Do you feel that each new book you release should be better than the last? Is that something you think about while writing, or do you just do the best job that you can and hope that your works improve naturally over time with your skill?
It really depends on the project. Yes, I want every book to improve, but that’s a bit of a platitude. It’s an easy thing to say. It gets a bit different when you sit down to think about it.
I followed The Way of Kings with The Alloy of Law . Is The Alloy of Law a better book than The Way of Kings ? No, it is not. The Way of Kings I spent somewhere around ten years working on; with The Alloy of Law I had a couple of months. In the case of a book like that, I sit down and say, okay, there are things I want to learn in this process. Different books are going to have a different feel. Now, there are people out there who like The Alloy of Law better than The Way of Kings —it’s not a better book, but there are people who will enjoy it more.
When I sat down to write Warbreaker , I said I wanted to get better at a certain type of humor. And I think I did get much better at that, in that book. Is the book itself better than The Hero of Ages that came before it? I do some things better, but it’s hard to compare a standalone volume to the third book in an epic trilogy. They’re going to do very different things.
So it’s hard to say “better book”/”not better book.” I think “always learning and growing” is a better way to put it than getting better with each book.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.