Sometimes the Magic Works (5 page)

 

I could have the idea on loan. He would give it to
me for exactly one year. If I wrote an acceptable
book in that time, the idea was mine to keep.
Otherwise, I would have to give it back.

 

B
LUEPRINT

IN LATE WINTER of 1984, I flew east from Sterling to New York City for a meeting with Lester del Rey. I made the trip for several reasons, but foremost of these was the desire to talk with him about what I would write next. Rewrites for
The Wishsong of Shannara
were complete, and it was time to consider a new project. I knew I did not want to do another
Shannara
book right away. After fifteen years of working in the
Shannara
world, I was burned out. I needed to write something else, but I did not know what that something else should be.

I had some ideas, of course. What writer doesn't? But I was leery of how they would be received. One year earlier, I presented a synopsis for a book entitled
The Koden King
, and both Lester and Judy-Lynn hated it. They did not say they hated it, not directly, but it was easy enough to read between the lines of their comments. They were encouraging of my work, as always, but clear about their opinion of the proposed book. I was tempted this time to call ahead to ask for guidance. I might not like what I heard, but at least I would avoid laying my neck on the chopping block right off the bat. But that was the coward's way out, so I decided to take my chances.

My confusion over where to go next was further complicated by the fact that I was at a crossroads in my life. I was an attorney in a small law firm and had been so for almost the same amount of time I had been writing
Shannara
books. I had become an attorney so that I would not starve to death trying to become a writer. But it had grown increasingly difficult to allocate my time between the two professions. Both were demanding; both really required all my energy, not just some of it. Seven years earlier, on the eve of publication of
The Sword of Shannara
, I made a bargain with myself that I would not consider myself a real writer until I had three books in print. Lester amended that bargain, on learning of it, by adding that I should also have a year's salary in the bank.

With the publication of
Wishsong
, I would have both. But I was still unsure about giving up my law practice. I know, I know. Was I waiting for a voice from a burning bush or something? But you have to remember how structured my life was back then. I was terrified of taking a wrong step. Practicing law provided a certain balance to my life that I was afraid I would miss badly if I gave it up. What if by abandoning law I knocked the pins out from under my writing? What if all that newly acquired time was too much time, and I found I could not write anything? What if I was not as ready as I thought?

So I came to New York and my meeting with Lester in search of more than just an idea for a new book. I came looking to discover the direction my life should take. I came seeking an epiphany.

On arrival, I checked into the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, which is where I always stayed in those days. It was close to Ballantine Books, which was located at the corner of East 50th Street and 2nd Avenue, and to the del Reys, who lived off 2nd on East 46th. Everyone was only a few blocks away, so I could walk to wherever I wanted to go. I knew I would spend most of the next day in a meeting with Lester at his apartment, then have dinner with both del Reys and one or two others a couple of blocks away at Sparks. I knew this because this is what we always did when I came to New York. Sometimes I thought Lester spent most of his time at home or at Sparks. With the passage of time, it became increasingly hard to picture him anywhere else.

I arrived late and slept in the following morning. Toward noon, I walked over to Lester's. The del Reys shared a cavernous loft apartment in what I think must have been a converted warehouse. The apartment was essentially one room, with a small bedroom leading off one end, a bathroom midway along, and a raised overlook that served as Lester's office and always reminded me of a pulpit. Lester and I sat in the living room portion of the apartment and ate a lunch of cold meats, cheese, and bread. We talked about
Wishsong
, about its publication, about other writers, about writing, about all the things that interest a writer and an editor. Everything but what I had really come to New York to talk about.

Finally, too impatient to wait longer, I brought the subject up. I wanted to do something besides another
Shannara
book, I told him. I was not leaving the series, only taking a vacation. But I needed to write something else. This was essentially what I had already told him over the phone before flying in. Lester agreed that writing something different might be a good idea. A writer needed to do more than one series anyway. What sort of book did I have in mind? I told him I wanted to do a fantasy, but not an epic fantasy. Something shorter, maybe lighter in tone. Something different. Something that would give me a break from the
Shannara
world.

I asked the crucial question. Did he have any ideas?

Not really, he responded at once, looking thoughtful. Oh, he had an idea for a story, all right. A good story, as a matter of fact. But I was not the right person to tell it.

I bristled at the implication. Why not?

Because it wasn't my kind of story, Lester responded. It wasn't my sort of book.

Well, how could he be sure of that? Perhaps it was. Tell me what it was about. Let me decide.

No, there wasn't any purpose in doing that, because it just wasn't the right story for me.

Tell me anyway, I insisted. Humor me. At least give me the plot. Maybe hearing about it would spark an idea I could use.

Lester sighed as only Lester could—long, drawn out, and reluctant. Then he told me his idea. The story was about a man who gets his hands on one of those high-end Christmas catalogues and while paging through it finds an advertisement for a magic kingdom. He decides to buy it, even though it doesn't seem possible that such a thing can exist. It turns out that it does, of course, but it also turns out that it isn't anything at all like what he imagined it would be.

Lester looked at me hopelessly, conveying the clear impression that the idea and I were not suited. I told him I liked it, that I thought maybe I could do something with it. I don't know why I said that. I didn't have the foggiest notion what I would do with it. But the gauntlet had been thrown down, and besides, something about the idea was appealing.

I like it, I told him. Really. Let me see what I can come up with.

He considered the matter for a few moments, then nodded. All right, I could have the idea on loan. He would give it to me for exactly one year. If I wrote an acceptable book in that time, the idea was mine to keep. Otherwise, I had to give it back.

On looking back after fifteen years, I am convinced that at that moment Lester looked a lot like Rumplestiltskin.

The fact of the matter was, I had been sucked in again. I didn't figure this out for quite a while, perhaps because I was obtuse, but more probably because I was so caught up in the challenge I didn't stop to think about how carefully it had been orchestrated. Later, as with so many other things, Lester told me that he had intended the idea for me all along, but felt I would respond better if he didn't hand it to me on a platter.

In any case, I completed my visit, took my borrowed idea, and flew home to Illinois. I was already thinking it through, trying to make it come together as a complete story. All I had was a concept, and a concept is just a starting point for expansion. A full-blown story requires a great deal more, and it is not a given that even the best idea can be successfully developed into a story that works.

I knew right away that the man who buys the magic kingdom would discover that it was not all it was cracked up to be. The old saw “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence” would be tested anew. What the man thought he was buying was not in fact what he would get. Nor would being a king of his own kingdom necessarily work out the way he expected either. It would prove more difficult than he imagined. Obstacles he hadn't anticipated would arise. This is the way life works. Even kings find that out sooner or later.

Then two questions surfaced, pretty much at the same time.

Who is this man?

Why is he buying this magic kingdom?

Everything else in the story hinged on the answers to these two questions—where the story was going, how it would resolve itself, and why the reader would identify with the protagonist.

I was surprised at how quickly the answers came to me. I discovered them almost immediately.

The man was a lawyer, and he was fed up with his life and wanted to change it. He wanted to change it at any cost. He was that desperate.

The man was me.

The revelation was stunning. I had lived all forty years of my life in the same town, save for time spent going to college and law school. I had been a lawyer for fifteen years, the last seven of them compromising myself as a writer so that if I failed, I would not sink into the mire and starve to death. I had wanted to be a writer since I was ten, but I had never been just a writer. I had never given myself the chance.

This was who the man in my book was. This was why he was willing to risk everything to buy a dream.

I began work on the book almost at once. As I wrote it, I talked about it now and then with Lester. In doing so, I discovered that he had envisioned a story more on the order of a Piers Anthony
Xanth
novel, light and breezy, filled with jokes and puns, a romp through an imaginary world that would cause readers to smile.

But I saw the story in a darker light. As a writer, I am drawn to harder-edged issues, particularly those dealing with life-altering decisions and secrets that destroy. So even though I cloaked this book in trappings of humor and populated it with peculiar and sometimes comical characters, the questions I asked were serious. What happens when you change your life completely? What are the consequences of abandoning everything you know? What is the impact on you and those around you when things do not work out as you expect?

I wrote the book in a little over ten months. It is the story of Ben Holiday, a Chicago trial attorney who loses his wife and baby in an auto accident, grows frustrated with a legal system he sees as antiquated and unfair, and searches for a way to change his life. When he comes across an advertisement in a high-end Christmas catalogue that lists a magic kingdom for sale for one million dollars, he is intrigued. On something of a lark and out of desperation, he decides to look into it. He flies to New York to interview for the position of king of Landover with an old man named Meeks (who looks and acts a lot like Lester). He ends up buying the kingdom and arrives through a curtain of mist in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. But being king isn't what he expected. His friends and retainers include a bumbling wizard with mixed intentions, a man who has been turned into a dog and can't change back, two kobolds of uncertain temperament, and a young sylph who regularly morphs into a tree. He also discovers that his alter ego in Landover is a ferocious, silent black knight who lives only to do combat and whose secret he must unmask if he is to survive.

Lester liked the book well enough that he let me keep the idea. I called it
Holiday's Magic
. Lester promptly changed the title to
Magic Kingdom for Sale
. He scheduled it for publication in April of 1986.

I didn't recognize the book for what it was until I went on a book tour to promote it. What I had written was a blueprint for my life. I couldn't foresee all the consequences yet, but I could guess at most of them, good and bad. The die was cast. A part-time writer for more than thirty years, I owed it to myself to try writing full-time, to give myself the chance to discover if I could make a living doing what I loved most.

I returned to Sterling and quit my job. I moved to Seattle. I began my new life. It wasn't always easy; there were many complications. But overall, it felt right. In time, I discovered that it was right.

In time-honored fashion, life had imitated art. To my surprise, my book did not lead me into the wilderness after all.

Instead, it led me home.

 

The list of successful authors who claim not to
outline their books before they write them goes
on and on. All right, you say, so why are you
telling us we should outline when they don't?

 

T
HE
D
READED
“O” W
ORD

NOW WE COME to the two chapters that are certain to be the most controversial. I have pushed them as far back into the book as I can, hoping that if you have gotten this far in your reading, you will stick it out for another few pages. This chapter and the next are intended primarily for unpublished writers looking to become published, but I'm hoping readers in general will find them interesting, too.

Sue Grafton would title this first chapter in her writing manual, if she had one, “O Is for Outline.”

I have a very simple ten-word formula for success as a writer of long fiction. It might apply to all forms of writing, but my experience is primarily in writing long fiction, so I am limiting the application of the formula to that form alone. I give this formula to you, as I do to anyone I speak to about writing, free of charge. It goes like this:

Read, Read, Read.
Outline, Outline, Outline.
Write, Write, Write.
Repeat.

I don't get much argument about steps one and three, which are pretty much self-evident to anyone with real aspirations for becoming a published writer. Nor does anyone have too much to say about step four, which is difficult to avoid in this business unless the degree of luck you experience in attempting to interest a publisher in your work is legendary.

But whole bunches of people recoil with genuine horror when I mention step two. They remember with no fondness whatsoever their secondary school experiences. They remember what they had to go through in learning about outlining from one or more teachers of English. The hated words still echo somewhere in the deep recesses of their minds.
Large Roman Numeral One, Capital A, small Roman numeral one, little a
—a litany of senseless conformity and rote invented solely to drive students mad.

Well, forget all that. When I speak of outlining, I want you to think of something else entirely, something that shares only one thing in common with all that early secondary school nonsense. That one thing is another “O” word—organization.

Now, you are going to hear a lot of very successful writers tell you that they don't outline their books. Never have, never will. They are going to give you all sorts of reasons why you shouldn't either—sometimes in direct fashion, sometimes by implication.
I've never done it,
they will advise,
so it's all right if you don't
. Or,
I've never seen the point to it, so how could you?
Like that. I've listened to and read comments like this for years—not from writers selling five thousand copies of their books a year, but five hundred thousand.

Let me give you some examples. Stephen King writes in his entertaining and informative book
On Writing
that plotting just gets in the way of storytelling and robs it of its spontaneity. He prefers just to plop down characters in a challenging situation and see what they will do. Anne Lamott in her wonderful book on what it is like to become a published writer,
Bird by Bird
, talks about just sitting down at the keyboard with no plan in mind whatsoever and thrashing around for hours, sometimes days, until something finally happens. I've listened to Terry McMillan, on being asked about outlining, reply to an audience of two thousand at the Maui Writers Conference, “Why would I want to tell the same story twice?” On a fantasy writing panel several years ago, after I had given my usual spiel about the importance of outlining, I had Anne McCaffrey turn to me and gently and sweetly say, “Terry, I don't think I've ever outlined anything in my life.”

The list of successful writers who claim not to outline their books before they write them goes on and on. All right, you say, so why are you telling us we should outline when they don't? Why can't we do like they do? Why can't we just sit down and tell our stories?

Well, maybe you can. Maybe you're one of the lucky ones who can make it work. On the other hand, maybe not. We know right off the bat that you probably aren't Stephen King or Anne Lamott or Terry McMillan or Anne McCaffrey. We also know that a lot of other writers aren't either, and a fair number, some of them very successful, do outline their work before they sit down to write their books.

Ask yourself this: How many books have you read where the author introduced a plot element that seemed to never go anywhere? Or involved you with a character who wandered off somewhere along the way and never returned? How many books have you read where the first three hundred pages were wonderful, and then everything fell apart—where you had the feeling that the author was just looking to wrap things up and get paid? How many books have you read that were so disjointed in their storytelling that you had to keep looking back to see where they were going? How many books have you read that were so empty of purpose that by the time you finished reading them—supposing you got that far—you felt you had been cheated out of the twenty-five-dollar purchase price?

I would suggest that all of these problems are organizational in nature, which means it is more likely than not that the author failed to do a lick of outlining.

Writing isn't a crapshoot. Publishing, yes—but not writing. Writing is a craft. You can learn it, and you can learn to do it better. As you've already read previously in this book, you might have it in you to be a writer or you might not; that's just the way it is. But if you do have it in you, what you would like to do is to reduce the odds of producing a piece of writing that doesn't represent your best effort.

So let me give you my thoughts on why I think outlining is a valuable tool that doesn't have to deflate your excitement before you even get started or turn your writing experience into a boring exercise in word assembly.

If you outline your book in advance, you will force yourself to think your story through. To some degree, depending on how thorough you choose to be, you will have to juggle plot, characters, settings, points of view, and thematic structure in order to assemble your story. You will have to build a story arc—a beginning, middle, and end—that comprises the gist of your book. You will have to consider all the possible choices you can imagine in crucial situations and select the ones that seem best. You won't do this for every twist and turn the book takes, but you will do it for the big ones. You will take this information and you will write it down in some recognizable fashion so that you can refer to it later.

This accomplishes several important goals.

It gives you a working blueprint to which you can refer later. Now, I don't know about you, but it takes me a while to write a book. It doesn't take just days or weeks, but months and sometimes years. For me, that's a long time to remember stuff. After fifty-odd years of dealing with life's vicissitudes, I find I don't remember things as well as I used to—or maybe as well as I think I used to. Having written down what it was you intended to do and where it was you intended to go can be a big help. Five months after you've started a book, you can still look at that blueprint and know what it was you wanted to accomplish when you started out—not only with the story at large, but with every major plot point and character.

By having outlined, you are also in a better position to know during the course of your writing when you are being scammed by trickster plot twists and duplicitous characters—by all those ideas that seem so good at the time, but in the end will lead you astray. It is a given that in the writing of any book, your outline will change. I mean, come on, you didn't think I was going to tell you your outline was written in stone, did you? These are working drawings we're talking about. These are sketches. Nothing informs the writer about how a book should come together like the actual writing of it. Remember what I said earlier about discarding all those preconceived notions about outlines? Here's a good place to start. No matter how thoroughly or carefully you have considered your story, you are going to get new and better ideas about how it should be told when you actually write it. You are going to see places where you can improve on the original plot, tighten the narrative, better use a character, and so on and so forth.

But by having already considered most of the possibilities while you were constructing your outline, you can now make a more informed decision about which way to go. Because you have those working drawings at hand, you can tell how a change you are contemplating will impact the rest of your book. The end result is that you can do a better job of keeping at bay those plot lines and characters that will play you false.

I would also argue that there is a good chance that an outline will help you stave off any onslaught of writer's block. Let me advise you right up front that I am not a big believer in writer's block. I think writer's block is God's way of telling you one of two things—that you failed to think your material through sufficiently before you started writing, or that you need a day or two off with your family and friends. In the latter instance, God frequently speaks to me through Judine. In the former, listen to this voice of reason as it whispers in your ear.
Hssst! If you want to avoid writing yourself into the box of dead ends or out into the desert of poor ideas or off into the wilderness of ill-considered plot choices, an outline will help!

Perhaps the best reason of all for outlining is that it frees you up immeasurably during the writing process to concentrate on matters other than plot. Think about it. Each chapter needs to be told from a character's point of view, needs to establish a mood and set a scene, likely requires both narrative and dialogue, and probably demands a sense of movement. That's just the bare bones of it, but even that much is fairly daunting. Plus, you have to think about how your story will come across to the reader. What words and images will you use? What emotions will you try to evoke? Where is the conflict in this scene? Is there a turning point, a secret, a revelation, a red herring?

Now, on top of that you want to mess around with trying to figure out your plot? Who do you think you are—Houdini?

Okay, I exaggerate. I'm a writer, what do you expect? But the core truth remains unaltered. If you take time in the beginning to think your story through and commit some of those thoughts to paper in the form of an outline, you will free yourself up later to concentrate on other matters of writing and thereby reduce some of the stress in your life.

In the next chapter, we'll take a look at specific ways in which you can make this process work.