The Sword of Shannara - Author's Note

The Sword of Shannara

Note Published: 1991 & 2002

Author's Note

It is commonly assumed that you write a book intending to publish it. That wasn't the case with The Sword of Shannara. I began writing Sword in an effort to slow an increasingly rapid descent into terminal boredom, a condition I had brought upon myself by deciding to enter law school. It was early in 1967, my first semester was completed, and I retained just enough presence of mind to know that if I didn't do something soon, I would sink irretrievably into a morass of mind-numbing legalese. Writing was an obvious lifeline; I had been penning stories since I discovered how to convert the alphabet into words. Therapy of the best sort, writing had always been a part of my life. Trouble was, I hadn't written anything worth talking about for almost five years. Oh, sure, I had submitted a series of short stories to the college literary magazine, pretentious stuff, the sort of nonsense you mistkanely assume must be wonderful because it is so full of angst and hidden meaning. But I hadn't written anything with teeth since high school, nothing with dash and verve, mystery and excitement -- in short, nothing that even faintly resembled the classic adventure story of which I was so fond.

I was about fourteen when I discovered Sir Walter Scott, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alexander Dumas, and all the other eighteenth and nineteenth century European adventure+-story writers. I was immediately hooked. What marvelous adventures! Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, The White Company, Sir Nigel, The Black Arrow, Treasure Island, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, and on and on. Each new tale seemed more exciting than the one before. Now here, I believed, were stories worth reading. Enough, already, of great white whales and repressed women wearing scarlet letters. Here were the kind of stories I wanted to write. And I tried, of course, but somehow they didn't work for me as they had for Dumas or Stevenson. I didn't seem to know enough. I wasn't comfortable with the time or the language or the feel of things. So I floundered about in fits and starts and eventually went away to college without ever completing anything.

But I hadn't forgotten how much I had enjoyed those stories or how profoundly they had affected me. So, five years of college and a semester of law school later, I decided to go back to them. An adventure story, something wonderfully dangerous, filled with hair-raising escapes, men and women of character and purpose, dangers that threatened from every quarter -- that was what I wanted to write and that was how I would escape the mind-numbing predictability of law life. But it had to be something grand. How wold D'Artagnan have handled Rupert of Hentzau from The Prisoner of Zenda? What if Jim Hawkins had met up with Quentin Durward? I envisioned a story that was panoramic, something vast and sweeping.

That was when I started thinking anew about J.R.R. Tolkien. I had read The Lord of the Rings two years earlier. What if Tolkien's magic and fairy creatures were made part of the worlds of Walter Scott and Dumas? What if the story took place somewhere timeless and placeless, a somewhere that nevertheless hinted strongly of our own world in the future? What if our present knowledge had been lost, and science had been replaced by magic? But it couldn't be magic that was dependable or simply good or bad. And the right and wrong of things couldn't be clear-cut because life simply didn't work that way. And the central figure needed to be someone readers could identify with, a person very much like themselves, caught up in events not of his own making, a person simply trying to muddle through.

That was how Sword began. It was conceived as a two-book set and outlined accordigly. I worked on it all through law school and the first four years of my life as an attorney after I got out. I wrote it at my desk in school, at the kitchen table of my first apartment, and the back bedroom of my first house. It was with me through the end of the Lyndon Johnson and the whole of the Richard Nixon presidencies. I put it aside several times, once for more than a year. I finished the first book, started the second, decided that the first wasn't satisfactory, went back and wrote it all again. I fussed over it constnatly. I never showed it to anyone.

Finally it was finished. Therapy complete, the patient cured, I sat there wondering what to do with it. After all, it represented a terrific amount of time and effort. It seemed a shame to just tuck it away in the cupboard. So I decided to send it off to a publisher and see if it had any merit. Knowing absolutely nothing about publishing books, I read some articles, looked around a few bookstores to see who was publishing what, and settled at last on DAW Books as a likely starting point. Lacking confidence in my own virtually nonexistent writing credentials, I enlisted the aid of my brother-in-law Peter in New York to act as a sort of front person. Peter penned a letter on my behalf and sent it off with the manuscript. Two months went by and nothing was heard. What was the delay, I wondered? Had they even gotten the book? I had Peter write a second letter and then place a phone call. He was told in no uncertain terms to back off and be patient. Finally, some months later and after intermittent correspondence with Editor Donald Wolheim, Sword came back with a letter of rejection that nevertheless encouraged submission elsehwere -- specifically to Judy-Lynn del Rey, who had just come in as Science Fiction Editor at Ballantine Books. Oddly enough, I had chosen not to send Sword to Ballantine in the first place because Ballantine published Tolkien; and I thought if they already had Tolkien, what would they want with me?

I did as Don Wolheim suggested, this time sending the manuscript out under my own name. Again, I waited -- months. Finally in November of 1974 a letter arrived from Lester del Rey. Lester was about to be hired as Fantasy Editor at Ballantine and would accept the book if I was willing to do revision work, some of it extensive. He had some experience in the field, he advised, and proceeded to set forth his credentials. Would I be willing to work with him?

Was he kidding?

I climbed down off the ceiling and raced for the typewriter to reply. And the rest, as they say, is history.