I hope you don’t mind if I have a second question since . . .
Uh, it’s the guys behind you that you gotta . . . they look like they’re nice fellows.
Thank you. Jordan didn’t plan 14 books certainly. As you said, you know, this trilogy will be good. And it’s no secret that as an author . . . no author seems to be in complete control of their creation. It evolves. And he kept saying, no more than three more books, for like five books from the end. I think it appears like George R. R. Martin seems to be in a similar place, where, you know, there’s this . . . [laughter, applause] Do you think that the experience of writing the end of Wheel of Time has given you a different perspective that will help you with Stormlight Archive? Or do you think that would never have been . . . Or do you think that your style, you know, did you always have it plotted out that it would never expand in that way?
It certainly could expand. It does happen to all authors, but authors do tend to fall into two general categories. George Martin has great terms for these, so I steal his. He calls them gardeners and architects.
Gardeners, which Robert Jordan was and George Martin is, they explore their story and more discover it as they go. Robert Jordan was actually a little bit like halfway between architect and gardener, because he would always have waypoints that he was writing toward, and he knew the ending and things like that. Stephen King is a complete gardener. He says he doesn’t know where he’s going. He just puts characters in interesting situations, and starts writing. And George R. R. Martin has said that he’s a gardener.
I’m an architect. And an architect is someone who plots out things beforehand, and then writes them. But even being an architect the creative process is such that if while you’re working on it, something better comes along, you have to be willing to knock down the blueprints that you have done, and build them up again.
That said, things have not expanded on me in the same way. People point to the last book being split into three, but I point to my very first blog post I made about it, where I said I was planning to write a single 800,000 word book. And instead I wrote one—it’s about a million words. So I’m within a fairly close hit on what I initially . . . [laughter] Eh, 200,000 words, 20 percent, whatever. But yeah, I’m more like a 20 percent than expanse—does that make sense? And Stormlight is written out as ten books . . . and I honestly think that it will hit that: two five book arcs, for those who are wondering. I think it will hit that, but we’ll see. I have never done something this long before on my own, so . . .
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