Now, what kind of story were you hoping to tell at the outset of the writing of this series, and what kind of story has it become as you’ve discovered it?
It’s become exactly the sort of story I thought it was going to be at the start. I knew the story I wanted to tell, and I am telling the story I wanted to tell. That hasn’t changed; it’s headed for exactly the same conclusion that I planned in 1984. What has changed, you might say, is my understanding of how many pages it was going to take to tell this story. When I started The Eye of the World , I thought that I could put x amount of the story into that book, only to discover that I could put maybe two thirds of x into that book, and with each book I have written, I have found that. I sit down, and I plan what I want to put into this particular book, and I think I can put x amount of the story, and discover that I can only put half that, or two thirds of it, or three quarters in some cases. With Crossroads of Twilight , that is a 700-page hardback—almost 700 pages—and I realized after a while that if I put everything into it that I wanted, it was going to be a 1200-page hardback, maybe 1300 pages, and it would be another year before it was available, before I was finished with it. So, since I had already had to tell my publisher he had to move it once, I didn’t think I could tell him that again.
Well, I don’t think your readers want to wait that long either. They’re slavering to get this story.
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