The Way of Kings is over a thousand pages and Towers of Midnight is over 850. The books were published within three months of each other. What’s your key to getting this much writing done?
It’s in part, cheating. The Way of Kings I already had a first draft of done before the Wheel of Time project was offered to me. There would have been no way to do them both in the same year if that hadn’t been the case.
People don’t quite understand a couple of things. Number one: that was a gift; I already had a first draft done. And I wrote it from scratch again, but it went very quickly because I had already done a first draft.
The other thing they don’t understand is when you’re a mid-lister like I was several years ago, when you turn in a book it takes several years for it to come out, because they’re giving everyone slots and they’re arranging it. And I would even usually work a year ahead, and then I’d turn it in, so it would often be three years until a book was published. An example of this is Warbreaker . It was released last year. I wrote it in 2006, that’s when the first draft was written, and it came out almost exactly three years later.
When you’re working on high profile books, they don’t sit on them for three years. And so what happens is I wrote these books that I did beforehand, and then I started working on the Wheel of Time in 2007 and 2008, and I finished the book and then it came out immediately. And so it looks like I’m releasing twice as many books as I am, because books I wrote in 2006 and 2007 come out the same year as books I wrote in 2008 and 2009, which is what’s happening here. Which is why there’s not going to be any of my books next year because we’ve now caught up, no solo books.
I’ve been telling people I doubt we’re going to have a Wheel of Time book next year, either. They’ve been spoiled, because if it takes us eighteen months to write a book, but we have a six-month buffer, we can get a book out and it looks like it’s only been worked on for a year.
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