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Terry Brooks has plenty to be proud of. The American author has written over 23 bestsellers and has sold 25 million copies. He’s the author of The Sword of Shannara, A Knight of the World, Running with the Demon, and dozens of other fantasy books that have become fan favorites.

Needless to say, his legacy is secure. However, when Brooks was starting out, his first editor Lester del Rey warned him that not all his readers would see his talent. Brooks recounts his early conversations with the editor, and how it shaped him as an author.

“I didn’t get a call. I didn’t deserve a call,” Terry Brooks says during New York Comic Con 2022’s Titans of Fantasy panel. “I got a letter saying in so many words, we think this potentially a powerful book for work, but it needs work first. Which didn’t surprise me as I said, I never wrote anything. So, I thought, ‘Hmmm, this sounds promising.’”

Brooks and del Rey got in touch, and their working relationship began. “After going quite a ways to explain who he was, which I didn’t need him to do because I already knew who he was, because I read all his work in my science fiction stage of life, he said I will send you some notes that will be helpful to you on writing this book. 25 pages later I got the notes, and I worked on the notes and he said not bad, try again. That was the first year.”

“This went on for three years and he said rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. Do better, do better. Until finally he said this is good. And that’s when he told me you are going to have two schools of thought out there. You’re going to have the school of thought that you are the biggest ripoff of Tolkien of all time, and people are going to hate you for this, and hang you in effigy. And I said, ‘What’s the second half of this.’ He said, ‘The other people are going to love you and think you’re wonderful, and they’re going to say that you are way in fact better than Tolkien.’ And I thought, okay, I can live with that. But the catch of course was he says, ‘Both of them are not speaking true. Remember, you’re somewhere in the middle.’ And I took that to heart.”

It’s safe to say that Brooks has proven himself. Still, there are worse things in life than being told you’re similar to J.R.R. Tolkien.

For more on Terry Brooks, read about his thoughts on how the publishing industry has changed in the past fifty years.