By the way, Towers of Midnight has just been released in the US. Was it easier to write this one than to write The Gathering Storm ?
In some ways it was easier, and in some ways it was harder. It was easier because I was more familiar in the world, and I was more confident, because The Gathering Storm had received quite a bit of accolade.
At the same time, Towers of Midnight is in many ways a more difficult story to write, because for The Gathering Storm , I picked several important characters and I focused on them and kept the narrative very tight and focused. For Towers of Midnight I couldn’t do that; I had to get back to everyone else, I had to widen my focus. And in this case I had to juggle far more characters, which made it a much more challenging book to write, technically.
I do a lot of notes and plans; I’m what we call an outliner. George R. R. Martin talks about writers and says that you tend to be either what he calls an architect or a gardener. And an architect is one who plans out everything ahead of time for their book, whereas a gardener is one who nurtures a novel and sees where it goes. Stephen King is known as very much a gardener. I’m an architect in most ways, and I like to have a nice outline; I like to know where I’m going. Though of course as a writer, you can never stick to your outline one hundred percent. You have to have the freedom to change as the story develops, and as the characters grow, if they become people who wouldn’t do what’s in the outline, you have to be able to throw the outline away and build a story that follows the characters.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.