Some of these questions I’m pitching at you at because I’m pretty sure I know the answer, but I want to have somewhere I can point people when they complain to me, “Rothfuss already has the book done and it’s not getting released! What’s up?” And I’m sure you’ve answered these questions before, but they’re probably buried in your blog or something like that.
I’ve heard that the frame story was added after the fact. Is that true?
Yeah. The story originally started with the Sentence. “My Name is Kvothe.” There was no Waystone Inn. No Bast. No Chronicler. Just him telling his story.
Admittedly, that was a very early draft. The book has obviously changed a lot since then.
I think part of the problem is that when I talk about revision, most people assume I’m fixing comma splices and running spellcheck. No. That’s copyediting. That’s proofreading.
When I’m doing revision, it’s REVISION. I treat the book like it’s a car engine. I strip it down into all its component parts and make sure each of them is doing exactly what it should. If it isn’t, I fix it.
The problem, of course, is that if a part isn’t working right, I can’t just order a new one out of a catalogue. I have to invent it myself and then try to reassemble the rest of the engine around it. If it doesn’t work, I have to take it apart and start again.
It’s interesting to me, I find, in both books—I’m now reading Wise Man’s Fear —that the frame story writing has a different feel of maturity about it. So that’s why I was curious to know if the frame story stuff is new. I actually think that some of the very strongest writing in the entire series has been in the frame story.
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