What advice would you give to a young and aspiring writer? Also, similarly, what advice would you give to would be world-builders? Would it be wise to create a world in its entirety before even starting to write, or should you continually add to the world as you write?
My advice to aspiring writers is: (1) Write, send what you’ve written to publisher, then immediately begin writing something else. And (2) Read. Read as much good stuff as you can find time for, and try to learn from it. Also (3) Write what you like to read. If you don’t like reading it, you won’t be able to write it very well.
As for world-building, I don’t believe that you should spend the time to build your world entirely before you begin writing. I began with sketching in the greater part of the world, with a much greater emphasis put on what was important in the first book, namely the Two Rivers, Andor in general, Shienar, an overview of the Borderlands, and especially Aes Sedai and the White Tower. Now I had those initial sketches of cultures like the Aiel or Cairhien or Illian, and as something occurred to me, I added it in. Every so often I checked on what I had compiled for various countries, and used a logic tree analysis which gave me more items. If A is true and B is true, what else must be true and what cannot be true, or at least is unlikely. I did the same for C and D, E and F, G and H, then for A and C, A and D, and so forth. At some point you come to a place where one line says that, say, Item 47 must be true, while another line says that Item 47 is at best very unlikely. Resolving those conflicts are where some of the more interesting quirks in a society come from. And of course, you need to ask yourself why those initial choices are true for that culture, especially when one seems counter-intuitive, or some combination seems counter-intuitive.
This process isn’t as mechanical as it sounds, because the initial items were things that I thought would be interesting to combine in one culture, rather than simply copying an existing culture. The result is, I believe, cultures that either seem somewhat familiar but not entirely (Andor) or else almost utterly strange with only a few somewhat familiar elements (the Aiel, the Seanchan), but either way, they seem real because the internal logic of them holds together.
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