How many attempts did you make to publish before you wrote Elantris?
Elantris was my sixth novel. I was working on my 13th when I sold Elantris . It was not publishable when I first wrote it; it took several revisions and drafts. It was probably somewhere around book nine that I was really figuring things out, I feel. I like to write and jump projects. Instead of finishing one and slaving over it to make it much better, which may have been better for me in the long run, I would always jump to something new.
For new writers, I always advise balancing those two. When you finish a book, write another one, but then go back to your first one and work it over to see if you can make it better. Then, go write a third one and go back to the second one and see if you can make it better.
Do that instead of doing what I did, where you finish a book and go, “Hmm…that one was good, but I can do better?” and then writing another book and ignoring the first one. Elantris was the first one that I really dug into revisions on, and it ended up paying off.
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