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DR: You’re also well known for your interest in and your study of literature in general. Was that as part of a conscious effort to develop yourself as a writer?
SD: Oh, absolutely. When I first conceived the ambition to be a writer – and I mean specifically a writer of stories – I looked around me at the resources that were available, because I conceived that ambition early in my college time, very early in my college time. I looked around at the resources that were available, you know, the teachers who taught creative writing classes and the students who were interested in creative writing, and I realised they were all people I didn’t want to have anything to do with.
You have to remember that I was young, I was the child of missionary parents, and people like that try very hard to raise humble children. The effect is that they tend to raise children that have no self-confidence. When I looked around me, what I saw – teaching creative writing and studying creative writing – were people who appeared to me, from my perspective, to have too much self-confidence. They seemed arrogant, they seemed full of themselves; they seemed pretentious. They seemed to me like they had too much ego, and I knew, even when I was that young, that ego is the enemy of creativity. In order to truly be creative you have to set ego aside, because it’s not about self, it’s about the creative act. So, I decided from the beginning, that if I wanted to be a writer I was going to do it by studying how other people wrote, not by having somebody teach me how to write.
So I became a straight English major, student of literature – English major in college without ever taking a creative writing or a journalism class. I got a masters in English Literature studying… what was it? American romanticism and Byron and George Meredith, and I was working on a PhD on Joseph Conrad when I dropped out of graduate school, because I finally felt like the time had come. I wanted to become a writer by seeing how other people did it and learning from their example.
There’s an implicit flaw in my approach. If you start out with somebody who wasn’t raised to be self-confident in the beginning, and then you immerse him in what is hopefully the greatest literature that our language has produced over five or six or seven hundred years, where’s that person going to get self-confidence? At a certain point I developed a fear problem – you know, I was thinking: ‘I will never be good enough to compete with these guys’.
I had become sophisticated enough – as a reader, as a student of literature, as an analyst of literature – I could see I’m just a guy and here’s these greats. It’s foolish for me to pretend that I can play the game at this level.
That was how I felt then. That was a crisis time for me in my progress toward becoming a writer and my ability to work my way through it was absolutely critical. I finally came to the conclusion that – and this goes totally against everything I was raised with – that it was okay for me to be who I was. Okay, I never can be J.R.R. Tolkien, I can never be Joseph Conrad, I can never be William Butler Yeats, I can never be Gerard Manley Hopkins, but they can’t be Donaldson. And ultimately nobody has anything to offer except themselves. No matter what field of human endeavour you go into, in the end the only thing you have to offer anybody is yourself. And if that’s not good enough there’s something wrong with life – there’s not something wrong with you, there’s something wrong with life.
So, I decided, okay, I’m not going to try to be those guys, what I’ve got to try to be is the best Stephen R. Donaldson there ever was. And when I got to that place, a lot of my fears fell away and I was able to proceed with something that at least looked like confidence. I still did a lot of what I call journeyman work – there’s a lot of fiction in my file cabinet that’s never been published and I have not the slightest desire that it should ever be published – I was finding my way – but launching onto a large epic fantasy with absolutely no background of success was possible for me because I had decided it was okay to be Stephen Donaldson, and that it was alright that I was not J.R.R. Tolkien.
DR: Given all that, and given the depth of your study of literature, how do view your own work now? Presumably you don’t look for comparisons with others.
SD: Well, I do believe that one of the characteristics of greatness is that it cannot be compared to anything else – only that specific artist at that particular time in history could have produced that particular work, and if it sounds like it could have been written by somebody else then it’s not great literature, great work.
Well, there are other standards and I don’t claim that I’ve necessarily met any other standards, but I do know that there is nobody else who could have written the work that I have done in my life. So, in that one measure, I feel like I have lived up to my aspirations. And I particularly felt that I reached that point when I was working on the Gap books. When I look back on the Gap books, I see things that I feel whatever else anybody else ever says about me later on – in life or death, that’s work – that nobody else could have done and I am very proud of that.
DR: You see the Gap series as your greatest work, then?
SD: Well, naturally, I hope to go beyond that in the Last Chronicles but certainly to date that is my magnum opus. That’s the best I’ve ever done.
(Continued on page 5…)
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For a summary of Stephen’s books, click here.
Other Links: Stephen Donaldson’s Website | Death Ray Magazine
