I like about your writing that you know when to stop. There are a lot of writers who just keep going and going and going and just don’t seem to know when to stop. How much of… pre-planning do you do for your writing, and when do you know when to… cut with the breaks off(?), like “you know, I’ve gotta finish this up, cause I don’t want this to drag out”, like so many other authors have done in past.
Um, so one advantage I had - I found I’m more rare in this, I though I would be the normal - but I am a heavy outliner, and usually what you find with outliners as writers is that they write good endings, but they have trouble with characters. Usually what we call a discovery writers who just kinda find their way through the book as they go is that they have this really lively characters and then their endings just kind of… whatever. And there are great discovery writers who have great endings, and there are plenty of outline writers who have great characters, you just have to learn to shore up(?) what you witness, learn your writing style, and for me that is my early books, the ones that weren’t published, where the weakness was characters. I was really worried about it, and so I spent like five years being “how do I make the characters work”, and I can only do this kind of hybrid method where I took my friends who I know write really great characters and I tried the methods they used, and so I kind of discovery-write characters and outline my plot and then if the characters grow into something the plot wouldn’t work for, I either take those characters out and grow someone else in that place or I build the plot for characters. So right now I have this floating outline that changes as I’m going. But I like good endings. And I feel like good endings are something that a lot of… Hollywood(?) skims on them, and a lot of books just don’t quite bring it together. And so it’s something very important to me, that I don’t start my book until I know what the ending I’m pointing toward is. And then (???) then I’m done, when I’ve got that ending and I’m pointed at it, when I finish it, I can then be done. I always feel that a piece of art that’s continuous, like writing a serialized work, it needs to finish at some point to actually be a piece of art. And that’s why, you know, Mistborn trilogy, the publisher hates that I ended the Mitborn trilogy with them dying, he said “yes, but you’ve just hit the bestseller list, hopped on the bestsellers”, and yep. I’m done, though. That is a piece of art. It’s finished. And it’s not, you know… one of the things I knew I was going to do in my life and I think the publishers were okay with it because a lot of things I was doing very early in my career was, you know, start with convincing readers - I hope I’ve convinced you all - that what they’re following is kind of Brandon Sanderson Book Brand rather than latching on to a series. A lot of authors have this trouble with people kind of latching on to the series and not the author, and then they feel tied to this series, and I never wanted to do that, cause like you said, I think there are plenty of series that have gone for a very long time and their authors always loved it. But I’ve also read series where it feels like the author feels chained to the series, and he only writes one of these when they actually need to pay checks or something like that, and I never wanted to be there. And so very early I’m like “I’m not writing the sequel to Elantris immediately, I might never” - I probably will, but I told people that it’s a standalone book, it’s just there, and if I write a sequel, it will be about different characters, cause that story’s done. Mistborn trilogy… yes, I’m gonna come back to the world, but the story of these characters is done. And training people to, like, “alright, I like what Brandon does, I’ll trust him that the next thing will be good too”, and… hopefully that works, and even if it doesn’t, I’m still gonna do what I do, I’d rather be a person who writes a lot of different things even if that means I have a smaller audience, because I really like jumping projects, it keeps me fresh. People ask me how am I so productive. It’s really a mix of two things. And I’m going on tangent, like I said! But people ask this all the time, and I’m like, “I don’t know how to answer that, I just do my job, right?” I write every day, consistently. I don’t write very quickly, I’m not a fast writer, but I write very consistently. I think I am lucky in that I didn’t get published earlier and so I had to have a job and all of this stuff and go through school all while finding time to write two thousand words a day and I did that for ten years before I got published, and so I had momentum, I knew I could just do these two thousand words a day and I would always have a book that I was working on and getting ready, and I also learned to jump projects a lot to keep myself fresh, and so when I finished something, I immediately looked for something very different to do, which will refresh my mind, let me hit the ground running. A lot of writers have downtime between books, and that downtime is because… I don’t know if you guys get this kind of, this… funk after you finish great book you’ve read and you realize like “oh maaan”, kind of like coming down from a high. Writers get that too, when you finish a book and you’re like “whoah”. But if I can get excited about the next thing very quickly, and start on it immediately, then I just keep my momentum and keep going. So it’s kind of a mixture of those two things, good habits and switching projects, so that means you shouldn’t be frustrated when I do a book that’s not your favourite series, whatever it is, because your favourite series would not be coming in faster, most likely. In fact, what you can look at the time the Stormlight books have taken, and compare them to time that other big epic fantasy series taken, I do a Stormlight book at about the same rate actually, I’m not that much faster than Pat or George or something like that, it’s just that I know to fill that time between those big books with something else to keep my momentum going - or at least my psychology lets me do this, and I don’t think the books would be any faster without that.
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