several unpublished (and unpublishable) novels that moped around the edges of mawkish contemporary tragedy. In the mid 1970s I was grinding out ‘Hunsecker’s Ascent’, a story about mountain-climbing which was a piece of tripe so bad that it even bored me. (No, you can’t see it. I burned it.) Then one morning before I went