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To this day I'm not certain if I had in mind anything as ambitious as a ten book series when I first started Gardens of the Moon. We were starving in paradise, unemployed on Saltspring Island, and my wife was pregnant. We were scraping by on pick-up work here and there, and what was left of a Canada Council grant that I had received for a collection of short stories that had found a publisher. The house we lived in was eight hundred square feet, four up, four down, with the upper level serving as bedroom and studio.
I wrote six to seven hours a day, trying to pull together a complicated swashbuckling adventure that went after the worst of the cliches in the fantasy genre -- with a sharp knife. Many of the world's details and characters were culled from a role-playing campaign that had gone on for years, but a lot of the tale was invented on the fly. I had a chart on the wall, beside the huge window that looked out a treetop where bald eagles nested, and that chart was a work-in-progress that took shape alongside the novel itself. From the role-playing came, most of all, the atmosphere, and the playfulness woven through the darker threads.
I suppose the notion of a trilogy bubbled in the back of my mind (before trilogies themselves became cliches), but most of all, I was having fun, and I think the pleasure of that writing -- even after a half-dozen rewrites -- still shows through in Gardens of the Moon. If you can't see the author's grin on every page on that book, then you've missed the whole damn thing.
The thing is, an entire world unfolds in the process of writing a book. Characters stride into view living and breathing and they're less invented than revealed. They possess histories that reach back to the other side of Page One, and when the last page is done they don't go away. The world doesn't end. It lives on. Something like that begs for immersion, it becomes a place one wants to return to -- certainly as a writer and hopefully as a reader.
The trilogy idea took shape, then a fourth novel, and a fifth, and it became clear to me that one story arc, in particular, demanded even more. In a sense, it has proved the simplest of plot-lines; the complexity was found in the scene changes, in the background of events that comprise the construction of all those circumstances needed to serve that single arc. And that gave me what I wanted most -- two levels of structure. I could write each as a stand-alone novel, in terms of storytelling, since I hated then and still hate cliff-hangers with a passion. And at the same time paint a much larger picture, patch by patch, that finds final resolution with the tenth novel.
Thus, the Malazan Book of the Fallen….
A Transworld Interview with Steven Erikson
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Hood's Breath
