Someone asked the regular question about the amount of books to come and why it’s taking so long.
There are a number of storylines that I want to tell, a number of stories that I want to tell. Basically I think of this as a story of people surviving the upheaval of their culture. … You know, when I began I knew the beginning, I knew the end and I knew certain major events that I wanted to happen in between, so that I would arrive at the proper conclusion, the conclusion of the story that I wanted to arrive at. And it simply wasn’t possible to get everything in there as quickly as I thought. The people must all undergo changes. The cultures must undergo changes.
Could it be possible that it will never end?
Uhm, no, there is no possibility that it will never end. I will wrap up all of the major storylines, I will wrap up some of the minor storylines. Other minor storylines will be left hanging, and I’m going to do worse than that. I am going to set a hook in the last scene of the last book, that will make some people who don’t believe what I say, think that I am setting up a sequel. What I am doing, what I will be doing, is trying to leave you with a view of a world that is still alive. One hope that some fantasies have is that when you reach the end of the book, or you reach the end of the trilogy, all the characters’ problems are solved. All of the things that they have been doing are neatly tied of in a bow, all of their world’s problems have been solved. And there’s no juice left, there’s no life left. you think ‘I ought to set this world on a shelf and put a bell-jar on top of it, to keep the dust off.
When I finish the Wheel of Time, I want to do it in such a way that you will think it’s still out there somewhere, people still doing things. This story has been concluded, this set of stories has been concluded, but they’re still alive.
mumble-mumble on the tape, but the answer should give you a general idea of the question.
No, I will not continue writing it, I will be going on to something else, and nobody else will continue writing it, because I have an automatic contract set up that if anyone tries to sharecrop in my world, their kneecaps will be brought to me. [laughter]
What will you write next?
Another fantasy novel, or a set of novels. More compact, I hope. That’s…I’ve been working on it, you might say, in the back of my head for five or six years. A different world, a different set of circumstances; different cultures, different rules, no connection really, at all, to the world … I’m writing about now. [Heh, seems even Jordan might want to have given Randland a name in the beginning so that we could refer to it as something other than Randland.] I want to make things different. [strong] I don’t like doing the same thing again. It’s a trap that writers find it very easy to fall in to. Fans say, ‘tell me the story again, tell me more of the story’, and the writer wants to do a different story. But the fan who loves this story says, ‘tell me this story again.’ [loud] ‘I want the story again, daddy!’ [laughter] So you tell the story again. And it is very much like telling the story to your child, because if you always tell the same story when the child screams, ‘tell me the story again, daddy’, you find out you can never ever tell a different story, that that is the only story that will be accepted. And I won’t do that. I hope you come along with me, when I go on to different stories. But if you don’t, I’m still gonna write the different stories. [laughter]
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