And as you touch on that, your books that you’ve written yourself focus—let’s not say heavily on religion, but your character has a religious foundation per se, and Jordan on the other end of the spectrum; there’s really not that formalized sort of religion.
Yeah, there’s spirituality, but not religion.
And how did you, as a writer that usually writes in that, you know… How did that make a difference for you? How did you have to approach it; did you have to make changes in the way that you write because of that?
You know, that’s not one specific thing that I felt I had to change a lot about. The truth is, for any given fantasy work you’re working on, there are certain things that draw a lot of your attention, that you focus on, and certain things you don’t. When I wrote my kids’ series, there’s no religion in those. That just wasn’t important for the world-building and the setting for those books. And I’ve written other books where religion is very important. Religion fascinates me. I’m a religious person. And because of that, I feel that the misuse of religion can be one of the greatest evils in the world. And so, you see me delving into that sort of thing and just the different approaches on religion. You know, I love to deal with different types of religion and all that sort of stuff. But I think Robert Jordan’s approach is very interesting. And I’ve always liked his approach to it. Like I said, there’s a spirituality without a religion. And…the Wheel of Time, that’s not an area that’s focused on a lot. And so, it was a very easy transition for me. Different books, you spend your efforts on in different places.
On Elantris , I spent a long time on the languages. On Mistborn, I didn’t. Because in Mistborn, it wasn’t… The world just didn’t revolve around the way that languages work. We had an all-oppressive dictator God King who had forced everyone to kind of adopt the same language. Beyond that, the books were taking place at the center capital of the world where everyone spoke the same language. So there weren’t even… You know, there were little dialects here and there, but I didn’t focus on language there. Whereas I did in Elantris . The same thing with different books, so…
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