David Eddings - The Rivan Codex - Ancient Texts of The Belgariad and The Malloreon

I’ll confess that I got carried away with The Mallorean Gospels. I wanted the Dals to be mystical, so I pulled out all the stops and wrote something verging on Biblical, but without the inconveniences of Judaism, Christianity, or Mohammedanism. What it all boiled down to was that the Dals could see the future, but so could Belgarath, if he paid attention to the Mrin Codex. The whole story reeks of prophecy – but nobody can be really sure what it means.

My now publicly exposed co-conspiratress and I have recently finished the second prequel to this story, and now if you want to push it, we’ve got a classic twelve-book epic. If twelve books were good enough for Homer, Virgil, and Milton, twelve is surely good enough for us. We are not going to tack on our version of The Odyssey to our already completed Iliad. The story’s complete as it stands. There aren’t going to be any more Garion stories. Period. End of discussion.

All right, that should be enough for students, and it’s probably enough to send those who’d like to try it for themselves screaming off into the woods in stark terror. I doubt that it’ll satisfy those who are interested in an in-depth biography of their favorite author, but you can’t win them all, I guess.

Are you up for some honesty here? Genre fiction is writing that’s done for money. Great art doesn’t do all that well in a commercial society. Nothing that Franz Kafka wrote ever appeared in print while he was alive. Miss Lonelyhearts sank without a ripple. Great literary art is difficult to read because you have to think when you read it, and most people would rather not.

Epic fantasy can be set in this world. You don’t have to create a new universe just to write one. My original ‘doodle’, however, put us off-world immediately. It’s probably that ‘off-world’ business in Tolkien that causes us to be lumped together with science fiction, and we have no business on the same rack with SF. SF writers are technology freaks who blithely ignore that footnote in Einstein’s theory of relativity which clearly states that when an object approaches the speed of light, its mass becomes infinite. (So much for warp-drive.) If old Buck Rogers hits the gas-pedal a little too hard, he’ll suddenly become the universe. Fantasists are magic and shining armor freaks who posit equally absurd notions with incantations, ‘the Will and the Word’, or other mumbo-jumbo. They want to build a better screwdriver, and we want to come up with a better incantation. They want to go into the future, and we want to go into the past. We write better stories than they do, though. They get all bogged down in telling you how the watch works; we just tell you what time it is and go on with the story. SF and fantasy shouldn’t even speak to each other, but try explaining that to a book-store manager. Try explaining it to a publisher. Forget it.

One last gloomy note. If something doesn’t work, dump it – even if it means that you have to rip up several hundred pages and a half-year’s work. More stories are ruined by the writer’s stubborn attachment to his own overwrought prose than by almost anything else. Let your stuff cool off for a month and then read it critically. Forget that you wrote it, and read it as if you didn’t really like the guy who put it down in the first place. Then take a meat-axe to it. Let it cool down some more, and then read it again. If it still doesn’t work, get rid of it. Revision is the soul of good writing. It’s the story that counts, not your fondness for your own gushy prose. Accept your losses and move on.

All right, I’ll let you go for right now. We’ll talk some more later, but why don’t we let Belgarath take over for a while?

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