Tell me about your series The Stormlight Archive, of which the first book, The Way of Kings , was published last August. What’s the motivation behind writing this story?
The Stormlight Archive—you don’t grow up reading the books I read, such as the Wheel of Time, without wanting to tell a big epic, and this is kind of what I always wanted to do, to have my own big epic. It’s what I love to read and so it’s what I want to write. So I’ve always planned for The Stormlight Archive to be very big, and hopefully meaty and weighty. I started writing about the characters as long as two decades ago, and I finished the first draft of The Way of Kings in 2002, so almost ten years ago now. So it’s a series I’ve been working on for a long time.
I think you’ll find that most authors have series like this; for Robert Jordan it was The Wheel of Time. And people have asked me if I want this to be my Wheel of Time, but that’s a very difficult comparison for someone to make. What I want is for this to be a great story, hopefully told really well; it’s a story I’ve been wanting to tell for years and years. And time will tell how that turns out.
What are your plans for the series as a whole?
It will be multi-volume; I pitched it to Tom Doherty [of Tor Books] as ten books, and I envision it as being a project I work on for a very long time, and try to do these audacious things I’ve wanted to do forever.
It’s very art-intensive, and very different from the other books I’ve done; it incorporates some of the other things I’ve liked to do from other books, but at the same time it’s its own thing. So I view as something awesome that I want to be working on for a long time.
When is the next book in the series coming out?
I’m planning the second book to be done following my finishing the Wheel of Time, so it will come, but it will probably be a little while.
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