Interview Brandon Sanderson

[jerome]

Une Interview de Brandon Sanderson est à lire en anglais ici.

Extrait :
"RF: What would you say has been the most difficult part of working on the Wheel of Time?
Brandon Sanderson : I would say keeping track of all the multitude of characters and subplots. I thought the hardest part might be writing the characters, and indeed that was kind of difficult. It was definitely the most important part: making sure they felt like themselves. But there’s so many different Aes Sedai, so many different Wise Ones, so many different named characters, and so many different sub-characters with smaller plots, and they all have different ways of speaking and ways of thinking, and tracking it all is a real challenge.

RF: That leads me to my next question. Robert Jordan’s notes are, I’m guessing, all over the place—I heard three million words worth of notes. He also did extensive writing for the last book that we get the impression was also all over the place. Has it been difficult writing that way, and is it very different from your own normal writing style?
Brandon Sanderson :: In some ways, and in some ways it has also been very nice. I am a writer who works from an outline. What I generally do when I build an outline is I find focal, important scenes, and I build them in my head and I don’t write them yet, but I build towards them. Well, in this case, a lot of those important focal scenes, Robert Jordan has outlined or written himself. So, I’ve actually been able to build an outline out of his notes that works very much the way that I work on outlines anyway.

The notes themselves are very interesting to work with. They are so very varied, so to speak. There is just so much there. In some cases we have scenes that he wrote. In some cases we have scenes that he talks about and his assistants wrote down what he said about them. In some cases, we have interviews that he did with his assistants through the years when he was sick, where he was just talking about the last book and they were asking questions. He dictated some scenes on his death bed. In other cases, we have things that his assistants remember him saying that they just wrote down after he passed away, everything they could remember. Other cases we have outlines that he was working from for the book. And this is just all in a big jumble that was handed to me, not in really any order, and they just said “put this in order, do what you need to do.” They gave me the tools to write the book and left me to write it, working through all of these things."