Raymond E. Feist is a Southern Californian by birth and a resident of San Diego by choice. After a hiatus from higher education in the 1960’s, he returned to school an received a B.A. in Communication Arts from Muir College at the University of California, San Diego. Divorced, he is the proud father of two teenagers, Jessica and James. Feist’s hobbies include wine, travel, history and biography, professional football of all nations - San Diego Chargers, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Osprey, Sidney Swans, and the All Black. He also enjoys the company of good friends and beautiful women, playing blackjack and poker, and watching too much TV.
Are you influenced by specific writers or does your inspiration veer more toward a specific type of writing?
More from a type. Historical novelists like Thomas Costain, Mary Renault, Harold Lamb, Samuel Shellenbarger, and Rosemary Sutcliff were always favourites of mine. And the “Boys Adventure” and Pulp writers, Anthony Hope, Rafael Sabatini, Howard Pyle, A. Merrit, R. E. Howard, E. R. Boroughs, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Sir Walter Scott. And pretty much any great writing encountered along the way, Shakespeare, of course, Twain, also of course, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Harper Lee, and a list that grows near endless as I contemplate it. I think all good writing a young writer is exposed to is instructive. It may not be how you’d do it, but it teaches you how someone else got there and in good fashion.
Was Fantasy a genre that you naturally gravitated towards or was the choice to write genre fiction a more conscious decision?
Both. It was as close to “Boys Adventure” fiction I could get in the modern publishing reality. Pirates, jungle princesses, lost cities, and all the rest of it was just not exotic by the time I started writing. Rather they were quaint, even though I still find things to marvel about when I revisit some of my favourite books from childhood. So, I wrote high adventure with magic and the supernatural and off I went!
Magic is an integral part in many of the books you have written. Have your notions of magic and its functional mechanics changed much since you first started writing fantasy?
Not really. It’s not real, so it has to only be one thing, internally self-consistent. If the magician can blow up a city in chapter two, he damn well better not have a problem opening a door in chapter six, unless the door is also magic and put there by a better magician, etc. Sometimes it’s a matter of “gut feelings” and the readers are quick to let me know if they disagree with my assessment.
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Lynne Jamneck - Lynne Jamneck lives in Auckland, New Zealand. Short listed for the Sir Julius Vogel and Lambda Awards, she has published short fiction in ...
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