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Interview #629: Amazon.com Author One-on-One: Patrick Rothfuss and Brandon Sanderson, Entry #4

Brandon Sanderson

I have a question for you, then. Did you always intend the Kingkiller Chronicle to be three days split across three books? Or did you start writing it as one book and then split it? What’s the real story behind that?

Patrick Rothfuss

Assuming I had any sort of plan at the beginning is a big mistake. I just started writing. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t know what I was doing.

For years and years I just thought of it as The Book in my head. I’ve always thought of it as one big story. Then, eventually I realized it would need to be broken up into volumes.

I can’t say why I picked three books except that three is a good number. It’s sort of the classic number. And while the story is working well in this format, part of me wishes I’d broken it into smaller chunks. This second book has so many plotlines. If I’d written this trilogy as say, 10 books, each one would be much shorter and self contained. More like the Dresden Files .

That’s pointless musing though. I’m sure if I’d written smaller volumes right now I’d be thinking, “Oh! if only I’d written these as longer books I could play more with interwoven plot lines…”

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, it’s interesting you should mention this, because what I keep getting told from a publishing side is that no one ever wants me to cut the story. I never get that. People ask that of me all the time, “Does your publisher want you to make the book shorter?” Well, the publisher would really like the books to be shorter, but they don’t want any of the story to be cut. I do sometimes wonder what we’re doing, what we’re setting ourselves up for by writing books of this length. Jim Butcher is able to reliably release a book every year or so in his series, in part because he’s able to split the story into manageable chunks. And you and I are not splitting our stories into very manageable chunks. This happens a lot in series.

I look back at the Wheel of Time; Robert Jordan was able to release books one a year for a period of time until the books were long enough and he got through the backlog of writing he’d already done, and suddenly he was not able to release a book every year because the books were long and involved and took a lot of work. Well, when he stopped releasing them every year all his fans complained, “What’s going on? Suddenly you’re not releasing your books every year?” So he started releasing them faster and shorter and they all started complaining that the books were too short.

And so, starting our series with such long books does kind of put us in this strange conundrum. And there are a lot of considerations people don’t understand, like printing costs and the like. Has there been, on your side, any sort of attempt on the publisher’s end to nudge you—saying, “They don’t have to be this long. You can tell the story in shorter chunks; don’t cut any story! But do it in shorter chunks”? Because I’ve gotten a bit of that. Granted they’re always willing to let me do what I want to do, but it’s kind of along the lines of, “We wouldn’t mind, Brandon, if you did it in smaller chunks.

Patrick Rothfuss

No, I don’t get any of that. My publisher, DAW, is really long-book friendly. Perhaps the most long-book friendly of all the publishers out there. They published Tad Williams back before Big Fat Fantasy was cool. They didn’t bat an eye at The Name of the Wind being 250,000 words. That’s a freedom that’s rarely given to new authors for their very first book.

That said, I was a little worried about the length of book two. The thing kept getting bigger and bigger. Finally I called Betsy and asked if the length was going to be a problem.

At first she just laughed it off. But when I told her it was getting REALLY long, she said, “Let me do some research.” Two days later she calls me back and tells me the longest paperback ever was about 420,000 words. So as long as I was under that, I would be fine.

All I could think was, “Shorter than the longest book ever? Sure, I think I can manage that.”

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