Wyrm’s Turn: R. A. Salvatore Interview

One of the greatest things about Gen Con is the chance to meet your idols. One of the very coolest things about Gen Con is running into them at random and getting that moment to really connect on a personal level. I was wandering the booths and aisles of GenCon 2010’s massive exhibition hall chatting with artists, writers and other notables when someone pointed me in the direction of Shelly Mazzanoble, Wizards of the Coast “Player-In-Chief.” I approached her with my normal fanboy butterflies, and found her to be instantly likeable and personable. Perfect for the front-woman job that she does at Wizards. While working up the guts to ask her for an interview, I noticed something from the corner of my eye. We were leaning on a table stacked with R. A. Salvatore books, and a line was trickling past me leading directly to the man himself!

Politely at a natural break in the conversation, I asked Shelly if she would mind me talking to Mr. Salvatore. With an answer in the affirmative, I sidled up to the currently empty space in front of him and sheepishly asked for an interview after he was done. “Sure,” he said in his characteristic Massachusetts accent. A short time later, line dissipated and lunch on the horizon, I stole approximately 15 minutes from Mr. Salvatore’s busy schedule. He asked me to call him Bob. I’d only had a few minutes to prep my questions, and my mind was swimming with the possibilities of that first perfect lead-in question.

Just then a random con-goer stepped up to him and said, “You’re the guy that killed Chewbacca!” There was my lead-in! I fumbled with the recorder and kept the flow of the conversation going. Bob said he hadn’t known he was going to do it, until after he signed the contract. Here was the man who’d created Drizzt Do’Urden, a D&D icon. I’m talking to the guy who introduced the world to dark elf culture, and had written countless New York Time’s Bestsellers. Now I discover that he was the one responsible for the death of Han Solo’s friend and co-pilot. I was interviewing an intergalactic assassin, and I didn’t even know it.

 
Stygian Jim: Oh wow, so wow you’re the guy that killed Chewbacca? I just heard about this the other day, I’ve only recently been getting into Star Wars books and someone was recommending that book to me.

R. A. Salvatore: Yup, that was me.

SJ: That’s a huge surprise, like many of your fans I’m more familiar with your work for the Dungeons & Dragons line, Forgotten Realms. What I really want to know though is how did you get into fantasy writing?

RS: I was a math major in college. My freshman year, Christmas, my sister gave me a copy of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. This was 1977 and I wasn’t a reader. I had been a reader when I was a kid, but school beat the reading out of me with some really irrelevant things to read. So I wanted money, but she gave me four books in a little white slipcase. It was the Ballantine edition. Two months later we had the blizzard of ’78 and school shut down for a week. I’m trapped in my mother’s house at 19 years old, but I wasn’t. I went to Middle Earth, over and over again, and fell in love with it. I went back to school and changed my major to communications so all my electives could become Lit courses. Then I read every fantasy book I could find, and at that time there weren’t many. Terry Brooks, Stephen Donaldson, Michael Moorcook, Fritz Lieber and Anne McCaffery, and that’s it. I ran out, so I wrote my own.

SJ: Are you one of the longest running D&D writers?

RS: Margret (Weis) and Tracy (Hickman). Most of the Dragonlance writers started a couple of years before I came in. Because Dragonlance was 85 and Forgotten Realms was 87-88. So there are others.

SJ: So one of the most popular characters in D&D is Drizzt Do’Urdern. How did you come up with him?

RS: Off the top of my head. I thought the Forgotten Realms were the Moonshea Isles, from Doug Niles, Darkwalker on Moonshae. It was the only printed thing I had for the Forgotten Realms. So I thought the Moonshae Isles were the whole Forgotten Realms and they wanted the book set there. So I used one of his characters to introduce my hero, Wolfgar. Then I got a phone call and they said, “We don’t want you to put it there.” I’m like, “Where do you want me to put it, the water?” So they said no, no, no, and they sent me a map.

So next thing I’m at work, I was a financial analyst, and I get a call from my editor Mary Kirchoff. She said, “Okay I’ve got to go to a marketing meeting to sell your book to the sales force, but you can’t use Daryth, you’re 3000 miles away.” I’m like, “I don’t want to use Daryth.” Because the sample chapter had Daryth. She says “I need a sidekick for Wolfgar.” I say, “Okay I’m working right now, I’ll skip my lunch and call you back then.” She says, “You don’t understand I’m running late for a marketing meeting and you need a sidekick for Wolfgar.” So I thought about it for two seconds, “We’ll use a black elf.” They were called black elves in those days.

There’s a long pause, she says, “You mean a drow?” I said, “Yeah, a drow ranger, no one’s done that before.” Long pause, “There’s probably a reason no one’s done that Bob.” I’m like, “No that’ll be cool a drow ranger, that’ll work.” She thinks about it for a minute and says, “Since he’s a sidekick we’ll let you get away with it. What’s his name?” So off the top of my head I said, “Drizzt Do’Urden of Daermon Na’Shezbaeron of the ninth house of Menzobarenzen.” She said, “What?” I said, “I don’t know.” She said, “Can you spell that?” I said, “Not a chance.” And I have no idea where the name came from, I didn’t know what a Daermon Na’Shezbaeron was. I didn’t know what Menzoberanzon was, or why it had houses. That’s how it happened. That’s true.

SJ: So you created almost all of drow elf society off the top of your head?

RS: Well it was three books later that they asked me to go back and tell where Drizzt came from, that I created Menzobarenzan. The inspiration for creating Menzobarenzen was Mario Puzo’s the Godfather.

SJ: A great book.

RS: An, amazing book and a great movie.

SJ: It’s inspired several of my modern and fantasy games.

RS: As an Italian kid from the northeast, worked for me.

SJ: Where are you from?

RS: Massachusetts. Central Mass, you can’t tell?

SJ: I have a buddy from Dracut. I don’t even hear the accent anymore, and I start to pick it up and I’ve got to stop myself.

RS: I know it well I went to school with a bunch of kids from Dracut, Chalmsford and that whole area.

SJ: Were you ever a gamer?

RS: All my life. I really got into it in college. Around 1979 and 80 I started playing D&D. I had the board games, War & Peace, Risk, Third Reich. I had all of those. Dungeons and Dragons just blew me away when I started playing around 1980. Then I got into computer games. The Orcs Vs. Humans, Warcraft, and Command and Conquer, Might and Magic. Then of course Everquest. I played a little bit of Ultima Online, but when EverQuest came around and they had that great first person view, and you could really get into the character. EverQuest, I started playing it and I said I could write 100 books here. Now I’m developing video games with 38 Studios. So there you go.

SJ: I saw that, it’s pretty exciting. You’re developing and writing?

RS: I wrote the world and the story. Then we got Todd McFarlane doing the art. Kurt Schilling is running the company. We got BHG to do the RPG game and then we’ve got Ken Raulston and Mark Nelson who did Morrowind and Oblivion to be our lead designers down there. We showed them the world, they picked a place in this world and a time and they wrote this great story. We approved it, and now their making this amazing RPG.

SJ: Have you had any strange con encounters?

RS: Always, every day, every five minutes. It’s why I come. I just thought of one, a guy came by me as he came in a dark elf costume with two scimitars. I said, “I know him.” He said, “Thank you.” I just got killed at Killer Breakfast, I got killed 1000 times after I left. That’s not fair. Tracy Hickman will pay next year. This is like my twelfth Gen Con, and I just love it. Also, last night my wife and I come back from dinner and stop ped down at the bar for a drink and then Robin from The Guild comes in. I’m like, “Hey Robin come sit down!” And then Jeff comes in, and Sandeep comes in, and before you know it we’ve got like 100 people there having the best time. I’m so freaking hung over today, and I’ve got a seminar in an hour.

SJ: Oh man, I love the Guild. My dad introduced me to it because he’s got a huge crush on Felicia Day, he has since she was on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

RS: Felicia’s a sweetheart. She wrote me the best review for Homeland online, a wonderful review. I love Felicia, she’s wonderful. Have you seen Doctor Horrible?

SJ: Yes! My dad kept pushing us and pushing us until we checked it out.

RS: She’s brilliant! The people from The Guild are some of the coolest, most down to earth, talented people you’ll ever meet. Love ‘em.

SJ: I wanted to ask you, you’ve inspired a whole subset of gamers’ to play Drizzt clones, including Vin Diesel. I don’t know if you were aware of that?

RS: I ruined the drow as the coolest monster in D&D, and I am eternally sorry to every DM out there, including myself. I didn’t mean for that to happen, but yes I’ve ruined the drow.

SJ: I think you’ve made them the best character race for the player looking to play a different kind of hero.

RS: I’ll take that. It sounds nicer, but I feel like I’ve ruined the drow as the coolest monstrous race in the game.

SJ: Do you have any advice for prospective fantasy writers.

RS: Yeah, if you can quit, quit! (Laughs) Let me explain. If you can’t quit, and you’ve got stories clawing at the inside of your skin trying to get out. And you’re not happy unless you’re writing, you’ll never be happy unless your writing. Then you’re a writer. If you can quit, then you’re not a writer. Because if you don’t love the writing, the business will destroy you. Then on a more practical level, when you write something and you get done writing it, read it outloud to yourself. Listen to it. Then you’ll pick up sentence structure, boring sentence structure. Then you’ll pick up verbal repetitiveness. Then you’ll pick up typos. Read it out loud.

 
Thanks so much to Mr. Salvatore for taking the time to talk with me. I highly recommend to any of you Geek-Life readers to go out there and pick up any of R. A. Salvatore’s great body of work. Just recently he published, Gauntlgrym, another great addition to his many Forgotten Realms novels.