This is a question for both of you. I was just wondering how you organize and plan such huge worlds and how you get about planning and writing your books.
Do you want to start?
No, you go ahead!
Actually, you and I talked about this when we did that interview. I learned about this from Brandon, I haven’t gotten this first hand from George Martin, who talks about Gardeners and Architects who kind of are free writers, and just start and have their story come out of their writing session, and those who do just an amazing amount of worldbuilding before they even start to put the fiction down. I’m a blend of this. I do a lot of worldbuilding beforehand. But the analogy I use is kind of like coloring. Once I get the framework, then it gives me kind of a latitude to color outside the lines, and I’ll find lots of discovery and worldbuilding occurs inside the writing. So I don’t ever find myself pigeonholed by an outline, but I definitely have a bit of a roadmap before I start. And then for the series itself, I have the first three books pretty clearly mapped out, and I know the end with a great deal of clarity, and then, Tor’s got to buy more books so I can finish it.
I do an outline and a lot of worldbuilding. I use, most recently I’ve found a wiki software most useful. It’s called wikidpad. I use that to keep my setting in because there are hundreds of thousands of words of worldbuilding that I do. So, it’s between those two things. Organizationally, I work from an outline, a bullet-point outline meaning: here’s a list of things I want to have happen, and they don’t always have to happen in this order, and that’s how I approach it.
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