Janny Wurts: No. It's like when you drop a snowball down a hill, and it turns into this monster boulder. It starts with the seed of an idea, just like everything does.

I remember making a very conscious decision whether to pursue this or not, and I can remember the moment when I said, "Yeah, I'm going to write this story," and it changed my life. But I don't think anything that complex ever springs into existence full grown. It very quickly acquired enough complexity that I had to respect this and take my time with it. But it didn't start with anything more than the thought that I'm going to write about a guy who's total light and a guy who's total shadows, and they're going to have a head on. Then I'm going to turn it on its head so you're going to root for the guy who's total shadows, because I'm sick and tired of the earnest blond always winning.

So it started really with a frivolous annoyance. I was sick of reading all the fairy tales where the blond, youngest always, blah, blah. I'm going to do this differently. It stopped being frivolous right there. But it's always going to have that. Some readers get irritated, because they keep expecting the charismatic blond guy to be the good guy. And when it doesn't happen, they say, "When are you going to get around to the real story?" And I keep telling them, "You're in it. Take your blinders off."

Crescent Blues: The funny thing is, perception being what it is, a person could read the entire story and still see it in terms of blond good guy/dark-haired bad guy. History defines a hero, but the person who knows the truth isn't necessarily the person who writes the history.

Janny Wurts: That's exactly what I say in the prologue. You decide who you think is the good or the bad -- if you dare to use those labels. You're going to find when the entire thing is said and done is that you can't use those labels.

And I don't think you can dare use those labels in our real life world today. That's where we get ourselves in trouble all the time. "I know what you mean." No, you don't. How carefully did you listen to start with, and how carefully did you listen to the guy next to you and next to him and next to him?

And what was the character of the person who was telling you that, anyway? Did they have a character you respected? Did they tell the whole truth? Did they know the whole story? We take so much for granted. It's frightening, and then we end up killing people over it.

Crescent Blues: That is the frightening part. But you almost have to take some things for granted, because one person cannot encompass the universe.

Janny Wurts: Oh yeah? If we're going to look at good and evil, the scariest thing for me is people saying, "I know what's good for you. My system will fix your life. Put up and shut up." Think about that. If I know what's good for you, you don't have any voice anymore. You have no respect, and I have no respect for you.

Oversimplifying anything is dangerous, and now that we have a global [economy and political interdependence] we really have to think about that with wider minds or we're going to wind up in some trouble. And it's tragic trouble. It's unnecessary trouble.

Crescent Blues: You very much strive for accuracy in describing war and battles, the forces leading up to conflict and the face of conflict itself. In contrast to the folks who view fantasy as one long, glorious crusade, all of your work tries to capture the grit and despair of the battlefield. What sent you down that path of accuracy?

Janny Wurts: Several things. The first is that I don't believe a killing war solves anything. It makes us better killers. It makes us better haters. It doesn't teach us how to heal. It doesn't teach us how to master peace. Until we decide to stop using violence to solve a problem, we're going to beget more violence. It's going to take an act of courage to stop it.

That's part of my reasoning. The one that really blew the doors off, though, was I wanted to make the battle scenes accurate. I'd done enough outdoor work and enough physical exercise -- I was an archery champion and a number of other things, and I took fencing -- that I had enough knowledge to know that I wanted to get it right.

I was mixing time periods, because technologies moved in a different time frame in the world that I was writing. So I had to, essentially, study all the battles that were ever fought roughly from the time of the Romans to the time when gunpowder began changing the way battles were fought. I read a lot of books.

Right about the time I finished that research, I walked into a documentary film on Culloden Field. For your readers who are not familiar with that, it was the real fall of Clan power in Scotland. Two very different cultures in conflict using very different kinds of arms.

That particular battle has been so over-dramatized. It's been used in mainstream fiction. It's been used in romance. But to see it in a documentary film as it actually happened tore me wide open. Essentially, the British opened cannon fire on a bunch of ill-dressed, freezing cold people with swords, downhill. And the commanders of the guys with swords were so inept that they had their forces badly placed, and the order to charge never happened. So for two hours, the Scots got shredded with cannon fire before anybody did anything.

Seeing that, then reflecting back on all the battles that I had just read about and all the so-called "great" wars, I realized they were all the same. There wasn't one that was any different. It was superior force wiping out a smaller force, a superior tactic wiping out an inferior tactic. These guys were inept, and these guys were not, or it was a God-awful blood bath where they butted heads, and everybody died, and nothing was accomplished.

I realized that a good cause had nothing to do with martial might. Who had the sharpest weapon or whoever killed the most people had nothing to do with solving the problem that was on the table to begin with. It sure didn't beget any understanding, and it sure didn't heal anything.

But I'm not going to write a book which condones this. Our educational system teaches us that violence solves the problem. The media tells us violence solves the problem. The books, our fiction, the movies, our entertainment -- all across the board we learn this fiction that harming somebody else accomplishes something. I don't believe that it does. I don't believe that human beings need to be knocked in line with force. Understanding and giving would do the job a whole lot better. So I decided to write a book that would rip the cellophane off, and these battles are not going to entertain you that way. And they are not going to solve the problem.

There will be people in the battles that you will root for or not. Your opinion may change. But I wanted you to walk away with that sense of what it would be like to be there. If you talk to the vets who have been in battle, they'll tell you what it's actually like. I don't believe in hiding that. I think it's a dangerous, dangerous way to think that war is the way to solve a problem, and that it's a "sanitary" or "surgical" strike. There's no such thing. Somebody dies and there's nothing sanitary or surgical about it. There's nothing "surgical" about somebody spilling the guts out of somebody else.

Crescent Blues: But your sense of accuracy goes beyond the battles. You're meticulous of the details of everyday life -- the way people handle horses, the way they hunt, etc.

Janny Wurts: I wanted to bring you a graphic experience. I want to put you there. I want you to go there. You're not just going to read these books; you're going to experience them. Most of the things in these books I've gone and physically done, because there's a radical difference between living through what the character is going through and what you imagine they might be. I'm touching on areas of the mind where the senses cannot go, areas of the mind where science cannot measure but which are still real, or they still have a validity. I'm trying to make the fabric of the story as real as I can, and if I didn't go out there and do a thing, I had an expert who did.

Crescent Blues: Where you fencing, riding and taking archery before you started to write fantasy, or were these things you started when you realized that you needed them to tell your stories properly?

Janny Wurts: Some of the things I had done first. I always lived restlessly. I believe it makes you a better writer if you go out and experience the world. Some it I chose to go and do, because I wanted to create something. I did a lot of world traveling, because I wanted to write fantasy, and I said, "If I haven't ever experienced another culture or learned to speak the language or eat food that was strange or walking in a culture whose history is completely different from ours, how am I ever going to invent a world without having seen what it's like to be outside my own?" It took four or five overseas trips to acquire the mental agility to be able to imagine it.

Crescent Blues: Do you think that's a function of how your mind works?

Janny Wurts: How do you mean?

Crescent Blues: Do you analyze a goal in advance to define the number of steps you need to achieve it, or do you just set a direction and move towards it?

Janny Wurts: I usually set a direction and see what comes in through serendipity to get me there. When I feel that there's a pitfall -- gee, I can't write that scene, because I don't know -- I go out and do it. But do I sit there with a checklist do I sit there and mastermind and orchestrate every step? Not to that degree. I know exactly where the story's going. I always have. I know exactly the steps it's going to take to get there, so there's nothing out of hand. I'm not digressing from the plot one bit. These guys who say I'm going to write an endless series are totally wrong. That will never happen. I do know where I'm going.

But I also believe you can't micro-manage. You have to keep your eye on the bigger picture, and you have to leave the mind free to see the bigger picture that you can't, because you're focused on this little puzzle piece over here.

So it doesn't bother me when something crops up in the story, because I know it's a long story. By now, I've been thirty years in the planning. I definitely know where everything goes. But in the early stages of planning, I didn't always know how it was going to all weave together. I kind of believed on one level; on another, I already knew. There was a feeling that I was following a trail.

Crescent Blues: So the story knows itself, whether or not the characters know it.

Janny Wurts: But the characters know themselves. They get on the page, and they know themselves. There's no doubt about it. They have their own way of going about something.

So many times, people say to me, "Oh, how did you invent this character?" And I say, "I didn't. The character invented itself."

Then they say, "Well, read this scene in Ships of Merior where the Master Bard gets killed." Arithon sees his friend and master murdered right in front of him, and everyone expects to see him tear the place apart, literally, because he's got the power to do it -- big vengeance trip. And he doesn't. I'm not going to tell you what happens on the page. I'll let you read the scene.

The British cover of Peril's Gate ((c) 2001, Janny Wurts, courtesy of the artist)

People say, "But how…?" And I say, it was perfectly logical what was going to happen, because here's the traumatic event that impacts this character. Given who this guy is, what he believes, what he thinks, what his disappointments are, what he wants out of life, where he's frustrated -- given the pattern of his character, you drop that model into the chute, you're going to know what course that character will take, because you know what that character values. You know what their weaknesses are. You know their strengths. So, to me, it's intensely logical those characters know where they're going, and I know where they're going, because I know who they are.

But people say, "Your plots are unpredictable." I don't know how, because the characters are acting true to themselves. Maybe that's why they're unpredictable, because I'm not the puppetmaster. Given this guy's take on life, what's he going to do in this room, at this time, with this impact? And out it comes. The character speaks their words.

Crescent Blues: So you see your fiction as more character-driven and idea-driven than plot-driven.

Janny Wurts: What do you call plot-driven?

Crescent Blues: Someone who has a story they want to tell and bends the characters to fit into the story. In a character-driven story, the story somewhat tells itself.

Janny Wurts: Pretty much it is, but you can start with a beginning, and you can stop at the end.…

I don't know. I think that the mind is so much richer than people give it credit for. I think we're taught in school that you have to micromanage everything. I think we're taught in school that you've got to keep checklists. And I think as a result, we shut down 90 percent of what we could do if we said, "Here's where we want to end up. We don't know how we're going to get there, but once you're focused on where you want to go, you're mind automatically sorts into the picture all the things that are going to help you get there. So you're going to perceive -- you train your perception, to get you there.

In effect, if we taught our kids to set goals and help them set goals, [we could] sit back and watch them do it, because the mind is made to work through things like that, but we don't take advantage of it. That's one of the maddening things I see in our society. We're locking ourselves in, because we have this silly concept that we have to have all the answers before we start on the path. You don't have to have any of the answers; you just have to know where you want to go.

It takes a certain amount of being relaxed and willingness to let things happen, but we're not training our kids to do that. We're training them that they have to have all the answers up front and express them, and it's frustrating [kids] and scaring them to death.

Crescent Blues: Because nobody has the answers.

Janny Wurts: But they're not equipped to find the answers, because our education system doesn't give you what you need to pursue them.

Crescent Blues: They never did.

Janny Wurts: It could. Hampshire College, the college I went to, came as close as you're going to come. Basically, you contracted your education: here's where I want to come out of the chute. This is what I want to do when I'm done. Here are the books I'm going to read. Here are the courses I'm going to take. Here are the people I'm going to talk to. Here's the field experience I'm going to cover that isn't in the books, and here's how I'm going to show you I figured out how I'm going to get where I want to go. This is what I'm going to show you I have the tools to do it.

That school taught you to get knowledge. So anything I want to do, I know how to get the knowledge to do it. That's an education. You don't do that with grades. You don't do that with parrot back, and you don't do that with: "I'll tell you what you have to know." You don't. And when kids come into that school, it takes them a while to get it, but by God, when they graduate, the list of what they've accomplished is pretty impressive.

Crescent Blues: Did you immediately start writing and painting professionally when you got back from your world trip?

Janny Wurts: I knew what I wanted to do, and I saw people ahead of me go and get high-paying jobs and never do what they wanted. I decided I wasn't going to go that route. So I took on a string of part-time, little things. And I had a low rent. You've got to make sure you've got a low rent. I did all the little stuff I could do that would feed into getting where I wanted to go, until eventually it did provide a living.

It took about four years, but I was always independent. I did not live off my parents. I did not live at home. People talk about not having two pennies to rub together. For a while, I didn't. But I think it's important that if people are thinking, yes, they want to work creatively for the rest of their lives, not to give that away.

Crescent Blues: Did you have one event that you look back on now as your "big break," or was it a string of events that let you know you were on the path to what you wanted to do?

Janny Wurts - Continued