“Whenever
you're writing a book or creating a movie or a game, your first task is to get
the reader/audience/player to suspend disbelief, to buy into the logic and
boundaries of your world, even though those boundaries might include things
like dragons and magic. To do that, you need long threads - of history and
culture.” – R.A. Salvatore
Robert A. Salvatore, born on this
date in 1959, is an American author best known for The DemonWars Saga,
his Forgotten Realms novels, and Star Wars: The New Jedi Order, a
series of novels set in the Star Wars expanded universe. He has sold more than 15 million copies of
the books in the United States alone, and 22 of his titles now have
been New York Times best-sellers.
On top of that, he has been highly successful writing the backstories
and text for a number of science fiction-type video games.
The youngest of a family of seven,
he credited his high school English teacher with being instrumental in his
development as a writer. During his time at Fitchburg State College (Virginia),
he became interested in fantasy after reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of
the Rings, given to him as a Christmas gift. He quickly changed his major from Computer
Science to Journalism/Media and took up writing fantasy type stories. Right out of college and before becoming a
full-time writer in the early 1980s, he worked as a bouncer, and attributes his
fierce and vividly described battle scenes to that experience (always write
what you know, right?).
“I never intended to be a professional
writer,” he said. “As the story (his
first novel Echoes of the Fourth Magic)
developed, the one thing I had in my hopes was that this would be something
tangible to separate me from the nameless, numbered masses. I loved the world of
imagination.”
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