There is nothing an author today has to guard himself
more carefully against than the Saga Habit.
The least slackening of vigilance and the thing has gripped him.
-- P.G.
Wodehouse, writing in 1935
How little
things change! I too am a victim of the
Saga Habit. Fifteen Deverry books, four
Nola O’Gradys -- and I haven’t even finished the Nola series! Now SORCERER’S LUCK, which I meant to be a
stand-alone, is insisting that it’s only the first volume of a “Runemaster trilogy”. Over the years, a number of people have asked
me why I tend to write at this great length.
I’ve put some thought into the answer, and it can be boiled down one
word: consequences. Well, maybe two
words: consequences and characters. Or
perhaps, consequences, characters, and the subconscious mind, above all the
subconscious mind. You see what I
mean? These things multiply by
themselves.
Not all
series books are sagas. Some are shaped
more like beads on a string, separate episodes held together by a set of
characters, who may or may not grow and change as the series continues. Many mystery novels fall into the episode
category, Sherlock Holmes, for example, or James Bond. Other series start out as episodics, but saga
creeps up on them as minor characters bring depth to a plot and demand stories
of their own, for instance, in Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan series
or Ian Rankin’s detective novels. What
determines the difference in these examples comes back to the idea of
consequences.
James Bond
can kill people, blow up large portions of real estate, see yet another
girlfriend die horribly -- and have nothing in particular happen as a
consequence, at least, not that the reader or viewer ever learns. I’ve always imagined that a large,
well-financed insurance team comes along after him, squaring everything with
the locals, but we never see that.
Consider, too, Hercule Poirot or other classic detectives in the crime
novel category. They do not grow and
change because they’re a collection of tics and habits. I don’t mean to imply that there’s something
wrong with this, or that episodic works are somehow inferior to sagas. I’m merely pointing out the difference.
An actual
saga demands change, both in its characters and its world. Often the innocent writer starts out by
thinking she’s going to write some simple, stand-alone story, set maybe in a
familiar world, only to find the big guns -- consequence, character, and the
subconscious -- aimed directly at her.
Sagas hijack the writer. At least
they do me.
A good
example is the Deverry series. Back in
1982, I decided to write a fantasy short story about a woman warrior in an
imaginary country. It turned into a
novella before I finished a first draft.
It was also awful -- badly written, undeveloped, pompous. The main character came across as a cardboard
gaming figure. She wanted revenge for
the death of her family. Somehow she’d
managed to learn how to fight with a broadsword. That was all I knew. Who had trained her? Why?
What pushed her to seek a bloody vengeance? What was going to happen to her after she got
it?
The ultimate
answer: like most cardboard, she tore apart.
Pieces of her life appear in the Deverry sequence, but she herself is
gone, too shallow to live. But her
passing spawned a great many other characters, both female and male.
Her actions had only the most minimal
consequence. She killed the murderer --
consequences for him, sure -- but he was a nobleman. What would his death mean to his family? His land holdings? The political hierarchy of which he was a
part? Come to think of it, what was the
political hierarchy in his corner of the fantasy world? Everyone had Celtic names. Their political world would not be a standard
English-French feudal society. People
still worshipped the pagan gods, too.
Why weren’t they Christianized?
The ultimate answer: they weren’t
in Europe. They’d gone elsewhere. A very large elsewhere, as it turned
out. And then, of course, I had to ask:
how did they get there?
Now, some people, more sensible
than I am, would have sat down with a couple of notebooks and rationally figured
out the answers to all these questions.
They would have taken their decisions, possibly based on research, back
to the original novella and revised and rewrote until they had a nice short
novel. Those of us addicted to sagas,
however, are not sensible people.
Instead of notes and charts, I wrote more fiction.
Here’s
where the subconscious mind comes in.
Each question a writer asks herself can be answered in two different
ways, with a dry, rational note, or a chunk of story. When she goes for the story option, the saga
takes over. To continue my novella
example, I wrote the scene where the dead lord’s body comes back to his castle,
which promptly told me it was a dun, not a castle, thereby filling in a bit more
of the background. In the scene of mourning, other noble lords were already plotting to get hold of his land, maybe by
appealing to an overlord, maybe by marrying off his widow to a younger
son. The story possibilities in that
were too good to ignore.
You can see their ultimate
expression in Books Three and Four of the Deverry saga with the hassle over the
re-assignment of Dun Bruddlyn. It just
took me a while to get there. The woman
warrior, complete with motivation and several past lives’ worth of history, appears in the saga as Jill, Cullyn
of Cerrmor’s daughter, but she is not the same person as that first piece of
cardboard, not at all. The opening of
the original novella, when a woman dressed as a boy sees a pair of silver
daggers eating in an innyard, does appear in a different context with different
characters in Book Six, when Carra meets Rhodry and Yraen. Rather than revenge, however, she’s seeking
the father of her unborn child.
More story
brings more questions. The writer’s
mind works on story, not “information”.
Pieces of information can act as the gateways that open into stories and
lead the writer into a saga. Tolkien
started his vast saga by noticing some odd discrepancies in the vocabulary of
Old Norse. Sounds dull, doesn’t it? But he made something exciting out of
it. The difference between varg
and ulf was just a gate, an innocent little opening leading to a vast
life’s work.
Not every
writer works in the same way, of course.
Many writers make an outline, draw up character sheets, plan the
structure of the book to be, and then stick to their original decisions. Often they turn out good books that way,
too. I don’t understand how, but they
do. I personally am a “discovery
writer”, as we’re termed, someone who plans the book by writing it and then
revising the entire thing. When it comes
to saga, this means writing large chunks of prose before any of it coalesces
into a book. I never finished any of the
first drafts of these chunks. Later I
did, when I was fitting them into the overall series.
(Someone like
Tolkien, who had a family and a day job, may never get to finish all of his
early explorations of the material. Such
is one risk of saga. Readers who
criticize him and his heirs for all those “unfinished tales” need to understand
where the tales came from. Anything
beyond a mere jotting belongs to the saga.)
Another
risk: the writer can put a lot of energy into a character or tale only to see
that it doesn’t belong and must be scrapped.
When I was trying to turn the original ghastly novella into DAGGERSPELL,
the first Deverry novel, the most important dweomerman was an apothecary named
Liddyn, a nice fellow, not real interesting though. My subconscious created a friend of his, a
very minor character, who appeared in one small scene, digging herbs by the
side of the road. When the friend
insisted on turning up in a later scene, I named him Nevyn. If I’d stuck to my original plan, that would
have been it for Nevyn. As soon as I
asked myself, “but who is this guy?” I realized what he was bringing with him:
the entire theme of past lives. Until
that moment, reincarnation had nothing to do with this saga.
Liddyn
shrank to one mention in one of the later books. Nevyn took over.
The past lives appeared when I
asked myself how this new strange character got to be a four hundred year old
master of magic. What was his
motivation? How and why did he study
dweomer? These questions bring us right
back to the idea of consequences. As a
young man Nevyn made a bad mistake out of simple arrogance. The consequences were dire for the woman who
loved him and her clan, and over the years these consequences spiraled out of
control until they led ultimately to a civil war. The saga had gotten longer but deeper, and I
hope richer. Had I ignored these
consequences, I would have been left with an interesting episode, isolated, a
little thin, perhaps at best backstory.
The term
“backstory” always implies a “frontstory”, of course, the main action, the most
important part of a book. Some readers
get impatient if they feel there’s too much of this mysterious substance,
backstory, in a given book or movie.
They want to know what they’re getting, where the story is going, and in
particular, what kind of story it is, front and center. Sagas, however, can’t be divided into back
and front. Is the Trojan War less
important than Odysseus’s wanderings?
The one is not “backstory” to the other.
The saga
has much in common with the literary form critics call the “roman fleuve,” the
river-system novel. A great many stories
flow together in one of these, like the tributaries that together make up a
mighty river meandering across a plain.
The classic example is Balzac’s Comedie Humaine. Romans fleuve follow a wide cast of
characters over a stretch of time, just as true sagas do. None of the stories are less important than
any other.
The past and present of the created
world together produce the last essential element of a saga: the feeling of
change, of movement forward in time of the saga’s world. In a true saga something always passes away,
but at the same time, something new arrives.
The elves leave Middle Earth, but the Fourth Age begins. True sagas, in short, include a future.
And that
future often calls the writer back to the saga.
Sometimes the damn things won’t leave us alone. Which is why I find myself contemplating a
return to Deverry for a novel that takes place hundreds of years after the main
saga. It should be a stand-alone, I
think. But I’m not betting on that.
