Speaking of adaptations, of course, you’ve taken over Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series and sped up the pace of the story considerably, so as a long-time reader there, thank you for that!
Credit needs to be given to Robert Jordan; he started to speed up in Book 11 [ Knife of Dreams ]. In fact, I’ve read interviews where he admits that the focus was a little bit wrong in Book 10 [ Crossroads of Twilight ], which is the one that the fans complain about being the most slow, and he himself changed that for Book 11 and picked up the pacing. And I like spectacular endings. When I build my books, I start from the end and work forward with my outline. I write from beginning to end, but I outline end to beginning, because I always want to know that I have a powerful, explosive ending that I’m working toward. Endings are my deal: if a book or a film doesn’t have a great ending, I find it wanting. It’s like the last bite, the last morsel on the plate, so I get very annoyed with the standard Hollywood third act, because they seem to play it most safe in Act Three, and that’s where I most want to be surprised and awed. That’s where it’s got to be spectacular. You’ve got to give the reader something they’re not expecting, something they want but don’t know it, in that last section.
Does that go for something like your Mistborn Trilogy; did you start with the end of the trilogy or go book-by-book?
I plotted all three backwards and then wrote them all forwards. I had a great advantage writing those books, because I sold my first book, Elantris , in 2003. The nature of how books are ‘slotted’ into release dates is that a new author doesn’t get the best slot. They want to give each author a good launch, but they can’t give them in the really prime slots. So we had a two-and-a-half year wait, and usually you have a year between books. That meant I had three-and-a-half years before Mistborn would be out, so I pitched the entire trilogy together and wrote all three before the first one came out.
Is that something you have in common with Robert Jordan, because re-reading the prologue to the first book you think, ‘This guy knows how it’s going to end’.
He actually wrote the ending that I worked towards. The last pages were written by him before he passed away. He always spoke of knowing the ending, so I think we do share that. He was a bit more of an explorer in his writing than I am. He knew where he was going, but getting there he wove around a lot. You can see that in the notes I’ve been given; he jumps from scene to scene. So there’s a difference there, but he really loved endings. And that ending is really great; I think fans are going to love it.
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