Introduction

Drawing Out the Dragons

JAMES A. OWEN

 

 

 

When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

—ERASMUS

 

 

That quote by Desiderus Erasmus is usually mentioned, wryly, by someone who doesn’t share Erasmus’ point of view about someone who does. I’m so far in the latter category I can’t even see the other side. I am utterly addicted to print, and am physically incapable of passing a newsstand, bookstore, or secondhand shop without giving the books on display at least a cursory glance. More often than not (which means practically every single time) I make some kind of a purchase, and for a moment that new book might as well have been under a Christmas tree for all the love I foster on it.

To a lot of people, it might seem as if my priorities are a bit skewed—but I’m really just engaging in something as old as humanity itself: I’m searching for connections to everything and everyone around me. And buying books is the best way I know to do that because books, and more precisely stories, are as important and vital and essential as food and clothes—and I’m not entirely convinced about the clothes.

Stories are what bind us together as families, and communities, and cultures. Stories are what connect us to our past, anchor us in our present, and lay the groundwork for the future. Stories are how we communicate understanding to one another both literally and through metaphor. And as one essayist in this collection noted, stories are important because none of them are new. All stories have already been told—only our point of view changes. And it is that unique point of view that makes every story at once individual and collective. Our differences make us interesting—but our similarities make us family. And that brings me to the story—and stories—of Christopher Paolini.

It was the stunning blue-visaged dragon painted by John Jude Palencar that first caught my attention. I’ve always considered myself an artist who writes rather than the other way around, so it was the design of the book jacket for Eragon that drew my eye before I cared one iota about reading the book itself. It wasn’t until the next book Eldest, with its matching red dragon, appeared that I really paid attention—and still, it wasn’t to read the books, but to take note of an interesting cultural trend: dragons were cool.

Not that dragons hadn’t always been cool—but usually they were cool to a subset of fans of a genre (fantasy) that most people considered, well, juvenile. So when a book set firmly within that genre was marketed to that exact audience (juvenile readers) to amazing and continuing success, dragons suddenly became cool to people who had never liked them before, or who had but didn’t realize it until Eragon came along. It was icing on the cake that the author of this literary fireball was himself barely old enough to drive. And suddenly, everyone in the world seemed to be reading books with dragons on the covers.

Having been one of that previous subset of readers, I already knew dragons were cool, which was one of the reasons I had written and drawn a book called Here, There Be Dragons. But it can only be chalked up to happy convergence (rather than astute planning) that my book (featuring a dragon on the cover, colored blue at the request of my publisher’s sales and marketing department) happened to be published just as the Eragon movie promotions were getting underway and every bookstore worthy of the name was assembling displays of books featuring dragons—including mine.

(The fact that Owen and Paolini sit next to each other alphabetically has resulted in a running joke among booksellers that I owe Chris dinner any time he asks, since he helped sell so many of my books. This became less of a joke and more of a potential accounting concern when my second book, The Search For The Red Dragon, appeared with a [naturally] red dragon on the cover. I would like to state for the record that there was espionage, research, and prayer involved in planning to make my next book, The Indigo King, purple so it would not match up with the gold cover of Brisingr, Chris’s third book. At the rate we’re already selling, though, I’m going to be picking up his dinner tab until he’s forty.)

My love for the cover art aside, it became a matter of professional courtesy to read the books and discover for myself just what all the hubbub was about. So I did. And amidst the thrilling tales of dragons and elves and hero’s journeys I found something else in Christopher Paolini’s books—I found myself.

A lot has been made about Paolini’s relative youth, to which I can relate. I was writing, drawing, and publishing my own comic books at the age of sixteen—and while I did not enjoy the same early and vast success nor endure the same harsh scrutiny that he has had to grapple with at such a tender age, I can empathize to a degree that many others cannot. I was the youngest publisher to ever exhibit at the San Diego Comic-Con—and I was constantly questioned, not because of my professionalism or the quality of my work, but because of my age. Had he been less persistent and not gotten the publishing deal he did, or had his books not been so commercially successful, Paolini might well have had an easier time of it. Under the glare of so much scrutiny, even praise has a certain kind of weight, because with success comes expectations, and life is difficult enough at fifteen without being world-famous to boot.

But whatever else critics might question, the achievement itself, to have written (and published) so young, is worthy of note. It requires an innate maturity to be able to convey so much in a work of fiction when one has had relatively less life experience. (It should also be noted—and is utterly appropriate—that two of the finer essays in this collection are written by authors who are as young [or even younger] now as Paolini was when he first conceived Eragon.)

The story itself is one that has been both lauded and criticized as “not new.” More than one essayist touches on this concept, that Paolini has drawn upon well-known and well-used archetypes for both character and plot. Paolini’s detractors claim that the work is therefore merely derivative, and brings nothing new to the world of fiction. But his advocates (of which I am one) maintain that he has simply done what all the great authors have done before him: retold the stories common to us all from a unique point of view. And it is a point of view that has been embraced by millions upon millions of readers around the world.

The question has been posed whether the story of Eragon is also the story of Christopher Paolini. I maintain that it might be—but the same can be said of us all, writers and readers alike. We write to express how we see things to the rest of the world, and we read to try to make sense of the world around us. Both are efforts to communicate, to make connections with the larger Story. Our dragons are metaphors, used to tie together the things we know and the things we hope to understand. Readers may find themselves drawing close to Eragon or Saphira, or perhaps Roran, and in the process discovering something about themselves. It’s been no different for any other story that’s gone before, whether it’s a tale of Perceval or Gilgamesh or even Luke Skywalker. They are all the same story. They are all our story. And the tales told in the Inheritance Cycle are our stories, too, told as they are by a storyteller who understands this, and put them into words in the way he believes they should be told.

That’s how the best stories work: They are new and familiar all at once. The book you now hold in your hands is an excellent example of this: a group of essays by writers who are doing the same thing as Christopher Paolini, and myself, and every other writer throughout history—telling stories, making connections, and trying to communicate their own unique points of view.