Question about Brandon’s outlining process.
Oh good question… You picked the hardest one to outline, by far. Normally the outlining process for me, I sit down and write Plot, Setting, Character in a new sheet. […] And then I put all the things that I have been thinking in my head for a while, that I’ve been brainstorming with friends or– Every book that I write I spent a long time planning it out, it’s when ideas connect together that you know you have a great book. One idea is not enough, multiple ideas that influence each other in cool ways is a book to me. So I write all this down and start looking for structure and what are people’s plots. Now the way I outline I’m goal-based. Say I want to have an interesting relationship between these two characters, how can I achieve that? What is the result at the end and what are the steps to getting there? […] Somebody wants to learn to use the magic, what’s my end goal, what are my steps to get there, what cool scenes will there be. Those are all separate in my outline, it’s not like in my outline there’s “Chapter one: this, this, this, and this”. It’s Goal and how to achieve, Goal and how to achieve, Goal and how to achieve. Now the Stormlight Archives is a strange beast, it is plotted as ten books, each focusing on a character, and for that what I did was sit down and lay out more in prose form by vision for the whole series and then I wrote a paragraph for each book. Then I did what I just told you for the first book, then I wrote the first book. Then I went back and did a bigger, much more detailed outline for the rest of the series. The interesting thing about the Stormlight books is that I actually plot each one like I plot a trilogy. So for instance, Words of Radiance you can find breakpoints between quote-unquote books, that this volume is actually written as three books with a short story collection as the interludes woven between. That’s how I approach those books. My publisher has a love/hate relationship with the Stormlight Archive because they feel they could publish them as four volumes and make four times as much money but I won’t let them. But they don’t want me to write other things because they really want more Stormlight because Stormlight is the one that sells the best out of everything. So they are like “Write more Stormlight, but can we split it please?” and I say “No you can’t split it” and they go *arghhh* […]
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