Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

Changing Hands, AZ

Stormlight 3 POV character? Some say Szeth other say its up in the air?

He said he’s not going to canonize it or anything, he’s also looking at Dalinar and Eshonai and going to see who’s backstory fits the flow of the book best.

Oathbringer, Brandon on writing,

Changing Hands, AZ

Will book 3 be Szeth's book?

He used to think so. Now it might be Dalinar's. He is going to do the flashbacks for both (and Eshonai) and then decide.

Oathbringer, Brandon on writing,

Calamity-Seattle

Is Dalinar’s wife really dead?

That is a RAFO, and you will discover it in the third book.

Dalinar, Oathbringer,

Brandon Sanderson RAFOlympics at JordanCon 8 (Verbatim)

If the highstorms existed prior to the Shards’ arrival, what’s the relationship between the highstorms and the Stormfather?

Oh good question. I was wondering if someone was going to ask that. So, I’ll try...let me see…[sighs] You know, I’m actually going to RAFO this one. And let me tell you why, because I mean, I want to give you some reasons to be interested in the things that Dalinar will be talking about with the Stormfather. So this is a RAFO with an explicit promise for book 3. These are things that will be covered now that we have bonded the Stormfather to a person who can now ask some of these questions. I could totally just tell you now, but where the fun of that? Read book three.

highstorms, stormfather, roshar, to be answered in Oathbringer,

Shadows of Self - Lansing, MI (Paraphrased)

When will Stormlight 3 come out?

I'm hoping next Christmas. My original plan was to turn in the book by Spring so that Tor has 9 months to finalize it, but then the other day I got a call from Tom Doherty, the founder of Tor, and he told me that I could take till June if I wanted and it would still get a Christmas release. So I've got until June if I need it.

This surprised me, as Peter has said on here that the process of taking a book's first draft and turning it into the product that sits on shelves takes about a year. So hearing that Tom Doherty said it could be done in 6 months for a book that's easily 2 or 3 times as large as normal, everyday books, was a bit surprising. (note by Ted: it is now November 2016 and the first draft is 99% done)

oathbringer, publication dates,

DragonCon 2016

(answering earlier question of "what you're working on right now)

So - I'm working on the third Stormlight book. (cheering) It is currently three hundred and thirty thousand words long, which, for comparison - the original Way of Kings was around three hundred thousand and Words of Radiance was about four hundred. And so... and it's only three quarters done. So I've prepared the publisher, and I'll have to get through this again... Maybe I'll be able to make the future books in the series shorter, but this one's gonna be a big one, which I know you guys are so sad about. I anticipate it'll be published about a year after I hit the hundred percent of the first draft, so if you watch that progress bar, right when it hits that hundred, you're looking at about a one year period. I've been doing really well, momentum's been really good lately, and so I'm expecting that to be October... But just watch as that goes, it'll slowly tick up, and it's not ticking up right now 'cause I'm actually doing the revisions for part three of the book, which I'm doing the revisions as I write the book this time to get my editor, who's bipolar... I give him the trick parts when he's manic, so he revises them (laughing) and that let's us get through them in the periods when he's not manic, and he's manic right now! So I'm going to send him a part and be like "okay, Moshe, time to work on this". You just have to learn how to work in business this way, when you've got an editor like Moshe. Book's going really well, it'll have most likely Dalinar's flashback sequence, and I will be reading one of those at my reading tomorrow. (wild cheering) Which I like to read those, because they take place before book one starts and it's not a huge spoiler for people who haven't finished Words of Radiance or anything yet, because that takes place before the series, but it's also- they're very self-contained sequences, they read very well, my big worry is that I don't know what room I'm in tomorrow... (checks, gives information)

oathbringer,

La Dimension Fantastique

Do you have any further plans about Moash? Will he have more screen time in Stormlight 3?

I have big plans for Moash, and he will actually have viewpoints in Stormlight 3. So good question!

moash, oathbringer, future books,

Borderlands SF-AU Tour (Paraphrased)

Is Lift going to be in the next book?

Yes.

lift, oathbringer,

Deseret News Q&A: Brandon Sanderson on the importance of fiction and how writing influences his LDS faith (Verbatim)

First off, congratulations on having the most pre-ordered audiobook in Audible.com's history.

Thank you, that was very cool. … Some people might know there really is an audiobook renaissance going on. They've been gaining ground the last decade, but really recently they've been just exploding. A lot of people are finding that they love listening to audiobooks, and what they particularly love listening to audiobooks for are books that are otherwise bulky and hard to carry around. They are not only a really good value on Audible, or your audiobook website of choice, but also since they are so big and heavy they are just much more portable in audiobook form. So we tend to do really well in audio, but I still didn't expect to be the No. 1 most pre-ordered book of all-time on Audible.

oathbringer, audiobooks,

Deseret News Q&A: Brandon Sanderson on the importance of fiction and how writing influences his LDS faith (Verbatim)

So it's been a little over three and a half years since Words of Radiance came out, how does it feel to have this book ready for release on Tuesday?

It feels great. Stormlight books are an enormous undertaking. People know me for big, thick, awesome but fat fantasy books. If you look in between, I've released four or so normal-sized books. The majority of the books I write are about the size you would expect the average novel to be.

But these books are something different and something special. It's not just the idea of, you know, "I want to write big." Big doesn't mean better, necessarily, but what I can do in these books is I can really dig into a topic that you just can't in a shorter book. I tend to plot these books like an entire trilogy, and each book had the plotting of a trilogy inside that single book. I include a short story collection in there that is interspersed in between. It's a really different way to plot a book, just because there are so many moving pieces, so many different things going on, so many plot lines to cover, but also it's really engaging and exciting to write because nothing else is like it. … There are really interesting things I can do with the format of a novel, and the methods of storytelling, that I just can't do in anything else. It is really exciting but it is so exhausting.

oathbringer, stormlight archive, brandon on writing,

Deseret News Q&A: Brandon Sanderson on the importance of fiction and how writing influences his LDS faith (Verbatim)

We talked a little bit about some of the challenges that you have publishing something as large as Oathbringer. For you what was a highlight moment during this journey of writing and releasing the book?

One of the things about it — and we're trying to do a spoiler free interview here — is the story of the Stormlight Archive, the story about the story. … I sat down in the early 2000s, before I had actually even sold a book, and I started work on this project that I wanted to be a really big epic of monumental proportions.

I worked on this book for a good two years and I just didn't have the skill to pull it off yet as a writer. The book just didn't work. There were lots of pieces in it that did, but the book itself didn't work. One of the problems is that I created all of these interesting characters, but I told all of their stories all at once, which meant that in the book I only got like 15 percent of each of their stories before it was just too long. … So the book as a whole was unsatisfying, a little piece of a lot of characters stories.

When I came back to it years later, after working on The Wheel of Time (series), after growing a lot as a writer, I decided the method I would use to tell the story would be to … focus on the backstory of one of the characters. That way I didn't have to dive into the backstory of each character at once, I could keep focused, and I could give each book in the series its own soul and heart, so to speak. That's a long, round about way of saying I have been waiting now years — 15 years — to be able to tell Dalinar's story, which I finally get to do in this book.

stormlight archive, oathbringer, brandon on writing, dalinar,

Deseret News Q&A: Brandon Sanderson on the importance of fiction and how writing influences his LDS faith (Verbatim)

That leads into my next question: why did you pick Dalinar to tell his backstory in this particular book?

It's interesting because originally I was going to do Dalinar in book five. That was the original outline. But I found that (was) the story I was telling in this book.

… What I wanted to have happen in these books is the character's backstory offers insight, parallel or some sort of interweaving with the main plot that the characters are going through in the present in order to change your perspective both on the past and on the present by what you read in the character's backstory. That's the goal. … I found that the more I worked on this book the more Dalinar's paralleled, or at sometimes contrasted nicely to the story that was going on right now. So I switched, it was going to be Szeth's and I switched to Dalinar and I am really pleased with how that went. The back and forth between the person Dalinar is becoming in this book, and the person he used to be, the journey he began when he was younger, and is only now meeting his fulfillment in his middle age, that story paralleled so nicely.

stormlight archive, oathbringer, dalinar, szeth,

Deseret News Q&A: Brandon Sanderson on the importance of fiction and how writing influences his LDS faith (Verbatim)

I definitely agree after having read it. It leads me to my next question. I'm not going to lie, there are multiple heart-wrenching moments for many of the characters. As an author, what is it like taking these characters you've created and love, and putting them through these situations that elicit a very emotional response from the readers?

There are a lot of different ways to respond to this. … On one hand, most of the times, since I'm an outliner, I've been able to see it coming for a long time.

So on one hand I don't have the same sort of anguish that a reader might since I've had that time to get used to the idea that this is what this character's arc is going to be, this is what is coming, and I'm prepared for it. Sometimes in the middle of writing you realize there is something (as an author) you need to do, and one response to it is an excitement, not because we're sadists, but because as a writer as you're creating a piece of art like this, and bringing it together, and something clicks where you say "Oh, that's what I need to do" — the kind of moment of excitement, relief.

I'm not sure I can explain the feeling of satisfaction when these things come together, and a little bit of awe that the process is actually working. Every writer I know has this sense in them that yes, they've been able to write books in the past but is this actually going to work this time? Is this the time where it's just not going to come together, and the book is going to fail?

There is always that worry.

And when a book is snapping together, even when it involves something really traumatic happening to a character, there is a part of you that is just so glad that it's working, and so excited by how it's working. Like I said, it sounds a little sadistic but often times the response is "ohhhh, that's right, that's absolutely right."

… Then there is the sense that books are catharsis. Books are a way for us as human beings (to) learn to deal with trauma and emotion in a safer emotional environment, even though they can be heart-wrenching. … When you can elicit strong emotions in readers for things like this, it's in a way, hopefully, what we're trying to do — making it so that the person is able to cope with that better in the future when it happens in their own life.

There is this sense of — and maybe I'm over-inflating my own usefulness in the world — but this is one of the things we try to do actively as writers is come up with these powerful scenes and emotions just to give you a chance to feel that before it blindsides you, perhaps, in real life when it happens in a more real and much more powerful way happening to yourself, or to people around you.

stormlight archive, oathbringer, brandon on writing,