I remember coming to see you the very first time, when Elantris was just barely out. I’ve always been impressed, because I was a nobody and you had read my book. There can’t be many other publishers of major companies who read as many of the books as you do. Why do you do that?
Well, if I’ve got an editor working for me, it’s because I believe that that editor really has something to contribute. Moshe [Feder] was so enthusiastic about Elantris that I couldn’t not read it. And when I read it, I loved it.
I think it’s pretty clear we really loved what you were doing. I may be a little prejudiced as his publisher, but I think Robert Jordan really created one of the great epic fantasies of all time—a magnificent series, and you just finished it magnificently. We never could have turned it over to anybody that we didn’t have tremendous confidence in, Brandon. We loved what you were doing. It said to us, “Yes, he can do this.”
If you weren’t the type of publisher who read all the books, you couldn’t have fingered someone like you did with me. You couldn’t have said, “Give him to Harriet.” I remember she said she asked you to send her some of my books. And you said, “Well, I’ll send you Mistborn instead of Elantris . I’ve read them both and Mistborn is a better novel.”
Yep.
Elantris is a first novel. The second novel’s better. You knew to send her Mistborn , and it’s that book that made her choose me. In a lot of ways, if you hadn’t been on top of things, it may not have happened the way it did.
Well, Mistborn ‘s really great. We thought of it as a trilogy, but then you wrote more.
Yeah, I’m in the Robert Jordan tradition, right?
You are. But, anyway, it’s smaller scale than The Way of Kings . The Stormlight Archive is such a natural progression for you, I think. You’ve told me you picked up foreshadowing from Jordan.
Yep. One of the main things I learned from him.
If I recall, you said that you’d actually written the first draft of The Way of Kings in 2003, and that you had ideas for it way back to high school, and that when you and Moshe were talking about what to do after Elantris , you weren’t completely happy with it.
It wasn’t good enough yet. I had all these dreams, these aspirations of doing something big and momentous like the Wheel of Time, but I couldn’t do it yet. I tried, and I couldn’t. The problem was juggling the viewpoints, and the foreshadowing.
What I learned, when I was rereading the Wheel of Time to work on the series, was that Robert Jordan kept everything really quite focused for the early books of the series. He expanded it slowly. He didn’t hit you in the face with twenty viewpoints.
We had something like a seventy viewpoint chapter in the last book. That’s something you have to earn, across years of writing. You have to get the reader invested in the main characters. Without that investment in the main characters, I wouldn’t have cared enough to pay attention to the side characters.
It was a matter of scale and scope and building upon itself, rather than just trying to start off with this massive book that gets everyone lost. That’s one of the big things I did wrong in the original write. I had six main characters with full arcs and full viewpoints. It was too much. You couldn’t really attach to any of them. In the revision I cut that down to three, which really focused the book. It let me give the passion and focus on these three characters, so that you felt it when you read the book.
Yeah.
Working on those Robert Jordan books did that for me. Writing The Gathering Storm in specific was like going to the gym and having to lift some really heavy weights you aren’t used to. Either you get used to it or they crush you. I had to get used to it very quickly. That taught me a lot. I grew more that year than I had at any point in my writing career, except maybe the very first year I was writing.
When I look at the Stormlight Archive, you also like to jump around like George R. R. Martin. These are the two great epic novelists of our day, Martin and Jordan.
That’s really one of George’s big strengths: jumping to keep the pacing up. But even he didn’t start with a lot of characters at the beginning of the first book. I’ve actually tried to learn from Robert Jordan and George R. R. Martin and say, “Okay, what are the things they had to deal with? There are growing pains when you’re creating a series this long. There are certain things that are difficult to do. What looks like it was difficult to do for them, and what can I learn from them?”
I often say that I had a big advantage over Robert Jordan: I’ve been able to read Robert Jordan, and he couldn’t, at least not in the same way. Reading Robert Jordan showed me what happens when you create a big series. Nobody did this before him, right?
No.
There were no massive epic fantasy series of that scope at the time. You have things that are episodic, like [Roger Zelazny’s] Chronicles of Amber, which is fantastic, but it’s thin little episodes. You have nice trilogies like Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow and Thorn. But you don’t have anything with the scope of the Wheel of Time.
I was able to watch and benefit from what Jordan did. After the fact, he said “You know, I don’t think I would have done book ten the same way if I had it to do over again. I learned this and I learned that.” Being able to pay attention to those things allows me to hopefully use that.
When I went into The Way of Kings , I saw what George R. R. Martin does, jumping to these other places and giving you a scope of the world. It makes it feel epic. But if you spend too much time on jumping to those places, you get distracted and can’t focus.
So I did this thing where I would end a section of The Way of Kings and do what I call interludes, where we jump around the world. If this is the sort of thing that doesn’t interest you, you can skip those interludes and go on to the next part, where we get back to the main characters. But there are these little stories in between each part, showing the scope: “Here’s what’s going on around the world, now we focus.” You get distracted for a little bit, after a natural end point, then we come back to the main story.
That restrains me. It makes me say, “Okay, I can only put this many of these chapters in.” It makes me keep my eyes on the main characters more. One of my main goals with writing this series is being able to juggle that. It’s hard.
I think you’ve done a particularly great job of still having that broad, epic feel with fewer characters. You only have the three principals: Kaladin, Shallan, and Dalinar. Jordan had six, maybe eight depending on how you count them.
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