Christopher Paolini: It’s the biggest published book I’ve done—you’ll laugh at it cause you write quite a bit beyond this, but it’s 309,000 words. A big boy.
Brandon Sanderson: Enormous!
Paolini added that “The goal was to do an entire series in one book. I’ve done the multi-book series with over a million published words, and I think you hold the record for the biggest of the big series at the moment—but I wanted to tell a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end in one volume. It was a personal challenge, and I thought it was going to save me time instead of writing a series, but it took me nearly ten years to write the darn thing anyways!”
BS [laughter]: Is there any A Fire Upon the Deep influence on this? That’s a book you’ve read?
CP: That is a book I’ve read, and I also had the enormous pleasure of meeting the author, Vernor Vinge, in an airport, between cons. I also enjoyed Rainbows End.
BS: I get a little bit of that! It’s really a cool book—I’m loving all the names, unless I’m completely off base, these are all little inside jokes? I’ve caught some aliens—
CP: Mm-hm.
BS: I’ve caught some science fiction author names for some of the names of planets and space stations, I’ve definitely caught some Dune here and there, little nods. I think it’s really cool.
CP: I threw everything and the kitchen sink in. I wear my influences on my sleeve with this book. This is my love letter to the genre of science fiction, and hopefully it shows some growth as an author, as a technician of storytelling. Of course it’s also frustrating, and I’m sure you appreciate this—this book is coming out and hopefully people will see some growth as an author on my end, but then I’ve learned so much from this already that I’m like, “I need to write the next thing!”
BS: I’ve read a lot of your books, and this is by far your best technical writing so far. I’m loving the book. I can see the influences, but it doesn’t feel derivative in any way. It’s its own thing. This is a big departure in a lot of ways for you.
CP: The short fiction was a “breather moment” while working on a big book. I wanted to write something that had a beginning, middle, and end in one cohesive piece. And I watched your video where you were discussing Sonic the Hedgehog!
BS: Oh, did you?
CP: I did! And for anyone who is an aspiring author, I highly recommend that you watch. The way you broke that story down is exactly how my sister and I break down stories and discuss them. The funny thing is that the longest short story that I wrote, in The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm, was actually because I watched a Hollywood movie . . . the 2014 Godzilla film?
BS: Yeah.
CP: As an audience member I felt that the film fundamentally misunderstood what its own metaphor was, what its own unfulfilled promise was, which was that Godzilla was a personification of death. And so as a result, you can’t defeat death, and the main character has to come to terms with death. So that was my short story—I wanted to do my own little take on that . . . but anyway!
BS: No, that’s really cool! This topic is really cool, because I would say that half of my works are responses in that same way. It’s not that I see something and say “Oh, they did it wrong” but I’ll see something and I say, “Huh, they didn’t take the path that I think would be interesting to take.”
CP: Mm-hm.
BS: So, let’s take that path! See where it takes me. That’s the origin of Mistborn, my first series, it’s me saying “OK, what if the Dark Lord won?” It’s not a critique on The Lord of the Rings, but it is me saying “what if we took it in a different direction?” You know how people often ask “Where do you get your ideas?” For me, that’s the only surefire way—there’s a theme of me responding to other pieces of art, that’s where I think a lot of art comes from, right?
CP: Culture in general! It’s a conversation not only with ourselves, but with other creators. I can read The Way of Kings and I start thinking about how you tackled the creative process, the storytelling process. I carried the hardcover of The Way of Kings in my leather bag for the entire friggin’ book tour of Inheritance. I carried it with me the whole tour.
BS: I am so sorry about that.
CP: [laughter]
BS: You’ll have that experience with this one—you’ll be making people carry giant hardcovers around all over the place.
CP: But I remember when I read The Way of Kings, there were two things that struck me, like from a technical standpoint—it felt like you tackled a fantasy world almost as if you were writing science fiction. And I found the pacing fascinating. You didn’t pace it as though it were going to be a standalone novel, or even like it was a trilogy—you paced it like it was the first book of a ten-book series, and each book was going to be about one thousand pages, and you just don’t see that, normally. As a reader I relaxed and said, “OK! I’m in for this big ride.”
BS: Pacing for the big books is a really interesting challenge, right? On a littler book, you generally want to pace it so the reader has a sense that they need to get through it now. You can pace it in such a way that they feel this tension pulling them through. But in a large book that’ll exhaust readers. Your book, I think you did an interesting job with the pacing, because I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that has chapters and subchapters?
CP: I’m going to admit I shamelessly stole that from The Dark Tower. Specifically because when I wrote The Inheritance Cycle, I was doing the occasional thing with the line break to indicate a jump in time or in space, but I never felt comfortable with it. By adding the subchapters, which are numbered in the book, it gave a real sense of framing for it. Then I felt the freedom to make them as long or as short as I needed to.
BS: I think it really helps with the pacing. The danger with an enormous book is that it can feel turgid. But with this, each chapter feels like a mini fast novel? Like ripping you through with the subchapters, but then it gives you the breaks you need to relax a little bit. It felt like it’s paced like a much shorter book, which will make it read fast, but still feel like you had an entire meal.
CP: When I came to this book, the phrase I’ve become fond of is “informational density.” As a reader I’ve noticed that the really great books—it doesn’t matter what the genre is—tell you something new and interesting with every sentence. For the most part they’re doing something interesting in every line.
CP: We’ve been talking about my book, but I want to talk about yours! Rhythm of War, Book Four of The Stormlight Archive.
BS: I’ve settled into this groove where I do the Stormlight books in three-year cycles. When I was newer at this, I thought “Ah, one a year!”
CP: I remember you saying that.
BS: Robert Jordan got one out a year in the first part of his career! His first books were like one out a year. I could do that! . . . no I can’t do that.
CP: [laughter]