A: No, it's not mechanical, he has a lot of fun writing, trying to get into the heads of his characters. The standard 'Harriet saying you've been writing Padan Fain again, haven't you' anecdote came along, now I remember that the character he mentioned actually writing was Semirhage.

A: He again mentioned the list of writers: Holdstock, Powers, Ford, Friedman, Jones. He likes George R.R. Martin's books, gave him a quote for his first book.

A: He begins to realize more things about a character as he writes it. The major characters were in his head from the beginning, the secondary level and even most of the tertiary characters as well. The minor characters you'll only see for a page or two are however often invented on the spot.

A: Ah, oh yes, he's a major character. Definitely a major player.

A: Think of it as ah, as what is autonomic, nervous-system really, autonomic nerve reflexes. You still breathe, you still move, but I would not I would not ask him to play the flute. Q: Language skills?

A: Amongst others. Any group that believes to know the Truth with a capital T and want you to believe the same. Mostly it's based on groups like the Teutonic Knights however, since they don't hide behind anything. The Church in the early christian days, like the Taliban now, are people who know the Truth, and they will kill you if you don't believe the truth. He did not pick up bits and pieces of groups like the KKK, but the Whitecloaks are simply that, a group of people who know the truth, Veritas.

A: Well, I do It's getting absorbed in the work, really, rather than getting absorbed in the world. I focus. When I used to play football, american football, we were calling it "in the zone". It's a total focus, so that in football, American football, everybody else is suddenly moving half a step slower, almost as in slow-motion. Peripheral vision extends. I can see facial twitches. I know who has the ball. I mean, I can see him, it's almost as if a faint glow comes up, but I can't hear the crowd. It's all dead silence, but I can hear the other players breathing, and it's a very strange situation. You get in the zone with the writing and here I am at my desk. My computer, the monitor. And here is a window looking into the side-garden [waving to the left], and over there [waving to the right] is a glass-paint door, looking into the long-garden behind our house. Now we have had heavy rainstorms and windstorms that drenched everything, that broke branches, were beating bamboo against this window [the left], there had to be bamboo hitting against this window, had broken branches down on the driveway over there [the right] and he never noticed any of it when in the zone with writing.

A: Ah no, they were no, no, no Damen Flinn and Corele eh no, no, that's meters just some meters. Err, they couldn't have come face-to-face. That's ,it's not a short, not a really not like you and me.

A: Well, in terms of history, I see some similarity to the writing of a fantasy novel and the writing of a history novel. In both cases you are presenting a world that is totally strange and alien to the reader. And if you don't believe that, read a good novel set three hundred years ago, one that really describes the life and you'll find very little recognizable in it. So there is a great deal of similarity there. The major difference is that if you're writing a good historical novel you must place the historical events where they actually happened, not shift them about at your own convenience. In a fantasy novel you can shift history for your own convenience. It's a great aid.

A: That's, that's a part of it. Another part of it is that I felt I could discuss things writing fantasy that I couldn't dicuss writing in other genres, things that I would have to sidestep. There's a great deal of the struggle between good and evil. I'm trying to decide what is good, and what is evil, what's right, what is wrong, am I doing the right thing? Not by preaching; simply the characters keeping face with a situation or they're gonna make a decision; they don't know enough, don't have enough information, and they don't know what the results are going to be; oh they know what the results are gonna be and they're wrong. We'll give them that. At least wrong a lot of the times. And they have to blunder on and blunder through anyway, cause that's all there is to do. But if I wrote about that, if I tried to say that there is a right, there is a wrong, there is good, there is evil, it's tough to tell the difference, but you really have to make the try. it's worth the effort to try. If I said that in a mainstream novel, it would be laughed out of town.

A: I'll take a nap while he answers that. [laughter] Pratchett: Well, I'll try to give a thorough and witty answer, but first I want to continue a bit about what robert said and he talked about us being in an Alzheimer age, not remembering our history, and how much history he used in his books, how rarely he had to make things up. Then he went on to say that he did indeed not see himself as an artist with words, but preferred to think of himself as a craftsman instead of a carpenter. He talked a bit about his training as a journalist, and about medieval guilds and masterpieces. a question followed for Jordan, asking if he considered WoT his masterpiece. Jordan stated that the interviewers had misinterpreted what Terry said about masterpiece, because the definition of masterpiece was not the most magnificent work. The masterpiece is the proof that you have the skills to work alone, and he considered his first novel to be that The role of the editor is the first set of eyes, to tell you what you are too close to the book to see. The person who tells you that yes, you made a beautiful leg, and yes the it is perfectly, but you're ignoring the fact that it's longer than the other three legs on the table. Pratchett was talking about you having to take care in fantasy not to use words like sandwich, unless you had the sandwich guy appear in your story. Jordan disagreed: the writer is simply translating.And their word for a bit of unidentifiable meat wrapped in between some two slices of greasy bread would translate as 'sandwich.' But that's not what they call it at all, that's just what you call it in english.

A: Pratchett said things about the people no longer knowing the rules of the game, about the suggestion that ideas are worth money etc. The talk continued in the direction of fanfiction, with Jordan talking about stacks of paper he sometimes received. Sitting there I felt certain the female dragon debate I'd given him was doomed, but listening to this again now, I have better hopes.People occasionally send me various compilations of faqs and things of that sort they've done about the books, or analyses of the books, and I will occasionally read that if I have time, but fanfiction, or other fiction, or 'I've read this book and would you please tell me what you think of it' or stories, it gets returned to them. I do not read it, I'm sorry. It's not because I think that anything is going to compete with my works, it's not, but it's because what Terry said, there are bozos out there. I was accused in an anonymous letter to my publisher, of plagiarizing. That the Dragon Reborn was plagiarized. Now this infuriated me to such an extent that I'm going to incredible efforts to find out who'd written the damned letter. I knew it was a nutcase bozo somewhere, because I knew that every word was ripped out of the inside of my skull. And I'm going to find him, and push him into a corner, and beat him half to death with my walking stick [laughter], because he made me that mad, that he would make this accusation against me. And this was in an anonymous letter, who is not making any effort, he's not trying to make any money out of it, he just wants to cause trouble. There are guys out there who I know who said 'you know, I have this great idea' and the great idea they want to share with you is worth about as much as "let's write a book about pilots" and the worst case is when they see something in the book and say, and they think that they can claim it was stolen from them. So I will not read fanfiction, I will not read anything that somebody sends to me. the only things I read are the books I buy.He ends very definite about not reading anything, but he's really only talking about fanfiction, and the first few remarks about reading analyses give me hope again.

A: Pratchett: On a Russian site? [half-laughing on a tone of uh-oh, no way to do anything about that Yes, and I'm not the only one up there apparently, a lot of guys, and I mean, I've gone after, I've gotten shut down other sites, people who had been posting a translation in Russia and other places, what this guy is doing I don't know, except that I was cautioned to not visit the site myself, and it's not apparently as simply as say 'stop this.' It would be quicker to get a contract with the Russian mafia.

A: The most interesting characters I write about are the ones you really don't want to meet. This is like the 'what one thing would you change about the world' that would lead to far too many unforseen consequences. So I'd say "thank you very much, I'm going fishing that day" Pratchett: [lots of talk, eventually he'd really like to see Death when he was 150, because he is such a nice chap and would say to him it's been fun, hasn't it.

A: Read And Find Out.

A: Yes.

A: No, they are really gone.

A: Ah, but you're not gonna have that sort of switch. In this Age, how can you have a switch? One of the things for instance in the Age that I wrote. One of the things. For instance, I've been accused by some people of ignoring the feminist struggle. Well, there is no feminist struggle in this world, because there is no need for one. No one says a woman can't do this because she is a woman. A woman wants to be a blacksmith, she can learn to be a blacksmith, and she becomes a blacksmith, or a merchant or a wagondriver, or a worker on the docks, or wherever else. All of that took place, took place a long time ago. And they're very good at it. That sets the whole reasons why this should come about. Three thousand years ago the world was destroyed, by men. There is one group that has survived for that three thousand years, one organization that has managed to stick together for three thousand years, and have a great influence on history, and that is a group of women. Okay, so you just don't have, you just don't have it. To have a reversal of roles means absolutely nothing.

A: Ah, that is one of the things, one of the things that would be a large, a very large change. Uhm, it's gonna be the smaller details, smaller things than that which change.

A: There are a number of storylines that I want to tell, a number of stories that I want to tell. Basically I think of this as a story of people surviving the upheaval of their culture. You know, when I began I knew the beginning, I knew the end and I knew certain major events that I wanted to happen in between, so that I would arrive at the proper conclusion, the conclusion of the story that I wanted to arrive at. And it simply wasn't possible to get everything in there as quickly as I thought. The people must all undergo changes. The cultures must undergo changes.