Volume 5, Issue 6 – December, 2002
Margaret Weis: Dragon Team Player
It takes two to tango — and to create a revolution. Margaret Weis discovered that firsthand when she teamed with Tracy Hickman to create Dragonlance, the ground-breaking, bestselling universe of role playing games and game related fiction. Later Weis learned that two heads also can be better than one when it comes to creating military fiction with her husband, Don Perrin. Casting the net still further, she worked with Hickman and frequent Dragonlance artist Larry Elmore to create the Sovereign Stone game and novels.
But one is far from a lonely number for Weis, a former editor who published her first book (on Jesse James) years before Dragonlance. Her solo galactic fantasy Star of the Guardian series enjoyed great success. Mistress of Dragons, the first novel in Weis’s new Dragonvaald series (scheduled for release in spring 2003), promises to do even better. At Dragon*con 2002, Weis talked to Crescent Blues about her solo ventures and what it takes when writing takes two.
Crescent Blues: Much of your fiction writing has been done in collaboration with other writers. What do you find most satisfying about working with someone else?
Margaret Weis: Writing is a lonely process. Even in a collaboration, writing is still a lonely process. With a collaborator, you’ve always got somebody to bounce ideas back and forth with. The other person comes up with new ideas and interesting ideas that are things you wouldn’t have thought of. Each of my collaborations has been different, so that’s also interesting. Tracy [Hickman] and I work differently than my husband [Don Perrin] and I do. So that also makes it fun and interesting. It involves another person in the world and the storyline, and that’s something I enjoy.
From your remarks at the panel earlier today, I get the feeling that when you work with Tracy Hickman you tend to be more character driven, while he focuses more on the structural and conceptual aspects of the work. Is this the case?
Yes, that’s it exactly. When Tracy and I do a collaboration, we get together — he actually flies out to Wisconsin, and we spend three days working out the plot synopsis, which is the essential part of the story for us. We have to have the plot to know where we’re going.
We work out the scenes and some of the characters. Then I do the writing. It’s important for us, at least, to have one voice. I do the writing, and Tracy goes back to Utah and does all the background work.
What do you mean by background work?
Like how magic works in the world. What’s going on thematically. What changes are happening in the world. What certain characters might think and feel.
Then again, if I write us into a hole — because even the best plot synopsis will have holes in it. (We do that on purpose, because the story has to breathe and live and grow. If you’ve got a very rigid plot synopsis, then it doesn’t happen.) So, if I write us into a hole or I discover that something simply isn’t working, that the character’s motivations aren’t going to allow him or her to do this, then I call Tracy and we work it out.
How does that differ from working with your husband?
Don is military, a retired officer in the Canadian army. Don and I write military books together — military science fiction and military fantasy. Military people talk to each other differently than non-military people. Don is able to capture that in the dialogue. Don and I also do a plot synopsis. Then I will say, “You need to write this, this, this and this,” because “this” is all the military bits.
I start from the beginning, and Don writes all the military stuff. When I get to the point where I need one of Don’s sections, I just drop it in and overwrite it so it has one voice. But that voice tends to be different [from my work with Tracy’s], because Don and I have the military voice.
Is it harder or easier working with your spouse, versus someone not quite so close to you?
Don and I have a very good working relationship. We haven’t gotten into any fights over the books. Once you enter this world, it’s sort of like a real world. You just know when things are working right.
And again, because I do the majority of the writing, it’s not like a do a chapter, then he does a chapter, and we criticize each other. That can become very tense. Writing is so very personal, it looks like you’re attacking the other person when all you’re doing is attacking the writing. In fact, one exercise that I remember Tracy used to do. He would hold out his manuscript at arm’s length and say, “This is the book. This is me. This is the book. This is me. My editor is criticizing the book. He’s not criticizing me.” That’s one thing that you need in any collaboration. But the fact that I do the writing makes it a lot easier.
You’re famous for working closely with artists, especially in your game-related stories. Has your interpretation of your characters ever been changed by the way the artist depicted the character? Is there two-way input?
In Dragonlance, the artist had done the character concept sketches first, before we ever started writing the books. Basically, what I was doing was describing the characters the artist had drawn. That actually led me to come up with one of the series’ most famous characters: Raistlin.
I knew Raistlin was a mage. He had a twin brother who was really a good-looking guy, but Raistlin was kind of thin. He had wispy white hair, and he was known as “The Sly One.” Nobody really liked him or trusted him. And he had golden skin and hourglass eyes.
I said, why does he have golden skin and hourglass eyes when is brother is obviously normal and doesn’t have this? And [the editor at TSR] said, “Oh, it was because the artist thought it would look cool.”
I had to come up with a reason why Raistlin had this, which led me to think that maybe this had something to do with his magic, that he had to take a magical test, and maybe the magical test and the power of high sorcery had somehow done this to him. This led to the development of Raistlin’s character and the whole co-dependent relationship he had with his good-looking twin brother. So the fact that the artist had given Raistlin golden skin and hourglass eyes led me to understand and create this character that became a very real character to me, and very interesting to a lot of people. In fact, I’ve met several children named Raistlin, which is kind of interesting.
Hmmm, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see if they develop golden skin and hourglass eyes. Which brings up the whole issue of characters and how they grow. When you’re not given the characters for a project, which comes first for you — the hero or the villain?
In Dragonvaald, what I’m working on now, the heroine was actually the first character I developed, then the hero, then the character that didn’t even really start out to be a villain. And he’s going to end up being more of an antihero.
An antagonist.
Yes, but he came along later. Dragonvaald is a smaller work in that it is much more a story of interconnected people. It will be a story of the lives of four people and how they affect one another in a larger world situation, as opposed to Dragonlance, where you have twelve people going on a quest. Dragonvaald is something where I think you will be more personally involved with the people.
Which brings up a point about Dragonlance. It started with a massive cast of characters that kept growing over time. It must be hard to keep track of everybody.
That was really tough. For me, that was the flaw in the first series of novels. I know a lot of people really loved that first series of novels, but to me that was the flaw. There were so many characters that we really couldn’t spend a lot of time and develop them all as they needed to be developed, which is one reason why, one, we split the party in the second book, so that at least we had a little smaller group to deal with; then two, why Dragonlance Legends is, to me, the better series. In Dragonlance Legends we were able to concentrate on just developing three or four characters fully, which I think is a lot better.
Are there any characters that you wish you could’ve developed more in the series?
I think always. For me, at least, I really don’t like to go back and read what I have written, because I always want to start over and rewrite it completely. I would love to do that with Chronicles. I would love to go back and rewrite Chronicles from the beginning and put in everything that was taken out.
At that point in time, TSR didn’t think Dragonlance was going to sell, because nobody had ever heard of us as authors. Random House, the distributor, was telling us that it was not going to go anyplace, so they were going to publish just a few copies. They wanted us to make it really short, so they couldn’t’ charge very much for it. I’d say about a third of what we wrote was cut out.
I would like to go back and rewrite it, put back in what was taken out, rewrite it from the perspective of having become a better writer through the years, then to go back and correct some of the things. When I go back and read it now, I keep saying, “Oh my god, Raistlin’s hissing all the time.” I went back, I’d make Raistlin stop hissing.
You couldn’t edit yourself.
No — and I was supposed to be the editor on the project. Tracy and I were never supposed to have written the books. I was supposed to be the editor. When it became clear to us that the writer we had hired was not doing the job, Tracy and I said to each other, we are the people who know this story; we should be the ones to write the books.
We turned in five chapters that we wrote on a weekend, and our editor said, “You know, you’re right. This is exactly what we’re looking for.” But that meant I couldn’t be my own editor. Another editor had to edit me, and of course, we had our other jobs, so it was really something.
Editing yourself is the hardest job in the world.
Yes, exactly, and I don’t like to do it. I rely on my editors too much to do that.
Is that how you keep internal continuity as you progress through your series?
Usually the editor will help you keep internal continuity. I think it was Star of the Guardian — my editor at Bantam discovered that I had changed the heroine’s hair color, inadvertently, in the second book in the series. The heroine started out as a brunette, but by the time I got to her in the second book, she had shifted into a blonde. The editor had been taking notes on the descriptions of the characters and wrote that unless she bleached her hair…
And then you’d have to explain how or why she bleached her hair.
I told the editor it was OK. We could go back. The heroine was definitely a brunette. I don’t know why I decided to change her.
Definitely, your editor helps you keep track of things like that, because you get so involved in the story, you can’t think of all these things.
Do you have plans for computer versions of your role-playing games?
Not at the moment. Of course, Dragonlance is owned by Hasbro. So that would be up to Hasbro Interactive. They own all the licenses, so I don’t know what they’re going to do. We’ve talked to some people about doing a computer version of Sovereign Stone in several different ways. That’s still in the talking stage.
Do you have any rituals that you follow when you write?
I work every morning from a set time. I start work about 7:30 a.m. and end about 11-11:30 a.m. My schedule is so rigid. I’m a very schedule-organized person. I have to be scheduled.
The dogs actually know my schedule, and about 11 o’clock they know I’m getting ready to quit. We can go for a walk. In fact, when they hear the music at the end of The Today Show, my Labrador Retriever gets up, walks upstairs and sits down by the computer, because she knows that’s where I’m headed next.
That’s my schedule. I maintain it Christmas, New Years, no matter what the holiday, if I’m home.
But not at conventions.
Conventions are different. I don’t do writing at the conventions, although lots of time, if we’re flying, Don and I will use airplane time to think up plots or discuss whatever we’re doing.
Do all the conventions ever run together?
We’ve actually had to limit ourselves with respect to the number of conventions we were doing, because it does get to be so time-consuming. We could probably do a convention every weekend if we wanted to.
People don’t realize that no only do we lose time at the convention, I lose time the day before the convention, because I have to do the laundry and pack. Coming in the day after the convention, you’re tired.
So, where we used to do a lot of small conventions, now we’re pretty much limiting ourselves to just major conventions — especially with the Dragonlance product [the d20 version of the role-playing game] coming out, because that’s a whole other level of work. I’m the editor-in-charge of the Dragonlance project, so I’m writing in the morning and editing Dragonlance projects in the afternoon.
When you were growing up, did you know you were going to write fantasy?
Fantasy wasn’t even an option. I was born in 1948, so I grew up a child of the ‘Fifties, but I was always a storyteller, even before I could read. My kindergarten teacher would set me in front of the class, and I would tell stories to the children while they lay on their little blankets, and she would do paperwork. That and the fact that I loved to read were the reasons I became a writer.
I read [J.R.R.] Tolkien in the Sixties when that whole phenomenon swept across the country with the hippies and everything else. Of course, I loved it. We all did. But after Tolkien, there wasn’t much else out there. So I read Tolkien, and that was it. I didn’t read anything else. I went back to the classics. I’m a big fan of Dickens and Jane Austen, and that was pretty much what I read.
Then I saw Star Wars, and I just loved it. Here, to me, was fantasy in outer space — galactic fantasy. So I went looking for something like that to read, and there wasn’t anything out there. There was science fiction, but I didn’t like that. It was much too science-oriented.
My agent at the time told me, you should write what you like to read. I thought that was pretty neat. So I wrote a galactic fantasy which turned into Star of the Guardian. But it was ten years from when I started writing it to when it was actually published. That came after Dragonlance. By that time we’d hit the bestseller lists, and publishers were saying, “Oh, do you have anything? We’ll take anything.”
“Well, I’ve got this galactic thing that I’ve been working on.”
“Sure. Sure. We’d love to see it.”
I got out the manuscript, and it was horrible. Eight years had passed since I looked at it, and I hadn’t realized how bad it was. So, I said, “You can’t have it yet.” I had to rewrite it completely.
How hard was it moving from the world of Dragonlance to the worlds of Star of the Guardian and coming back out?
Because I’d been thinking about the world of Star of the Guardian for so long, it was really very easy to jump back into it. I couldn’t do it now. But at that time, it had still been in my mind. So it was easy to go back.
People ask me if I’m ever going to go back and do any more Star of the Guardians, but I was at a certain place in my life, and I can’t go back to that place in my life, so I don’t think I could bring the same feeling to it.
How do you think the classics have influenced the way you write?
[Charles] Dickens for characterization. I go to Dickens to study how he gave us people that have lived for so many years in our minds. We all know them. You just say “scrooge,” and the word conjures up the image of Scrooge. Even if you’ve never seen the movies. If you read Dickens, his descriptions and the way he used characters and how he wrote his characters — I study him.
Alexandre Dumas — The Three Musketeers. I loved the Musketeer books as a girl. Dumas for adventure and blending humor with tension.
Jane Austen — I think her women. Everyone says, “Oh, well, she’s a romance writer.” Austen’s women are so… They think and feel like women. I think that’s what she brought to us through the centuries — you can really empathize with her women, and they are strong in their societies. Even the heroines who are kind of weak have their own inner strength. The way they’re dealing with their society and the situations that they’re brought — I think that’s what fascinates us about Jane Austin. We really can feel and empathize with here heroines.
Especially ones like Emma who are trying to run everybody’s lives.
Yes. I love Lizzie. She’s my favorite. I named my daughter Elizabeth for Elizabeth Bennett.
You and Tracy came up through the gaming industry. Other people you’ve worked with like Douglas Niles and Michael Stackpole are now making names for themselves in fantasy and science fiction. Why do you think that role-playing games have been such a fertile developing ground for writers?
The main reason is when you’re involved in games you have to be able to create a good, solid world. That, to me, is what is important in fantasy. You have to have a world that is very real and believable and that operates on laws and principles, especially magic.
Magic has to have laws, because you cannot let it run rampant. You can’t let your mage be able to do everything. A game automatically puts limits on magic. Your mages have restrictions. Either they get very tired if they cast a spell, or there are other things that happen to them. I think it was [Aldous] Huxley who said, “Even wizards must suffer.” And that is one thing that a game environment does. A game environment provides a world. It provides maps. It provides cities, races and laws that you have to follow.
Anything you’d like to add?
Dragonlance has been optioned for a movie by Silver Creek Pictures. I can’t say anything more, but Wizards of the Coast will post more information as it becomes available.
Click here to learn more about Margaret Weis’s early days at TSR.
Jean Marie Ward
In addition to editing Crescent Blues, Jean Marie Ward writes for a number of Web-based and print magazines, including Science Fiction Weekly. She is the author of Illumina: the Art of Jean Pierre Targete (Paper Tiger) and several short stories, including “Most Dead Bodies in a Confined Space” in Strange Pleasures 2 (Prime Books). Her first novel, With Nine You Get Vanyr, written with Teri Smith, is scheduled to be released by Samhain Publishing in late 2006..