We talked a little bit about some of the challenges that you have publishing something as large as Oathbringer . For you what was a highlight moment during this journey of writing and releasing the book?
One of the things about it — and we’re trying to do a spoiler free interview here — is the story of the Stormlight Archive, the story about the story. … I sat down in the early 2000s, before I had actually even sold a book, and I started work on this project that I wanted to be a really big epic of monumental proportions.
I worked on this book for a good two years and I just didn’t have the skill to pull it off yet as a writer. The book just didn’t work. There were lots of pieces in it that did, but the book itself didn’t work. One of the problems is that I created all of these interesting characters, but I told all of their stories all at once, which meant that in the book I only got like 15 percent of each of their stories before it was just too long. … So the book as a whole was unsatisfying, a little piece of a lot of characters stories.
When I came back to it years later, after working on The Wheel of Time (series), after growing a lot as a writer, I decided the method I would use to tell the story would be to … focus on the backstory of one of the characters. That way I didn’t have to dive into the backstory of each character at once, I could keep focused, and I could give each book in the series its own soul and heart, so to speak. That’s a long, round about way of saying I have been waiting now years — 15 years — to be able to tell Dalinar’s story, which I finally get to do in this book.
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