I basically asked how long he thinks it will take him to write future Stormlight books, since The Way of Kings took 6 months to write and Words of Radiance took 18 months to write.
My anticipation is that Stormlight should take about 12 months to write. It went in six months the first time because I had written the book already once. And so being able to start over from scratch, I had done it all once, so it was really like, even though I really wrote every word new, it was like doing a second draft. Words of Radiance took so long because I had to lurch out of the Wheel of Time mindset. I hadn’t written this book before, I had written the other one, and I was so steeped in the Wheel of Time doing two books that it took a lot more to pull me out. And I would start on it and would end up getting distracted by some other project like one of the novellas or I’d start on it and then I’d go back and do a revision on Steelheart and then I’d start on it. Eventually I managed to start on it and stay in it, but it took that extra six months of spinning my heels before I really dug into the book. And so, I would say that I’m hoping 12 months. I might be able to do them faster, maybe nine months. I don’t know. They are big complicated books to write, and you can’t really do these on the speed that you can do other things. It doesn’t scale. If I can write a novella that’s 20k words and I can write that oftentimes in a week, that doesn’t mean that when I’m working on Words of Radiance I can do twenty thousand words a week, because it’s just a lot harder to get everything connected. The longer you go, the longer it winds up taking per word.
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