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DR: In aiming to develop as a writer, how deliberate were you in terms of the progress you wanted to make while writing those intervening books? Were certain books an attempt to add a particular string to your bow, to expand your vocabulary in certain specific ways?
SD: It wasn’t premeditated in that way. I am not what I call a fecund writer. I don’t get a lot of ideas for stories and because story ideas are comparatively few for me, I perceive myself as the servant of my story ideas. They aren’t there to do what I need them to do, I’m there to do what they need to do. Plainly, this is an intellectual game, because, of course, where do the ideas come from except my imagination, but it gives me an attitude towards them. I don’t censor or control what my imagination is doing, if it gives me an idea for a story, then it is my task to write that story. If I start censoring, if I start picking and choosing, if I start using my ideas to put forward my own agendas of any kind – my agendas as a writer, my agendas as personal political views, my agendas as religious or environmental views – I start using my ideas to serve me, they’re going to dry up and go away.
That’s been my belief for years and so I’ve know all this time that I’ve been striving to become a better writer, but it wasn’t because I needed to become a better writer so that I can write The Last Chronicles, it was: ‘I need to become a better writer. Period. And here’s a challenge unlike anything I’ve ever done before and it’s in my head and it’s demanding utterance – so let’s do it!’
Now probably tucked away somewhere, way in the background of my mind, was that thought that I needed to prepare for these last books, but it was virtually never a conscious thing. That would have detracted from the integrity of the individual story I happened to be writing at the moment. Whatever story it is I’m working on, I really try to give it my whole attention. It’s not a case of ‘oh good, this will give me a chance to practice unreliable narrators, and then I can use that later when I write Covenant.’ No, it wasn’t like that at all. You know, I write this story because I’m working on this story.
SD: This question comes up most often in the form of: ‘Do you know what you’re going to write next? What are you gonna do after you’ve finished The Last Chronicles. The truth is I’ve no earthly idea, but I never had had an idea. I don’t try to answer that question until I’ve finished the story that’s right in front of me. Once it’s done then I say ‘oh, ok, now what will I write next?’. And the same has been true for the past twenty years. I haven’t searched for ideas that would help me prepare for Covenant, I’ve just searched for ideas that felt like they were so exciting it felt absolute necessary to write them.
DR: That’s interesting, because it does seem that in some of your books there is a very specific method being employed. I’m thinking of the first of the Gap series, The Real Story
SD: Right.
DR: …and reverse them as the narrative progresses. That seems fairly deliberate in terms of demonstrating a certain type of storytelling.
SD: It was, and in some sense that first book was the most self-conscious story I’ve written. It was explicitly a technical exercise, and the reason it was explicitly a technical exercise is because of the material I was writing about. Most of the time when I get ideas for stories, they feel like they come from outside me; this one felt like I was discovering it inside me, and as a result I felt very exposed, as if this were a covert autobiography. It was to counteract that feeling – because when I wrote the original novella I had no intention of expanding it, I was trying to make it work for it’s own sake on it’s own terms – and I developed it as that technical exercise as a way of distancing, of creating some form of distance from how personal the subject matter felt to me.
Many rewrites later, I was still just completely dissatisfied with the results and it’s the only time I’ve ever written something and just tossed it in my filing cabinet and tried to forget about it, because I knew it didn’t work. I didn’t know why it didn’t work. Certainly it was educational to write – that form of technical exercise is always educational – but just because it’s educational doesn’t mean it’s worth publishing, and it wasn’t until years later when I realised that this other idea I’d had in my head all these years – an idea loosely based on Wagner’s Ring Cycle of operas – that I’d been thinking about that idea the wrong way, I’d always assumed that was going to be fantasy. When I realised that that should be a science fiction novel rather than fantasy, and meanwhile I had this science fiction novella that didn’t work sitting in my file cabinet, when I put these two things together then I had the Gap books.
After that first book, we returned to my normal narrative methodologies: it’s much more straightforward, experiential, we see the world through the eyes of, in this case, Morn Hyland, with occasional interruptions, straightforward, chronological sequence of events, building, hopefully, towards some kind of climax – which is, until The Real Story, the way I’ve written all my books. The Real Story is the only thing I’ve done that, you know, sort of cycles around itself, like its trying to sneak up on the point.
DR: So The Real Thing was the only book written in that way? You don’t have that kind of technical aim with other books?
SD: Well, I did want to study that particular narrative archetype but I don’t plan stories that way in general. Now, there’s a reason why that’s a narrative archetype and you can find that pattern throughout literature, no matter what writer you look at. But for me stories are always about their climax, they’re always about that place, the final crisis, the reason for me telling that story is to get to that place and that vision always involves an intersection of a situation and a set of emotions. It doesn’t entail specific patterns of storytelling, it’s just like thirty seconds of a bit of cinema or something – a scene, a flash of a scene, a flash of a feeling, a feeling combined with an action, and that becomes the goal. Figuring out how to get there is a different challenge every time I try to do it, but if I can’t see the ending, I can’t write at all.
I know and admire a number of writers who see the beginning and they just launch into it and see where it goes. Perfectly excellent work gets done that way, but I couldn’t work that way at all. I have to know, word one, I have to know what my destination is, what’s my purpose in telling this story and that always involves seeing where I’m going. It doesn’t always involve seeing how I’m going to get there.
Now it is true that the first thing that I get after I’ve seen the ending, the first thing that comes to me, is a general sense of the scale and structure of the idea. So, after I’ve had that vision for a while, I know whether it’s a short story, whether it’s a novella, whether it’s going to be four volumes – because I can see the architecture of how I might get from ‘a beginning’ to that place. Once I have that sense of architecture, then I’m usually ready to start figuring out how can I actually begin.
Now in the case we were talking about earlier, with the Gap books, that was easy, because I could begin right where The Real Story left off – you know, take the old novella out of the drawer, make some changes in it to suit the new story I have in mind so it fits more perfectly with my intentions and then scene one, the very next word, after the end of The Real Story starts in the Forbidden Knowledge
Usually it’s not that easy. Usually the beginnings are by far the hardest parts for me to write and I do more floundering and starting over again at the beginning than at any other point in the writing process. Once I have the design in mind I work very much straight through the story. I have also met writers who leap around in stories. You know, they write this scene, then they write this scene that occurs 200 pages earlier, then they write that scene, as if those were somehow separate stories. But, whatever a writer has done, that methodology works for them, and when it’s done it becomes a seamless novel. I admire that too, but it’s also something I can’t do. Once I’m ready to start writing, I need to experience it in the same way that my characters experience it, so it’s very much a chronological, day one, day two, hour one, hour two, approach to storytelling so that I can feel what it’s like to be them.
DR: Is it the beginnings of each individual book or the beginnings of a story as a whole which gives you the most difficulty?
SD: Beginnings of the story as a whole, so for instance in The Last Chronicles, the beginning of the Runes of the Earth is what I’m talking about, I’m not talking about the beginning of Fatal Revenant. Fatal Revenant is comparatively easy; I pick up from exactly where I left off in Runes of the Earth.
But in the beginning of Runes of the Earth I had a story, I know exactly where it goes, I know a great deal about what goes in it, but I’m in a position where it feels like there are thousands of roads that might lead to that place and pick up all these other threads that I have in mind along the way.
How do I choose between those thousands of roads, how do I know which one is the one that’s going to be perfect for that
particular design? That’s what makes the beginnings hard, because there’s no objective rule that I can follow that’s going to say: ‘yes, you need to do this instead of this’. From a technique point of view there are certain kinds of guidelines that are useful to follow. It’s useful – and, you know, writers have been saying this for centuries – it’s useful to start in the middle of an action, even if it’s a small action, so that the reader picks up the book and already they’re moving; paragraph one, we’re already going somewhere. We’re not writing a five-page essay setting the stage and describing the town and the weather and then gradually… Some of the Victorian novelists used to work that way, but most of the time – and they used to talk about this in Greek literature – starting in the middle of an action.
Now from that point of view you can say there are objective tools that authors can use to start stories, but in terms of choosing what is the most effective narrative path to get to that goal, I have to feel my way for that, and so beginnings for me – and I specifically mean the beginning of The Second Chronicles the beginning of The Mirror of Her Dreams
(Continued on page 3…)
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Other Links: Stephen Donaldson’s Website | Death Ray Magazine
