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Originally Posted by =X=
Yes I do recall seeing a documentary where Tolkein had to break up his books into several books.
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Tolkien wasn't an author in the usual sense we think of nowadays. He was a college professor who began by inventing languages, and then invented the people who spoke those languages, and their history.
He was also trying to craft a specifically British branch of Faery, which meant derivations from Norse and Germanic sources, and no drawing from Celtic mythology.
But I suspect he didn't even think about the practical issues of publishing his work until he had it to the point where Unwin and Allen, his original publishers, took an interest.
He was refining the story taking shape in his head, through many iterations. I have some of the volumes of annotated manuscripts his son Christopher has been releasing, and it's interesting to watch the development over time.
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What you say is still true today there are probably limits imposed on authors today.
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There are indeed. They are greater than they used to be, but will still be limits on how large a single book can be.
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The scary thing is size is a bit harder to grasp electronically and one thing that scares me is authors not feeling a need to refine their work down to a tolerable page size.
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"Page size"?
Oh, I think size is graspable for authors. Especially when the default standard writing tool is Microsoft Word, and Word apparently gets troublesome on really long manuscripts.
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I recognize that for many folks the experience of getting lost in a world is part of the fun, I have several friends that enjoyed that aspect of the series. Unfortunately for me I cannot enjoy that aspect alone. I realized after reading his latest book, at the time, I no longer enjoyed the his books they felt more like a chore to read than pleasure.
A book needs to move forward with some direction, his books just seemed to be moving away with no real direction. Just think 20yrs later and he still has not closed the series. He had to pass-away and somebody else take over for the series to end.
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As of the last couple that Jordan did, there was motion. I got a sense of zwischenzug (German for "intermediate move"), to use a chess term. He was moving his pieces on the board, and getting things positioned for the end game.
I'm sorry he didn't live to complete things himself, and I'll be curious to see what Brian Sanderson has done. I have suspicions about a couple of places where Jordan might have been going in his development, but one of the things he's been good at is not going where he seems to be. When you read his books and say "I bet I know what's going to happen next!", chances are you're wrong.
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Dennis