Mark Lawrence interview

The folks at fantasy-faction.com just posted an interesting interview with Mark Lawrence, author of The Wheel of Osheim (Canada, USA, Europe).

Here's a teaser:

Your own writing approach is very different to some other authors in the genre. You don’t plan ahead that much at all, but are led by the story and characters such that you can be as surprised by what happens between the top and the bottom of the page as the readers are. Despite this, the editing adjustments made to your previous books have all been fairly minor and what the readers see on the page is pretty much what flowed into the first draft (an agonisingly long three years earlier).

Have you ever wished you had planned a story more in advance?

Only in as much as I might feel a lot safer knowing where it’s going and confident from the start that I will produce a book that keeps both publishers and readers happy. Having a plan though would take a lot of the excitement of writing away for me.

I prefer to read books where the characters dominate and I get very involved with their activities and ambitions. I am less of a fan of intricate clever plots where rather generic characters march around with precision to unfold the miraculous engine before me replete with clever twists. Ideally of course you would pack both seamlessly into the same book space. Anyway, that’s the kind of book I like to write too. Emotionally engaging, unpredictable.

Follow this link to read the whole thing. =)