Une interview de Janny Wurts

[jerome]

Je signale une interview de Janny Wurts ici. Elle avait signé en fantasy avec Raymond E.Feist La trilogie de l'Empire.

L'interview porte sur sa série toujours de fantasy : Les Guerres de l'ombre et de la lumière (actuellement chez Bragelonne).

Petit extrait :
"A common complaint of long fantasy epics is that too many plot and character threads tend to overwhelm the author after the first half a dozen books in a series. Yet arguably, The Wars of Light and Shadow doesn’t suffer this problem. How have you tackled this problem of the genre?
Janny Wurts : Planning, for one thing – I’ve worked with this story idea for better than thirty years. Yes, I started very young. Before I published book I, much of the material had been written in crude draft, probably up to Peril’s Gate. I had scenes in piles, and stacks of notes on the back history, and a lot of the future course of the books in fragmentary form. Arc IV’s scene notes ran to over 80 pages. Arc V, close to that.

The other angle is the thrust of the books was never designed to sprawl out. I wanted everything “onstage” at Volume I, and from that point, each volume peels off another layer, and shifts the angle of view to deepen the perspective and heighten the viewpoint. I can’t speak for sprawl, because running off in tangential directions and getting lost is just not my way of working. The new, in this series, arises in the revelatory moment, when you are given the fresh angle that rearranges all the markers. What you presumed was not what is actual. What you think at first sight to be a classic pattern gets shattered by one fact, or one scene, that opens up a whole vista – there all along, if you could have perceived, or understood it.

I’m eager to bring this massive undertaking to the finish I’ve envisioned at the outset. I’d bore myself cross-eyed to write the same book twice, or dwell in an endless sequence of sequels, or languish in tearoom reunions of favorite characters. There’s not any financial incentive to draw things out, either – instead, the challenge of working a highly individual style and story in a rapidly changing global/corporate market has become a hair-raising endeavor. Fantasy written for a more mature and intelligent readership has posed a labor of love from the outset."