You’ve been nominated for and have won several awards, but what kept you going before this kind of affirmation?
The hardest point for me was when I was trying to break in. I wrote thirteen novels before I sold one.
Wow. Congratulations for persevering.
I say that to people and sometimes my editors shake their heads and say, ‘Don’t tell people that; they’ll think that you’re awful.’
I was not very good at this when I started. I think a lot of authors do that. I’ve come to realise that the thing holding me back for a lot of years was the unwillingness to revise. I was one of those authors who like to write a book, be done with it and move on. Then I would say, ‘Oh, I’ll write the next one really well.’ I liked writing. I really enjoyed that process, but there were some tough years in there, particularly after I started feeling that I was writing things that were really good, that were publishable, that were quite solid and I still kept getting rejections. People kept telling me the books I was writing were too long, I kept sending in these big massive epic fantasies.
[Nalini pulls her copy of Way of Kings forward.]
Yes. They kept saying these were too big and people aren’t really buying epic fantasy now…this is what the editors were saying.
So that’s a fashion thing in the industry.
Yeah. Mm-hm. I don’t know if they were right or not, but that’s what they were saying. So I decided to try writing what I felt the market was doing, and started chasing the market a little bit. I failed at that: I wrote a couple of books that were just awful. That’s the point when I really had my moment of ‘why am I doing this? What am I doing here?’ This was in 2001, maybe early 2002.
I kind of had to make the decision that I was doing this for me. I was writing books because I loved books; I was doing it because I loved writing. I was going to write the type of book that I wanted to write. I had to decide I didn’t care if I didn’t get published. I decided I would keep writing books until I died, even if I ended up with seventy-five novels unpublished. I actually made that decision.
The next book I wrote was The Way of Kings , throwing away all the stuff that people said to me. They tell me my books are too long, and I wrote a book that was twice as long as any book I had written before. They were telling me my books were too expensive, so I wrote one with thirty interior illustrations.
While I was working on Way of Kings I actually sold my sixth book, which was Elantris , one of the ones I had written in the era when I really felt I was doing good work, before I decided to try chasing the market. At that point it was like: ‘Oh, I just sold one of those!’ It actually worked out for me, but it was about eighteen months after I made that decision, that I eventually sold a book in 2003. Since then I’ve had the conviction that I do this because I love it. I haven’t had to have the affirmation to push me along, but it’s great that people do enjoy my books. I certainly wouldn’t be making a living at it if people didn’t enjoy it, but I’d still be writing.
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