Well, it’s good to put yourself in your own writing in ways people don’t quite expect. That, I’m sure, is not what they were thinking of you. We’ve touched on some of your series, and they’re big books. You’re writing novellas on top of that. You finished “The Wheel of Time”. You’re doing all of these things. Where do you find the time to teach?
I only teach one class, one semester a year, and it’s one night a week. Teaching from 5 until 8, one night a week, one semester a year, is really not a big time commitment. It is something that I enjoy. It gets me out of the house. When someone else might go bowling or go watch the game, I go teach my class.
You’re teaching writing.
I am, how to write science fiction fantasy, the lectures of which are posted online.
Oh, wonderful. What is the one thing that you hope your students will take away from your classes?
I hope that they will learn that being a writer is about training yourself to write great books. It is not about having written a great book. Too many people look at this not as the process of becoming a writer, but as an event of writing a single book. That’s not how it works in the arts.
You want to be a person who can write great books. You want to train yourself to do that. The way to do that is by writing bad books at first. You practice, you write, you experiment, you learn your style. At the end of doing that for years, you figure out what you’re doing, to an extent.
I don’t think any of us actually believe we know completely what we’re going. The writers really just need to practice. If they will practice and sit down and write, they will learn way more than I can teach them.
Do you find yourself still evolving, still learning?
Oh, yes, of course. I don’t think there is a writer who doesn’t think that. That’s what we do.
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