Ed Greenwood is most known for creating the Forgotten Realms fantasy world for the Dungeons and Dragons game. He now has a new series out together with Robert B. Marks called The Eternity Quartet.
First of all can you tell us a bit about The Eternity Quartet and how it came about?
The Eternity Quartet, name and all, came from the mind of my friend Rob Marks, whom I first met at a long-ago Ad Astra. He conceived of a series of short stories, moving through the history of a world like our real Earth but with “flash-bang hurled spells” magic that works, and asked me if I was interested, and I was. So we got together, talked things out over a meal, and proceeded. It’s about that simple.
Robert B. Marks starts it off with Seizing the Torch and you follow up with An Evil Wind where we meet Lord Emgrar in the valley of the Godsblood. Can you tell us a bit about An Evil Wind? What is the common thread?
Seizing the Torch looks at a prehistoric hunting and foraging tribe, and An Evil Wind shows us the descendants of that tribe in a roughly pre-Akkadian ancient Sumerian era (that’s where the words “abgal” and “gidim” come from). There’s a glowing blue gem that we see in both stories, to make the link between the people of Rob’s first and founding story and my tale clear to the reader. The common thread as the sequence unfolds will be that lineage; the blue gem may or may not show up in every story.
You are writing The Eternity Quartet together with Robert B. Marks. How has that been and what would you say are his strengths compared to yours?
It’s been fun; relaxed fun, two friends sitting down to “play” with an idea, in between and behind larger big-deadlines writing projects. Rob is a publisher, a details man, a planner and a tireless worker. I’m the fast “Get it done!” type, so I can swiftly bring examples of trying this or that to his desk, so we can both see how well a notion works or fits.
You have a long experience in working with other authors, have this been different in any way?
I try to make every collaboration different, by always (as much as I can), letting whoever is my collaborative partner choose how we do it. There’s no “right way,” and there’s only a “best” way for that particular partnership in the specific time and circumstances—so I learn the most, and enjoy it best, when it’s different every time. In this case, Rob came up with the root idea and he’s the publisher, so he set the structure, and my job is to fit stories into it of maximum interest and color.
How did you start writing? Was there a particular book or moment in your life that spurred you on?
I started writing at the age of six, inspired by fiction—all sorts of fiction, from classic Dunsany fantasies to two-fisted pulp adventures, so there was no one book or writer or moment—I found and loved in my father’s den, which had walls of home-built bookshelves crammed with the books he’d collected during a long book-lover’s life. Often I’d rush up to him with my latest discovery and excitedly ask him what and where the sequel was; what happened to these characters next? And quite often, given that my father’s reading tastes ranged over more than a century of published books, he would tell me that the author was dead, and if I wanted to read more, I’d have to write it myself. So I did!
What sort of challenges, as a writer, might you have faced over the years? Any insights you would be able to share for those aspiring writers seeking advice?
I’ve been writing professionally for more than fifty years now, and during that time I’ve experienced numerous publishers going defunct holding unpublished work of mine, I’ve had mysterious individuals rewrite my books and put them out under their own names, I’ve not been paid, or paid too little, so often that I now figure I’m literally owed millions of dollars that I’ll never see, I’ve had endless editing tussles with people whose command of English was less than stellar, and just about every malicious or just carelessly bad thing that can happen to a writer. And my advice is simple: whatever happens, good or bad, just pick yourself up, get back at the keyboard, and write some more. Waste as little time as possible on upsets and feuding and doing what you don’t like, and as much time as possible on what you do like. For me, that’s writing. I don’t mean pay no attention to contracts or what an agent or editor or publisher says or does, but I do mean don’t procrastinate or let bad things depress you into not writing. Write every day. You breathe every day, you visit the bathroom every day, so . . . write every day. (And the long impressive roster of novels will come.)
Have you ever struggled between what you would like to happen to a character and what you considered more sensible to occur? Can you tell us when and what did you do at last?
That’s a struggle I’ve faced before, when writing fiction “to order” following a script or outline provided by someone else (I’ve done lots of ghostwriting and behind-the-scenes scripting, which contractually I can’t say much specific about, but it’s all writing work that I thought would be fun and that I’d learn from). It’s fun, and something I often do when freely writing my own projects, to let characters just take over and see where they lead a story, but that’s seldom a luxury available in collaborative work. If you’re hired to write the latest Captain Calabash adventure, and Captain Calabash has to survive at the end of the book and win, you can’t create a villain, fall in love with that villain, and have that villain trap, defeat, and kill Captain Calabash just because that seems to be the way the story went when you were writing it. As the writer, I must control the story. My job, if the story has specific events that must or must not occur, is to spin a convincing, engaging narrative that links together those set events in a way that entertains the reader and at no point makes the reader think a character is “acting out of character” or being really foolish or forgetful, just so the plot can turn out in a particular way. So I went ahead and did my job. No agonizing, no procrastinating; I wrote it, then took a hard look at what I wrote to see if it seemed convincing and if it could be improved by saying less and leaving the reader to draw conclusions or fill in the blanks (and if I was writing a mystery, was it desirable to raise a red herring by leaving the wrong impression? Or not?). The needs of the story are and must be paramount.
What sort of research, if any, did you do as part of this project?
None, and a lot. What I mean by that seeming contradiction is that thus far, I’ve done no specific research at all. However, I have spent my life voraciously reading and learning. About darned near everything that’s happened to come to my notice, from why female dress and shoe sizes are different from male ones to how the city of London, England has been policed, down the centuries—and I’ve already drawn on that, and happily delved into the pages of my home library of over 80,000 books, in thinking up what I’m going to do in my Eternity Quartet stories. The history of our real world is useful in establishing mood and feel, but as that history doesn’t include the aforementioned “flash-bang hurled spells” magic that works, it needn’t and indeed can’t govern the unfolding storytelling. A reader who wants to disagree with me on the design of stirrups at a particular era of Earth history is entirely missing the point.
You plan to release a story in The Eternity Quartet every month with an anthology in the end. Do you see this as an experimental way of publishing or what are your expectations?
An experiment for Rob’s Legacy Press, yes. I’m already involved in similar processes of “e-stories published alone, subsequently assembled into collections” for my own fiction, and fiction in which other friends will play in imaginary settings I’ve created. (For more about this, take a peek every so often at theedverse.com where more will be forthcoming as it’s ready.) The advent of widescale e-publishing easily makes possible different ways for a storyteller to communicate with readers, where such ways were unfeasible before. Not all of those ways will be successful, so my expectations here are to have fun, and to create something that purchasers will feel was worth the price of admission: they got their entertainment money’s-worth.
For your own reading, do you prefer ebooks or traditional paper/hard back books?
As I’m getting older and my eyesight is failing, and I have to stare at a screen writing or editing or formatting for hours each day, I prefer curling up with a good old-fashioned print book that I can feel and smell and handle. And that survives power failures and changes in format, and that no dastardly publisher can bar me from reading in my own preferred way with DRM or anything else. However, I’m fully aware that ebooks offer the potential for increasing font size for readability, backlighting so I can read under the covers without using up my flashlights, and so on. Yet you asked about my preferences, and I still love beautifully-designed books I can hold in my hand.
What kind of books do you read, any favourite authors?
I read everything. I have worked in public libraries for more than forty years, and I feel that wide reading is part of the job. I buy and read more than twenty-five novels a month, and any number of short stories, magazines, and non-fiction titles (yes, I’m a fast reader). I have many favourites. To confine myself just to the living (and hoping I’m not helping anyone into an early grave by mentioning them here) I love the works of Guy Gavriel Kay, Terry Pratchett, Spider Robinson, Dana Stabenow, J.V. Jones, Jo Walton, Julie Czerneda, and more than a few others.
What do you do when you’re not writing, any hobbies?
I like to learn to cook, fix things around the house, and read, read, read. When I was younger and still had shoulders and knees that worked, I liked to fence (with swords, not to erect barriers between farm fields) and climb down caves. Everything else came and went with my whims.
What’s next? Do you also have other projects besides the Eternity Quartet you are working on now?
Oh, yes. As of right now I’m writing three novels at once, doing some publicity writing, planning a very large publishing venture (hint: watch theeverse.com and there’ll be more on that soon), and writing half a dozen fantasy, sf, mystery, and pulp adventure stories for various friends who are doing Kickstarters. Oh, yes, and I’m designing two game systems and contributing material to another three existing ones. My next two already-finished novels will be a steampunk romp from Tor Books, The Iron Assassin, and Spellstorm, a new Forgotten Realms® novel (I created the Realms, back when I was six, so it’s fifty years old this year) from Wizards of the Coast.
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Interview by Dag Rambraut – SFFWorld.com © 2015
