The Reality Break Interviews: Volume #0

by Dave Slusher

  DS: Let's dig into that a little more. You've been reading fantasy and heroic fiction for most of your life, I would guess.

  TW: Yes, just about.

  DS: What exactly is it about this that made you want to become a writer of it yourself?

  TW: There's two things going on. One is that when it's good, and fantasy considered in the larger sense—almost anything is a fantasy. Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is fantasy, The Odyssey and the Iliad are fantasies because they deal with things that aren't really the real world as we know them and weren't real at the time. So when fantasy works, its wonderful for a variety of reasons that I could talk about. The other aspect, though, is that fantasy as a commercial product has become incredibly successful and as a result, as with anything that is commercially successful, it has drawn in a lot of not very good stuff, Product with a capital “p". As somebody who loves fantasy as a genre but at the same time said, as many writers do, “I can do better than that.” The combination of those two things is what led me into it.

  DS: Specifically about this book, this is the second part of To Green Angel Tower.

  TW: That's almost embarrassing. I had planned originally when I outlined it to write it in a single volume and once I turned in this horrendously long outline, which the outline itself was as long as many people's novels, my publisher realized it was a multivolume book to get this finished. I eventually settled on three volumes. When I started writing the hardcover of the third volume of the original manuscript that there was so much stuff to be wrapped up that it really should have been two books. But, I was not going to spring a fourth book on people when I told them it was three. I wrapped it all up in that one volume, but it was a tremendously long volume—something like 1200 pages in hardcover. You simply cannot bind a paperback book the way you can a hardcover. They are flimsier because of the way that they are made. We couldn't get that hardcover into a single paperback book that would have lasted through an entire reading with pages flying out all over the place. It was purely a practical decision.

  DS: When you sat down to write the series when you first started, were you aware it would grow to such a length?

  TW: No, I knew by the time I started it that it was going to be more than a single volume and as I said I was shooting for three. They turned out to be three extremely long books. A lot of people out there may have seen or read The Lord of the Rings, and this is twice as long in words as that. I really didn't know that would happen. Part of it was that as a writer I was maturing, and I was learning to trust my instincts. Trusting my instincts often meant following plot tangents and characters off in directions I hadn't planned. Once I got there, it looked interesting. I still had all of the things I'd originally planned to do in the book, but now I had all of this new storylines and characters cropping up.

  DS: Do you think as fantasy gets more popular and more writers are writing in the genre, is there more of a burden on the individual author to make it different?

  TW: I think that if you don't write a book and decide to write the best damn book that anyone's ever written, I think you are in trouble from the word go. If I had simply sat down and said “I'm going to write another successful commercial epic fantasies", I don't think I would have been able to finish it. I sat down and decided that I had things to say, I've got a big reaction to what I think has gone wrong in the field of fantasy as a genre, and I had a lot of things I wanted to talk about in the philosophical and moral sense, and I had a lot of commentary. I had all of these things I wanted to do with that book, and I think any writer needs ... inspiration is an old-fashioned word but I think you need to be driven, certainly.

  DS: Did you anticipate that the books would be as successful as they are, or was that a surprise?

  TW: Somebody asked me this the other day about my first book, if I was surprised when it did well. It sounds megalomaniacal, but no, I wasn't surprised. I read an awful lot, and I felt that I could do a good job. I've always been a storyteller, I love words, I love fiction, I love what fiction does for people because that's what it did for me. These amazing things that no other art form can do for you. I said that I think I can do a good job, and once I'd finished, I said “I think it is good.” I thought people would see that it wasn't a run of the mill book. The fact that it does well also doesn't mean anything in and of itself, because everybody knows that if you look at popular music or popular art or popular culture of any kind—just because something sells well doesn't meant that it's great art either. I'm not kidding myself that that means I'm a great artist when I've sold a lot of books. I did think that they would do fairly well, and I was, of course, pleased when that proved to be true.

  DS: Now that you've been writing for a while and you've had the success, does that affect your writing of future books? Do past successes make you write a different book?

  TW: I think, first of all, at the kind of length that this series was and the next big thing that I'm working on, you better damn well better get up every morning and really be into what you are doing. It took me eight years to write the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn books. That's a career. You don't just get up, knock it out and go on to something else. You are committed to living with those characters and that book for a long time. In that sense, you do have to be really involved with what you are doing and really care about it. As far as what effect it has on future books, it has made the decision making process more poignant. [laughs] Before, I was at a certain level of success as a writer of commercial product. Let's face it—(A) I want to make a living off of what I'm doing, because I love doing it and don't want to do anything else. (B) The people selling my books want to keep selling books and even sell more if they can. But, I've always said that I won't write the same thing twice because I wouldn't be interested in that. It would show. When somebody is saying that we can virtually guarantee you twice as much money if you write the same thing again, compared to what you will get for doing something different. Then you are forced to look at yourself and say, “Do I really want to live by these principles that I brought up a lot when it was easy?” When it wasn't a question of real money, I threw them around a lot. In that sense, it has made them much more poignant. I have decided that I have to do what I want to do and I can't write the same book twice, so maybe I won't sell quite as well as somebody who has developed a real familiarity and you always know what their next book is going to be. In that sense, it has made it more clear to me that these decisions have ramifications.

  DS: Would you have gone into it if you had known that it would be such a big commitment of your life?

  TW: That's a difficult question to answer. I probably would have. First of all, it became a very important story to me and once I'd started it I did want to see it all the way through. Secondly, I get a lot of nice responses about them. People say things about these books that make me glad I wrote them. I guess I would have, but it is certainly something that you look at and consider seriously. As a matter of fact, I just started this new quite long series of books. When I finished the trilogy and this eight years of my life, I told my friends that if I ever start something like this again, shoot me. Either they are poor friends or just bad shots, because I'm starting another multi-books series. I guess I have not learned my lessons. A story must be as long as it has to be. A long book is a different kind of book, but it has its own intrinsic value.

  DS: The fans get their favorite characters and they get attachments too, and you get characters that you like, after you get into the second or third book, is it hard to “kill your darlings", so to speak?

  TW: It's never easy when you have that kind of relationship with, admittedly imaginary, people. It's not easy to kill them off, but one of the things that I did very deliberately was that I started killing them off early in the first book. [laughs] In part, one of my complaints with commercial fantasy is that these catastrophic worldwide convulsions occur, and very few people die—and those are expendable. Anybody knows who had a family that lived in Europe during the World
Wars, or in Asia during World War II, that these kinds of conflagrations affect everybody. Everybody knows somebody who has lost someone. I didn't want my readers to sit back and believe that almost all of these characters would survive. I wanted them on the edge of their seats, not knowing what I would do next. I did start killing off major characters fairly early and continued it all the way through. This was not to be dramatic or cruel, but simply because that was the kind of situation that these characters were in. It was a very dangerous time when there was nothing you could trust, institutions had crumbled and the world was at war. As a result, I think my readers could never sit back in comfort and feel positive that these characters that they had identified with were all going to be fine at the end of the book.

  DS: Tell us about what you did before you started writing.

  TW: I'll talk about those ones that I can mention in front of a mixed audience. I did a lot of different things. A lot of writers have these bizarre and varied curriculum vitae. I think it is in part that we always have the sense that we are meant for something other than a normal job, wearing a tie—or that we are unfit for a normal job, as is more often the case. I did a lot of different things. I always had some sort of artistic thing going, and then usually something to actually pay the rent. On the rent paying side, I sold shoes, threw newspapers, managed savings and loans and art stores, sold comic books, waited tables, just about everything that you can name in terms of low paying, low esteem jobs. On the creative side, I did theater, I was in a rock band for a number of years, I did radio for about 12 years. I was a commercial artist, cartoonist, technical artist. I've done it, whatever it is. I didn't necessarily do it well, don't get me wrong. Probably some of these people are extremely happy that I became a writer so as never to inflict my skills on their particular chosen profession again. I've done a lot of kind of strange things.

  DS: That helps with the writing, that you've been around and done so many different things.

  TW: Absolutely. My characterization, my one line synopsis of most writers in terms of our intellectual prowess is that we tend to be a mile wide and an inch deep. We know a little bit about a lot of things. We don't tend to have very deep vertical knowledge of anything. Some writers do, but most of us are just kind of gadflies. We know a lot about a lot of strange useless subjects.

  DS: Of this huge cast of characters, which ones are the ones that you like the best personally?

  TW: That's always hard to say. Many of them have their genesis as some fragment of my own already somewhat fragmented personality, which I then add to and change until it becomes a real person. I come from a very food oriented family. We are fiercely protective about food and very interested in it—if you reach across someone else's plate you get fork marks in the back of your hand. So one of the characters, started out literally as a starving, very hungry scholar. It was that aspect of me that was the first thing that informed him as a character. By the end of the books, he was completely different. That was only just one tiny bit of his personality. In that sense, a lot of them have something . do with me. Obviously, the main character goes through a lot of the things I and my brothers went through during adolescence, so there is a great deal of personal stuff in it. A lot of the lessons that he learns as he moves into adulthood are lessons that I'm still trying to learn as I move through adulthood. I'm also very fond of some of the quirkier characters. The troll Benebik is one that most people seem to like, and he is certainly a favorite of mine. I'd be hard pressed to name specifically all of them. I like some of the villains tremendously, and I like the monsters a lot. It's hard for me to pick anybody. It's like picking which of your children you like the best.

  DS: With all these characters in there, is keeping control of the cast difficult, like taking a bus full of kids on a field trip?

  TW: [laughs] It feels like taking a bus load full of armed children, is what it feels like. [laughs] One of the things I learned to do during these books—it has served me well and will continue to serve me well—is to have a certain amount of faith in my own ability to work things out. A lot of it is not necessarily in a conscious sense. I don't literally sit down and solve them, but I just walk away from them for a couple of days. The subconscious does the hokey-pokey and after a while I come back and all of the sudden, the solution that pops into your brain is a much better solution than the ones you were tying to hammer out consciously. It connects things, and answers some questions while setting up something for the last volume that you've been wondering about. I think that is another reason why I will continue to write big books. I've learned that I'm good at , or my subconscious is good at weaving these very large tapestries.

  DS: When you were setting up this milieu for these books, there seems to be some consistencies between the races and our existing ethnic groups. Was that your starting point?

  TW: This is where you get into Tadspeak 101 if you aren't careful. I had a lot of thought that went into a lot of these things. Sometimes you get more than you really wanted to know. One of the reasons that I did that is because I knew about the decisions you make with a fantasy novels and with world building in particular. If I had been true to my first impulse, I would have made the whole thing completely alien and completely foreign. Literally, I would have tried to simulate languages that didn't feel anything like human languages. What I realized fairly early in the planning stage is that there were going to be so many characters and so many changes of scene—I've got twenty different focus point locales going at any one time—that I needed to give people some handles to hand onto so they could make the associations quickly. When a character shows up who has sort of a Scandinavian sounding name, they can figure out which group they belong to. This character is probably with so-and-so. If all the names were indistinguishably different from regular familiar stuff, people would have to literally start from scratch with the introduction of a new character or a change of scene. I based some of these things on Earthlike cultures, or at least Earthlike languages, vary particularly to give people a bit of a road map. This let people jump more quickly into the important stuff, which is what is happening to the characters rather than who are they, where are they from.

  DS: You've mentioned your other big book and a few short pieces that you are working on. What sort of shorter works are you doing?

  TW: I have short stories hither and thither all over the place. I did a short story for a Michael Moorcock Elric anthology, and a short story for a Neil Gaiman Sandman anthology. Neither of these were very short, I might add, typical of me. I have a short novel coming out this fall called Caliban's Hour, which is based on Shakespeare's The Tempest from Caliban's point of view, although this is what happened after The Tempest as well. I'm really excited about that. I'm starting the next big thing, which is not an epic fantasy, although it will have a lot of fantasyish elements, as well as science fictional elements. It is called Otherland, and I'm very excited about that. I've just started working on that.

  TW: I was just sitting with my publishers last night at dinner. We were talking laughingly about the first time we met in San Francisco in 1985, which is when we agreed that this would be my second book. My first book, Tailchaser's Song, they had already bought. We were reminiscing about this, and I asked them if they realized that that was the point they agreed to do it. The final book is only now coming out! It's been ten years since the inception of this project, and the last paperback volume is finally hitting the stands. It's been a very long time.

  * * *

  Visit www.evilgeniuscorp.com for information on additional titles by this and other authors.

 

 

 
-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share