Stephen DonalDSon

The american fantasist tells us why he never wants to repeat himself

As opening sallies for a Brought To Book interview go, Stephen Donaldson’s first remarks are unexpected: “The story of my life as a writer is that I don’t know how to write.” Not that he lets this alleged lack of literary skill hold him back. “I have to tackle challenges that I’ve never faced before, I have to develop skills that I’ve never had before,” he continues. “I don’t know why that’s true and it does make life difficult, but it’s necessary to my imagination.”

More seriously, what Donaldson is trying to get across is he doesn’t want to “write novels that I already know how to write”. So Seventh Decimate, the first volume of a new trilogy, eschews the high fantasy of his much-loved Thomas Covenant sequence. Instead, according to Donaldson, it’s variously “an attempt to combine a world in which magic really works with the technology to have cannons and rifles”; a reflection on religion set in a world where religion itself is a disruptive presence because the existence of magic means people “don’t need to explain things through the supernatural”; and an exercise in telling a story that “jumps back and forth in time”.

It’s also a trilogy that grew from a more modest project. “I wanted to write a book about a mysterious library,” says Donaldson. “God knows why that entered my head, except that there are lots of very fascinating stories out there about mysterious libraries, and I thought that would be a fun new challenge for me. Then I thought I was writing a novella, which I did, and it was a complete failure.”

Not the most promising start, but then Donaldson realised the novella was a “door” to “a much larger story”. In the new novel, a legendary library that may or may not exist and potentially holds the key to the future is central to what’s in many respects a classic quest narrative.

other worlds

If that description seems to contradict Donaldson’s earlier remarks, that’s not how the writer himself sees things. To understand why, we need to go back to the 1970s. When he was working on his first trilogy about Thomas Covenant, a young writer embittered and ostracised after he contracts leprosy but who takes on a second life in another realm, the Land, Donaldson had planned only a trilogy.

However, the ideas for a second and third sequence stemmed from these books and the Second Chronicles quickly followed in the early 1980s. But then came a more than 20-year hiatus until the first volume of The Last Chronicles, The Runes Of The Earth, appeared in 2004. “When I wrote The Second Chronicles, it became clear to me that I was not a good-enough writer to write The Last Chronicles, I didn’t have it in me to write them,” says Donaldson. “I didn’t have the skill, that I would need to tackle the capstone of the whole project, so I stretched myself in other ways.”

So what changed? “I got old and I realised I was running out of time.”

It may also be that Donaldson was suspicious of his own success, which saw the first two trilogies sell more than 10 million copies. “The kind of commercial success I’ve experienced is very seductive and very misleading,” he says. “It, of course, makes you feel really good – there’s nothing quite like being lionised to give you a good opinion of yourself, but the ego is not really your friend.”

making movies

He finds it a “comfort” that nobody has yet made an offer to turn Thomas Covenant’s story into a TV series. “I want to live in the world of literature,” he says. “There was at one time the option outstanding for my science fiction Gap series [written in the 1990s], and the hardest part of negotiating the contract was that the people who were thinking of making the movies wanted 100% of my time, they wanted me to be at their beck and call, and on the set and working on the script and doing everything possible to try to make the project succeed. I wanted them to have zero access to me. My position was, ‘I don’t make movies, you make movies, go make a movie, leave me alone.’”

To ensure he’s not disturbed, Donaldson has a condo where he works, between 8.30am and 4.30pm every day, treating writing rather like a regular day job. “If you want to be able to be steadily creative for a long period of time, a long book, you need to pace yourself," he says, “and so I quit at quitting time.”

It’s in keeping with a change in his life that occurred when he became a father many years back. Having previously hungered to be a writer, his perspective was altered. “My aspiration became to have a life,” he says. “I wanted to be a good father, I wanted to be a good husband. I had very troubled parents myself and a very troubled childhood. I decided they were simply too precious to ignore and so in my early years I pretty much put writing on the far back burner while I learned how to be a father and learned how to live in a family.”