This interview was conducted under unusual circumstances. It
was in front of an audience and (as mentioned in the con report in
issue forty-three) also had welcome interjections from Jane Lindskold,
writer and Roger's companion. I have tried to capture the flavour of
what was a very enjoyable hour with Roger. An interview with Jane
will appear in a future issue of Phlogiston
.
When did you first realise you wanted to write?
Oh, I was about six years old. And I read stories and decided I
would have done different things with the characters. One day I
realised that "Hey, I could do this", so I tried and I've been doing it
ever since. I didn't start selling right away.
What characters did you think you could do better with?
Oh back then it was people like Doctor Dolittle, some of Dr
Seuss' characters. I read a lot of mythology as time went on and I
used to play games with that too.
When did you sell your first story?
The first time I got money for a story I was fifteen or sixteen years
old but I didn't sell another one until I was out of college. This was a
contest I happened to win
Let's talk about the one you sold when you got out of college
Well, I decided that as a teenager that I really didn't know enough
to describe character well and I was wasting my time. I'd learned as
much as I could about story telling techniques and it wasn't a matter
of technique any more. It was a matter of substance. As a result I said
I was going to wait until I was a lot older and had more experience. So
it was that after I got out of college I'd been away from SF for about
four years. I'd read SF steadily from when I was eleven until I started
college. When I started college I said, "I'm not going to read that
while I'm here, I'm going to learn poetry and other things of that
sort" in fact I wrote a lot of poetry then.
In the spring of sixty-two I sold my first story. I got twenty dollars
for it. The first thing I did was sit down and read ten paperback SF
and Fantasy novels, chosen at random. Then I picked up a copy of
every SF magazine being sold at the time. Then I made a list of the
magazine markets starting with the best paying one, working my way
down the list to the cheapest ones the cheapest one was
Amazing for a penny a word.
What I'd do was send my story out to the best paying magazine
and if they didn't want it, then I'd send it out the second best paying
and so on, until I'd gone through the entire list. If nobody wanted it
I'd throw it in a box and later on I'd look it over again to see if I could
learn anything from it.
So that went on for some time; I started selling fairly regularly.
That first year I sold seventeen stories, all short. I didn't get rich that
year.
I promised myself that I would not try anything too ambitious at
first, because I had so much to learn, that I would devote the first
couple of years to just writing short things because they are a lot
faster to write and I could learn more writing tricks from doing them.
So that's what I did. I wrote short stories for two years and then
during the second year I started stretching them longer and longer,
to novelette and novella length, and finally I decided "All right, I think
I can write a book".
Then I wrote the one that's called This Immortal
, my title was And Call me Conrad (which was what it was serialised under for
F&SF). That was my first novel and in the years that followed I
interspersed novels and short stories, fantasy and SF. I didn't want to
be typified too closely with any particular sort of writing. I hated the
thought of getting categorised and then that category would be the
only thing they'd buy. So I did vary things a lot, and that's why I think
they never bothered me, just let me write pretty much what I wanted.
Once I'd established a track record and they saw a Roger Zelazny
book would sell x copies
I had a full-time job the whole while. I was a civil servant. I did
that for seven years. I promised myself I'd keep the job until my
earnings from my writing equalled the money from the job, then I'd
quit my job and write full time. I reached that point and I sort of
chickened out. I worked another year.
A couple of years before that I'd set things up. I'd had a long talk
with Bob Silverberg, who was very influential on my early career.
He'd, out of the kindness of his heart, at a convention told me that he
thought I'd made several mistakes in the way I was disposing of my
stories. And I said, "I don't understand what you mean, but I'll be glad
to buy you a few drinks, if you'll tell me about it". So we adjourned to
the bar and sat there a couple of hours. He was drinking Bloody Marys
back then; I was drinking Black Russians. And he told me all sorts of
things which carried me over the next several years; it was a lot of
information for a couple of drinks. He told me that the first thing I
should do if I wanted to write full-time was to get a really good agent.
He said that after a while the business end of writing takes too much
of the writing time. Better to pay someone ten percent and find that
you're still more than ten percent ahead in the end.
Which is true. My present agent says that he always feels that a
good agent during the course of a year should earn back for his client
at least the ten percent he takes by way of commission, so the client's
really nothing out. And what he should ideally do is make him more
money than the ten percent.
So that's what I did; got an agent, quit the job. Wrote for a
number of years before I realised I was making a go of it. Then I
decided that it was silly. I was living in Baltimore because I was
working for a Government agency which had its headquarters there.
But I had a choice of living anywhere I wanted, all I needed was an
agent in New York. So after a period of time, I moved to Santa Fé, New
Mexico. Been out there for twenty years now. It's a kind of dry
country. Jane will tell you about the mud.
Jane: It's Brown. The Houses are Brown. The Landscape is Brown.
The trees are Brown a lot of the time It's Brown. But it has great
sunsets
You said that you sold your first story for twenty dollars, who
was it who took the first chance?
A lady named Cele Goldsmith. Oddly enough it was a strange
period of time in the history of SF. Because within three or four
months of each other she published my first story, Piers Anthony's
first story, Ursula K. Le Guin's first story, and Thomas M. Disch's first
story (all in 1962). We all just clicked at the same time and all of us
agree that she was a very perceptive lady. Even though Cele didn't
discover Harlan Ellison, he's always had a soft spot for her
So for a number of years I've lived in Santa Fé, but I don't know
that I will always live in Santa Fé, and the only thing I miss in Santa Fé
is water. I figure you should either have mountains or water, and
Santa Fé has mountains, very pretty mountains (<Jane>: Brown). I
live about eighteen miles from a ski basin, so we're up pretty high,
about 7000 feet
You sold the story for twenty dollars; just for the historical record
how much would twenty dollars buy then?
Well that would have been more the equivalent of selling it for
eighty or ninety dollars today. In fact, I sold a story almost exactly the
same length, which I wrote in a short period of time, for a hundred
dollars. I thought, "This is a quick idea I can dash off in an evening"
and it sold.
<!-- Generation of story text from PM publication page 4 -->
Partly they are buying the name, I might as well be honest about
it. They aren't just saying "Oh gee this is a wonderful story", they're
saying "Gee, this is a story by Bob Silverberg or Roger Zelazny. Welllll,
it's not his best story necessarily but it would be nice to have his
name on the magazine". There's a certain amount of that; I'd be lying
if I said there weren't
So why Science Fiction?
I wanted to write something. My first choice was poetry, but no-
body was making a living at the time writing poetry in the USA except
for Robert Frost and Carl Sandberg. I said the next best thing was
fiction, what kind of fiction? Well, I thought about it and I used to like
SF a lot. So I decided to try it and if that didn't work I'd try something
else.
I have had two books of poetry published, but everyone who told
me about it was right. I sold both of them about fifteen years ago and
neither one has earned out it's advance <chuckles> which wasn't
particularly large.
Poetry just doesn't sell in the States. It's a pity, but one of the
facts of life.
So how do you write now? What kind of mechanical process do
you use?
Jane uses a computer. I normally compose on a lap-held portable
typewriter and I have a lady who does part-time clerical work for me.
I give her the manuscript and have her run it through her computer
and get her to give me disks if the publisher wants disks or hard copy
if they want hard copy.
She's afraid I'm going to learn word processing and put her out
of a job. And I'm afraid I am. Jane and I share an office, I look over at
her periodically. We both put in well she works harder than I do
<chuckles> might as well be honest about it. She puts in a lot of time
and effort and she can write a book quite quickly and the quality
doesn't seem to suffer from it. Which has impressed me and I've
been thinking, I'd kind of like to pick up that speed. Another year or
two at most and I'll switch over.
How do you approach your writing? Do you write to some sort
of fixed schedule?
I try to write every day. I used to try to write four times a day,
minimum of three sentences each time. It doesn't sound like much
but it's kinda like the hare and the tortoise. If you try that several
times a day you're going to do more than three sentences, one of
them is going to catch on. You're going to say "Oh boy!" and then you
just write. You fill up the page and the next page But you have a
certain minimum so that at the end of the day, you can say "Hey I
wrote four times today, three sentences, a dozen sentences. Each
sentence is maybe twenty word long. That's 240 words which is a
page of copy, so at least I didn't goof off completely today. I got a
page for my efforts and tomorrow it might be easier because I've
moved as far as I have".
Do you Feel compelled to write?
Yeah. I do. Not just for the mercenary end of things although that
is a consideration no, there's something inside. When I've gone
for long stretches of time, like when I was sick a while back, I felt very
uncomfortable. I read a lot, but I can only read so much before I want
to start putting words down myself.
I met Jane, oh over half a dozen years ago I
never answer fan letters I answered one from her. We struck up a correspondence.
We became friends after a while and she was teaching at college in
Virginia. Jane had an opportunity to write a literary biography on me
for Twayne Books American Author series. She did not want to jeopardise our friendship you can't write a book about someone and
make everything sound really good without the book sounding really
phoney and sweet. So I said go ahead and she wrote this book I really
like; I'm very happy with it.
Have you ever experienced writer's block?
Not too much. I've slowed down. I can always write and that's the
thing with three sentences at a time, even if you're feeling sluggish
you can always get three sentences out.
I've never had one of those really bad ones like some writers I've
known. But there are times when you'll be writing along and you're
not exactly sure what you want to do next. What I do is just slow down
and think about it and it's usually not long before you are back on
track.
I've heard so many wonderful and so many horrible stories about
writer's block that it's always sort of amazed me that I've never felt
that bad.
Bob Silverberg, someone once asked him if he'd had writer's
block. He said, "Yes, I did. It was about ten years ago for about twenty
minutes on a Thursday". And I believe him!
Larry Janifer shared an office once with Bob and almost had a
nervous breakdown. They used to go into the office about 9:30 and
they had this little partition down the middle. Bob would get in every
morning, have a cup of coffee, sit down at his typewriter and start
going click, click, click, click. And Larry would be sitting there staring
at his typewriter while in the background was this click, click, click,
click. And Larry would be sitting there, listening and staring at his
typewriter. And sometimes Larry wouldn't write anything all morning.
Then about 12:30 there'd be a knock on the partition and Larry
would say "What?" and Bob would say "Let's go get some lunch, Larry".
And Larry would have to sit there and have lunch with Bob and then
go back and listen to him type all afternoon.
Men as Gods, and possibly poor ones at that, feature in at least
three of your works. Why are you drawn to this theme?
As I said earlier in this interview, I discovered mythology at a fairly
early age. When I started writing my first novel,
And Call me Conrad, they always say write about what you know And I said well if I get a
nice sort of combination SF and Fantasy with these resonances from
Greek Mythology it might be pretty good. It would also give me a
chance to start filling in my background on all those things I don't
know much about but should if I want to be an SF writer.
So I sat down and made a list of everything I felt I should know
more about. Astrophysics, Oceanography, Marine Biology, Genetics
Then when I'd finished the list I read one book in each of these areas.
When I'd finished I went back and read a second book until I'd read
ten books in each area. I thought that it wouldn't turn me into a
terrific, fantastic expert but I'd at least have enough material there to
know if I was saying something wrong. And I'd also know where to
turn to get the information I want to make it right.
While I was doing this, to keep the words and cheques flowing I
wrote books involving mythology. And once I started picking up
things involving astrophysics I'd write stories that played with those
sorts of things. So that's why I started out with mythology.
A number of reviewers would say things like, "Roger Zelazny's a
pretty good writer, but all he writes is these darned rehashes of old
myths. It would be nice to see what else he could do sometime".
Then after I'd finally learned all this stuff I'd spent several years
catching up on and started writing stories that involved science, I
started getting these reviews that said "Gee, Zelazny used to write
these wonderful stories involving mythology"
And I said to hell with it and decided to ignore reviewers.
In Isle of the Dead you created your own mythology.
Yeah, I was in a hurry there. I sort of thought it would be fun to
make up one of my own. I kinda liked that one. I came very close to
using that character again but I forbore. He may well appear again one
of these days.
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You work in both the SF and Fantasy fields, do you have a
preference?
No, not really. I like both so much that I consider it restful to
switch back and forth. You can get tired of writing SF, but you can get
tired of writing Fantasy as well.
So I just try to vary them. The one I'm writing now is set in the
22nd Century and is a non-cyberpunk world datanet story. Which is
very different from anything I've seen so far.
Did criticism ever play a part in your learning your craft?
Well, to the extent that I did attend graduate school. My under
graduate work was in Psychology. But I took a Master's degree in
English and Comparative Literature and that gave me criticism in
connection with literature.
What about criticism of your own work? Did that ever help you?
Not really. I got comments from critics that I really didn't like and
so I worked out ways of working in more of those things they really
didn't like in my next story.
What about criticism from editors and other writers?
That's different! These people are pros. They are not out to
destroy your aesthetic and refashion you in their own image. Editors
are just out to make as strong a book as they can. I've learnt some very
nice things from editors I've learnt some dumb things, too. But
John Douglas, is a prince. He's at AvoNova, he's a very fine editor I've
been with for years. In fact he's been Jane's editor on her last several
books.
Every now and then you just pick tricks up from editors. Even if
you have no connection with them, you just happen to meet them at
a convention and have a beer together and sometimes they'll tell you
a thing that comes in handy.
I think criticism from authors and editors is important if it's good.
And after a while you get to know which ones have some common
sense.
Reviewers and critics often miss the boat about what you are
doing, and that sets your teeth a little on edge.
Jane: I've read a lot of criticism of Roger's work. Most of it misses
the boat completely. I think one of the strongest one of the neatest
things about Roger's work is that he worked very hard early in his
career not to get pigeon-holed and there are a number of critics who
seem to have no delight whatsoever except to try and pigeon-hole
him! And then they get mad when he doesn't fit into a pigeon-hole
that they've designed or write this dynamic
article that touches on three or four books for their entire thesis. Roger has written, if you
count collaborations and poetry books, close on fifty books now. So
to come up with this entire critical theory from some four books is a
little like analysing your life based on the years between one and five.
So I think critics have more trouble with Roger than they have with a
lot of writers because he does not pigeon-hole easily.
You've written some very good short stories and some excellent
novels. Do you see a benefit in one length over the other?
My favourite form is the short story. From an aesthetics stand
point you really have to pare down to the bone. You can't write a
throw-away scene.
Whereas in a novel see in my first book I could have Conrad
walking along a street late at night trying to figure out what he's going
to do about some problem. And have him stop in a cafe and have him
listen to a singer for about a page and then walk on.
I don't like stories to be completely deterministic and something
like that helps to show that the story is partly a random process and
the fellow just happened to stop and have a drink and listen to some
songs and felt better.
I would maintain that provides a certain texture to the book. It's
giving some of the background to the setting and also deepens the
characterisation to show some of the things he likes.
In a novel you have more elbow room. You can get away with a
gratuitous scene so long as it's close enough to the rest of it so you
can say "Well, yeah, it doesn't advance the action at all but it does tell
you a little more about this person's life".
I prefer short stories for technical virtuosity, very compressed,
very economical. How to say everything in as brief a span as possible.
[Aside to Jane: I never asked you, which do you prefer, novels or
short stories?]
Jane: I feel pretty much the same way as Roger does. Only I don't
think of it that way. Some stories demand to be told at novel length,
you couldn't do them credit as a short story. And some stories are
short stories and if you padded them into a novel, they'd be very bad
novels but they make really cool short stories.
You've written some collaborations. What motivated you to get
into that area?
The first one was kind of a fluke and it happened to be Phillip K.
Dick. Who I thought was a very interesting writer, so I took the
publisher up on the offer. Phil had been blocked for a number of
years, but once I wrote a few chapters and sent them to him, he got
unblocked, he liked what I'd done and wanted to write a few chapters. And he did and I wrote a few more and we switched back and
forth until it was finished.
Fred Saberhagen is an old friend of mine. I first met him 1961 and
some years back we were walking through the Zoo. We stopped
outside the giraffe house and Fred looked at me and said "Do you
want to do a collaboration?" So we did Coils
.
Fred is a terrific fan of Edgar Allan Poe; every January he gives a
birthday party for Poe. So after a while he said let's do a book about
Poe and I said "Sure why not?" So I went off and read that of Poe I
hadn't read previously.
But Fred and I did it a different way. Fred's a very good outliner. I
can take an outline by Fred Saberhagen and run a chapter's worth of
outline through the typewriter very quickly. So I'd send that back to
him and he'd alter it, while I was working on the next section of
outline. And before long we had a book.
Now Robert Sheckley I'd always been very interested in his
brand of humour which is really off the wall and bizarre. It was our
agent who brought us together by suggesting he could get us a pretty
good contract to do three books together. So we talked it over and
said "Okay". Robert pointed out that he was not good at outlining, but
I'd learned so much from Fred that I said, "I'll run a bunch of ideas by
you, you find the ones you like best, grab the top one, I'll outline it,
you write it in quick draft, I'll rewrite it". And that's what we did.
So it's whatever feels appropriate when you collaborate with
someone else. And I've learned something from every collaboration
I've done.
The most recent one is that I've just finished the novel Alfred
Bester was working on when he died. I'm a great admirer of Alfred
Bester's and I thought "Well, I can be off writing something else for
more money, but I'll never have another opportunity to finish a book
by Alfred Bester".
It's called Pyschoshop, about a shop in Rome where you can
actually pawn parts of your psyche that you're unhappy with or want
to replace. It has a very unusual proprietor I couldn't resist that.
Bester had written ninety-two pages and that was it. There are
also about four pages missing from the ninety-two. What I did was
treat the missing pages as a black box experiment. Something went in
here, and something came out here, and I just had to figure out what
I needed to make it happen that way.
I picked up the story where Bester had stopped in mid-sentence,
same thing I did with Phil Dick. I picked up Phil's in mid-sentence and
I completed the sentence and went on writing. I did the same thing
with Bester. I hope that bodes well
<!-- Generation of story text from PM publication page 6 -->
[Interjection] Why did Bester end in mid-sentence
?
Bester was in pretty bad shape. He was pushing himself along just
to keep his mind off his pain and such. He was a strange man, he
didn't have any living relatives. He used to stop at this one bar every
night for a beer. And he owned a little farm in Bucks Country, Penn
sylvania and he had an apartment in Manhattan. Every night he'd stop
in at this bar and have a chat with the bartender. When Bester died
the bartender discovered he was Bester's heir. It seems the bartender
was the only person Bester talked to regularly.
It's sometimes a lonely business writing
You said that the whole first Amber series was planned out in
your head in rough. Were you surprised at how big the project
turned out?
Yes! I thought it was going to be one book, maybe a book and
sequel later on. I had no idea how much the story would embellish
itself and just keep growing longer. But I'd do other things of that
size, even bigger.
Was Doorways in the Sand fun to write?
Yes! It's one of my five personal favourites in all my work. Possibly
because it was the first humorous novel I was able to finish. I loved
that book. I was cackling away while I was typing.
Jane: He laughs at his own jokes.
If they're good ones especially if they're ones I haven't heard
before.
Jane did not understand at first. She'd hear this mumbling and
didn't know that I would sometimes rehearse dialogue kinda
sotto voce while I'm sitting at my typewriter.
Jane: That's a polite way of saying he talks to himself.
One of your most fascinating novels was
Roadmarks. It was a very large concept. Have you ever considered writing a sequel?
No. One of my main reasons for writing it was to set up this futuristic
writer's conference by a fellow who's a fan of the Marquis de Sade so that
when the Marquis left under duress he could take some of the manuscripts from the writer's workshop Think how it would feel if you were
really working hard on a story and you turned it in and you get a rejection
slip from the Marquis de Sade. There was something about that concept I
found real funny says a lot about me I guess.
You've said you prefer He Who Shapes
to the novel The Dream Master. Why?
And Call me Conrad had to be cut for serialisation in
F&SF and I was always disappointed because I didn't realise the hardcover
publisher kept some of the cuts. I didn't know for years that I was
missing some scenes, until it became a SF bookclub choice and the
editor there told me that after looking at the magazine version and
the book version that a bunch of stuff was missing and then asked me
if I could go over the text and produce a definitive version.
The opposite was that I'd written He Who Shapes
and I'd liked the story. Damon Knight was positive he could talk a fairly big name
publisher into doing He Who Shapes as possibly a hardcover novel,
which in those days were quite prestigious.
So to get it into a novel form frankly, I padded some of the
scenes. Aesthetically I don't like that, but at the time there was a lot of
money involved which I needed. So I did some scenes I'd thought of
which I wished I'd done initially, and there were a few others I wasn't
overjoyed with.
I showed it to Damon and he talked to the publisher who said
that they didn't like it, the initial description was good, but the novel
wasn't. Later on my agent sold it elsewhere
To produce a text I'm happy with there would have to be money
involved. It's not just a matter of being mercenary, it's a question of
time as well
I did get conned into a similar situation with
Damnation Alley, I expanded it and I like the shorter version better. I didn't think much
of the film, but I took their money.
[Questions from the floor]
What are your five favourite novels?
This Immortal, Lord of Light, Doorways in the Sand
, Eye of Cat, and my most recent one, A Night in Lonesome October
.
Do you have multiple projects going all the time?
Often yeah. Unless it's a big fancy book, then it's the focus of my
attention, not to say that if someone came along and offered me a
place in an anthology of stories based on an idea I liked, I wouldn't be
above writing a short story.
Thank you for your time.
Postscript. A few months after this interview, Roger Zelazny died. It
came as a shock to those at Conquest as he had kept his illness very quiet.
A fuller account of the circumstances of his death and two tributes to
him appeared in Phlogiston issue forty-three. A profile by Alan Robson
of Roger Zelazny and his works appeared in issue forty-one.
Bibliography
Awards: Balrog 1980, 1984; Hugo 1966, 1968, 1976,
1982, 1986, 1987; Locus 1984, 1986; Nebula 1965 (2), 1975;
Prix Apollo 1972; Seiun 1984 GoH World SF Con 1974
Books: This Immortal (1966) [And Call Me Conrad
] [Hugo], The Dream Master (1966), Four for Tomorrow
(1967) [A Rose for Ecclesiastes], Lord of Light
(1967) [Hugo], Nebula Award Stories 3 (1968) [Edited],
Isle of the Dead (1969) [Prix Apollo], Creatures of Light and Dark
ness (1969), Damnation Alley (1969),
Nine Princes in Amber (1970), The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His
Mouth (1971), Jack of Shadows (1971),
The Guns of Avalon (1972), To Die in Italbar
(1973), Today We Choose Faces (1973), Poems
(1974) [C/poetry], Sign of the Unicorn (1975),
The Hand of Oberon (1976), Bridge of Ashes
(1976), Doorways in the Sand (1976), My Name is Legion
(1976), Deus Irae (1976) [With Philip K. Dick
], The Courts of Chaos (1978), The Illustrated Roger Zelazny
(1978), The Bells of Shoredan (1979), Roadmarks
(1979), Changeling (1980), For A Breath I Tarry
(1980), When Pussywillows Last in the Catyard Bloomed
(1980) [C/poetry], Coils (1980) [
With Fred Saberhagen], Madwand (1981),
The Changing Land (1981), A Rhapsody in Amber
(1981), To Spin is Miracle Cat (1981) [C/poetry],
Dilvish the Damned (1982), Eye of Cat (1982),
Unicorn Variations (1983) [Balrog; Locus], Trumps of Doom
(1985), Blood of Amber (1986), Sign of Chaos
(1987), A Dark Traveling (1987), Roger Zelazny's
Visual Guide to Castle Amber (1988) [Nonfiction with Neil
Randall], Knight of Shadows (1989),
Frost and Fire (1989), He Who Shapes (1989) [
Tor Double #12], Home is the Hangman (1990) [
Tor Double #21], The Graveyard Heart (1990) [
Tor Double #24], The Black Throne (1990) [
With Fred Saberhagen], The Mask of Loki
(1990) [With Thomas T. Thomas], Prince of Chaos
(1991), Gone to Earth (1991) [Author's Choice Monthly #27
], Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming (1991) [
With Robert Sheckley], Here Be There Dragons
(1992), Way Up High (1992), Flare (1992) [
With Thomas T. Thomas], A Night in the Lonesome October
(1993), If at Faust You Don't Succeed (1993) [
With Robert Sheckley], Wilderness (1994) [
Non-Genre Fiction with Gerald Hausman], A Farce to Be Reckoned With
(1995) [With Robert Sheckley], Warriors of Blood and Dreams
(1995) [Edited], Wheel of Fortune (1995) [
Edited]A