STARLOG Jan 1995
"If I could figure out a war to persuade Barbara Cartland to refer toher books as something else I would do it," asserts David Eddings."Because the technically correct term for what I'm writing is romance.My work is a direct outgrowth of mediæval romance and I, unlike J.R.R.Tolkien, adore Lord Alfred Tennyson and Sir Thomas Malory's `Le Morted' Arthur.'" Eddings, whose Belgariad, Malloreon, Elenium, and Tamuli series havegained him international status, began reading fantasy and SF ataround age 13. "When I was 17 I started writing," he says, "butdabbling in fantasy never really occurred to me. Well I did do one ortwo short stories in the science fiction mode in my mid-20s, butdidn't like them all that much. They didn't work, maybe because I haveno science training whatsoever. I think I know the formula for waterand Newton's third law. Thats about as far as it goes. I'm horriblyincompetent at anything mechanical, and mathematically I'm inept,which is why my wife balances the checkbook." Although convinced he was going to become an actor, Eddings ended upconcentrating on academic English studies while at Oregon's ReedCollege. "Reed required a thesis for a bachelor's degree," Eddingsexplains. "Normally a Bachelor's is like being stamped `Prime USBeef.' They just walk you through, hand out the diplomas and you fillin your name later. But I wrote a novel for my first degree, and I'mvery happy I didn't submit that to a publisher. I sympathize with myprofessor who had to read it. Nevertheless, I wrote a novel I actuallymanaged to finish the thing, and it was acceptable enough to get me mydegree. I also wrote a portion of a novel for my Masters thesis at theUniversity of Washington. Simply because I devoted just one semesterto it, six months, I only got about halfway through. But I think itwas a much better book than the one I wrote at Reed." What kind ofnovels were they? "Contemporary. They had nothing whatsoever to dowith the field in which I am perhaps unjustly famous." College was followed by a spell in the Army. But whether he joined or"volunteered" is something Eddings still can't make up his mind about."That's a moot point. It was the end of the Korean War nonsense and wehad the Draft at the time. But my Draft Board was very understanding.They would send me a letter every fall saying `Do you intend tocontinue your education or are you available for military service?' Iwould reply with, `I'm going back to school this year,' and get adeferment. They had been so decent about the whole thing that after Ifinally got my Bachelor of Arts degree, I thought, `Well, they're notreally shooting at each other that seriously in Korea right now, let'sget this over with.' So I wrote a letter saying, `I do not intend toreturn to school this coming year and am available for militaryservice." "I made the mistake of telling them I had served three years in theNational guard, although I was criminally under-age to do it, and whenthey ran out of cadre men, they gave me my very own platoon and said`Here are 63 men, try to keep as many of them alive as you possiblycan.' That was one of the most harrowing experiences of my life. Weekswent by when I didn't see the inside of my eyelids. But hey I did keepthem all alive. I lost one, but that was because he ran away, and Istill feel a little guilty about that. But one out of 63 isn't bad.Fortunately, they didn't send me to Korea; they sent me to Germanyinstead, and with two years of college German, I got along fairlywell."
Missile Bum
After his discharge, he began looking for a job. "Simply to supportmyself, because my family was not well-off, I went into working ingrocery stores. I discovered that a good journeyman grocery clerk cango into any town and probably have a job within 48 hours. I've fallenback on this periodically, although i must say that getting out of thegrocery business ranked right up there with getting out of the Army asone of the happier experiences of my life. It was good to me, but Ididn't really care all that much for it." "Then I got employment with Boeing in the aerospace industry inSeattle. I wound up being what was called a missile bum. I got marriedat that time and we bounced around the country placing Minutemenmissiles, finally settling for a while in New Orleans, where I workedon the Saturn project as a buyer. I spent more taxpayers' money thatI'll ever be able to replace. Everything we were doing, simply becauseof the size of this monster we were building, had never been donebefore. I was buying very exotic things, none of which I understood. Iwould take the specs to the engineers and say. `Does this make anysense? Keep in mind the fact that I'm committed to spending about $5million.' hey would look it over and say `Oh yeah, that seems allright.' But I was never quite sure I believed them." "There we were in New Orleans. My wife, Leigh, was asthmatic, andasthma is a fatal disease in New Orleans due to the climate, Iremember getting her to the hospital one night just in time. I figuredwe had to get above the Mississippi delta. Boeing was unsympathetic,so I parted company with them and we went to the upper Midwest, whichis dried if nothing else. I taught English in a business college forabout a year. Then i taught in a small teachers college for three orfour years, at which point all the administrators got a pay raise andthe teaching faculty didn't. I told them to take their job and dowhatever they wanted with it. And good heavens, I abandoned tenure inthe process. I could still be there, teaching Dostoevsky." To Eddings, that seems as good a time as any to try his hand atprofessional writing. "Having saved a few dollars, we lived frugallyfor a year and I wrote what was to be my first published novel, HighHunt. Then we moved to Denver, I went back to the grocery business andin my spare time hammered out all the kinks built into the book. Ifinally sent it off, and rather surprisingly - well it was_astonishing_ to me - Putman took it and published it in 1973." HighHunt is a tough outdoor adventure focusing on a group of men on a deerhunt in the mountainous region of Washington State. Away from theirurban environment, violent tensions and rivalries surface. "it didvery well and there was even some talk about a film. But it came outat almost exactly the same time as Deliverance and The Taking ofPelham 1-2-3, which were kind of similar. "We left Denver, and moved to Spokane, where I had been born. I alwayswondered why my family left so soon after my birth, but when we gotthere I realized my father was a great deal smarter than I thought. Itis a terribly, terribly boring town. There is nothing to do inSpokane. If you've read my novel The Losers, which I wrote during thatperiod, you'll see it says a number of nasty things about Spokane,most of which are probably true." The Losers remained unpublished until 1992. Its protagonist, promisingstudent and athlete, Raphael Taylor,loses a leg in a car accidentwhile drunk. He then finds himself living in a run-down neighborhoodof Spokane, surrounded by outcasts and insensitive social workers.Eddings' desire to write the novel dated from his days in the grocerytrade. "The grocery store in The Losers where Raphael works has almostthe same layout as one of the stores in which I worked," he explains."Many of the characters - those poor, broken-down pathetic people- Iused to wait on. Most of them were on welfare, and they would come into redeem pop bottles so they could scrape together enough money tobuy food." Why this disdain for social worker? "Experience. I developed anantipathy for then while I was there, and I used the social workers inThe Losers as the Devil's mouthpiece. Anytime I wanted to saysomething outrageous, I would put it in her mouth. Here's a girl whohas gone through some upstate college, majored in boyfriends, had theobligatory abortion in her teenage years and came out with a minimaldegree in social work with a C-minus average. Then, they giver her acase-load of 40 or 50 people over whom she has absolute power. Andthis incompetent,who knows nothing whatsoever about what life on thestreets is all about, makes decisions that affect their entire lives.All social workers want is to get everyone involved in a program.Because a program provides full employment for three generations ofsocial workers. And they mess up, I've seen it. "Right after The Losers I wrote several other, monumentallyunpublished books and was beginning to think maybe I should give somethough to a career in poetry or something. I was struggling along andmaking half-hearted attempts to get back into teaching. But the marketfor unemployed English teachers wasn't very great."Mainstream Novelist
Eddings would have carried on trying to make his mark as a mainstreamnovelist is it hadn't been for a chance discovery in a bookshop. " Iwas heading toward the back of the store where they kept the seriousfiction," he recalls, "and walked past the SF rack. Down on the bottomshelf was a copy of The Two Towers, the second volume of The Lord OfThe Rings. I looked at it and though, `Is this old turkey stillkicking around?' I picked it up and saw it was published byBallantine. Now Ballantine, unlike many other publishers,listsprinting histories. I turned the title page and saw this book was inits' 73rd printing! This gave me pause for thought. "I was supposed to be working on a book at the time, and it was boringme to tears. It is terrible when a writer is bored by his own work,but it was a real bomb and had reached the point where I couldn't evenstand to look at it anymore. I had gotten into the habit of goofingoff from this book by doodling, and I had started to draw a map of animaginary world, which I eventually put aside and forgot about. AfterI saw the 73rd printing of The Two Towers, I went back and pulled thatmap out again. I made some changes, putting in different names forsome of the kingdoms. Then, I began thinking about the people wholived in these places and wrote that this race is like the people ofPoland in the eighth century, or this one is like the Romans of thethird century B.C., and so forth. I finally came up with a completemythology, various theologies and a serious bad guy,who turned out tobe a sort of renegade god. That led to inventing various othercharacters. What I was doing was generating preliminary studies forthat became the Belgariad and Malloreon series. It took me about ayear and ran for about 230-something pages." There was no doubt in Eddings' mind that he wanted his fantasies to bea saga. "None whatsoever. Because, you see, my original perception ofhow you did these things was based almost entirely on The Lord Of TheRings. Being completely innocent, I thought it was standard practiceto write these books as trilogies. At that time, I was unaware thatPoppa Tolkien wanted to do the whole Lord of The Rings as one solidvolume, and was really, really upset when his publisher, Unwin, saidthey were going to break it up. But I believed that if you were goingto write a long fantasy , it was supposed to be in three books, so Iproposed Belgariad as a trilogy to Ballantine. I didn't even know DelRey Books existed; I simply sent my letter to inquiry to Ballantinebecause they were Tolkien's publisher. I figured I would start at thetop and work my way down. "At that point, the postal service contributed greatly to my career asa fantasy author by losing that letter. I wrote a sniffy note andultimately got a response from Lester Del Rey himself. I should saythat I grew to love Lester dearly, but he and I fought continuously.We used to scream at each other over the phone, burning up the wires,and his wife Judy-Lynn, bless her, would try to step in and make peacebetween us. But he gave me a very quick education on the realitieswhich is to say the economics, of American publishing. The market isdominated by two major booksellers, B.Dalton and Waldenbooks, and theyhave certain rules about genre fiction. In those days,the cover priceof a paperback could not be over $3. This has modified of course, butwe're talking about 1978 or 79. Lester said `What you're proposing isa trilogy that's probably going to run between 1500 and 1800 pageslong. If you break it into three, you're going to have 600 page books.There is no way these booksellers will accept them in that format.'Then he made the famous statement. `This is what we are going to do.We're going to break it up into five books.' `We' of course. meaningme." "I wasn't very happy about that. I had absolutely perfect climaxes foreach of the three volumes all laid out, ready to go. And here wasLester proposing to do major violence to the story to please thebooksellers. I was terribly offended. But since I had already signed acontract, I didn't have too much choice and had to go along with him.He did point out that I would receive advances for five books asopposed to advances for three books, which was going to net me asignificant additional amount of money, and that softened the blow.So, I floundered around for a month and finally came up with a planwhich kind of worker. I still think it might have been betterpresented in three books as opposed to five. But it has been aroundfor so long that if I tried to change it now I'm sure the howls ofprotest would be heard as far as the Moon."Real Fantasies
Eddings admires Tolkien greatly, as evidenced by his affectionate useof the term "Poppa" in reference to him, but has some reservationsabout the legacy of The Lord Of The Rings, "There's no doubt the man'sa giant. The thing is that Poppa was such a giant in the 60s that heseems to have establishes the parameters of what fantasy is. even tothe point that lester would say `Fantasy is the most prissy of all artforms.' He meant that what people will accept in, say, bodice-rippers[romance novels] they find absolutely unacceptable in fantasy. Inother words, part of Tolkien's heritage is a certain prudishness. Withone or two possible exceptions, there aren't any female hobbits, andhis heroines end at the neck; you have the beautiful hair and the eyesbut thats about it. This was like waving a red flag in my face, and Iwent out of my way to start pushing the boundaries. Not to turnfantasy into pornography or anything of this nature, but just to seeif I could get away with taking it a little bit further. I'm having agreat deal of fun pushing those boundaries of prissiness and insertingerotic elements into my work." "This ties in with recognizing the fact, and my disliking the fact,that people in America are absolutely convinced that the melody for"Greensleeves" is a Christmas hymn. It was composed in praise of a prostitute. Come on, I've read Chaucer, I know there were prostitutesin the Middle Ages. And if I'm dealing realistically with the MiddleAges, there have to be pickpockets, thieves and prostitutes. I thinkthe third character who appears in the Elenium is a prostitute, alittle streetwalker being rained on. I introduced her to establishthat it's a real world, and to establish that, despite itspreconceptions theologically, mediæval society probably had at leastas many prostitutes as it had knights whose `strength was as thestrength of 10 because their hearts were pure.'" Eddings' fantasy world has its basis in the Middle Ages, buteverything else - the culture, politics, magical system and so on- wasdevised from scratch. Isn't this one of the more difficult aspects ofbeing a fantasy author? "it can be very difficult, yes, and you haveto be conversant with many, many things. You can have a character say`Gee they bounced one of my checks' in a contemporary story andreaders will; know what you are talking about. But in fantasy, youmust invent the theology, sociology, and everything else. And when youbegin as I did, by dropping three or four eons of Western Europeanculture into a blender -essentially ancient Romans, French and Spanishnoblemen, Vikings and Muslims- when you put all that together andpress the `on' button, you get a very strange mix of anachronisms. Itgets you thinking about what sort of world it would be with Romans andArabs living next to each other." The temptation to invent some kind of magical McGuffin to get his heroout of a tight corner is something Eddings works hard to avoid. "It'sthe Superman complex, isn't it? If you're more powerful that alocomotive and can leap tall building in a single bound, what do youhave to worry about? take the all-powerful sorcerer. There is nothinghe has to fear. The guy is bulletproof. I spoke with Lester Del Reyabout this rather extensively. He said the only way to get around itis to come up with believable limitations, and you must be veryspecific about what those limitations are right at the outset. Mygimmick is that magic is tiring. Wizardry poops you out. SO doingsomething with magic is as hard as doing it with your muscles, it'sjust that it happens almost instantaneously. I refined the gimmick sothat when a character does something with magic it makes a `noise'other sorcerers can hear. If you're trying to tiptoe through thetulips and sneak your way through the back alleys, using magic, you'regoing to sound off wizard burglar alarms all over town. Everybody whois the least bit talented at this sort of thing is going to hear whatyou're doing, which is a significant factor if stealth is important. "I'm pretty vague when I get to sorcery. I use the gimmick of the willis the word. Which means that when a character wants to use magic, hesimply says `Happen!' or `Let it be so~' or whatever. Start tellingreaders how to do a spell, whether or not it works, and they're goingto try it. If you have some 14 year old kid who's absolutely convincedthat if he recites this particular spell, he'll be able to fly, andgoes and jumps off a 70 story building, it's your fault damnit! Themore susceptible reader can go ahead and concentrate as hard as theywant and I don't think that, like Uri Geller, they will be able tobend a key with their mind. If they can that probably have a future inshow biz."Silent Writer
Having sold so many books, Eddings' appeal seems quite broad. "I get fan mail" he notes "Do I ever get fan mail. Naturally, because I'm writing to a genre that appeals to adolescents, a heavy percentage of my readership is adolescent, and to use a Nevada idiom, I don't cut'em no slack. I have eight years of college English behind me, and extensive reading in the classics, and I do my level best to stretch my vocabulary and hopefully theirs at the same time. Call it my little gesture toward social conscience, but I like to think I'm teaching a certain number of people to read. Now that sounds pretentious." "But it isn't only younger readers who write to me, I'm getting the middle-aged range, too, and some of them are naming their children after my characters. I'm also getting people of advanced years. Even more advanced than mine, which is a bit hard to accept. Some days I feel like I'm older than dirt. "Occasionally, I get unwelcome attention too, of course. I received some really strange correspondence from an absolute, total nut. What he wrote made me a little bit nervous. This was when Ronald Reagan was President, and although I had no particular love for Reagan, I don't approve of assassinations as a means of political change. And there seemed to be a slightly threatening overtone in these missives. So I called the FBI, and they put me in touch with the Secret Service. I read them the letter, they checked and said `Yeah, we have a file on him. Don't worry, he's harmless.' "This man identified himself as `The Son Of God.' You'll be happy to know that the Redeemer is alive and well as far as I know, and living in Arizona. I got him off my back but something that probably sent him straight to the funny farm. Since he called himself the son of God, I wrote to him under the letterhead `From the desk of the Lord God Almighty to His Son.' The letter said `Your mother and I are a little concerned about your behavior. You shouldn't reveal your identity. Remember what happened last time.' I didn't hear from him for years. Then, he started writing again and I sent him another one. I haven't heard anything since. It was a rotten thing to do but I didn't need the aggravation." After years of almost nomadic wandering, David and Leigh Eddings may not have settled permanently in Carson City, Nevada. "Carson City is the most peaceful little town you have ever seen, with about 40,00people spread out over several miles. It's absolutely beautiful if you like to look at sagebrush, and there are probably more mountains in Nevada than there are in any other state in the country. I'm done moving. I'm settling down roots. I like this place. "It's very pleasant and quiet almost to the point of boredom, which makes it ideal for a writer. I'm taking advantage of that quietude to write a pair of prequels to Belgariad and Malloreon. I'll ultimately wind up with a 12 book epic. If it's good enough for Homer, it has to be good enough for me! Now that I know how the story ends I can go back and write the beginning. I'm doing them in conjunction with my wife and she's finally going to get credited. She has suffered though this, and her editorial input has been more valuable than anything I've gotten from any publishing house. And these two books are going to be noticeable heavier than the others. I'm trying to hold the novels to 600 typed pages, but unfortunately - for the people who have to pay for them, both publishers and readers- these are going to be thick, heavy and consequently a little more expensive." The modus operandi Eddings is applying to the new books has hardly changed since he established it with High Hunt. "I always start with an outline, which is flexible but very, very detailed. I'm dealing in a world that never was, and if I permit myself to wander off, I can disappear into the jungle and never be seen again. I have to know where I'm going. I wouldn't want to say I'm outline-bound, because, I'm always open to suggestions, but I do have it laid out. I may stray once in a while, but I stay pretty close to the road map. I tend not to wind up in Australia when I'm heading for Portugal." "Because I get up at an unholy hour in the morning, my work day is completed by the time the Sun rises. I have a slightly bad back, which has made enormous contributions to American literature. I can only sleep for a few hours, then I'm going to get up whether I want to or not, and as long as I'm up anyway, I may as well got to work. So, I go to bed at 8pm and my morning starts at 2am. The thing I really appreciate is the quiet, I have the chance to concentrate and I can turn out six hours of fairly good stuff. It has worked rather well for me." "The unfortunate thing about working for yourself is that you have the worst boss in the world. I work every day of the year, except Christmas- when I work a half-day. I think it was the musician Arthur Rubinstein who said, `If I don't practice for one day, I notice it. If I don't practice for two days, my wife notices it. If I miss three days, the audience notices it.' I feel that if I were to take a week off, I would have to go back and learn how to write all over again. I don't want to do that. It's also a matter of relying on a routine. You know if you go to the same place, use the same pen, have the same kind of lighting and so on, it becomes an unbreakable habit." Although he doesn't overrule the possibility of further ventures into mainstream fiction, David Eddings thinks he'll be sticking with fantasy. "I went to a convention in Spokane, which is a weird place to hold one, and met FM Busby, who was fun. We got into a long discussion comparing the world's social climate at any time when one or the other of the given genres of speculative fiction, fantasy or SF, was most popular. We concluded that if people's general belief was that things were going OK, then SF, where we look at the future, was very popular. If things were going to hell, then everybody wanted to read fantasy, because it took us back to a simpler time, when there were verities when we could believe what out leaders were telling us and they only lied when it was necessary." "I hesitate to predict whether this theory is true. But if the general opinion of mankind is optimistic, then we're in for a period of extreme popularity for science fiction. If the general opinion is pessimistic, fantasy will hold its own." "I'm enough of a pessimist that I'm going to continue to write fantasy."
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