I am curious if professional writers ever get psyched out by their own works. When you are working on an epic series, such as The Stormlight Archive, do you ever have moments of doubt in your ability to see it through to completion? Does it ever feel overwhelming that you have so many volumes ahead of you to write?
That’s not the part that psychs me out. Length doesn’t do that to me, particularly when I have a series well planned and I have a feel for how each book is going to be distinctive. This really helped me with the Mistborn series, for instance—when I planned it out, I planned each book to have its own identity. That kept me interested in them.
No, what psychs me out is that sometimes something just turns out really well, like The Way of Kings , and then I immediately start thinking, “I have to do that again, and I don’t know how I did it in the first place.” Writing becomes a very instinctive thing.
Most of the time when I talk about the process of writing, I’m analyzing what I’ve done after the fact. The truth of it is that right in the moment, right when you’re sitting there working on a book, a lot of that stuff isn’t going through your head. You’re just running on instinct at that point. So it’s easy to get psyched out when you’re not sure if you can ever do it again.
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