| Stephen R Donaldson | Contributor: Amfo | Posted: 04/12/07 | 17:46 |
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Speak to Donaldson long enough and you realise much of his language is couched in terms of looking back. He even alluded to this in setting up the interview, where he showed a preference for VOIP because he could adjust the volume because his hearing "isn't what it used to be." I wonder if getting old is frustrating for someone who has created so much, especially when Donaldson runs a website where he has to have detailed information about his 22 books to hand ready to answer any question. It is very impressive the way you can still rattle off those details to people who ask...
Ha ha, now wait a minute, there's no "rattling off". Some of those questions take me three months to answer. Sometimes I have to get in one of my private readers and say "please help, I have no idea what this person is asking about!"
That's the great thing about the website of course, I can take my time to answer those questions and get the details right. I'm so glad it comes across as me just rattling off answers, because the reality is anything but! New writers have said to me "oh I wish I could do such-and-such as effortlessly as writers like Donaldson do". Did you feel the same way about your predecessors? Did they appear to be like magical beings, able to snatch stories whole out of thin air?
Well you have to understand, I came out of a Literature degree and I was made to study these guys and about the lives of the these guys so I could see it didn't come to them effortlessly.
But I mean, that's the illusion you want to create of course, that it is effortless. There's nothing worse than reading a book where you can see the author sweating behind the machine. That said, some aspects of writing do come to me pretty easily. It's like there's this whole extra person living in my brain who occasionally gives me things that I can use. You often talk about the bits of your writing that are tough for you, but what does come easily? What's your "thing"?
I think for me it's story structure. The Gap cycle for instance is very much an exercise in story design and I think it's quite beautiful to watch. I mean, you can have a character like Angus Thermopyle start in book one and then be brought to a situation by the end of book five that makes perfect sense, it's believable, but it's a massive change from where he started, all through good structure.
That's not to say the Gap cycle wasn't hard for me because it was. I'd never tried a story with so many point-of-view characters in it. It was enormously technically challenging and in the beginning whenever I changed point-of-view it was like I had to completely restructure the novel from scratch each time. But the way the characters catalyse each other, I'm very proud of that. As we all know, the Gap cycle is based on Wagner's Ring cycle. That strikes me as a very intellectual decision to make about a story. Was it hard to make it your own, to make it more than a technical exercise?
That structure was really only a starting point. It was pretty easy to make those characters my own. Dealing with all those points of view, that was the challenge. But if there's an undercurrent to what we've been talking about here it's that I really do try to push myself to do new and challenging things with everything I write.
And with that it's time to let Donaldson go because even though he's an elder statesman of the fantasy scene, he's not resting on his laurels. He's an active writer, busy creating the final two books of the Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. As he mentioned earlier, he's on track to deliver Against All Things Ending in a couple of years, but we'd better not risk distracting him for too long! Among authors Donaldson is nearly unique in his willingness to self-analyse and talk about the intricacies not only of his imagined worlds, but also the real world of being a writer. I suspect it's his academic heritage poking through. Imagine the mark you'd get turning in an essay on yourself! If you're hungry for more details on Donaldson's work, his website is a wealth, a virtual treasure-trove of information. There are links to other interviews, but also the Gradual Interview we've mentioned several times here. It discusses not only the Covenant and Gap books, but also his The Man Who... mystery novels, which are a radical departure from his more fantastical work. While Donaldson says he doesn't plan future projects in advance, he did confess he has a "project shelf" in the back of his mind. And while he says there's nothing new on that shelf right now, he's not worried. He might need to adjust the volume on his VOIP phone, but this is one writer a long way from retirement. We look forward to his future works, even as we read and reread his current ones. |
