Interview with R. Scott Bakker

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RB: Was The Warrior-Prophet a more difficult work?

RSB: Both books were difficult for different reasons. One of the things about The Lord of the Rings is that the story it tells is a story that can be told (and has been told) in any number of different worlds. One of the many things that makes the story so remarkable is the way it engages the breathtaking intricacies of Middle-earth without really depending on those intricacies. People usually crinkle their noses when I say this, so let me explain a little.

When I started my first exhaustive rewrite of The Darkness That Comes Before, this time with the intent on getting published, I joined something then called the Del Rey Online Writers Workshop (or ‘the DROWW’ as we called it), where I learned fairly quickly that although I could write, I really knew squat about storytelling. If you want to write something mysterious, the first tendency, I think, is to make everything mysterious. And if you have a vast world of which you are overweeningly proud, the first tendency is to try to reference everything. Both are big mistakes. In order to interest readers in a mystery, you need to give them firm ground to stand on - concentrate on the mystery rather than on making everything mysterious. Likewise, in order to interest readers in a world, you have to give them a clear road into that world.

One of the lessons I’d learned from Tolkien is something I call ‘narrative transcendence,’ which expressed as a rule might be something like: In epic fantasy, the world must transcend the story - it must, like our own world, seem like a place capable of containing innumerable stories. To me, this meant creating a detailed world. Reality, afterall, is a function of detail. But Tolkien has a storytelling lesson that’s the compliment to this worldbuilding one: no matter how detailed the world, keep the story simple, stupid, at the beginning at least. Give the reader a clear road.

Now, through the rewrite, I had little difficulty with the mystery problem, but the ‘clear road’ problem proved nearly insuperable. Unlike Tolkien, I had a story which, though universal in abstract (the Son searching for the Father), turned in so many ways on different details belonging to the world. Since I set out to write an epic fantasy as convincing as a historical, you might think this is a good thing - and perhaps it is - but it sure made rewriting The Darkness That Comes Before difficult. I’ve lost count of all the various ways I tried making the Three Seas and Earwa accessible. And in some ways I think I failed.

With The Warrior-Prophet, I already had the world in place, and in certain respects, this made things so much easier. Even still, I found the new difficulties that arose just as challenging, but I’ll save that story for the next question.

RSB: The main difficulties I faced in The Warrior-Prophet stemmed directly from the outrageous goals I had set for myself. In a sense, the book is about conquest, the myriad and often bizarre ways in which humans submit to one another, whether through violence or seduction. So on the one hand there’s the conquest of the heathen by the Holy War. I really wanted the Holy War to come across as a living, breathing thing - as an alternate protagonist, in fact. Doing this, however, required a line of quasi-historical narration (which I patterned off of Harold Lamb’s Iron Men and Iron Saints) threaded through the various strands of character narration. Since I wanted to play these two lines against each other in interesting ways, they became painstaking affairs. Also, I find the tendency is to gloss over the details when telling the story of collective actions - to narrate at a level that invites abstractions. This is what makes history boring to so many people. So there was also the continuous struggle to keep the Holy War concrete, to keep it alive in my reader’s imagination. If I think I succeeded, it’s only because I recognize that it’s impossible to carry everyone with you - the detail that enlivens historical narration for some is going to overwhelm others. There’s no way around that. As a writer I think it’s very important to pick your reader.

On the other hand, there’s the conquest of the Holy War from within - by Kellhus. Here my goal was to tell a story that shows a prophet coming to power, rather than simply telling it. Think about the difference between describing a conversation that captivates a listener, and actually giving that conversation. The former need not be captivating at all, whereas the latter has to be, somewhat, if the reader is to find its consequences plausible. Now I’m as conceited as the next guy, but I have no doubt that if I met Kellhus he would have me washing his drawers while marvelling over my good fortune. It’s bloody hard writing someone that much smarter than you! I just used the shot-gun approach, writing stupid thing after stupid thing, until I got lucky and wrote something improbably intelligent.