This is for Brandon. You’re one of the most ambitious authors I’ve read. You’re working on finishing up the Wheel of Time series and your own ten-book epic, not to mention another Mistborn trilogy. How do you deal with writing that much book?
That’s a good question. Every writer has their own process, and understanding my process may help you understand how I work. I kind of have different levels of projects in my head. I have the big epics, the big super epics that I work on for a long time and take a lot of brain space, but also take a lot of digestion. They don’t just pop out. They take years to get right. Gathering Storm took about 18 months to do. It didn’t seem that way because I was ahead on some of my other projects, but that’s what it took. And Way of Kings , you know, I finished the first draft in 2002. You got something like the 15th or 16th draft in 2010. And so these books take a lot of brain space, but just take time. It’s hard to work on multiples of that at the same time. Doing the first Stormlight book was possible because I had finished the first draft in 2002. It is not possible for me to do the second one while working on another big epic. I can only really do one book of that scope at a time, which is why you aren’t going to be seeing Stormlight 2 until Wheel of Time is done, just because I can’t physically and mentally do that.
But I have different projects that work on different sort of brain space levels. I need to take breaks from the big epics some time, to just do something different and refresh myself. And I’ve talked about this on my blog; it’s how I work. And usually these are quick projects that I give myself a few weeks or a month to work on in between big epics. My children’s books, the Alcatraz books, were these during the Mistborn triology stage. I would stop and I would write one of these to really just cleanse the palate, to do something different. And I usually don’t do a lot of outlining for these books. I write them off the cuff. I’ve talked about the difference between architect writers and gardener writers. Gardeners kind of just start with something and see where it goes. Neil Gaiman describes it as jumping out of an airplane with a ball of yarn and trying to knit a parachute by the time you hit. Robert Jordan was more of a gardener writer in all of his books, from what I’ve been able to determine. I usually architect, which means I plan extensively, but I do gardener books in between. Then I just see where it goes, and some of the times these books turn out horrible, and so I don’t do anything with them, and sometimes they turn out great. But it doesn’t really matter to me if they turn out great or horrible, because the purpose of them is to refresh myself so that I can then get back to the big epic.
And so when you see these side projects coming out, it’s when one of these turns out really well and I decide to publish it. For instance, the new Mistborn book. The new Mistborn book is not part of the Mistborn epic. The new Mistborn book is a side project where I said, well you know, I’m not going to be able to return to this world for the next . . . I’m doing three trilogies of Mistborn books eventually. I’ve done one, I’ll do a second, this book that’s coming out is not one of those. This is a side project, kind of a short tale. It’s more of a New Spring type thing, something where I’m like this is a cool story I want to tell. And I wrote it, and I still hope it’s fun and exciting and people love it. But the purpose of this book, it’s really a single narrative, one plot line. It has a couple viewpoint characters, but they’re all together doing the same thing. And it’s kind of a mystery set in an industrial age in Mistborn , the Mistborn world during the industrial age. This is the sort of thing that I can take one month off and write. I can’t take one month off and write another Stormlight book. So, what you’re looking at, how do I balance all these things? Well, what you’re seeing is, you’re seeing my vacation time. When I take a vacation for a few months, I work on something completely different to change, just to shake it up. And sometimes those turn out well and those get published, and so it looks like I’m producing differently than I am. Really, all these books are my babies, I love them, I hope that you all like them, but some are the big epics and some are the side projects. The Mistborn 4 book is a side project.
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