“We always tend to get so hung up on labels,” Salvatore opines. “Is Star Wars fantasy or science fiction? I see it as fantasy. It hinges on the classic Hero’s Quest, and the Force always seemed more magical to me than physiological (thanks for the midi-chlorians there, guys …). I think I’m not alone, and that was part of the blow-back when the Force was suddenly ‘explained.’
“As for ‘Hugo Mann’s Perfect Soul,’ well, it’s got enough mysticism, theology, and suspension of disbelief in it to qualify as speculative fiction, or fantasy, or speculative theology, or whatever else you want to call it.”
To Salvatore, “it’s simply another look at human nature, which is what I do in all of my books. My purpose in writing is, and always has been, to study the spiritual side of what makes us who we are. That’s why I spend as much time in the heads of our villains as our heroes, why I’m as fascinated by [The Legend of Drizzt assassin-villain] Artemis Entreri as I am about Drizzt Do’Urden.”
This touches back to what we discussed in Chapter 5. Salvatore had something to say in this story, and he used the freedom allowed by speculative fiction—we could call it magic realism and not be too far off—to explore that idea to some depth.
FATE OR CHOICE?
Salvatore continues, “What I tried to get at in ‘Hugo Mann’s Perfect Soul’ was the question of fate versus choice, as much as anything else. Well, in this case, it was a matter of choices made within the characters’ predetermined fate—more predetermined, even, than that of a dark elf born in Menzoberranzan. In a way, this story is anathema to the themes I often explore in my later novels, because it infers the deity role in the characters; you’re either born with a perfect, or even substantial, soul or you’re not, after all.
“Maybe that’s why Hugo Mann was driven mad. Maybe the concept of that which he discovered was too discordant for him to accept, or maybe it was too discordant for his god [the writer] to accept it, so I took decisive action.”
It’s interesting to hear that the author has seemingly been puzzled by his own story. This certainly doesn’t mean he wasn’t thinking about it. A not-uncommon response from authors when asked about their characters’ choices is that the characters seemed to make their own decisions, taking the author along for the ride. Though there is a bit of hyperbole there, there’s also more than a grain of truth. Part of what any author does, as I’ve stressed over and over, is ask questions of the characters. If the characters come to life, as they should, they provide answers—or more questions.
Find the Continuing Themes
It is also common for an author to ask similar or even the very same question from novel to novel, story to story. “Hugo Mann’s Perfect Soul” touches on themes common throughout Salvatore’s body of work, though perhaps less overtly.
Though this story speaks openly of God and Jesus, in The Legend of Drizzt, Salvatore purposely avoids the invented deities of the Forgotten Realms setting. “I don’t want to deal with them,” he explains. “When the dark elf Drizzt finds his goddess, it’s not that there’s some actual being (though in Realmslore, there is) out there ready to help him, but rather, he is introduced to the tenets of the followers of this goddess and finds that those tenets are reflective of that which is already in his heart.”
He adds, “From Drizzt’s point of view”—like that of Richard Hilgedick’s—“it’s all choice. There is no predetermined fate. There is no controlling hand playing us like marionettes. I doubt Drizzt would even accept psychotherapeutic notions of being trapped by your childhood experiences—though in more than one instance, he found that he had erred precisely because of that childhood. Still, in the end, he overcame that baggage and made the correct choice before him.” In much the same way, Richard (unlike Hugo) can be sanguine about the similarities between Jesus and Hitler: Jesus made better choices.
These ideas, in slightly different ways, went on to inform Salvatore’s later work.
EXPLORING THE NATURE OF EVIL
“All of the themes from The Legend of Drizzt carried into DemonWars in terms of self-discipline and climbing through station into greatness,” says Salvatore. “But looking back now, the thesis of ‘Hugo Mann’s Perfect Soul’ could be applied to DemonWars. For example, those with perfect souls in the short story can carry out acts of great evil, but only because they think they’re doing right. In DemonWars, the character of Marcalo De’Unnero is exactly like that. I get more letters saying, ‘I hate that guy,’ regarding De’Unnero than anyone else, even Artemis Entreri. That monk is one of my favorite characters ever, precisely because he believes with all his heart and soul that he’s doing great good, that his means are justified by the end he will bring forth.”
The Villain’s Motivation
Hugo Mann’s inability to reconcile the good acts of Jesus with the evils of Hitler brings us back to the question of a villain’s motivation that we explored in Chapter 10. Remember that an unmotivated villain is neither scary nor interesting.
Salvatore notes that when writing DemonWars he “didn’t intend any analogies to some of the things we saw post–9/11 in the United States, obviously, since the DemonWars series was written almost in full before that tragedy, but I was making a general statement about my view of human nature. A villain who wakes up every day thinking, ‘What evil can I do today?’ is boring. A villain who wakes up every day and simply doesn’t care whether he does good or evil, and just does what’s best for him, is rather inane. But a villain who thinks himself a hero, a villain who believes that the evil he is doing is for the best, is a villain worth reading about.”
WHAT HAS CHANGED?
And now that almost twenty years has passed since Salvatore wrote the story—almost that long since he last read it—how have his ideas and attitudes changed?
“I hadn’t thought of the story in a long time when I pulled it out for this project. To my surprise, I didn’t cringe when I read it, as is often the case with some long-ago work. In fact, I find myself wanting to rework the story to punch up the theme even more, and perhaps less obviously. Suppose there is this one meta-being, Human, who lends pieces of his soul to his corporeal manifestations and now that those corporeal manifestations, people, have multiplied so greatly, there’s simply not enough ‘soul’ to go around.”
KEEP REVISING AND REVISING
There’s something we didn’t talk much about: When do you stop revising? If the story hasn’t been published yet, go ahead and keep tinkering. Perhaps the ideas behind the story are strong, but you need a whole different way of expressing them.
For Salvatore this may have been the case with DemonWars, a project he regards as deeply personal and returned to several times in his writing life. You will likely also end up with a story that sits in a box somewhere, silently informing the rest of your career.
CONCLUSION
NEVER FEAR
I hope that over the course of this book I’ve given you new tools you can use not only to write a science fiction or fantasy novel, but also to do it well. Keep at it and learn from your successes and failures. And no matter what I tell you, what anyone else tells you, don’t give up.
“If someone can talk you out of being a writer, you’re not a writer,” screenwriter Josh Olson wrote in an article for the Village Voice. If you want to be a writer, keep writing. As long as you’re writing, reading, researching, working, revising—even when it feels as though you’re just beating your head against the wall—you’re getting better.
Remember, Yoda told Luke Skywalker, “Do, or do not. There is no try.” He knows what he’s talking about.
Write, or write not.
—PHILIP ATHANS
Washington State, December 2009
JOIN ME IN THANKING …
This book wouldn’t have been a sixteenth as good without the generosity of sixteen people who were like angels on my shoulder:
Lou Anders
Kevin J. Anderson
John Betancourt
Terry Brooks
Brendan Deneen
Ethan Ellenberg
Harlan Ellison
Paul S. Kemp
Jess Lebow
Kuo-Yu Liang
Logan Masterson
J. M. McDermott
Paul Park
Mike Resnick
R. A. Salvatore
Paul Witcover
With a special thanks to Peter Archer for suggesting I do it in the first place, and for being a far more patient editor than I would have been; Bill Slavicsek and Bill Rose for their blessings; R. A. Salvatore (again) for agreeing to be more deeply involved in the whole thing than first he bargained for; everyone on the blogosphere who’s visited Fantasy Author’s Handbook (http://fantasyhandbook.wordpress.com); and as always, Deanne and the kids.
Copyright © 2010 Simon and Schuster
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“Hugo Mann’s Perfect Soul” copyright © 2010 by R. A. Salvatore.
Harlan Ellison’s quote from the documentary
Dreams with Sharp Teeth copyright © 2008 by the Kilimanjaro Corporation.
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The Guide to Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction Page 19