It’s a really interesting thing. When I got to college, I decided I wanted to be a writer, and I started reading the books that I loved as a youth and studying them and trying to figure out how to do writing. Because . . . I love my professors, but writing teachers don’t actually teach you how to write. I don’t know if any of you guys have taken writing classes, but they’re like well, let’s explore your inner voice. And I’m like, you’re telling me I have to hear voices? Well, I already do but they’re not telling me how to write. How do I write? How do I make a character cool? And teachers aren’t really big on teaching you how to make characters cool. They like to teach you how to develop your style.
And so I started reading books, and I was actually very very disappointed because some of authors that I read—I won’t mention names—but some of authors I read as a youth did not hold up when I was an adult. And they were perfect for me at the age, but as I tried to inspect them as an adult writer trying to develop my style, I didn’t find the depth that I wanted to dig into that I thought would teach me how to write. Robert Jordan still did. In fact, Robert Jordan was the one that I would dig into and find how much I’d missed. I constantly tell a story about as a 15 year old reading these books, you know, there’s this character Moiraine who’s just like always keeping the boys down and not letting them . . . She’s always giving them orders, and I was always like, Moiraine, just leave them alone, they need to go off and do cool things! And then I read the books as an adult and I’m studying them and I’m like, you stupid kids, listen to Moiraine!
[laughter]
There’s this depth to Wheel of Time books that the various characters are all expressed on very different levels. And Moiraine has an entire story going on behind the scenes that you don’t see because you don’t see through her viewpoints. And there’s a little subtlety and detail. I mean, maybe I’m dense, but I didn’t get the whole thing with it being our world, and there . . . and who was it? Not Buzz Aldrin, um—
John Glenn.
John Glenn being in the book referenced, and America and Russia and the Cold War being referenced in legend. I didn’t get that stuff till I was in college, and I’m like how did it miss that? You know, it’s like a smack to the face, right, the first time you realize that Egwene is Egwene al’Vere, which is Guinevere. And you know, I didn’t get this as a kid, and building these things out and understanding them and seeing the depth of writing that he was capable of—the really wonderful sentences that evoke so much feeling, emotion, and description.
I started studying the Wheel of Time to learn how to write. It became my primary model, just on a prose level, of how to do this thing that no one could teach me how to do. I spent the next . . . I decided I wanted to be a writer—actually, I was serving mission for the LDS church in Korea. The reason is I . . . I really wanted to be a writer before then, but my mother convinced me that writers don’t get scholarships, and that I should be a doctor instead. And so I actually applied to BYU—I grew up in Nebraska—to go be a chemistry major, because that got scholarships. And then I got into college and realized what they do to all those people who just said they want to be chemistry majors to get a scholarship, is they put them in a really hard chemistry class that other people don’t have to take their freshman year to show you what chemistry is like.
And I then went to Korea and was so happy to be on a different continent from chemistry. I did not enjoy that freshman year, but I did spend a lot of that time writing. And I decided I missed writing so much, but I didn’t miss chemistry, that I had made the wrong choice, and I decided to start writing a book on my days off during my missionary work, and I just started writing in a notebook. And I completely fell in love with the process. I’d known since a kid this is what I wanted to do, but that’s the first time that it clicked for me, that what I loved to do should be my job, right? That I could spend eight hours working on a story and come out of it feeling awesome and have not missed that time at all. I get the same thing from a lot of my friends who are code monkeys. It kind of scratches the same itch—that you get into it, and you’re creating something, and it’s working, and it’s clicking. And yes, it can be hard but you love it at the same time. That’s what I wanted to do.
Over the course of the next eight years I wrote 13 novels, trying to break in. And I eventually sold Elantris , my sixth book. And I sold it to Tor books. And when I got an offer from Tor . . . It was funny, I called up my agent. He said, well, I want to take this and I want to shop it, because usually you can get a better offer if you have one offer from somebody. This is basic business philosophy, right? And you go to everyone else and say, well, we got this offer from this company, will you beat it? And I said no, you can’t do that. And he’s like, but we can get more money. And I said, Tor is Robert Jordan’s publisher. [laughter] We’re not going anywhere else. When you have an offer from the top you just take it, and I did. And he, to this . . . not to this day, because things have kind of changed in my career, but there were many years where he would say to me, you know, I still wish you’d let me taken that, I bet we could have, you know, got a bigger launch, and yada yada yada. And when I did start working on the Wheel of Time, I actually called him and I said, so do you still wish? And he’s like ah, you know, ah . . .
[laughter]
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