or a girl growing up in Missouri in the 1950s, fantasy was not an option. But nothing can stop a born storyteller. Margaret Weis, co-creator of the Dragonlance fantasy universe, began honing her craft in kindergarten, entertaining her classmates while the teacher took care of paperwork.
In the '60s, the works of J.R.R. Tolkien entranced her, but they seemed unique among the bestsellers of the day—not the sort of thing a sensible woman could make a career of. So the storyteller became a proofreader and editor, ultimately rising to the post of editorial director at an Independence, Mo., publishing house. Along the way, Weis wrote a biography of American myths Frank and Jesse James.
But Weis didn't start making her own legends until 1983, when she moved to Wisconsin to take a job at TSR Games. There she met Tracy Hickman and forged the creative partnership that would revolutionize role-playing games and game-related fiction. Since then, Weis and Hickman's Dragonlance, Rose of the Prophet and Sovereign Stone novels have sold tens of millions of copies. And if that weren't fantastic enough, Tor Books recently asked Weis to create an exclusive new series of books about (what else?) dragons.
Do you think your experience as an editor made it easier to adapt your voice to writing with a partner?
Weis: Certainly. When I started out at TSR in 1983, one reason they hired me was that I was a writer and an editor. At that point in time, the editors in the book department were mainly rewriters, because TSR was publishing books so fast that the authors didn't have time to spend a year on a book. The authors would be lucky if they could spend a month on the book, which meant the author wrote the story down, and we rewrote it to get it out.
Then we were working on those Endless Quest books, which were very difficult to write. In Endless Quest books, you start the plot, and the character has to make choices. Then you have to write one choice over here, one choice over there. The author might get one or two choices out, and we'd discover when we did the plot tree that we had to add a bunch more.
Another thing we had to do was rewrite and keep the rewrite in the author's voice, not our own. Roger Moore [the editor of Dragon Magazine] and I once wrote a book [Riddle of the Griffin] in 48 hours. Neither of us wanted our name on it, so it's under the pseudonym of Susan Lawson.
Sounds like a heck of a way to spend a weekend.
Weis: There was a hole in the schedule, and something happened. I don't know what happened, but we didn't get the book in time, so the editor-in-chief said, "We've got to have this book, and you've got 48 hours." So Roger took half of it, and I took half of it, and we merged.
You actually typed 250 pages in two days?
Weis: Yeah. Fortunately, it wasn't that long. It was one of the Endless Quest books, so it was shorter than that. But yeah, basically, we divided it up. We sat down and came up with the plot, the choices, where the tree went. Roger took one side, I took the other side, and we merged it together.
I cannot imagine physically typing that many pages in two days. I thought you might have dictated it, and someone else transcribed it.
Weis: It was very frantic, but everything tended to be frantic in those days.
When you first started working with Tracy Hickman on Dragonlance, did you have any idea that it was going to turn into this enormous creation?
Weis: No, we knew we had something really, really good, and we were very proud of it. But at the time we were working on Dragonlance, TSR was going through all sorts of financial difficulties, which it seems to have done periodically all through its lifetime. This was one of those times.
There were actually two mass firings while we were at TSR. At one point, we didn't know whether we would have jobs the next day or not. At that point we thought, if we're going to go out, we're going to go out with something really, really good. And maybe if we can come up with something really good, like Dragonlance, we can actually help the company survive financially. We wanted to get Dragonlance out, because we knew it was good, and it would help TSR continue with all our friends. It was very much a labor of love.
When you talk about your friends at TSR, it almost sounds like you're talking about family.
Weis: Oh, they were, very much so, because at that time, there were very few of us in TSR actually from the area. I moved to Wisconsin from Missouri. Tracy moved there from Omaha, Neb. [Artist] Larry Elmore had come from Kentucky. So when we moved into the community, really, all we had was the camaraderie of everybody working at TSR. All of us became very close. Working on shared projects also establishes a closeness, so it really was almost like a family.
Speaking of Larry Elmore, I understand you and Tracy are helping him realize one of his fantasy worlds.
Weis: Yes, The Sovereign Stone.
What prompted your involvement in that project?
Weis: Larry sitting down and telling the story over dinner one night. Larry had been developing the world for The Sovereign Stone for many years and had put it on the shelf. Larry, of course, is not a writer, but he had painted some of the characters. Then one of his friends—Ken Whitman—said, "Why don't you tell the story to Margaret and Tracy to see if they'd be interested in writing it?"
Larry said, "Oh, they're got their own projects."
But Ken said, "C'mon."
At that point we were looking for a new project, something new to write. Larry flew up to Wisconsin, we went out to dinner, and Larry told me the story. I was just enthralled. This was such a neat world, and such a neat story, and of course, since he had it for so many years, Larry had thought about it for a long time. So I talked to Tracy, and we thought, yeah, this would be really good. It was great to work with Larry, of course.
So you've got a three-way collaboration going.
Weis: Kind of, except Larry, not being a storyteller, says, "I'll tell you my ideas, and you guys take it and go with it." Like he says, he's not going to tell us how to write, and we don't tell him how to paint.
I can't help but notice the similarity between "Sovereign Stone" and "Sovereign Press," the company you and [husband] Don [Perrin] own. Was this intentional?
Weis: Yes, we developed Sovereign Press in order to develop the Sovereign Stone role-playing game.
But the company does more than Sovereign Stone.
Weis: Yes, we have the license to do the Dragonlance d20 role-playing game, which we're very excited about. That will be very, very neat.
Will you be working with your regular Dragonlance team for the game's d20 version?
Weis: We hope so. We have some new people. Jamie Chambers and Christopher Coyle are employees who are working on it, but we're getting a lot of input from Dragonlance authors and some of the old Dragonlance team members. In fact, one of the reasons we got the license was because Wizards of the Coast was so impressed with what we had done with the Sovereign Stone role-playing game.
Did you know when you killed off everyone in the Dragonlance universe a few years ago that you would be forced to resurrect them?
Weis: Like Tracy says, we've probably written the last Dragonlance book three times now. When we wrote Dragons of a Summer Flame, everybody figured that was an ending point for Dragonlance. We knew we were going to take the world into a different age, which eventually became the Fifth Age, the Age of Mortals.
But at that point in time, we were doing other things. TSR was doing other things. TSR ended up taking the world into a different direction than we would have. Whether it was good or bad, it was simply different. But TSR not only took the world in a different direction, they also introduced a new gaming system to the world for various reasons.
This ended up splitting Dragonlance fandom. There were those who really liked the Fifth Age. There were those who really liked the Fourth Age, those who liked the new game system, those who liked the old game system. It sort of split everything right down the middle, which to all intents and purposes fractured Dragonlance.
The game wasn't selling very well. The novel sales were dropping. The whole thing was pretty contentious. Then again, TSR was going through more financial difficulties, which eventually ended up with Peter Adkison of Wizards of the Coast buying TSR.
Peter, who is a big gaming fan, had seen what was going on with Dragonlance. After he bought the company, he asked Tracy and I to come in for a meeting with all the Dragonlance group. His mandate was: "I really would like you and Tracy to find some way to bring both sides together again."
So Tracy and I worked with the Dragonlance team. It was never our objective to destroy the Fifth Age or act like it didn't happen, but bring everybody together and to move Dragonlance forward into an age that would incorporate the best of all possible worlds. That was our mandate with War of Souls and why we came back. And we had a great time.
Can you explain the differences between the earlier and later gaming systems used for Dragonlance?
Weis: No. I play the games, but somebody always has to tell me what dice to roll. I hardly understand anything about the differences in the systems. All I know is Saga [the system for the Fifth Age] used cards. The other system used dice. I do know the d20 system has revolutionized gaming and brought a lot of the interest back into the gaming industry that had been missing for a long time.
You're also working on another project, Dragonvaald.
Weis: At Tor. I am so excited about that. This is something I'm doing on my own. This will be my first fantasy written just by Margaret Weis. I did The Star of the Guardian, but that was more of what I call galactic fantasy—not necessarily science fiction, but fantasy in outer space.
But Dragonvaald is for Tor, and they are the top of the fantasy publishing world. They are just so cool, and they actually came to us and asked me if I would develop a series for them. I was so flattered and so thrilled.
Dragonvaald is about a world that is ruled by dragons, but the humans don't know it. The humans know there are dragons in this world, but they don't know that the dragons really are the rulers, the gods of this world.
It is a kind of atypical fantasy world in that there are just humans. No elves, no dwarves—at least not yet. And I don't know if there ever will be. At this point, there are just humans. The first book is called Mistress of Dragons. It's very exciting. I'm having a lot of fun with it. I can't even tell you any more about it without giving away what's going on. Steve Youll is doing the cover art.
Didn't you write Steve Youll into one of your books, and didn't he include you in a cover painting?
Weis: We're really lucky in that I got to know a lot of the artists, just from my days at TSR—Larry and Keith Parkinson, for example. We got to meet Steve and his wife Jamie, who's the art director for Bantam. They're really neat people, and we became friends. So Steve asked me to write a blurb for his art book [Paradox]. I am really excited that he is doing the covers for the Dragonvaald books.
The family thing again.
Weis: It is. It really is. It makes a difference. Steve will call me up, and we'll talk about the characters, or I'll send him little bits of the book to read. I like working closely with artists. I think that's very important in fantasy and science fiction—the visual aspect of the worlds and the characters. We kind of got spoiled in the old days, being able to work with Larry very closely, and Keith and all of them. And I think that's carried over to our current projects.
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