Get Busy Writing or Get Busy Dying

I have never read David Gemmell - his oeuvre somehow passed me by. But I have been inspired to do so by a recent article in the Telegraph which caught my eye. It is sadly paywalled, but here are the main bits:

David Gemmell is our greatest fantasy author since Tolkien – but is being written out of history

In 1976, journalist David Gemmell received the devastating news that, at age 27, he might be dying of cancer. “I felt ill. A lot of weight was gone. I was passing blood,” Gemmell would recall. “It’s not a nice thought, cancer of the kidneys.” 

There was a two-week wait until the tests came back. It was the longest fortnight of Gemmell’s life, during which he did not know whether he would live or die. But rather than brood, he sat at his typewriter and wrote what was to become one of the most important British fantasy novels of the Eighties, the gritty blockbuster eventually published as Legend. 

Gemmell did not, as it turned out, have cancer. Yet those two weeks of sheer, existential terror would be the furnace in which was forged one of the most distinctive fantasy voices of his generation. More than distinctive: his grim, cynical take on the JRR Tolkien school of heroic storytelling arguably influenced subsequent generations of authors, not least Game of Thrones’s George RR Martin, whose unflinching style echoed Gemmell’s stark world-view. 

But today, at a time when fantasy is dominated by the gooey milieu of “romantasy”, there is a case to be made that Gemmell – whose worth is now being celebrated with a new collection – is not nearly as well known as he deserves and has even been written out of history. He was absent from Time’s 2020 countdown to the 100 Best Fantasy Novels of All Time and was also missing from a similar list published by Penguin Random House. Shockingly, a David Gemmell forum on Reddit clocks up just 1,000 weekly visits, while that for the Dungeon Crawler Carl series – the hot new saga in fantasy – has 275,000. Gemmell is the incredible shrinking giant of 20th-century fantasy. 

 

That’s despite an origin story almost every bit as striking as Tolkien’s admission that the opening lines of The Hobbit came to him in a delirium of boredom whilst he was marking exam papers. In the shadow of his cancer scare, Gemmell had written the first draft of Legend in two weeks – but left the ending open-ended. The novel was a metaphor for his illness, with the flinty hero Druss (modelled on his stepfather Bill Woodford) and sidekick Rek (an insert for the author) defending the crumbling fortress of Dros Delnoch against invading hordes of the Nadir – who symbolised the cancer he believed was ravaging his body. 

“It was so terrifying at that period – the only thing I could do to take my mind off the fear of dying was to write. I created a decaying fortress under siege from a terrible enemy,” he later said. “The idea was I would write in the two weeks I was waiting for the tests. If I had cancer, the fortress would fall.”

...

He was in his way, as significant a figure as Tolkien, says fantasy author James Worrad... “Someone once called him ‘English fantasy’s second wind’ and there’s some truth to that,” he tells me. “If you stand back far enough away it’s Tolkien and Gemmell you can make out, jutting up from the genre’s landscape like two mountains.”

I am sure that Gemmell's original draft of Legend was far from perfect, full of holes and inconsistencies, and read badly. But still - the idea of just sitting down and writing out a whole novel in two weeks is both an intimidating and inspiring prospect. Anybody can write a novel. You just need to sit down and write a novel. So why don't people do it more? Why haven't I done it? Why haven't you?

These thoughts chime with others inspired by an interview with Steve Jackson, of UK Games Workshop/Fighting Fantasy fame, which I recently read. In it, he describes how the other Steve Jackson, the American Stave Jackson associated with GURPS and The Fantasy Trip and others, came to London and ended up writing a fighting fantasy book:

Steve had flown over to London from Texas to talk to Ian and I about Games Workshop distributing his games in Europe. We’d mentioned Fighting Fantasy and how well it was doing. We also mentioned that competing publishers were beginning to publish their own gamebooks and, in response to this, Puffin wanted to publish a new gamebook every month. There was no way Ian and I could write an adventure a month, so we’d decided to sign up other authors to create new FF books. Anyway, the business side of things was sorted quite quickly. So we then asked Steve if he’d like us to take him to Stonehenge, or the Tower of London – all the places Americans want to see in the UK. But no. He didn’t want to go anywhere. He just asked for a desk and a typewriter. And he spent the next 3 days writing a Fighting Fantasy book!

That book apparently became Scorpion Swamp, which came out not long after. I am not sure whether he wrote the whole thing in three days, of course. But still - he did write it. He just sat down and did it. Anybody, in other words, can write a gamebook. You just need to sit down and write a gamebook.

Let me repeat, for the avoidance of doubt: anybody can write anything they like. You just need to write it. So what are you waiting for? What am I waiting for? What's stopping me? What's stopping you?