It’s interesting that you should mention rewriting and changing as an author. In some ways, these books that have been with us for so long are much harder to work on than books that just occur to us or that we start off brand new.
I think you’re absolutely right about that. Writing that 60,000 word subplot was easy. It was integrating it into the rest of the book that was hard.
In my history as a writer, The Way of Kings is a project I’ve been working on for years and years and years. But the Mistborn trilogy was an idea I had, executed, and finished. These two projects have been very different from one another to work on. With one, I had a great idea, I built the world, I built the story, and I wrote the three books straight through and released them. And with the other story, I have all the “killing your darlings” sort of things that are tough to deal with when you’ve been playing with a character since you’re fifteen years old and now you’re finally sitting down to write their story. It’s hard to manage the baggage of that many years and weave out and cut out things that aren’t needed for the story despite the fact that they’re integral to the character’s soul, to you having spent all this time on them.
That’s one of the reasons why I recommend to new writers not to initially work on those stories that have been so close to you for so long. I feel now that I’m practiced and established an author, I know how to tell the best story out of all of this stuff I’ve been working on since I was a kid. When I was a new author I don’t think I could have done it. I think it would have turned into a fanboy session for my own world that nobody else knows, which would have been a disaster.
Yeah. It’s relatively easy to take a pile of lumber and turn it into a house. But a lot of what I’ve been doing (And a lot of what it sounds like you had to do with Way of Kings ) is like building a house out of a different house. A house that you built back before you knew what the hell you were really doing.
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