You started writing Elantris while still at college. How many months of work went into the creation of that first novel? Was it an easy thing to do or was it a massive effort?
Believe it or not, Elantris was the sixth novel I wrote. I took a creative writing class at university from David Farland where he said that when you start writing, your first million words will be crap and not to worry about that. The experience and practice you get from writing a novel is the important part; your first novel doesn’t have to be any good.
So with that in mind, I sat down to write a novel were I wasn’t worried about how good it was. And when that one was finished, I didn’t revise it—I just opened a new document and started writing a new novel. I ended up writing thirteen novels this way over a three-year period. Elantris was the sixth, and when I finally got an offer from Moshe Feder at Tor to buy Elantris , I was working on the first version of The Way of Kings . You may wonder how I had so much time to write; I was working as a night auditor at a local hotel, and they let me write while I was on duty as long as I fulfilled my responsibilities. That way I paid my way through college and also got a lot of practice writing.
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