BS: I pushed for that for a while, and it just kicked me in the head. So eventually I was like, let’s try a three-year cycle: eighteen months on Stormlight and then eighteen months on whatever else I want to do—the weird wacky stuff. I’m on draft number four right now, I finished it yesterday. And I do five drafts on most of my books. I have the final polish left to do and it’s due July 1st.
CP: How do you manage that amount of material? You have your team, and of course the folks at Tor, but I know [revisions] get exhausting, I’ll finish 300, 400 pages and say “I just finished a book! I still have another book to go!”
BS: I’ve gotten to the point where I know how much I can do in a day without burning myself out. Lots of practice has gotten me there. I look at the word count, and right now Rhythm of War is 474,000.
CP: Gaaaah.
BS: I usually cut 10 percent in the last pass so it’ll end up at 430,000.
CP: Is this your biggest book?
BS: Oathbringer is 460,000—it started at 540,000, and it needed a lot of trimming. I need that final pass to rein it in, to tighten everything up. I cut 10 percent from each chapter. If I’m doing actual daily new prose writing I can do between 2,000 and 3,000 words a day. Stephen King does 2,000 words a day, and I always thought that was a good model for me, I really admire King’s work, and his work ethic.
CP: How much are you getting through when you’re editing or revising?
BS: In Draft 2.0, 20,000 words a day. It’s fast because I haven’t gotten any feedback from anyone else yet, I’m only fixing things I know I need to fix. Drafts Three and Four are alpha readers, my team and the Tor team, and beta readers, who are the first audience test. My team goes through all of those and insert the comments in the actual document.
CP: And how do you manage to not get overwhelmed by the feedback?
BS: With beta reads it’s a matter of submerging myself in the main feedback. Give me a twenty or thirty page document, and I’m going through beginning to end, reading, absorbing, and changing what I need to change. Really it’s a matter of bug-hunting. I list the problems from most important to least important.
CP: I do the same thing.
BS: I’m trying to cross things off the list, and there will still be things at the bottom of the list, but I can fix those during the publishing draft.
CP: How do you manage—it’s easy for editing to feel like it’s an attack on yourself, your ego. You’ve created something you care about deeply, and now here are people—whose advice you’ve solicited—who are telling you every single thing they think you did wrong. How do you keep a sense of success through that process?
BS: My beta readers know to talk about what they like, also. Cause, it feels like getting punched in the face.
CP: Yup.
BS: But a good editor knows to periodically tell you what they like as well. You get this carrot and stick sort of thing. But your mind is going to naturally ignore it, it’s going to gravitate to the one-star reviews. It is rough. But, I asked for this, and I know it’s going to make the book better. I wrote thirteen books before I sold one—and when I actually started selling was when I started listening to feedback, and learning how to take it.
CP: As Stephen King says, “No one gets it right the first time.” We all edit, we all revise—what’s the saying in the military? “Embrace the suck.” Go toward the hardest bit because that’s how you get better.
CP: You’re coming up on the fourth book of the Stormlight Archive coming out—is this the end of the first cycle of the series?
BS: Yeah. It’s really two five-book series, but ten is so mythologically important to the books that I had to call it a ten-book series. There will be some character continuity between the two series, but I kind of have them very separate in my mind. I’m coming to the first ending.
CP: And, how does that feel? Where are you at with it?
BS: The Stormlight Archive will be the defining series of my career. It’ll be the longest, and the one I’ve spent the most time on. If I’m going to be finishing the next six books of this, and doing them every three years, there’s twenty more years of writing on this series. It’s inseparable from what I wanted to do with fantasy. This is where I set out to carve my space in the genre. I’m on a very long journey to finish. Each of those five books have things built into them, in my original outline, which I’m really excited to share with the readers. There are secrets and character moments, and big set pieces that I’ve designed now for twenty years, which I finally get to write when I write each book.
CP: [delighted laughter]
BS: I’m looking forward to people finally being able to read it.
CP: You told me the final scene! Was it for the Stormlight Archive or for the Cosmere as a whole?
BS: I can’t remember which one I told you . . . my team all knows both of those. So I could have told you either one!
CP: I think it was Cosmere, but I’m going to keep that to the grave. Without spoilers, what can readers look forward to?
BS: There is a character moment that was one of the pillars of my outline from the very beginning. This scene that I was working on. There were only two or three scenes that were core pillars. My beta readers feel like it landed. There won’t be a moment like this again until Book Seven or Eight.
Audience Questions!
BS to CP: Do you plan a continuation of The Inheritance Cycle?
CP: Yes, I’m planning on more collections of short stories, because I find them to be palate cleansers, and a fun way to explore the world. There are a couple of large standalone novels in the world that I want to write in the future, probably the biggest one is the one I’ve affectionately been calling BOOK FIVE. [laughter]
CP to BS: Will we ever get anything from Wit’s point of view? Maybe an interlude?
BS: Each book has an epilogue from Wit’s point of view. You will eventually get his backstory. That’s a three-book series that I’m planning after the Stormlight Archive narrative is done, so I’ve gotta keep moving! I actually think it would be fun sometime to write a novel of him telling a story.
Brandon Sanderson’s Rhythm of War, Book Four of the Stormlight Archive, will be out from Tor Books on November 17, 2020.