Dragaera

Brust interview

Tue May 11 08:43:16 PDT 2004

On Tue, May 11, 2004 at 07:41:19AM -0700, skzb <skzb at dreamcafe.com> wrote:
> My problem with using ideas that I've read on the list has nothing to do
> with any legal questions.  It has more to do with thinking, "Oh.  Someone
> else came up with that?  Well, I guess it must be too predictable/"  I hate
> being predictable.  On the other hand, changing something I think is cool
> just because someone else had the idea is problamatical.

This paragraph is fairly reassuring.  

It is widely speculated that one of the reasons Jordan's series 
degenerated so rapidly was because the online fan base engaged in 
such extensive (one might even say "rabid") analysis of the 
books.  The author noticed this and seemed to become annoyed that 
we were unravelling a substantial fraction of his mysteries 
before the story did, and so he started obfuscating them even 
more (some would argue that he even changed his plans to avoid 
giving the "accepted wisdom on the net" answer to some).  

This resulted in a lot of wasted effort, not to mention a lot of 
bad writing that could have been avoided.

I'd very much like to encourage the Resident Author not to fall 
into that trap.  Write what you think is cool; if we didn't think 
those ideas were cool, too, we wouldn't be here, so it's not 
surprising that some cool ideas are shared.  Trying to be 
unpredictable just to be unpredictable is not a good idea. :)

-- 
Matthew Hunter (matthew at infodancer.org)
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