As I said earlier, this collection provides a kind of running description of a process. It included a lot of groping. Some things that looked very interesting just didn’t work. Other things jumped off the page right in the middle of the actual writing. Not infrequently, the story would take the bit in its teeth and run away, dragging us along behind it.
As I’ve mentioned before, when the urge to write an epic fantasy seizes the unwary reader, he will usually rush to his typewriter, and that’s his first mistake. If he leaps into the swamp right away, he’ll probably produce a chapter or two and then find that he’s run out of story, largely because he doesn’t know where he’s going.
Papa Tolkien once wrote, ‘I wisely started with a map.’ I’m not sure how wise my doodle was, but my inadvertent following of the same path also dictated much of our story. People who live on a rocky seacoast usually become sailors (translation: pirates). People who live on large open grasslands usually need horses, and usually get involved with cattle. People who live in natural converging points—river fords, mountain passes, and the like—usually become traders or merchants. Geography is very important in a story.
One of the items ticked off by Horace in his Ars Poetica was that an epic (or a drama) should begin in medias res, (in the middle of the story). Translation: ‘Start with a big bang to grab attention.’ Fantasists tend to ignore grandfather Horace’s advice and take the Bildungsroman approach instead. This German term can be translated as ‘Building (or growing up) romance’. (Note that most European languages don’t use the word ‘Novel’; they still call these things ‘romances’.) The ‘growing up’ approach is extremely practical for a fantasist, since all of our inventions have to be explained to our ‘dumb kid’ hero, and this is the easiest approach to exposition.
Some of you may have noticed that we did follow Aristotle’s advice in the Elenium/Tamuli. That one did start in mediasres, and it seemed to work just as well. Would you like another test? How about, ‘Explain the theological differences between Eriond and Aphrael’?
To counter the ‘Gee Whiz! Look at that!’ sort of thing that contaminates fantasy, the fantasist should probably grind his reader’s face in grubby realism. Go ride a horse for a day or two so you know what it feels like. Saddle sores show up on both sides of the saddle. Go to an archery range and shoot off a couple hundred arrows. Try it without the arm-guard a few times. The bow-string will act much like a salami-slicer on the inside of your left forearm, and it’ll raise blisters on the fingertips of your right hand. Pick up a broadsword, swing it for ten minutes, and your arms will feel as if they’re falling off. Those things were built to chop through steel. They’re very heavy. Go out and take a walk. Start at daybreak and step right along. Mark the spot where you are at sunset. Then measure the distance. That’s as far as your characters will be able to walk in one day. I used twenty miles, but I’ve got long legs. Ask a friend not to bathe for a month. Then go sniff him. (Yuk!) When you write dialogue, read it aloud—preferably to someone else. Ask if it sounds like the speech of a real live human being. The spoken word is different from the written word. Try to narrow that difference.
Next, learn how to compress time gracefully. You can’t record your hero’s every breath. ‘Several days later it started to snow’ is good. It skips time and gives a weather report simultaneously. ‘The following spring’ isn’t bad. ‘Ten years later’ is OK if you’re not right in the middle of something important. ‘After several generations’ or ‘About the middle of the next century’ skip over big chunks of time.
I’ve devised a personal approach which I call ‘authorial distance’. I use it to describe just how close I am to what’s happening. ‘Long distance’ is when I’m standing back quite a ways. ‘After Charlie got out of prison, he moved to Chicago and joined the Mafia’, suggests that I’m not standing in Charlie’s hip pocket. ‘Middle distance’, obviously, is closer. ‘The doors of Sing-Sing prison clanged shut behind Charlie, and a great wave of exultation ran through him. He was free!’ That’s sort of ‘middle’, wouldn’t you say? I refer to the last distance as ‘in your face’. ‘Charlie spit on the closing gate. “All right, you dirty rats, you’d better watch out now,” he muttered under his breath. “Someday I’m gonna come back here with a tommy-gun an’ riddle the whole bunch of youse guys.” Then he swaggered off toward the long, black limo where Don Pastrami was waiting for him.’ ‘In your face’ means that you’re inside the character’s head. Be advised, though, that it uses up a lot of paper. (See Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgarathe Sorceress. First person is always in your face.)
I try, not always successfully, to keep chapters within certain parameters as to length—no less than fourteen pages, or more than twenty-two—in typescript. I try to maintain this particular length largely because I think that’s about the right length for a chapter. It feels right. Trust your gut-feel. Your guts know what they’re doing even if you don’t.
Don’t write down to your readers. Don’t do a re-write of Run, Spot, Run! Belittle your readers and you belittle your work and yourself. Epic fantasy is genre fiction; so are mysteries, westerns, spy books, adventure novels and bodice-rippers. This does not mean that we can ever afford to say ‘Aw, hell, that’s good enough,’ because it won’t be. Write anything you put on paper as good as you can possibly make it. ‘Good enough’ stinks to high heaven, and ‘It’s only a fantasy, after all,’ will immediately enroll you in that very large group known as ‘unpublished writers’.
Everybody in the world probably believes that his own language is the native tongue of God and the angels, so I’ll offend people all over the globe when I assert that English is the richest language in human history. Its richness doesn’t derive from its innate beauty or elegance of expression. Its structure is Germanic (Frisian, basically, with strong overlays of other Scandinavian tongues). West Saxon, the language of King Alfred, wasn’t really all that pretty to listen to, and it’ll sprain your tongue while you’re learning to speak it. English is a rich language because the English were the greatest pirates in history. They stole about one fifth of the world, and they stole words and phrases from most of the languages of the world as they went along—French, Latin, Greek, Hindi, Zulu, Spanish, Apache—you name it; the English stole from it. My eight years of exposure to college English gave me an extended vocabulary (my cut of the loot, you might say), and when it’s appropriate, I’ll use it. The youthful, marginally educated reader is going to have trouble with such sentences as ‘Silk’s depredations were broadly ecumenical.’ That might seem a little heavy, but it said exactly what I wanted it to say, and I chose not to rephrase it to make it more accessible to the linguistically challenged. If you want simple, easy books, go read ‘The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore’. How’s that for towering arrogance?
In line with that thought, I’ll take one last pass at that ‘I get letters’ business. Some I’ve received have candidly admitted, ‘I didn’t really like to read before I got into your stories, but now I read all the time.’ Let television tremble. Big Dave and Little Leigh are coming to black out those screens. Maybe that’s our purpose in life. We’re here to teach whole generations how to read—not everybody, perhaps, but enough to possibly make a difference. ‘They left the world better than they found it,’ sounds like a tombstone, but there are worse things you can say about people, wouldn’t you say? Egomaniacal, huh? But egomania is a requirement for any writer. You have to believe that you’re good and that people will want to read your stuff. Otherwise, you’ll give it up after your first rejection slip. Always remember that Gone with the Wind was rejected by thirty-seven publishers before it was finally accepted, and short of the Bible, there are probably more copies of that book in print than any other in publishing history—or so I’ve been told.
I’ll close with a recommendation. My personal favorite fantasy author is Lord Dunsany. He teaches me humility, since he does more in four pages than I can do in four hundred. Read The Book of Wonder. Get to know Slith, Th
angobrind the jeweler, Pombo the Idolater, and Nuth. Ponder the fate of people who jump off the edge of the world. Consider the folly of messing around with Hlo-Hlo, the Spider idol. Journey across the Plains of Zid, through the cities of Mursk and Tlun, around the shoulder of the Peak of Mluna that overlooks the Dubious Land, and cross the bridge from Bad to Worse.
Go ahead. I dare you.
THE END
1 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.
2 The name of the village was added in Belgarath the Sorcerer to justify his name linguistically. ‘Garath’ could mean ‘of the village of Gara’ in the archaic form of several languages.
3 These old people are those Ulgos who chose not to follow Gorim to Prolgu. ‘As the branch that is cut off, they are witheréd and dying.’ (Because their women are barren.)
4 It was not until the Malloreon that we revealed the Orb’s off-world origin. At first it was simply a rock Aldur had picked up in a riverbed and modified with the touch of his hand.
5 An early indication of the prohibition against unmaking things.
6 A note here for the linguistically obsessed. ‘Bel’ may or may not be ‘the symbol of the Will and the Word’. It is more likely that it means ‘beloved’. ‘Bel’ is the masculine form, and ‘Pol’ is the feminine. Polgara’s name derives directly from her father’s name, since it’s a patronymic like ‘Ivan Ivanovitch’ (Ivan son of Ivan) or ‘Natasha Ivanova’ (Natasha, daughter of Ivan) in Russian. Note that this principle does not apply to the name of Pol’s sister, Beldaran, which perhaps indicates that Belgarath loved Beldaran more than he loved Pol.
7 Notice that Belzedar’s obsession with the Orb is introduced here.
8 This is grammatically incorrect. When using archaic language it is important to pay attention to the verb forms, which are not the same in second person familiar as they are in second person formal. The proper form here would be ‘wouldst’.
9 ‘The high places of Korim, which are no more’ are visited at the end of the Malloreon. This is misdirection from Belgarath.
10 That is not ‘another story’. It’s the core of this one.
11 This is a creation myth with resonances of the myths of several cultures on this world. It even has a flood. The flood myths on planet Earth were probably generated by the melt-down of the last ice age about 12,000 years ago. The flood on Garion’s world was the result of a volcanic incident, which is described in some detail in the preliminary studies to the Malloreon.
12 The maiming of a god has no obvious counterpoint in the mythologies of this world. Milton, however, did lock Lucifer permanently into the form of the serpent after he used that form in the temptation of Eve. The branding of Cain may also be an equivalent.
13 We changed this in Belgarath the Sorcerer. That ‘thousand leagues’ looks great in a ‘Holy Book’, but it’s too cumbersome in a story. Moreover, three thousand miles would have put them in the general vicinity of the north pole.
14 The account in Belgarath the Sorcerer differs. The pack ice of winter offered an alternative to that ‘land bridge’.
15 ‘Doom’ originates in Scandinavian mythology, and the word in contemporary English derives from the Scandinavian ‘dom’. It does not mean ‘preordained death’, but rather ‘destiny’ or ‘fate’.
16 An abbreviated version of this became the prologue for Book One of the Belgariad, Pawn of Prophecy, and Belgarath repeated it at Faldor’s farm to give Garion a reference point. It also recurs in Belgarath the Sorcerer.
17 The University of Tol Honeth has its origins in this headnote: a group who were meticulous about details, but who had no idea what was really going on.
18 The chronology was revised.
19 This passage establishes the apostasy of Belzedar. In actuality, Zedar is a tragic hero. When he originally went to Mallorea, he thought he was clever enough to deceive Torak. He was wrong, and, like Urvon and Ctuchik, he is more a slave than a disciple.
20 This is typical of the Nyissan character, and the addition of the hundreds of narcotics available to them enabled us to posit an alien culture with no correspondence to any on this world. It is reasonable for them to be the way they are. Their society has echoes of the Egyptian, but only slight ones.
21 This was written to explain the haunting of Maragor. Note that we now have two insane gods (Torak being the other). Mara recovers, however, when Taiba appears. Note also the hints of a matriarchal society.
22 The merchant class has been greatly neglected in fantasy, but wrongly. This Tolnedran ‘greed’ added an interesting side-light to the character of our heroine. Ce’Nedra loves money.
23 As mentioned in the Introduction this was a false start. We were still groping around the edges of ‘the Will and the Word’ when it was written, and this was an attempt to define it and to set some limits, the most important being that you have to believe that it is going to work. This ‘power’ is essentially Godlike. (And God said, ‘Let there BE light! And there WAS light.’) The King James version is poetic, but some of its translations are highly questionable. The West Saxon translation (eighth century) uses the word ‘Geworcht’ (‘Make’ or ‘construct’) instead of that oversimplification ‘BE’. This suggests that there’s a certain amount of effort involved in the process.
24 This is that ‘unmaking’ business that we finally prohibited.
25 Once we started on this particular Holy Book we began to see all kinds of possibilities beyond the original intention of providing background for Relg. And when we expanded the Ulgos into the Dals, the Melcenes, the Morindim, and the Karands, we had constructed much of the non-Angarak population of Mallorea.
26 Here is that prohibition, but this isn’t the final word. It was ultimately refined so that ‘Be not’ wouldn’t obliterate the entire world, but only the person foolish enough to say it. Primitive mythologies seethed with ‘forbidden words’ (‘Jehovah’ is probably the most prominent). We tampered with that idea and made the obliteration the result of a command rather than a mere word. Sin doth lie in the intent.
27 This date is not a coincidence. Garion was born in 5354, so he is fourteen at this point (and so is Ce’Nedra). This is the year when the quest begins with Garion, Polgara and Belgarath leaving Faldor’s farm to join Silk and Barak.
28 This brief section is really no more than a verbalization of the map cast in the fictionalized voice of the scholars at the University of Tol Honeth. Note that we describe only half a continent at this stage.
29 We used the ‘league’ (three miles) fairly consistently.
30 This is an absurdity, of course. Fun, though.
31 The University of Tol Honeth supposedly exists for the sole purpose of educating the crown prince. Also, we decided to distinguish between ‘your Highness’ and ‘your Majesty’. (‘Highness’ for a prince or princess; ‘Majesty’ for a king or queen.) This is not consistently followed in the royal courts of this world.
32 The use of the word ‘race’ is somewhat archaic. The Alorns are clearly Scandinavian; the Tolnedrans, Marags, Arends, and Nyissans are Mediterranean. The Angaraks, with their ‘angular eyes’ were intended to suggest the Mongols of Genghis Khan or the Huns of Attila.
33 The emperor who commissioned this study was a member of the Borune family, so the scholar who wrote this was evidently trying to ingratiate himself.
34 The dynasties provided a convenient, methodical way to establish the chronology. That was their main purpose, but the frictions between the great families also proved very useful.
35 This was significantly modified in Belgarath the
Sorcerer. The notion that a race of pirates had never heard of the richest place on earth before is obviously absurd. As an aside here, note that in ‘Beowulf’, the original King of the Spear-Danes (Gar-Dena) is referred to as ‘the Sheaf Child’, an obvious derivation from the Story of Moses. The people of the dark ages did have contacts with each other, and some Viking stole the idea and shamelessly used it in ‘Beowulf.’
36 This is one of those ‘internal footnotes’ I mentioned earlier.
37 This was modified later. Kal-Torak (Torak himself) did have a second army, but it came from the south, not the east, and it was bogged down in the Desert of Araga by that unnatural blizzard.
38 This ‘history’ is a scant 40 pages (or so) in length, but it gave a grand overview of about 5000 years of history which proved to be invaluable.
39 These little details add the necessary sense of reality to a story. Note that most of them are the same as they are here in the ‘real’ world.
40 These values are arbitrary, and have little relationship to the current value of precious metals.
41 In Belgarath the Sorcerer Belgarath spends some time in Maragor after Poledra’s apparent death. This paragraph on Marag social organization served as the basis for that sojourn.
42 This xenophobic restriction was significantly relaxed during the actual writing.
43 This account differs markedly from the one in Belgarath the Sorcerer.
44 Geran becomes a boy of six in Belgarath the Sorcerer and Polgara the Sorceress.
45 This description of Barak derives from an earlier character sketch.
46 We chose not to follow the institution of thralldom (slavery). It was present in Europe during the Dark Ages, but it would have served no purpose in this story.
47 These population numbers were low throughout. We had the Dark Ages in mind, but the societies that developed in the story were noticeably more advanced.
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