Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons From a Writing Life

by Terry Brooks

  It is so much easier just to let things be. Big cats can’t be put in the same pen as grass eaters. Everyone knows that. Everyone knows what will happen if you try.

  Except children, of course. They think anything is possible.

  * * *

  I read so many books of fiction in which the author fails to give any real time and effort to coming up with a good beginning or ending that I grow discouraged.

  * * *

  * * *

  BEGINNINGS

  AND ENDINGS

  * * *

  I GAVE CONSIDERABLE thought to whether or not to write this chapter, worrying that the subject matter was too esoteric and my opinion too subjective. I finally decided I should—had to, in fact. I read so many works of fiction in which the author fails to give any real time and effort to coming up with a good beginning or ending that I grow discouraged. It should be self-evident that both are exceedingly important, that the function of each is so crucial to the success of a book that a failure at either front or back is likely to sink the whole project.

  You think I exaggerate? Protest too much? Then here is my defense. You decide if it’s a good one.

  We have lots of choices for how we spend our free time. Books are only one option and not necessarily the most exciting one. You can argue until you are blue in the face (and I have) that books are the best and most satisfying choice, but they are not the one most people think of first. Otherwise, more people would be reading than going to movies or attending sports events or playing video and computer games or watching television, and they aren’t. Reading a book is the least visual form of entertainment (aside from listening to music), yet requires the most work from the participant. Think about it. If you watch television or go to a movie or attend a sporting event or a concert, all you have to do is sit there and let it happen. If you play a video or computer game, you have to exercise your thumb and a few fingers and in some extreme cases your brain, but you still have a screen to tell you what is happening. When you read a book, everything takes place in your mind. Not only do you have to imagine the landscape and the characters and the action, you have to remember it all for at least a couple of days or maybe weeks, depending on how fast you read.

  We must also accept that we live in a time when speed is the central component of most forms of entertainment. Television takes place in ever-shortened segments broken up by rapid scene shifts and endless commercials. Movies and sporting events last no more than a couple of hours and rely heavily on visual movement for their allure. Video and computer games—well, you don’t need me to tell you about speed there. That leaves books as the single form of entertainment that really doesn’t happen quickly, even when the story is a fast-paced one, simply because it takes time to read and digest all those words and imagine all those pictures.

  What all this means is that to a large extent other forms of entertainment drive the way readers approach books. Like it or not, or even realize it or not, they are influenced by all this fastness, this rapidity. I would submit that if a book doesn’t hook most readers in the first couple of pages, they grow less and less likely as they proceed with the reading of it to want to continue. If they even get that far, I might add, because they might not get past the jacket copy when they first pick it up in the bookstore. It takes a lot to persuade a reader to take a chance on any particular book. (With my aging eyesight, I even like to check out the typeface.) In any case, once the choice is made, readers don’t want to invest an undue amount of time finding out whether or not the story is going anywhere. They don’t want their faith in the writer tested.

  Writers can do so much to help themselves here, and they so often don’t. The solution is simple. Get into the story. Jump in with both feet. Start with something compelling enough that the reader won’t be able to put the book down right away. It doesn’t have to be an action scene—a murder, a cataclysmic event, or a battle—to get the job done. It just needs to be something memorable enough to avoid the letdown of a too-slow, too-meandering start.

  I began The Sword of Shannara, way back in 1977, with a long descriptive passage that set the scene and gave the reader a leisurely first look at one of the protagonists. Really, I meandered about for almost the first hundred pages. I got away with it then, but I wouldn’t think of doing that in today’s entertainment climate. A good opening needs to be immediately compelling. A good first sentence gives it an even better chance. Readers who are familiar with and have read my books will stick with me for at least a couple of chapters or maybe even all the way through, no matter what sort of opening I use. But readers who are new to my work are going to need a little more persuasion. A reading of the jacket copy will suggest if the subject matter is of interest, but if I get that far, I need a vivid, compelling opening to make sure that reader’s commitment to the book doesn’t waver.

  The single biggest problem with openings is that writers have a tendency to want to begin at the beginning. They want to start where it all happens first so they don’t leave anything out. But the truth is nothing starts at the beginning, at least not since the time of Adam and Eve. Everything starts in the middle of something else, and that’s where it ends, as well. So you might as well jump in somewhere interesting as somewhere boring, and bring the pieces of the story and its characters together as you go along. Choosing the important components of your story ahead of time—and discarding the unimportant ones—will help you do that.

  Endings suffer from a different kind of problem. Remember several chapters back when I was talking about outlining (don’t cringe!)? Remember when I mentioned all those books by all those writers that were great for three hundred or even four hundred pages and then just tanked, all because the writer hadn’t taken the time to outline the book in advance of writing it? Well, one conclusion we might draw is that bad endings suffer from poor beginnings. Another is that bad endings result from poor planning. The result is the same. What began as inspired writing some months back has suddenly lost its impetus. That memorable journey begun with such high expectations has meandered off into the wilderness. If the writer hasn’t thought the story through before, now the pressure is really on. A good ending is desperately coveted, but not always immediately recognizable. Thus bad things start to happen. An ending that might not hold up so well under careful scrutiny suddenly looks like a million dollars. Or worse, the first ending that comes to mind seems good enough.

  Sometimes, the problem is unsolvable. I discovered this the hard way with my late, lamented second effort, as chronicled in chapter six. I wrote that second book without thinking it through, and by the time I was four hundred pages in, it was too late to come up with a workable ending, because the rest of the book was junk. But even if I had written a good first four hundred pages, I would still need an ending that satisfied my readers and justified the time and effort they spent getting to it.

  Think about it. The ending of a book provides readers with their final look at a writer’s storytelling ability and writing prowess. It is the last impression they have of that writer. If the impression isn’t a good one, it colors all the successes the writer has enjoyed up to that point. It mutes the reader’s overall satisfaction with the story. It makes it that much easier, the next time around, to give that disappointing writer a pass.

  It is hard enough to find a sufficient number of readers in the first place. Ask any writer working in the field of fiction today, and I’ll bet they will tell you they could stand to have a few more readers. So why toss away a perfectly good opportunity to keep one you already have? Yet that is what happens all too often, with endings that don’t live up to expectations.

  It has been said that in the perfect scenario for a successful book, the ending should not be apparent at the beginning, but should be clearly inevitable and perfectly logical once you arrive at it. This symbiotic relationship between beginning and ending is what makes a book feel structured and well conceived. There should be a tightness to the storytelling that leaves the read
er hungry for more because what was offered was so satisfying.

  If I were given the chance to whisper like the proverbial muse in the ears of those writing or planning to write fiction, I would say one last thing. Don’t settle for a beginning that doesn’t feel strong and compelling or an ending that doesn’t completely satisfy. Make your story arc the rainbow it deserves to be.

  * * *

  Publishers are supportive of the artistic side of writers, as well, wanting their books to be critically well received, but mostly they want them to sell lots

  and lots of copies. Publishing is, after all, a business.

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  * * *

  THE WORD AND

  THE VOID

  * * *

  IN THE WINTER of 1993, an extraordinary opportunity came knocking at my door. My publisher, Del Rey Books, offered me a lot of money to write a new fantasy series, one not connected to either Shannara or Magic Kingdom. I could write on any subject (so long as it was fantasy related) and break the series up into separate, stand-alone books or keep them as a trilogy. Because I was in the middle of fulfilling obligations for books on another contract, I didn’t have to write these new books until I had finished the old, which would give me several years to think about what I wanted to do.

  Let me stop here and explain something to you about the way publishers view writers. Publishers view writers as investments. They spend time, money, and effort promoting their books, hoping in the end for a decent return. They are supportive of the artistic side of writers, as well, wanting their books to be critically well received, but mostly they want them to sell lots and lots of copies. Publishing is, after all, a business.

  Mostly, it takes more than one book to “break a writer out” (a favorite publishing term for increasing sales dramatically) so that the books the publisher has been nurturing and supporting for all these years finally begin to pay off. When one book sells, usually the others start to do better, as well, and the publisher can anticipate the possibility of recouping its outlay and seeing a profit—so long as it can persuade the writer to remain in-house and not decide to take his newfound success elsewhere. When a writer produces a book that makes the jump from obscurity to midlist or midlist to best-seller, what the publisher wants the writer to do is to repeat the success. The writer can do this best, in the publisher’s experience, by writing another book just like the last one.

  You see where I am going with this.

  When the writer decides to do something different, maybe only a little different, maybe altogether different, the publisher is usually not overjoyed. After all, it took time and money to break the writer out and build an audience for his or her work, and it was done, almost always, with a particular kind of book or series. Only a few contemporary fiction writers regularly write a different kind of book each time out, and even then they tend to stick with the same themes and types of characters. Yes, a handful of writers are so successful that no matter what they write, they are going to sell a lot of books. Tom Clancy, Stephen King, John Grisham, Danielle Steel, and Michael Crichton come to mind. They might not sell the same numbers as they would if they were writing what they usually write, but they will do well enough that the publisher can afford to indulge them. (Indeed, given the amount of money their books earn, a publisher had better indulge them.) But there aren’t many of these, and all the rest of us made our names by writing a particular kind of book in a definable category of fiction.

  So when one of us who isn’t King, Steel, Grisham, et al., decides to move away from the type of fiction that the publisher has spent all this time and money promoting, a concerted effort is made by all those concerned with the business end to get the writer to reconsider. This is not to say they will flat out tell the writer not to do it. That would be like waving a red flag in front of a bull—especially where you are talking about a writer’s art. You don’t hear anyone trying to tell painters what to paint or composers what to compose, do you? It’s no different with writers. Nevertheless, those with a vested interest in the writer will try to make clear the possible consequences of abandoning established ground for new country.

  In all fairness, the publisher has a valid point. Attempts by established authors with established audiences to try a new kind of fiction usually don’t succeed. What happens is that a sizable chunk of the audience drops away to wait for the next book because they read the writer for the kind of book that won them over in the first place, not this new stuff. Even front-rank authors have to accept that not writing the sort of book they are known for is likely to decrease their sales for at least one outing.

  The reason for this digression on how publishers view authors is to demonstrate that Del Rey was showing a certain amount of confidence by agreeing to allow me to write anything I wanted, even if the agreement stipulated it must be fantasy. Fantasy, after all, is a big tent. A lot of strange animals tend to wander inside.

  I am not sure to this day what Del Rey expected me to come up with, but I do know that I was quite certain from day one what it was that I wanted to write. When the offer reached me I already had something very specific in mind and it wasn’t like anything I had ever done before. I wanted to write a dark, contemporary fantasy, one set in our world that would address current social issues and incorporate a framework of magic that would fit seamlessly with what we know to be true about ourselves. I wanted to set the story in a fictional town in the Midwest that would be modeled after the town I grew up in. I wanted to talk about growing up—about how when we are children we believe in a sort of magic, the kind that lets us accept for a short time that anything is possible. I wanted the main characters to be a fourteen-year-old girl who could do magic and was struggling with her identity and a raft of family secrets, and a drifter who had been sent to find her because she might be the key to either triggering or aborting the Apocalypse.

  It would be the kind of story that I knew would never work in either a Shannara or Magic Kingdom setting.

  It would also be exactly the kind of story that would violate the rule I have just described about sticking to what your readers and the publisher expect of you.

  I knew this going in. I also knew the probable consequences. I had experienced them once already when I did Magic Kingdom for Sale some ten years earlier. Even then, my audience overwhelmingly preferred Shannara books—epic fantasies in the Tolkien tradition. I had seduced my readers with those books, and they had come to expect, rightly, that this was the kind of book I would deliver each time out. When I wrote Magic Kingdom for Sale, they were accepting, but not altogether pleased. They liked the story well enough, but the most frequent comment I heard was, When are you going to write another Shannara? When, instead of doing that, I wrote two more Magic Kingdom books, it did not endear me. The consequences were these: fewer sales by as much as two-thirds, publisher and reader dissatisfaction in the change, and author disappointment that the books hadn’t caught on.

  Eventually, they did. They found an audience, and they gained acceptance from both the publisher and the readers. Now I am regularly asked, When are you going to write another Magic Kingdom? But it took some time and effort to get there.

  And it did not involve the kind of money that this new series did, which I knew would color everything.

  But here’s the whole point of this chapter. Sometimes, when you are a professional writer, when you have successfully published and no longer have to worry about breaking down doors, you still have to make the occasional hard choice, and one of the hardest is choosing between writing what compels you and writing what makes money. The choice isn’t always clear, and the one doesn’t necessarily exclude the other, but in many cases you have a pretty good idea of which is which. I didn’t understand this when I wrote Magic Kingdom for Sale, because I had never done anything but Shannara books and was still naÏve enough to think my audience would follow me anywhere. But by the time I got to the book that would become Running with the Demon, I knew better.

  Still,
writing is an art, and artistic expression requires that the artist follow his heart. This was true to some extent with Magic Kingdom for Sale, but in the case of Running with the Demon, it was everything. I was passionate about this story, so much so that I told myself it didn’t matter if it didn’t sell the way everyone hoped it would. Not that I believed for a minute that this would happen, because I am as capable of self-delusion as the next guy. In fact, I thought this book would do even better than the Shannara books. I was so invested in it, so enamored of it, that I was convinced everyone else would be, too—even though I should have known better.

  Well, you can guess the rest. I wrote what I believed then and now to be a really wonderful book—maybe the best book I have ever written. Hopes were high, fanfare was great, promotion was strong, and the book went right onto the New York Times Best-Seller List on the very first week of publication.

  And then it promptly sank like a stone. Oh, it did pretty well, don’t get me wrong. It just didn’t do nearly as well as everyone, myself included, had hoped. It sold about as well as a Magic Kingdom book, but nowhere near as well as a Shannara. It got on all the best-seller lists, but it made only a cameo appearance. It was well placed in all bookselling venues, but only for about a month before everyone could see the handwriting on the wall.

  As my contract provided, I wrote two more books in what would become The Word and The Void series, and neither of these books did any better than the first. But slowly an audience began to build, just as it had with Magic Kingdom. Readers quit wondering when I was going to do another Shannara book and started asking about the new series. Now I am as likely as not to hear from readers, When will you do another Word and Void?