Sometimes the Magic Works: Lessons From a Writing Life Read online

  I did not find out what I am about to relate until many years after the book was in print. By then I was no longer quite so naÏve about the business, which made what I discovered all the more mind-boggling. Lester himself told me one day while we were visiting at his home in New York City. He did so in a matter-of-fact way, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I masked my astonishment mostly because I knew I would need time to think things over later.

  This is what he told me.

  When I submitted my manuscript in the spring of 1974, Ron Busch, then president of Ballantine Books, had just hired Judy-Lynn del Rey to run the science fiction division. He was negotiating, through her, to hire her husband, Lester, to work for the company, as well. When Judy-Lynn received my manuscript, all eight-hundred-plus pages, she was impressed enough by the letter from Don Wollheim not to dismiss it out of hand. But her publishing background was not in fantasy; it was in science fiction. So she gave the book to Lester to read.

  You have to understand Lester to appreciate what happened next. Lester was opinionated, argumentative, and a curmudgeon of the first rank. He prided himself on being able to argue any point of view and would switch sides in the middle of a debate without skipping a beat. He was also a brilliant editor. I would hear from those who worked with him over the next fifteen years that he was one of the great editors of the twentieth century. Together with Judy-Lynn, he launched successfully the careers of a dozen major fantasy and science fiction authors and resurrected or reinvented the careers of a dozen more. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, they turned Del Rey Books into the number one publisher of science fiction and fantasy.

  But in 1974, before he was even hired by Ballantine as an editor, he began this crusade with The Sword of Shannara.

  The perception in publishing at the time was that fantasy did not sell, that its readership was small and not broad based, and that the potential for expansion was limited. Yes, J. R. R. Tolkien had sold hundreds of thousands of copies of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. But that was because he was J. R. R. Tolkien, and no one else was. Fantasy, as a form of category fiction, was too esoteric to be widely marketable.

  Lester believed that this was horse pucky. He believed the market was huge, the readership vast and hungry, and the potential for sales enormous.

  He decided to use The Sword of Shannara to prove his point.

  He did so by telling Ron Busch that he would take the editorial position being offered. He would work with Judy-Lynn at Ballantine Books, where they would launch a science fiction/fantasy imprint. But Ron must agree to let him make The Sword of Shannara his first original fantasy publication and the centerpiece of the imprint’s launch. Ron, who admitted to knowing little or nothing about science fiction and fantasy but who trusted the del Reys implicitly, agreed.

  The end result was that Lester disproved those critics who had maintained that fantasy wouldn’t sell to a large audience. The Sword of Shannara sold in record numbers and changed the face of publishing. I had nothing to do with any of this. I watched it all from the sidelines, as amazed as everyone else, wondering for a very long time at my incredible good fortune.

  What are the odds against things working out in so serendipitous a fashion? Enormous, of course. It is the prototypical case of being in the right place at the right time. Six months earlier or later with my submission, and I would have been out of luck.

  Luck, with a capital L.

  Ultimately, I am conflicted. I was used as a guinea pig so that Lester could prove a point. The book was published precisely because it was so similar to Tolkien’s work, and for many critics and readers that was an unforgivable transgression. As a result, I was savaged in many quarters. Lester was not the least bit troubled by this. The reviews and commentaries were sent to me, good and bad. He dismissed them all, telling me to keep them, to give them the momentary attention they deserved and no more, and to remember that no matter what anyone said, Sword was a “damn good book.”

  At the time, I took it in stride. After all, the book sold well, so what did it matter if a few critics didn’t like it? Well, more than a few. The experience helped form my view of what it means to be a commercial fiction writer. It thickened my skin. Only later, when I learned the truth about how the book got picked up and anointed for special treatment, did I take time to wonder at the capriciousness of being published.

  A month before the release of The Sword of Shannara, I attended a launch party in New York City for the Del Rey imprint and met both Lester del Rey and Don Wollheim for the first time. I heard Lester tell Don that he owed the latter a dinner for sending over the manuscript for The Sword of Shannara. I heard Don reply that Lester owed him a good deal more than that.

  How much, then, do I owe Lester? And Judy-Lynn? Even after all this time, I have no idea how to calculate it. Conflicted or not by what I later learned, it is considerable. If my book was a driven man’s experiment, it was a successful one. I do not feel cheated or betrayed. The book was a labor of love for all of us, whatever our respective motives. Lester proved his point, Judy-Lynn had her launch, and I had my dream fulfilled.

  Not too shabby.

  I have decided, on reflection, it is best just to remember that sometimes the magic really works.

  * * *

  I am incomplete without my work. I am so closely bound to it, so much identified by it, that without

  it I think I would crumble into dust and drift away.

  * * *

  * * *

  WHY I WRITE

  * * *

  JUDINE BELIEVES THAT fiction writers are born to their calling. She believes that genetic makeup determines if you are suited to write stories for a living. Even if you decide that this is what you want to do with your life, you won’t be successful if your genes don’t allow for it.

  I understand her point. Maybe you have to live with a writer to understand why she feels as she does. Fiction writers are strange beasts. They are, like all writers, observers first and foremost. Everything that happens to and around them is potential material for a story, and they look at it that way. I am no different. I see something happen, read or hear about an event, and the first question that pops into my mind is, How can I use that in a story?

  The strangeness doesn’t stop there. Who else do you know who lives life in two worlds on a regular basis? Fiction writers do. I have already said so. They live in the real world and whatever world they are writing about at the same time. They go back and forth between the two at the drop of a hat. What happens in the first suggests what might happen in the second. Daydreaming takes on an entirely new meaning. I am particularly bad about this. I can go away from a conversation in an instant, leaving this world for the one in which I am working, lost in an idea or a plot development. It happens at parties. It happens in the middle of conversations. I don’t have any control over it, and I am not sure I want to. I think it is the source of my creativity, and I don’t want to disrupt the process.

  It may be that writers are actually happier living in their books than they are in the real world. There is evidence of this in the way writers immerse themselves in their fiction. How many times have you heard it said about someone that they are happiest at their work? Writers are like that, whether they admit it or not. But while most jobs fall into the nine-to-five category, fiction writing is a twenty-four-hour-a-day occupation. You never leave your work behind. It is always with you, and to some extent, you are always thinking about it. You don’t take your work home; your work never leaves home. It lives inside you. It resides and grows and comes alive in your mind.

  Whatever the behavioral propensities of writers and regardless of the prerequisite of a proper genetic makeup, they still have to find their way to their craft. I suspect that there are as many ways of this happening as there are stories of being published. Since I cannot speak for other writers in this matter, except to the extent that their experiences are the same as mine, I shall stick to what brought me into the fol
d.

  I submit that it has mostly to do with how I grew up. But you must judge for yourselves.

  I was born in a small midwestern town in the mid-1940s. Sterling, Illinois, had a population of about fifteen thousand and was situated directly across the Rock River from the city of Rock Falls with a population of about ten thousand. They were essentially steel towns settled in the middle of farm country about a hundred miles west of Chicago. My father, back from the war, worked at a small printing company where he was the junior partner. My mother was a housewife. They weren’t Ozzie and Harriet, but they weren’t all that different either.

  Because my growing up took place during the late 1940s and early 1950s, my life was different from that of today’s kids. I know. Duh. But I mean really different. Allow me to illustrate. There weren’t any computers or video games. There weren’t any videos. There weren’t tape players or CDs. Television was a luxury. There wasn’t a television in my house until I was six, and even then it didn’t offer much programming for kids; Saturday mornings and after-school serials were about it. There were movie matinees every Saturday afternoon, but nothing midweek or at night. Mostly, there was radio, comics, and books.

  I can see it in your eyes. How old is he?

  There wasn’t a lot in the way of kids’ toys either, so even if you had the money, which most of us didn’t, there wasn’t much to choose from in any case. There was very little toy merchandising connected with television or movies. No one had tapped into that gold mine yet, and the world probably wasn’t ready for it anyway.

  Mostly, kids were expected to entertain themselves and stay out of their parents’ hair. To that end, you were sent outside to play at the drop of a hat. It wasn’t an option; it was a standing mandate. If there wasn’t a winter blizzard or a spring rainstorm or a summer heat wave, you went outside and stayed outside until the next mealtime came around.

  The neighborhood I grew up in was my designated playground. My boundaries were carefully laid out—west to Avenue J, east to Avenue G, south to 12th Street, and north to the cornfield, which at that time was somewhere around 16th Street. All of my friends lived within the perimeter of these boundaries, and we all hung out together. Today’s concerns about letting kids wander around alone didn’t exist. Everyone in the neighborhood knew who you were and kept an eye on you when you were within shouting distance, and you were always within shouting distance of someone because in those days women mostly were housewives and stayed home.

  What did we do for fun? Well, we tried to stay out of trouble, of course, although I’m not sure that any of us ever figured out exactly how to do that. We invented our fun from what we knew, and what we knew came mostly from the aforementioned books, radio programs, and comics. We all read the same comics and listened to the same radio serials. We saw pretty much the same movies. We read different books, but mostly on the same subjects. We were impressed by these stories and played at being the characters. We would establish a story and improve on it. We were knights in armor one day and soldiers the next, cowboys and Indians one week, Sergeant Preston and his Mounties the next. We were anything and everything, and we invented role-playing before there was even a name for it.

  The results were mixed. Some games were better than others. We had a great World War II version of Capture the Flag going for several weeks one summer. The Three Mesquiteers—Bob Livingston, Ray Corrigan, and Max Terhune—dominated a couple more. But when we cut off broom handles for lances, took up metal garbage can lids for shields, and ran at each other on our bikes like the knights of King Arthur, we knew we were on to something. Unfortunately, my mother glanced out the kitchen window, saw what we were doing, and quickly intervened. We talked about the possibility of hanging Frankie Clements after seeing The Ox-Bow Incident. It was his brother’s idea, I should hasten to point out. Frankie didn’t seem to mind; heck, he was eager to try it. I mean, we weren’t really going to hang him; we were only going to pretend. But his mother wasn’t very understanding when she found out what we were planning. She sent her own kids up to their rooms and the rest of us packing for home. I don’t know about the other kids, but the inevitable follow-up phone call to my parents got me just the sort of lecture you would expect.

  When I was only five or six, I spent three days tracking a bobcat through the neighborhood. I can’t remember now how I learned about the bobcat, only that I did and I was sure it was coming our way. After all, it was sighted only two counties over. It was winter, and I found its paw prints in the fresh snow right away. Biggest cat tracks you ever saw. There was no doubt about what it was. I never actually caught up to it, but for those three days that I tried, I lived right on the edge of a heart attack every time I rounded a corner.

  When I was not playing outside, I played up in my room. The rules changed, but the games were the same. Because we didn’t have our outdoor space, we had to give up our live-action adventures and go to figures. I had hundreds of them. Some were from sets, some came with plastic models, and some were paper cutouts backed on cardboard. All doubled at being more than one type of character and none ended up being used as the manufacturer envisioned. Weeks of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea utilized mostly World War II figures and some clay models. A Roy Rogers western set was used for everything from Zane Grey to Black Stallion.

  It didn’t really matter. We weren’t in Camelot or Tombstone or aboard the Nautilus or anywhere but up in our rooms or outside in the neighborhood. What we created was inside our heads, because that was where it was most real. That was where it came alive.

  But mostly it came alive for me. My friends played at these games, but they didn’t live them the way I did. I thought about them all the time. I was involved enough that I was content to play them alone, assuming all the roles. I was constantly reworking the story and redeveloping the characters. This fixation with playacting went on for a long time, and I know in the end, as high school neared, that my parents were beginning to despair. They didn’t say so, but I could tell what they were thinking. They were thinking I was not entirely normal.

  What saved me was writing. Eventually, adventures with role-playing and figures became too confining and too predictable. I wanted a larger playground, and the only one that seemed sufficiently large was inside my head. I gained an inkling of the possibilities in the fourth grade when I wrote my first story. It was about a group of boys who accepted a dare to stay overnight in a haunted house and encountered aliens. The story earned an A grade. I was hooked. There were others after that, and somewhere along the way I decided that this was what I really wanted to do. I loved writing stories. I loved the puzzle-solving aspect of the process. I loved creating my own worlds, big and bright and colorful, the possibilities captivating and endless.

  I didn’t begin by writing about elves. First I had to write a few dog and horse stories, then a few science fiction stories, a western or two, a war story, and finally a story about a great white whale. I didn’t finish any of them and none of them were very good. Nothing I wrote came out exactly the way I wanted it to. I can admit that now, safely removed from the immediacy of the pain such an admission would have cost me then. I had a story to tell, a really good story—I knew I did—but I could not seem to discover what it was.

  The problem, I eventually discovered, was that I didn’t want to write stories set in the real world. The real world wasn’t large enough or strange enough for me to work in. I needed a place that was so enormous and so different that no one but me could even begin to define it. It could not exist anywhere outside my mind except in the words I wrote. It needed to be about places we knew, but about places we didn’t, as well. It needed to be about us, but about other people, too. Everything I wrote about had to remind readers of what they already knew, yet make them take a second look at whether or not what they believed was really true.

  Writing is habit-forming. It is addictive. You get caught up in the challenge of the storytelling process. You become enchanted with the worlds and characters you create
. The worlds are your home and the characters your friends. You come to know both as well as you know yourself. Born of you, they become a part of you.

  What is interesting to me now, more than forty years after that first story, is how deeply enmeshed I am in what I do. It is beyond reasonable. If I don’t write, I become restless and ill-tempered. I become dissatisfied. My reaction to not writing is both physical and emotional. I am incomplete without my work. I am so closely bound to it, so much identified by it, that without it I think I would crumble into dust and drift away.

  One of my writer friends has an ironclad rule about her work. She writes five pages every day—no matter where she is or what she is doing. It doesn’t matter if she is sick. It doesn’t matter if she has to get up and write at four in the morning. She does it. I understand why. She is afraid that if she doesn’t, she will lose her identity and her presence and disintegrate. She is the sum of her words. She is her writing.

  I expect that is why Judine feels so strongly about writers and genetics. If you have a better explanation, feel free to let her know.

  * * *

  The point of book signings is not to make you feel

  good about yourself. It is not to rack up huge sales

  of your work while you stand by beaming benevolently on an audience of clearly enlightened readers.

  * * *

  * * *

  IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU

  * * *

  THE SWORD OF Shannara was on the market for maybe six minutes when I started asking Lester del Rey about doing autographings. Oh sure, I was going to sign at the local Waldenbooks, but how about something more exciting? But Lester did not believe in book tours or public appearances for first-time authors, no matter how successful the book. Authors who had written only a single book should stay home and concentrate on writing a second, he advised me more than once. I did not argue the point. I lacked a frame of reference from which to do so. I relied on him to tell me what was best. When he told me I should stay home and write, I believed that was what I should do.