Your earliest books seemed like they were a little bit larger, I guess, than your more recent books? How has your writing style changed over time with your ten different novels in the series?
Well, in the series, I’m not certain that the style has changed so much, but the amount of ground covered. In some of the earlier books, frankly, I was writing so many hours a day that I was killing myself. Even my publisher—by the time I reached Lord of Chaos , which was the longest of the books—I handed that in, and my publisher said to me, “You don’t look well. You need to take more time before handing in the next book. What about two years instead of one?” And see, now I have breakfast, read the newspaper over breakfast, go to my desk, and generally forgetting to stop for lunch, I write until six in the afternoon when I stop to go in the house and help my wife to get dinner on the table, and I do that seven days a week. There was a time when I got up in the morning and had breakfast and went to work, and I didn’t eat lunch, and I wound knock of at…oh, eight or nine o’clock at night, and sometimes I didn’t knock off then, and I would do that seven days a week, and that’s how I was able to write the longer books in the shorter period of time. But now, it doesn’t quite work that way. I cut the books at what seems to me a natural length for that book. Some of the later books could have been a bit longer, but there are also time constraints in getting the book published. When the fans say, “Give us the book, give us the book, give us the book,” my publisher says, “We gotta give ‘em the book.”
That makes sense, and it seems also that, in the earlier books, you had to establish the world.
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