Meanwhile, Sanderson has also found time to go back and rewrite The Way of Kings and sell it to his publishers, who by this time were very glad to take it.
It’s worth mentioning here—”though my publisher would rather I stopped talking about this, they think it’s off-putting”—that he had always intended it to be volume one of a 10-book series, The Stormlight Archive, each book of which will be about the size of the first.
“The thing about fantasy novels is that they start off with a very steep learning curve. They’re like historical novels, except that the world is entirely invented. You have to learn new names, you have to learn new laws of physics, new geography, new history, all of these things.”
“This is what fantasy readers love, but when you’re making the effort to master all this information it’s nice to maximise the payoff. That’s what a big series has that a shorter series doesn’t, it can be far more richly immersive. You get to spend serious time in this new world.”
In other words, even before he was tapped to complete Jordan’s magnum opus, Sanderson was setting out to be his generation’s answer to Robert Jordan. Is he not worried, with nearly four million words of projected storytelling ahead of him on this series alone, that he may meet a similar fate?
“I’m still pretty young. Plus, I live in perpetual fear of this distant cubicle far behind me. Some day I worry it will catch me and I’ll have to become an insurance salesman or something. So I tend to work pretty hard. My hope is that I’ll be releasing two of these books every three years. There’ll probably be a third book in there as well, something smaller to keep me fresh. We’ll see.”
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