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Tristan Brand

You're planning the Stormlight Archive as this big long ten book series and I imagine that obviously look at your work with the Wheel of Time the other big long epic series, one of the issues that at least some fans perceive is that these series are at least perceived to sag or at least slow down at some point in the middle. People start to get very bogged down and it takes years for the next one's out, is that something you're considering for your structuring of the Stormlight Archive and what are you trying to do to address that?

Brandon Sanderson

Excellent question, it is actually something that I've very consciously thought about when designing this story. One of the reasons that I didn't release The Way of Kings when I wrote it back in 2002 is that I hadn't figured out this problem yet. And it's one of the reasons that I shelved the book and re-wrote it from scratch back a couple of years ago.

I really was conscious of it because I have an advantage over authors like George Martin and Robert Jordan, who have had these kinds of accusations levelled at them, in that I've read them! I've read Robert Jordan. Robert Jordan didn't get to read Robert Jordan in the same way, and I can see he's kind of pushed his way through the snow for some of us to fall behind and see some of the things that he did, even after he said "Boy, I think I might have done that differently." We can learn from that.

What I'm trying to do is... first off The Stormlight Archive is divided in my head into two five book series, it is a ten booker but it is two big five book sequences, which I do think that will give me more of a vision of a beginning, middle, and end for each of the sequences.

The other thing I'm doing is I consciously did some little thing in the books. For instance, one of the reasons we end up with sprawl in epic fantasy series is I think writers start writing side characters and getting really interested in them. The side characters are awesome, they let you see the breadth of the world and dabble in different places. What I did is I let myself have the interludes in The Way of Kings, and I will continue to do those in the future books, and I told myself I can write these interludes but those characters can't become main characters. Those characters have to be just glimpses.

The other main thing that I'm doing is that each book in The Stormlight Archive is focused on a character. That character gets flashbacks and we get into the backstory and that gives me a beginning, middle, and end and a thematic way to tie that book together, specifically to that character, which I hope will make each character, each book feel more individual.

Which is part of also the problem I feel with the big long series, that they start to blend. And then, if the author starts to view some of them as blending then you stop having big climaxes at the ends of some of them and view them too blended together. This isn't a problem when the series is finished. I think that when the Wheel of Time can be read beginning to end straight-through, a lot of this worry about middle-meandering is going to go away, because you can see it as a whole. But certainly while you're releasing it, you get just these little glimpses that feel so short to us.

I feel that if I can take each book and apply it to one character, give a deep flashback for each one and thematically tie it to them, each book will have its own identity and hopefully will avoid some of that. That's my goal, who knows if I'll be able to pull it off but it is my intention.

Google Moderator

You seem to be pulling it off so far Brandon.

Brandon Sanderson

Well I only have one book yet! I mean none of these, none of these series... they all started with great first books, in fact I feel that a lot of them are great all the way through, but the sprawl issue doesn't usually start to hit til around book four is really where the, where the problems show up.

Questioner

Have you chosen a flashback character for book two of Stormlight Archive yet?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. I have chosen to use Shallan as the flashback character for Stormlight Two. I feel that her narrative is the best one right here, and so I pretty much filled out the first five, 'cause Stormlight's in two five-book narratives, where we're going to anchor it with Kaladin is the first one and Dalinar is the last one, and then we'll use Shallan, Szeth is number three, and then probably Navani is number four. That's the one I haven't nailed down yet. It's either Navani or a character I can't tell you yet.

zxg15 (paraphrased)

I asked him for more info on what he meant when he said that Stormlight will be organized as two 5 book series within the total 10 books.

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Understandably he didn't want to give much away, he wouldn't say if there would be a time skip or not. He did tell me that there would be a large change in tone between books 1-5 and 6-10. Also, he said that since book 2 is now going to be Shallan's, he wants Dalinar's book to be number 5. He then talked about how the 5 characters that were introduced in depth in WoK would be the the 5 flashback characters for the first 5 books and the others would be more focused on in the final 5 books.

Questioner

What’s the status of the second book of the Stormlight Archive?

Brandon Sanderson

I will be going right into that as soon as I finish A Memory of Light. I have it outlined, I have decided whose book it will be, each of the Stormlight books will have a focal character who gets flashbacks. It’s going to be Shallan’s book. So the first major cycle of the Stormlight Archive is looking like it’s going to be Kaladin, Shallan, Szeth, Navani, and Dalinar as the five book arc. And if you haven’t heard, I’m doing it in two 5-book arcs, so the first 5 books should wrap a lot of things up and whatnot. And I might even stop then and do like an Elantris sequel and things like that, and then start the second 5-book arc. So I will do that immediately, I’m actually planning to do that and have it out, it probably won’t be next year, it’ll probably be the following spring, but it’s a little over a year away. I’ve got it all outlined, so it should be...I’ve done a lot of work on it, I just haven’t written it.

Questioner

I really appreciate all the work you've done on the Wheel of Time, and everything else. Now that you're starting your own really epic fantasy series, you know, I've noticed an issue that Robert Jordan had and that George R.R. Martin has is that the series kind of bloats on them over time. So, how would you approach that with your series, and how are you dealing with the possibility of that happening?

Brandon Sanderson

That's a really good question, actually. A lot of the great series that we love did get a little bit...they feel like they may have gotten away from their authors a little bit, and I have a big advantage that Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin didn't have, which is that I got to read Robert Jordan and George R.R. Martin. [laughter] And I say that—we laugh at it—but if you really think about it, a lot of these big epic fantasy series, these people are treading new ground, and they didn't have—you know, the best they have is Tolkien, three books. What do you do with that? I mean, maybe you have Zelazny with Amber, and a lot of books, but they're really thin, and I mean nobody had really done what Robert Jordan did, before he did it.

What I'm trying to do, is I kind of have a mantra for myself on these books, is that they must be...each one must be individual. Meaning, it's gotta have its own conflicts, its own feel, it's gotta have its own art. I can't let them just blend together, and I think that will help a lot. And so, for doing that, that's why I assign each book in the series a character, and I do the flashbacks in that book for that character in that book, and tell what I want to be a complete arc for that character in that book. Doesn't mean the other characters won't be in the books; Kaladin will be in all the books; Dalinar will be in all the books—assuming they survive. [laughter] But each book will have a character as being kind of the soul of that book, which I think will make them all feel self-contained, and be their own thing.

The other thing that I'm doing is I'm trying to avoid secondary character bloat. One of the reasons secondary characters show up is you want to show off this little piece of the world, and so you write this thing about this character, and then you're like, "Wow, that's an awesome character; I wanna write more!" And then...BOOM. And so, in The Way of Kings, I actually gave myself these Interludes, which are in-between parts of the book; I let myself do basically two short stories set in the world, or maybe three, and the purpose of that is to show the scope of the world, but to use characters that you don't really need to come back to, for most of them. And so it kind of gets it out of my system, but I have kind of written down as my mantra: "These characters cannot become main viewpoint characters." That's the purpose of doing them in that, and so by doing that and giving myself a sort of pressure valve in one way, and a kind of constraint in the other, that each book must be about a specific character, I'm hoping it will keep this series more focused.

unknown

Was Vallano, Szeth's grandfather, also a Truthless? And if not, what did he do to disgrace the Shin?

Brandon Sanderson

No, Vallano was not Truthless.

Szeth was a very respected member of his society, once. There are clues to what happened in his story, but you won't hear it in full until he gets his book. (Which will include his flashbacks.)

radda

Will Stormlight 2 have more Shallan? I require more Shallan.

Brandon Sanderson

Much more Shallan. It's probably going to be her 'flashback' book.

ISw3arItWasntM3

Do you plan to write the stormlight archive books with the same POV characters throughout the series (like WoT) or do you think that you give other characters POV (aSoIaF) as the series continues?

Brandon Sanderson

Most of the main POV characters have been introduced. Each book will take one major character (Kaladin, Dalinar, Adolin, Jasnah, Shallan, Navani, Szeth, Taln) and give them 'flashback' sequences in the same way Kaladin got flashbacks in the first book. There are some open spots for which I'm toying with other characters being used.

Yserbius

What made you decide on a 10 book length for The Stormlight Archive? Do you have the entire thing planned out, including how it will be paced and plotted?

Brandon Sanderson

I had eight characters I wanted to tell a story about, and wanted to give each one a book to include flashbacks and specific character development. Once I got to outlining, I realized that I had material for about ten books, and ten was a very special number in the world. So I settled on that.

It will be paced and plotted much as the first, though I plan the future books to be a little shorter than the first establishing one. There will be two primary five-book arcs, so you could consider it two series of five, if you'd prefer.

Louise

Have you already decided whether it's Shallan or Dalinar for the book 2 central plot? What about the tentative title?

Brandon Sanderson

I keep going back and forth. I'll probably have to sit down and completely write out both of their backstories--their flashback sequences--and after finishing that see which one best fits the theme and the plot of the novel, the story I'm trying to tell. So it's going to take a while to decide that, and it would require enough of my focus that I really need to do A MEMORY OF LIGHT first. So we'll know more after A MEMORY OF LIGHT is finished and I begin writing out their sequences

Cory

Will there be flashbacks for a different character in this next book?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. Each book will explore a different character in flashbacks, though Kaladin will also end up getting another book with flashbacks of his sometime down the line.

17th Shard

On later Stormlight Archive novels will there always be one character we get to see flashbacks for?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, and it should rotate to different characters. I have not yet decided who gets book two yet. It's really between Dalinar and Shallan and I go back and forth on whose story I want to tell next.

17th Shard

So, does that mean there's going to be 10 different characters that would be seen?

Brandon Sanderson

It's very likely there will be 10 different characters. The only caveat on that is that part of me really wants to do a second Kaladin book. And so I haven't quite decided who gets flashback books. You can probably guess from reading this book some of them who do. But there are some that don't necessarily absolutely need them, so Kaladin may get a second flashback book.

17th Shard

So, fingers crossed, fingers crosses, will Szeth get one?

Brandon Sanderson

Szeth will get a book. Yes, Szeth will get a book. Shallan and Dalinar will get books.

17th Shard

Adolin?

Brandon Sanderson

Um…I'm not sure on him yet. He's one that could, maybe not. I mean he's got some interesting things going on but we'll see how the series progresses first. There are characters who will get flashback books that you haven't yet met or at least not spent much time with.

17th Shard

The Way of Kings has a very interesting format. Why did you decide to go with that format and what prompted you to include the interludes?

Brandon Sanderson

That's another excellent question. You guys are really on the ball. Uh…so, what went through my head is one worry that we have in epic fantasy. The longer the series goes, and the more characters you add, the less time you can spend with each character. This gets really frustrating. You either have the George R. R. Martin problem where he writes a book and doesn't include half of them, or you get the middle Wheel of Time problem where he will jump to each character for a brief short time and no one's plot seems to get advanced.

If you look back at Elantris, I did a lot of interesting things with form in that novel, and I wanted to try something interesting with form for this series that would in some way enhance what epic fantasy does well and de-emphasize the problems. And I thought that I could do some new things with the form of the novel that would allow me to approach that, and so I started to view the book as one main character's novel and then short novellas from other characters' viewpoints. Then I started adding these interludes because I really like when, for instance, George Martin or Tad Williams or some other authors do this. You'd jump some place and see a little character for a brief time in a cool little location, but the thing is, when most epic fantasy writers do that, that character becomes a main character and you're just adding to your list. I wanted to actually do something where I indicated to the reader that most of these are not main characters. We're showing the scope of the world without being forced to add a new plot line. And I did that is because I wanted to keep the focus on the main characters and yet I also wanted to have my cake and eat it too. I wanted to show off the interesting aspects of the world.

When you read Way of Kings Prime someday you'll see that there are six major viewpoint characters, all in different places, with all different plots, because I wanted to show off what was happening in different parts of the world. That spiraled out of control even in that one book. Keeping track of who they were because there were such large gaps between their plot lines was really problematic. Instead I condensed and made, for instance, Kaladin's and Dalinar's plots take place in the same area as Adolin's. And so, even though you have three viewpoints there the plot lines are very similar. Or, at least they're interacting with one another.

And so the interludes were a means to jump around the world. They're essentially short stories set in the world, during the book, so when you get this book, maybe you can think of it this way: Kaladin's novel with Shallan and Dalinar each having shorter novels or novelettes or novellas, with occasional, periodic jumps to short stories around the world. And then of course Kaladin's flashbacks. As we've mentioned, every book will have flashbacks from its main character to enhance the main plotline.

I'm hoping that form will do a couple things. It'll show the scope of the world without us getting too overwhelmed by characters we have to keep track of. You know when you hit interludes that you aren't going to have to pay attention to most of them. You can read and enjoy them, but you aren't going to have to remember them. How about that? You can want to pay attention but you don't have to remember them. By the end of the book, the main characters' arcs and flashbacks should have been resolved and you should have a feel of a completer story from that main character. And then we have other characters that are doing things that are essentially just starting plotlines.

In the next book, you'll get another character with a big arc and flashbacks. The major characters from previous books will still have parts and viewpoints; Kaladin will still be important in the next book but it won't be "his book". He'll get a novella-length part instead.

17th Shard

Will the next Stormlight Archive books have interludes as well?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, all of them will have interludes. And you will, very occasionally, revisit people in the interludes. I'll let myself have one interlude that's same between each part like we did with Szeth in this book.

Ah…Szeth's a little bit more of a main, major character, so you'll get, like, one four-parter and then you'll get what, eight just random [characters/viewpoints] around the world. And you may occasionally see those characters again, but you don't have to remember them; they're not integral to understanding the plot. They should add depth and they should be showing you some interesting things that are happening in the world while we're focused [on a few important plot lines]. I don't to travelogs in my books; my characters are not going to be sweeping across the countryside and showing you all the interesting parts of the world. I tend to set my books in a certain place and if we travel someplace, we skip the travel.

But that means the chances of us ever visiting Gavland, um…or Bavland I think I ended up naming it…

17th Shard

Was that the place with the grass?

Brandon Sanderson

Shinovar is where Szeth's from. Bavland is where Szeth is owned by the miner and things like that. I can't remember what I renamed that. Originally I called it Gavland, and then we had a Gavilar and so my editor insisted that it be changed. I think it's Bavland now.

And so the chances of us ever visiting there with a major character and a long plot are very low. But, you know, being able to show just a glimpse of Szeth there allows me to give some scope and feel to the world.

Brent Weeks

So something that I'd love to hear your thoughts on are if you think as your career progresses that you can get away with things—story things—that you couldn't when you were less well known?

Obviously, as we grow in our storytelling skills and experience with the industry, we can try harder challenges and succeed where we wouldn't have before. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm more curious about if you think we train our readers (and book store buyers). I think—pure speculation because I haven't yet dug in to my copy of The Way of Kings—that if a 400,000 word tome hit my desk from someone I'd never heard of and when I began reading, I found it didn't follow any epic fantasy structure I knew, I'd be much more likely to assume it was just an amateur mess—but because it says "Brandon Sanderson, #1 NYT Bestselling Author" on the front, I trust that you're Doing Something Big. I think I read it differently. Do you agree?

I run into the same sort of thing: I've got a decent reputation for deep characters now, so when a character does something contradictory (dumb jock says something brilliant or whatever), my readers think, "Oh, there's more going on here under the surface, can't wait to see what." Rather than, "This character is inconsistent. Bad writing."

And I would contend that precisely because you're a magic system guy, that if you don't explain the magic in TWOK, people are NOT going to say, "Good book, but magic system doesn't make sense." They're going to say, "Obviously brilliant stuff going on with the magic, can't wait until book 12 to see what!" (That's hyperbole with a wink, not snark.)

Do you believe you can get away with storytelling stunts, elisions, or tricks now that Brandon Sanderson the debut author couldn't have? If so, what's the good part of that—and is there a bad side?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, there are things I can get away with now that I couldn't before—or ones I didn't try to get away with before. One big one is flashbacks. In my early years as a writer, published and unpublished, I stayed far away from flashbacks. Partially because I'd been told to do so, and partially because I'd seen them done poorly from a large number of other new writers. There are good reasons to stay away from them, and the advice is good. If you do flashbacks the wrong way, you'll break the flow of your narrative, risk undermining the tension of your story, confuse the reader, and basically make a big old mess.

Then Pat Rothfuss comes along and does a narrative-within-a-narrative where the entire book is basically flashback, and it works really well. I do know, however, that Pat had a lot of trouble selling that book of his to start. (Though admittedly, I'm not sure if that was the flashbacks or not. I seem to remember he added the frame story later in the process, and that the huge length of the book was what was scaring people away at first.)

I guess this brings us back to the first rule of writing: you can do whatever you want, if you do it well. Regardless, I decided—after some deliberation—that I'd use flashbacks as an extensive device in The Way of Kings and the rest of the series. None of these were in earlier drafts of the novel, however, because I knew that many readers (and editors) have a knee-jerk reaction against flashbacks because of how likely they are to screw things up. Now that I'm established, however, I feel that people will trust me when they see them.

(One thing I'm leaving out is that I think I'm a better writer now than I was before, and if I'd tried these flashbacks during earlier days, I'd likely have flubbed them.)

Mad Hatter

If you can tell us, what's the tentative title for Book 2? And estimated release date? I know you've plenty left to tackle with WoT 14 so we'll take anything you say with that in mind.

Brandon Sanderson

Good. The tentative title was originally Highprince of War. I’m not decided on that yet, because it might be Shallan’s book, not Dalinar’s book. It depends on whose flashbacks I decide to tell, and which ones will complement the events of the next book. Though I have an expansive outline for the series, I really have to sit down and get a more detailed outline for the second book before I decide which title I want. If it’s Dalinar’s book, it will be Highprince of War. If it’s Shallan’s book it will not be. Tentative release date? I’m going to start on A Memory of Light January first, and it will be published probably about three months after I finish it. (Knowing how Tor’s publishing my books these days.) It will just depend on how long that takes to write. Then I will start on The Stormlight Archive 2 after that. I don’t anticipate that book being as hard to write as A Memory of Light, which is going to take a lot of time and a lot of work. Best case is that I finish A Memory of Light in August of next year, it gets published in November, and I write the sequel to The Way of Kings starting immediately after that and finish it in the middle of the next year so it can be published November 2012. That’s the best-case scenario. But it’s what I hope to be able to do; we’ll see.

Yeti Stomper

Structurally, The Way of Kings is fairly unique. There are three main POV characters in Kaladin, Dallinar, and Shallan, a handful of minor POV characters Szeth, Adolin, and then The Asides in which we only get a few pages of material largely unrelated to the overall plot. How will the cast grow and change in future volumes? Are you thinking of keeping each volume to a similar number of POVs or expanding it?

Brandon Sanderson

There will be a similar number, with a small expansion. At this point I believe you have met every one of the major viewpoint characters for the series. I don't want it to spiral out of control. I think too many viewpoint characters is a danger to epic fantasy, putting a writer in difficult predicaments for subsequent books—whether to leave some characters out, or whether to show a little bit of each of them without getting any major plot arcs for any of them.

So you've seen pretty much everybody. Now, at this point there are several who are major viewpoint characters for the series who we have not had many or any viewpoints from yet—Jasnah is one, a character who shows up in the epilogue is another, and there are a few others—but there are in my mind essentially eight or ten major characters in this series, and it will stick to that.

The interludes will continue to be what they are, which is that those characters may show up again, but it's unlikely that there will be many more viewpoints from them. The interludes are there because I wanted to have my cake and eat it too—I wanted to have the big sprawling epic with a lot of major viewpoints that we spend a lot of time on like Robert Jordan did, but I also wanted to have the quick jumps around that George R. R. Martin does, and they're two masters of the genre. And so I decided on the interludes as a way to jump around and show the world, to give depth and to give rounding to what's happening—give you little glimpses into important aspects of the world—but those characters are not people you have to remember and follow. Each of the interludes will have one character that you need to pay attention to, but you can take the interludes and read them and without having to focus too much on remembering and keeping track of what their plot is. Then you can jump back into the main characters. And that's always going to be the case in the books to come.

Each book will also have one character who has flashbacks throughout that book—we'll stick to one per book, and you will find out how they ended up where they are as we dig back into their past.

Mad Hatter

Did you move a lot of sections around during the development? It certainly seemed as though Kal's parts could go in a different order or start his story from the bottom and work out how he got there.

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, I did move things around a lot, particularly between the first draft of this book in 2003 and this draft. Things have jumped around all over the place, and even at the last minute I was moving different things between parts. Dalinar moved around more than Kaladin did because I was trying to decide where I wanted his ending in part two to happen. I wanted each of the parts to have its own climactic sense, to have a good ending particularly for the characters who didn't continue in the next part, when Dalinar and Shallan were alternating. So there was a lot of juggling and trying to decide—for instance, the prelude was added very late in the process. I'd had the prologue and decided I needed a second prologue as the prologue to the series, which is where the prelude came from.

Kaladin's entire sequence, with the flashbacks and things, was decided on early on, but remember I'd written this book once before. At the end of his flashback sequences, he makes a decision. Where this book deviates from the original I wrote in 2003 is that in the old version he actually made the opposite decision, and it happened in chapter one.

Now we get to see flashbacks of him making the other decision, which works so much better. It's one of those things where I was beating my head against the wall for years trying to figure out how to make his character work. His character was the part of the original The Way of Kings Prime that had not worked, and it took me years to figure out how to make his character work right. That one decision of his was the turning point.

Patrick

SFF authors such as Robert Jordan, George R. R. Martin, and Steven Erikson have all had problems keeping an adequate momentum over the course of long series. Looking forward and knowing that there are pitfalls associated with writing fantasy sagas of epic proportions, how do you plan to avoid this as you progress with The Stormlight Archive?

Brandon Sanderson

That is a wonderful question. The people you mention are brilliant writers whose skill and mastery of the genre I'm not sure I can ever get close to matching. I'll just put that out there. I do think, having read their work and seeing what they've had to do—I mean, if you look at something like the Wheel of Time or A Song of Ice and Fire, these authors have had to do this without a lot of guidance. When Robert Jordan wrote The Wheel of Time, there were no fantasy epics of that length out. There were trilogies; we had David Eddings' five-booker, but those were all much shorter than what The Wheel of Time became. There was just nothing like what Robert Jordan was doing. George R. R. Martin was kind of in the same boat. They've had to do this without examples to follow. What I have going for me is that I've been able to watch them do it—and as you said, watch them hit those pitfalls (and admirably do great jobs of crossing them)—and hopefully learn from their example. The main thing that I feel I need to do with this series is keep the viewpoints manageable. What Martin and Jordan both ran into is that the more viewpoints you add, the more trouble you get in, because when you get to the middle books you've got so many characters that either you have a book that doesn't include half of them, whereupon you have the latest George R. R. Martin book, or you do what Robert Jordan did famously in book 10 of the Wheel of Time, which is to give a little bit from each viewpoint and progress none of them very far. Which was also very problematic. Both of those solutions were very wonderful things to try, and I'm glad they did them, but what this says to me is, "Keep your viewpoints manageable." So that I won't run into that problem as much.

Another big thing I'm doing is that I'm trying to make sure each book has its own beginning, middle, and end so that it is a complete story when you read it. When I would read the Wheel of Time as just a fan, and get only a small sliver of the story, it would be very frustrating. When I reread the Wheel of Time knowing and having read the ending, it was a very different experience. I didn't feel a lot of the slowing and the frustration, because I knew the ending, and I knew how long the book series was. So if I can give a full story in each book, I think it will help with that.

The last thing I'm doing is this idea of the flashbacks for each character. I think that each character getting a book will fundamentally change the form of the epic fantasy, which will allow each book to have its own story without having to do something like Anne McCaffrey did, in which main characters in one book wouldn't have viewpoints in later stories. I think that made for a wonderful series, but for me it detracted a bit from the series' epic scope. I knew that if I read about a character, I wasn't going to get that character again, ever, and there was something sad about that. I don't want this series to be like that. Kaladin will be very important to the rest of the series—in fact, he's probably going to get another book, so he has two.

Hopefully the books will remain epic without having that drag. We'll see if standing upon the shoulders of giants as I am will help me to approach this in a different way.

Patrick

What can readers expect from the second volume of The Stormlight Archive? Any tentative title or release date?

Brandon Sanderson

I originally had titled the second book Highprince of War. I'm not sure if I will keep that title, depending on who its central character ends up being. With the Stormlight Archive, I am playing with the form of the epic fantasy novel in a way that's very exciting to me that I haven't done since Elantris. If you read Elantris, the form of that book was very important in how it developed, with its chapter triad system. The books in this series also have a very specific form. Each book will focus on one character. That character will get flashbacks exploring their past, to show you how they arrived where they are. But the book will progress the narrative for everyone. For instance, this book was Kaladin's book, and you got flashbacks for him. He will appear substantially in the next book, and you'll have lots of viewpoints from him, but it will be someone else's book and that character will get flashbacks. Each book will have one central character, with two or three major characters who have no flashbacks and not quite as much screen time—characters like Dalinar and Shallan in the first book, and to a lesser extent Adolin and Szeth.

The other thing that will continue is the interludes. I really enjoyed including those in the book; I'm not sure what people will think of them, but most of them are essentially going to be short stories set somewhere in the world, that enhance the main narrative and show different aspects of the world without forcing you to follow yet another plotline. They're just quick one-offs. You'll see those between parts in all of the other books.

Tentative release date? I have to finish A Memory of Light first. I don’t know how long that will take to write. In a perfect world, which is probably not going to happen, the ideal case is that I’m able to finish A Memory of Light by around August of 2011, whereupon it gets published in November 2011 and I start Stormlight Two January of the next year and it's ready for publication in November 2012. That would be the ideal situation. I often do manage to hit the deadlines in ideal situations, but I'm not making any promises on this one. I'm thinking 2012 spring is more likely for A Memory of Light, but we'll see.

Shawn Speakerman

So, obviously, since you spent ten years developing that kind of magic system for The Way of Kings, it can't be just a one-off book.

Brandon Sanderson

No, it's the start of a large series. I originally pitched it, and I said, "This is ten books." And the publisher said, "Oh. Make sure you don't tell too many people that." (Which, it's already too late.) "Because either they'll hear that and be scared off because it's too big. Or eventually you'll be getting near the end, and you'll wanna extend it a book or two, and you'll have locked yourself in." But ten is a very mythological number in this series, and it is based on these ten Orders of Knights, and I'm pretty sure it'll be the ten books.

One of the things I'm playing with is trying to figure a way that I can make a long series like that feel like individual books. You know, I want to have an epic series, but one of the problems with epic series is that you get a few books in, and you start to lose track. And it's hard to keep track of everything. I want each of the books to feel individual. And the way I'm doing that is, each book is essentially about one of the characters. And there are other characters that appear, other viewpoints and things, but in each book, we delve into one character's past and tell a complete story, beginning with having some flashbacks to what happened in their history, and having a full arc for that character. So each of the ten books... they take place chronologically, it's not like we're always jumping back and things like that, but in each character's book, we will see one character's past and history as it's influencing what's happening with them in the present. So, hopefully, that'll work something like Lost, or one of my models is the old Highlander TV series, with their wonderful use of blending flashback, where we can see a person's past and watch their present, and get a cohesive feel for each book. Hopefully.

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Twenty-Three

Spook Remembers Clubs

Ah, fever delusions are such useful things for us authors. Every character should go through a few of them so that we have an opportunity to explore their backstory through the use of a very timely flashback.

On a more serious note, I'm glad I had an excuse for this one. I like to avoid flashbacks when I can—they're usually more of a hassle and an annoyance than they are useful. However, on occasion they can add something that would have been very hard to get across any other way. This is one of those times. We get to see Spook as a kid, the day that Clubs recruited him.

By this time, Clubs had already served in the Lord Ruler's army and had been wounded in the leg and discharged. Though I rarely mention it, the borderlands of the empire include a large population of rogue skaa who are constantly causing trouble. Despite what's believed in the rest of the empire, there were in fact some successful uprisings, most notably these clans who stuck to the desert wastes out there on the edges of habitable land.

...

Anyway, Clubs had been discharged, an event that left him without a means of supporting himself. However, during his time fighting, he'd Snapped and become a Smoker. So, he found his way into the underground, where he was paid very nicely for his abilities.

He was always a lot more softhearted than he let on. When he discovered what was going on with his nephew, he spent quite a bit of his savings to go rescue him and bring him back to Luthadel. Clubs spent twenty times as much money on travel expenses (skaa were forbidden to travel, so he had to stick to some very expensive hidden routes) as he did on that bag of coins he left with Spook's family.

Spook never really knew how much Clubs sacrificed for him. Or perhaps he did—his uncle's death, after all, affected him quite dramatically. Clubs was a far better parent to the boy than either his father or mother ever had been.

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Nineteen

Yes, okay. I'll admit it. I started a chapter with a dream sequence. However, if you didn't realize that it was a dream before you got to the end, they you obviously haven't been paying much attention to the rest of the book. It's usually good advice to avoid dream sequences. It's particularly a good idea to avoid flashback dream sequences at the beginning of your novel. I did it anyway. The truth is, I liked what this scene did too much to cut it. My purpose was not to "fake out" or confuse–but simply to show some things that would be otherwise impossible to show in the novel.

I wanted to show AonDor working without Elantris' current limitations. The only way to do this–to really show this, rather than just describe it–was to have a flashback. So, I gave Raoden the dream where he able to remember the days before the fall of Elantris. You'll notice that I refer back to this dream several times through the chapter, using it as an example of several things Raoden considers.

...

There are a lot of other clues sprinkled through these chapters. If you're really clever, you could probably figure out from this chapter what is wrong with AonDor, and from that extrapolate why the Shaod went bad.

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter One

There are a couple of interesting things about this chapter. First off, it didn't originally start with Raoden waking up. When I first wrote the book, I threw Raoden directly into the city, line one. That original line was: "It wasn't until Raoden heard the gate swing closed behind him, booming with a shocking sound of finality, that he realized he had been damned."

While this line worked pretty well, I found I had to do an extended flashback showing him waking up and frightening the maid, etc. In the end, I realized that this was a bulky construction that didn't really speed the novel up–but rather slowed it down. So, I rewrote the first scene to have Raoden waking up, seeing Elantris, and then realizing he'd been taken by the Shaod.

My books tend to have what are called "steep learning curves." In other words, they take a little getting used to. Fantasy in general has a steep learning curve, and I don't tend to write very standard fantasies–I like to push the genre a little bit, introducing strange settings and irregular magic systems. Because of this, I have to be very careful at the beginnings of my books not to overwhelm the reader. This book was a good example–taking it a little easier, giving the reader a more cautious ease into Elantris, proved the better route.

Happily, I eventually managed to preserve the original line with its catchy feel. I don't usually do things like this–I don't believe in the standard "hook" idea. However, when I was thinking about this book, the first lines of the first three chapters were some of the first things that occurred to me. These three lines became the foundation for how I characterized the separate viewpoints, and they were part of what drew me to writing the book in the first place. If you go through and read them, I think they each have a little bit of zip, and hopefully invoke a sense of curiosity. These three lines introduce each character and one of their primary conflicts, and do it in a simple, clear way.

Maintaining this feel with the new first scene was important to me, even though it could be argued that the first line of chapter one is a bit of POV error. I'm revealing information that the viewpoint character doesn't yet know. I avoid these, but in this case, I felt that cohesion was more important than strict POV, right here.

I also did a second massive cut just after Raoden was thrown into the city. If you read the earlier draft, you'll see that he struggles with what has happened to him a bit more. There's even a brief section where he thinks about Ien and some of the seon's words of wisdom. I cut these sections because they just slowed the book too much. I figured Raoden's shorter soul-searching at the beginning, where he quickly comes to the decision to "look damnation in the face," helped the story move along. Again, I worry about my beginnings–perhaps too much–because they have a history of dragging just a bit. By pushing Raoden into walking through the city, I kept the pacing up.