Did you move a lot of sections around during the development? It certainly seemed as though Kal’s parts could go in a different order or start his story from the bottom and work out how he got there.
Yes, I did move things around a lot, particularly between the first draft of this book in 2003 and this draft. Things have jumped around all over the place, and even at the last minute I was moving different things between parts. Dalinar moved around more than Kaladin did because I was trying to decide where I wanted his ending in part two to happen. I wanted each of the parts to have its own climactic sense, to have a good ending particularly for the characters who didn’t continue in the next part, when Dalinar and Shallan were alternating. So there was a lot of juggling and trying to decide—for instance, the prelude was added very late in the process. I’d had the prologue and decided I needed a second prologue as the prologue to the series, which is where the prelude came from.
Kaladin’s entire sequence, with the flashbacks and things, was decided on early on, but remember I’d written this book once before. At the end of his flashback sequences, he makes a decision. Where this book deviates from the original I wrote in 2003 is that in the old version he actually made the opposite decision, and it happened in chapter one.
Now we get to see flashbacks of him making the other decision, which works so much better. It’s one of those things where I was beating my head against the wall for years trying to figure out how to make his character work. His character was the part of the original The Way of Kings Prime that had not worked, and it took me years to figure out how to make his character work right. That one decision of his was the turning point.
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