Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

On later Stormlight Archive novels will there always be one character we get to see flashbacks for?

Yes, and it should rotate to different characters. I have not yet decided who gets book two yet. It's really between Dalinar and Shallan and I go back and forth on whose story I want to tell next.

17TH SHARD

So, does that mean there's going to be 10 different characters that would be seen?

BRANDON SANDERSON

It's very likely there will be 10 different characters. The only caveat on that is that part of me really wants to do a second Kaladin book. And so I haven't quite decided who gets flashback books. You can probably guess from reading this book some of them who do. But there are some that don't necessarily absolutely need them, so Kaladin may get a second flashback book.

17TH SHARD

So, fingers crossed, fingers crosses, will Szeth get one?

BRANDON SANDERSON

Szeth will get a book.

17TH SHARD

YES! (laughter) We're all cheering.

BRANDON SANDERSON

Yes, Szeth will get a book. Shallan and Dalinar will get books.

17TH SHARD

Adolin?

BRANDON SANDERSON

Um…I'm not sure on him yet. He's one that could, maybe not. I mean he's got some interesting things going on but we'll see how the series progresses first. There are characters who will get flashback books that you haven't yet met or at least not spent much time with.

Ok, fair enough. Do you have a scene you enjoyed more than the rest, and on the flip side, was their something that you did not enjoy?

I will say that I really loved doing all the interludes because they gave me a sense, when I was writing this book, of jumping to something new, which is part of what kept me going in all of this. Are they my favorite scenes in the book? No, but they were probably my favorite to write because it's like I get to take a break and write something whacky and looney, so to speak.

Hmm…is there anything that was harder? You know, revisions are always hard. In the next to last draft I changed Dalinar's arc very substantially, and that was a hard write. And, you know, Adolin was not originally a viewpoint character, so there was a lot of hard writing there. So, poor Adolin probably gets the badge for hardest to write. Not because he as a character was hard to write but because I was having to repurpose scenes and toss out scenes and rewrite them with Adolin as the viewpoint character and so on to add just a little more dimension to Dalinar's plot arc.

When Kaladin helped Adolin fight in the arena, did Elhokar notice him surgebinding?

RAFO. :)

I would say that what Adolin did was less dark, personally. I would say that what Adolin did was something that needed to be done, that no one else was capable of doing.

Question

Will it have any ramifications for him down the line? With how it was handled?

Brandon Sanderson

Oh, there are definitely ramifications. How it's handled, there's lots of ramifications. And there are certain characters who would think that what he did is totally, totally, totally wrong.