BRANDON: Welcome to the editorial panel for the
Rhythm of War release party. This is actually the first thing that we are recording for this,
and so forgive us if we have any bugs or mishaps or things like that. But we have three of the
editors who worked on this book. We have Devi, who is the publisher at TOR and a vice president
at McMillan, but also my editor. So, thank you, Devi, for coming and joining us.
DEVI: Thank you for having me. BRANDON: We have Peter, who is my editorial
director in my company. The difference between Devi and Peter is, Devi works at TOR and is kind
of in charge of TOR. Peter works only with me. He does a lot of facilitating the comments that come
from a lot of different places and collating them, and of course, adding his own. What happens
is when I am done with the revisions, normally an author would then have to oversee
what are called the copy edit and things like that in the proofreads, which I don’t do.
I hand it to Peter, and he takes over. We also have Karen. Karen is our continuity
editor. Karen’s primary job is to keep me honest and consistent in writing the
books. She keeps track of the timeline. She keeps track of all the characters. And she
points out all the places where I say one thing and then say something different two books later.
The format of this little presentation is I’m going to step us through the creation of
a book from the viewpoint of the editors, and we’re going to let the editors kind of talk
about their experiences. And then for the second half of this, we’ll take some questions for
editors that we’ve gotten through my Facebook. For those who don’t know, I usually
do about five drafts of my books, which does not count the copy edit and proofread,
which are separate drafts, you could say. Really, we’re working with seven different drafts. The
first two drafts I do completely on my own in a perfect world. The first draft is the vomit
draft, where I get everything on the page, and the second draft is where I go through, and I
fix the big problems that I introduced during the vomit draft. Most of the time, my team is seeing
for the first time something when it’s in a second draft. And a second draft is still not
a good draft. It is a better draft. One of my questions for all of you is when you
get these second drafts, how do you approach a draft that you know isn’t where it needs to be
yet? What sorts of things do you focus on giving feedback on and helping, and what sort of things
do you ignore? And how do you approach helping an author take something that is good and turn
it into something great? Why don’t we go to Devi first, and then we’ll work our way around?
DEVI: Sure. I think that’s a very big question. I think it depends on the author. Some authors
are very happy with minimal kind of feedback. There have been authors I’ve talked to on the
phone and had a conversation where I was like, “This is a book that could use a lot more
expansion here, here, and here. These are the weaknesses here, here, and here.” And they’ll
completely gut it, go and take off with it. And I think that depends on the author and the book.
There’s other authors who need a very different style, where they really want the more detail,
“This is a pinpoint place here. This is a pinpoint place here. Your characters need work over
here. Your worldbuilding needs work over here.” I would say it very much depends on the author and
the book. And if you give me a specific kind of book, I would have to do a kind of different edit
based on that book. And it also depends on certain authors too because some of them want to have the
conversation before they’ve even written the book. BRANDON: When you get a book the size
of something like a Stormlight book, is your process any different for that
than it would be for a shorter book? DEVI: My process is usually the same. I have to
read a book twice before I edit it. Or rather, the first time I’m reading it, I’m
reading it as a reader and a fan, so I can just enjoy it. And the second time I read
it, I read it to edit it. And the third time I’m going through, I’m compiling my editorial notes.
I’m figuring it out. The problem with having such a big book, like Stormlight Archive, for me,
is that my memory’s not very good anymore, nor has it ever been. Remembering all of the parts
and pieces is kind of a process. And I use my notes to help me, like all of my detail notes that
I write to myself/you and Peter to help me kind of compile a bigger letter. So, memory.
BRANDON: Peter, what sorts of things are you looking for in that 2.0?
PETER: Basically, in the 2.0 I’m going for my overall feelings on how the book is going.
I mean, basically, I go through each chapter, and then I write some notes at the end of
the chapter and say, “Here are things that were really working well for me, and here are
some things that weren’t working so well.” But things that I don’t pay attention
to, don’t pay attention to spelling, or grammar, or any of those little things.
BRANDON: Right. That’s hard to do, I’ve noticed, like, for newer editors, newer beta readers and
things. Recently Emily, my wife, has a book group and she had them read Dawnshard for feedback.
And they could not get over the line level stuff, and so everything was line level. They were
so focused on fixing the grammar here and things that they couldn’t give any feedback on
the full book. I’ve found that’s very common, that sometimes it’s just impossible to
not focus on the detail. How do you make yourself focus on the large scale?
PETER: I mean, practice, honestly. BRANDON: Yeah.
PETER: It’s just a habit that I’ve gotten into. I mean, I can just look
at this and say, “Oh, well, there’s a problem,” and then just move on, because I know that
I’ll have plenty of time to fix it later. BRANDON: Karen, what are you looking for in 2.0?
KAREN: Well, the first thing I do, like Devi, is read it through like a fan. And it’s really
hard for me because I’m the first person in the company who does that. Everybody else is
still finishing up on the last thing. And so, I’ve got a couple of weeks where I can’t say
anything to anybody, and that’s hard. But on the first time through editing, I start
my timeline, which is really one of the major things I do is, how many days has it been
since the last scene with this person? Do the scenes with the other people
fit in in between those days? So, I start the timeline. I also just write
a lot of kind of even notes to myself, “This is twigging my Spidey sense. I don’t
think this is quite right.” And then on the next time through, I usually go through it twice
on that draft, I will go look everything up and start putting stuff into the wiki so that I can
look back at what’s already been done in this book. Because other times I’ve missed stuff
because I didn’t write down everything that was happening in the book, from the start to the end.
BRANDON: Maybe you should explain what the wiki is.
KAREN: OK. I have this wiki, like an encyclopedia. It has a page for every character, a page for
every place, a page for every kind of spren, historical events, and just everything.
I’ve got a lot of index pages, like who has been in Urithiru? Who can we find in the
war camps in various groups? Who was on this ship? Then on a character page, I’ll have their
nationality, whether they’re dead or not. PETER: Eye color.
KAREN: Yes, eye color. BRANDON: Which, believe it or
not, is very handy to have. KAREN: Full description of every part of
them, what kind of clothes they like to wear, what their major back story or contribution.
BRANDON: And usually these are quotes from the books. You’re like, description, here’s a quote.
KAREN: Right. I don’t write interpretation. I just say, description, quote
one, quote two, quote three, so that when somebody says, “Why do you
think that they have brown eyes?” I can say, “Because it said it right here.”
BRANDON: This page, this book, right there. It is really handy. It is a lot of
work. One of the questions I have for you is, things change between drafts. And so, someone’s
description maybe becomes completely different. How do you keep track of if things are changing
in the book? You’ll add something in the wiki. How do you revise that?
KAREN: Well, in the wiki, I write in big capital letters “DRAFT” on those
quotes. And then as I go back in the same book, if I get to the end I can put in a final quote. But,
yeah, after I finish the book I’ve got to go back and get final quotes for all those draft things.
BRANDON: Now, once this is all done, what comes back to me, usually from Devi, is more of an
editorial letter than it is a line by line sort of critique. Devi, can you
step us through what an editorial letter is and how you create one?
DEVI: Oh. An editorial letter usually is kind of a compilation of all of the smaller
notes that I take as I go through the manuscript. In the draft 2 that I go through,
I take all my little minor notes. And then when I write down the editorial letter,
I go through it again and I think about, what are the big things that I would like the author, you,
to focus on? Kind of, here’s the worldbuilding I want to think about. Here are the characters. Here
are different things you could think about. Here are areas where you could strengthen this or this.
I don’t want to get too much into the detail, because I don’t want to give anything away.
BRANDON: Yeah, we’re trying not to give spoilers because you guys haven’t read the book yet.
DEVI: No spoilers. But it’s a lot of, it’s kind of like a conversation that I want to have in terms
of, here are certain things that really work for me. Here are things that I think are really great,
but you could improve it by 2% by just doing this. BRANDON: Exactly.
DEVI: That’s kind of how I put it together. BRANDON: When these come to me, what usually
happens is that Peter then takes it and slices it up and gives the overarching notes at the top of a
document for me, and then all the kind of section relevant notes he goes through and will add to
the 2.0 draft, the Peter Working Draft. It’ll say, “See this heading in the Notes file.”
PETER: Yeah. BRANDON: We arrived at this process because
I found what happened is when I was going through a book, if there were just
huge texts of inserted commentary, I lost the thread of the narrative and it was
really hard to revise. But what we found is if Peter puts a heading saying, “See this,” I
can go to this heading in the Notes document, and then I can read all the stuff that has been
said about this idea across various chapters. And then usually Peter’s really good at
saying, “And this here, it shows up in this chapter and in this chapter,” and these sorts
of things. Do you actually have one of these? PETER: Yeah. Basically, this shows the
notes file. In the left column here, it starts with Part One, and then it has different
headings, and it has Brandon’s notes on whether he’s addressed something or responded to it.
And then it starts with the Prologue and has some headings from the prologue. On the right side
you can see a couple of the headings there I have, like, about the flying speed from Hearthstone.
BRANDON: Yes. Stuff that—and this works really well for our process because it helps me keep
these things as a heading in my head rather than a problem just for this chapter. I can go and
see all the things that have been said about it. But also, it lets me, when I’m working
on the document, I will delete that comment and then massage anything I need to in this
given chapter, because I can then see the chapter and have the note file open next to me.
This is a really handy thing that Peter does. KAREN: Some people have asked, what does the
manuscript look like when you get it back. He sends us a draft, and then what he
gets back is that same word document with comments all through it, just in line.
BRANDON: Yeah, we use track changes. I don’t like the little things that pop the bubble
out to the side. I like it right in line. But if it gets too big, I like it in a separate document.
And so, what you would see is, you’d get a page, and it would have (See flying speed from
Hearthstone) in kind of parenthesis or brackets at the bottom of a paragraph. And in
that paragraph, if I’ve gotten some things wrong, they’ve been changed. And if there’s
a sentence or two where Karen’s like, “You might want to add a spren here,” that
mostly happens later, but it might say, “Here’s a timeline thing that you’re mentioning.
This might not work with the timeline.” It’s all in line for me. And I start on page one and
I go through it to create the next draft. PETER: I have a screenshot of the
manuscript from after the beta read. BRANDON: OK.
PETER: Which is very similar. BRANDON: We’ll show that when we get to the next
draft. Because what happens is, I take all of this and I do a third draft. Now, I usually separate
alpha readers from beta readers. The group here, these are the alpha readers, this and my writing
group are essentially my alpha readers. Alpha readers are people that I’m looking to to not
only identify problems, but to offer solutions, and to dig a little deeper into the story. When
Peter notices something, he’ll often offer, “Maybe if you did this,” or “This is what the
problem is.” It’s more even doctor diagnosis stuff. “This might not be working because
the promises are just not working, that you haven’t made the right promises
earlier in the book.” These sorts of things, I feel like I need industry professionals to give
me, and the team does a very good job with that. I go through, and I try to fix all of those
problems or address them. Or sometimes, I don’t change a thing. I decide, you
know what? This is in line with my vision, even though it’s a problem for this reader.
That’s one thing that a lot of people ask me about the editorial process, and I’m going to
kind of pitch to you Devi, is how do you work out this idea where sometimes the author and
the editor disagree on what should be done? How do you reconcile that?
DEVI: It’s your book. BRANDON: That has been Devi’s answer every
time. That’s not every editor’s answer. Do you give a different answer to a brand new
author than you give to me? And I actually don’t know the answer to this.
DEVI: I don’t. I think every time I start a new author, in terms of an edit
letter, my edit letter usually starts with, “Everything I tell you is a suggestion. This is
your book, your baby. I am trying to help you change it. If you see a suggestion you don’t
like, you don’t have to take it. But at least think about it. And if there’s a different
way to address it, address it.” I’m not saying that I’m the right and the only voice in this.
Something that I say might be off and you can fix something else and that’ll fix that problem.
But it’s just a matter of just look again. BRANDON: Moshe would always say to me
that he doesn’t always have the solution, but he wants me to try something else. Try
something else here and see. Because a lot of times what happens is if an author is nudged
to try something else, that they will make the connection that what needs to be done and
fix problems that even they and the editor weren’t able to quite identify. It is a very nice
process to just take another stab at something. The only time that Moshe and I couldn’t reconcile
on something is when I wanted to call something a podium and he wanted to call it a lectern, and
he won. That’s the only time that I’ve had this. I had a lot of that with Harriet in The Wheel of
Time because it was a special circumstance, where it wasn’t my book. It was Harriet’s book. And
in those cases, we always ended up bowing to Harriet because that’s a different situation.
On my books, if it comes down to the line, except for the lectern situation, it has always been that
we go with what I want to have happen in the book. What’s that?
DEVI: You might want to explain Harriet too.
BRANDON: I should explain. Harriet was TOR’s original editorial director back in
the ‘80s, and she was the editor of The Wheel of Time books and the wife of Robert Jordan.
She was his editor first and then his wife. I think that that’s a good way to make sure that
your editorial advice gets taken. Before he passed away, he asked her to find someone to finish The
Wheel of Time series. And so, she picked me, and she was the editor on that project. And she gave
me a ton of flexibility to do what I needed to do. But she was the ultimate judge of whether
something belonged in The Wheel of Time. In hindsight, almost all the things I disagreed with
her on have come to light as being good decisions. The only ones I still quibble with are paragraph
level things. There’s nothing I’ve quibbled with that were large scale things. There were some
things that were really difficult for me to cut from the book. As an example, we put in the
charity anthology a sequence with Perrin that we cut from the book that I really wanted to stay
in the book. When I looked back at it last year to put it in, with fresh eyes, I realized just
how bad it was, to the point that I had to do a serious revision of it before I’d even let
it go as a deleted scene into the anthology. This is where having a really good editor
is really handy, because they’re someone who can step outside. Like, I can never step outside
myself. That’s just impossible. You can sometimes, and this is ideal, give yourself distance from
a project to approach it fresh. But a really good editor has that brain that is not quite as
emotionally invested in the story but is equally emotionally invested in doing well. Really,
I look for editorial advice to help me fix problems in this, and so maybe I would ask this
next kind of question to you as, are there any specifics on how you can help a writer fix
a problem when the writer doesn’t even know yet what’s wrong? Let’s pitch that one to Peter
first, and then we’ll let Devi take the last stab at this one. How do you help me fix something
when I—how do you help me realize it’s a problem? PETER: I mean, basically, I can say, “This is what
I think you’re trying to do here.” And then I say, “And it’s not working for me because of these
reasons, but that that might not necessarily be the actual reasons.” I can give some suggestions.
But there are a number of things where I’ll point something out and it actually takes
several drafts before it really just kind of sinks in. It takes more feedback from other people
to say, “Yeah, you’re right. It wasn’t--.” I mean, when they notice without seeing my comments,
when they start noticing the same things, then it becomes, “Oh, yeah, maybe this
is an issue that deserves a second look.” BRANDON: That’s what I was going to pint out. I
can think of multiple times where Peter has said something and I haven’t changed it, and then
the beta readers all point out the same thing, and that’s when I realize, “No, I really need to
acknowledge this.” Sometimes it takes me and Peter talking back and forth where I say, “I’m not going
to fix this. I don’t think this is a problem.” And then Peter explains it in a different way, and I’m
like, “Oh, this is the problem.” Because it’s this thing where neither of us can define what it is.
I think it’s fine. Peter knows something’s wrong but can’t actually define the right reason
or what is wrong. And so, what he writes, I’m like, “No, that’s not a problem.” And then
we talk and I’m like, “Oh, there is a problem. Peter’s trying to dig at this other thing that
he’s noticed a symptom of that we need to fix.” And that happens quite a bit, I would say.
PETER: Yeah. BRANDON: There are still things that I don’t fix.
But when I do that, it is me acknowledging, “I am OK with people making this complaint.” Like, Peter
and Devi and Karen don’t make complaints about the book that other people aren’t going to notice.
Like, they have an editorial eye. So, I have to be OK with the idea that a certain percentage of
the readership might have this problem, and maybe that’s OK with me because the thing I’m trying to
do is more important to me than trying to please everyone, which you can’t do in every book.
PETER: Yeah. And I also want to point out that there’s a lot of times when I or Karen think
something is a large issue, but it turns out that a very small change actually fixes it completely.
Or just changing the tone of an issue without really changing what happens erases the problem.
BRANDON: Oh, that’s something I should talk about. Because one thing that Peter and I often have
a disconnect on is looking at it as a writer, things that he thinks require a major
rewrite, I’m like, “Oh, no, that’s easy.” Things that he thinks will be easy, I’m
like, “Oh, man, it’s going to be so hard.” Because in revision, certain things don’t require
structural changes, even though as an editor you might think they do. It requires a tone change.
It just requires a character’s perspective shift. And it turns out that that sort of thing’s
actually a lot easier for me to do as a writer than a huge structural change. A lot of times,
we’ll have—we had several on this book, where it’s like, it looks like a huge revision. And
when the book’s out we can talk about this. It was actually a lot easier than it looks because
I was shifting a character’s pervasive viewpoint throughout the book. And it was an extensive
rewrite, but it was an easy rewrite because I could just change that character’s perspective
in every chapter, and I had a goal, and I had ahead of me I knew what I was doing. And so, it
wasn’t very hard. The changes where you’re like, “I have no idea how I’m going to do this. This
is going to require huge structural changes,” the character’s plot no longer works. I often bring up
Sazed in book 3 of Mistborn as one of those really hard ones that sounds like just a perspective
change, but it required a huge change in the way I was viewing the structure of his thing, so it
was really hard. The one in the original Way of Kings where I split half of Dalinar’s viewpoints
out and made them Adolin viewpoints was really hard. Though it was no more extensive than
the revision we’re talking about for this one. I just breezed through this revision. And then
people got the next draft back and they’re like, “Wow, this is fixed. This is so much better.
Why didn’t you do this the first time?” But that was after the beta read, which maybe we
should talk about what a beta read is. For me, a beta read is, I call it a test run at the book.
It’s like a soft launch. You know how video games have a soft launch where they get a stress test
of a certain number of people playing the game, a beta, if you will? I do that with my books.
I do a stress test of 30 to 50 people who are under NDA and read the book. I’m just looking
for their honest reactions to it. I’m not looking for them to fix problems. I like it
when they identify them, though they don’t always identify the right thing as the source
of their problem. But when they talk about the problem they’re having, it helps me. But I
want to see what my audience thinks of a book. Devi, my experience has been that I
do this more than a lot of writers. Do most writers you work with use beta readers?
And how do they use their beta readers? DEVI: I think you are an exception
in how you use your beta readers. A lot of writers have their writing groups, and
I think a few of them have one or two people that read it. But I don’t think anyone has the setup
that you have in terms of using a beta reader and having the whole group and having Peter and all
of that set up so that you have it as streamlined and as—it’s just a great process to have.
BRANDON: It’s kind of strange to me that it isn’t done more. Because movies and video games and
commercials and everybody, they all show things to test audiences and get feedback before it goes
live. But a lot of writers, I’ve noticed, don’t. They use basically a bunch of alpha readers,
and then they revise the book and it’s done. Our beta read process is pretty crazy, and Peter
organizes this. So, I’m going to pitch it back to you. Tell us what we do with the beta read.
PETER: Well, I think this is a major reason why a lot of writers don’t do it, because it takes
a lot of organization and time away from doing other things. That’s why I do it instead
of Brandon. Basically, for this book we had more than 60 beta readers, which is the biggest
we’ve ever had. Before, the most we had was, like, 40-something. But essentially, we send them
the book, but first I run it through a script to number all the paragraphs in a specific way
so that in each chapter each paragraph starts with a number that they can see no matter which
platform they’re viewing it on. Like, some people like to view it on their Kindle or whatever.
And then I have a spreadsheet which we use, just a Google spreadsheet, and they go onto that
sheet and basically there’s just tabs along the bottom and there’s one for each chapter. I do it
by part in the book. A Stormlight book has five parts. And so, we’ll have a tab for
the prologue and then chapter 12, et cetera. Then there’s color coding. They use
a different color code for whether it’s a plot issue, whether it’s a character issue,
or a culture comment, and things like that. Basically, they go through paragraph by paragraph
and just say if something jumps out to them, they write a comment on it. Then to try to
reduce the duplication of comments, I just—that’s why I have the paragraph numbers
in there so everything’s in order. They can see if someone’s made that
comment already and they can just— BRANDON: They can sign their name to the end of
the comment to agree. And it’s actually—that’s one of the most handy things you came
up with for this. Because he can write, “Here is this issue. By the way, 30 beta readers
agreed with this,” or whatever. Usually, you don’t get that. By the time there’s, like, nine or 10,
they’re like, “OK, enough people have said this.” But when I see a +9, I know,
“Oh! OK. I better pay a lot of attention to this one.” It’s really handy.
PETER: Yeah. But the amount of words that beta readers are writing, actually for this book and
the previous book, for Oathbringer, it ends up being longer than the manuscript itself.
BRANDON: Yes. PETER: And so if Brandon had to go through
and look at every single beta reader comment, it would take months.
BRANDON: Months, yeah. PETER: Back in the day when we only had 20,
then I would go through, and I’d collate them. I would distill them down to
the most essential comments, and then I would put that into the notes file,
and put the little ones that can go, the small comments I would put straight into the manuscript
itself. But starting with Oathbringer, I’m like, “This is too much work even for me.” So, I had to
hire two people to go through, and Kristy did the comments for part three. She went and collated the
comments for part three. First, I gave examples of how I did it in previous parts, and then she gave
me samples of a few chapters, and I said, “Well, you know, you didn’t do quite enough here in this,
and here you included a few more comments than you actually needed to.” Basically, one thing
that we’re cutting out a lot more recently is positive comments, because Brandon doesn’t
need to have his ego stroked, basically. But for this book we actually hired another
writer. We hired Peter Orullian to go through and do the collating, and then I went through
his, and even some of that I trimmed it down a little bit more. And some things I went
and said, “I think there might be a little bit more here from the beta readers.” So,
I went back to the original comments and then said, “Oh, yeah, they were talking more
about this.” And so, I added some more in. BRANDON: And you think, and you’re
probably right, you think is the book that we’ve done that has changed most between
the draft before the beta readers and the one after. Didn’t you say you thought this is the
most, just by sheer number of lines changed? PETER: Yes, I would agree. I mean,
Oathbringer went really well. BRANDON: There was only one major problem
with Oathbringer that we needed to fix. PETER: Back in Words of Radiance there were
a few chapters that had to be added, and some things had to be moved around. I was hoping it
would be more like Oathbringer this time. But it ended up more like Words of Radiance,
and perhaps even a little more extensive. BRANDON: Yeah. There were some major viewpoint
shifts that I did with two of the characters, one that was a hard rewrite, and one that was
an easy one but required more actual work. Running out of time for Devi, and we’ll go on a
little bit after this. But I think—why don’t I just ask you. I’m sure you get this question a
lot Devi. It’s not specifically about my work. But every new author wants to know what an editor
is looking for. No editor wants to answer that question, because the editor, what they’re looking
for is great storytelling and they’ll know it when they see it. But can you give us anything that,
like, when you know a book is really working, when it’s really clicking, what
are some of the things that you look for in those early manuscripts that
just make you say, “Ah, I can latch on. This is something that’s going to work.”?
DEVI: Most of the books that I have fallen in love with and acquired, I know within the
first few pages that I’m going to buy that book. I think those first few pages
are true for almost every editor. There are very few books where you’re going
to read halfway through and you’re like, “I guess I’m going to buy this book.” I would say
within those first few pages, if you have great pacing, and if you have the characters down,
and the worldbuilding down, and all of that, you have it. But it’s kind of hard for me to
articulate in terms of what that spark is. I would say it comes down to whether that book has spark.
There is something about that book that makes you want to keep turning the pages. You can’t stop.
There’s some books where the language is so beautiful, you’re just like, “Oh my god.” Every
book is different. Is that too vague an answer? PETER: So, Devi, I was wondering, are there
books sometimes where you’re reading the first few pages and you’re sure you’re going
to buy it, but then you get to the end and it just doesn’t come together?
DEVI: Rarely. Very, very rarely. BRANDON: It seems to me, and I’ve
heard other editors talk about this, that an ending is actually one of those things you
can fix. An editor can help you fix your ending. But an editor can’t fix whether, you can’t
fix that spark. You can’t help you fix making interesting characters. That’s much harder, right?
If you can’t write interesting characters, if you can’t write something that is capable of
grabbing attention and holding on, that’s the thing that you need to be working on. I mean,
I have lots of friends who are bad at endings, and they all have great books with great endings
that get released. It seems like an ending is one of those things that’s kind of easy to fix, maybe.
Devi, thank you so much. We’re going to keep talking for a bit, but we’ll excuse you. Thank you
for all your work on this book. You read the book, like, four times, and it’s 450,000
words long. I really appreciate that. You’ve been very handy. This is the first of my
books that Devi was the editor on. Devi did work on Oathbringer as well. But this is your first
full Brandon Sanderson book. I hope we didn’t overwhelm you with too much, too many words.
DEVI: I loved it. It was awesome. It was a pleasure. Thank you, guys.
BRANDON: Thank you very much.
DEVI: Bye. BRANDON: At This point I have this document.
But it also has something Karen’s added. What do you add to the 3.0 draft before I look at
it? This is usually the spren draft and the kind of real timeline continuity stuff.
KAREN: There is one draft where I read just straight through
looking for spots where spren should be. The things like Windspren and Coldspren,
those are easy to find spots for because you can search for keywords and just plop them
around. I also look for scenes where there's just big emotion. Sometimes I'll write, “Lots of
emotion here. What do you want to do here?” Other times I say, you’ll say, “She was ashamed,”
and I'll put in Shamespren. And then the next time it comes around, you'll say, “She said this and
then Shamespren fluttered around her,” and it becomes much more of a show than tell. And that's
a really rewarding part of my process, that I can see specific things where the book got better
because I wrote this word. That’s a lot of fun. I also, on the timeline, by the time it gets
back to Brandon for third or fourth draft, it’s got a date stamp at the top of each chapter
that says, this is the date. It’s been this many days since the last chapter. In line somebody will
say, “Yeah, three days ago I did this,” and I just cross it out and I say “two” to make it fit the
timeline. I’ve got this spreadsheet that’s got, like, a couple of thousand lines of every chapter
in every book, sometimes more than one per scene, saying the quote, which I do in the wiki, the
quote and all the other stuff and why I think this date is the way it is. Because
sometimes we go back and say, OK, I can move that by a week or so if I need to. And
sometimes I’m like, no, it has to be this day. BRANDON: One of the things that changed
because of this work in this draft was, at the end, not to give spoilers, but it had
a lot of things happening on the same day. And Karen’s like, “This is a lot of stuff
to be happening on one day.” I’m like, “I’m pretty sure it’ll work.” She’s like, “OK.”
And so, Karen said, “Well, for it to work, here are the timestamps of all these
various things and where everyone is.” And when she did that and I looked at
it, I’m like, “Oh, this is ridiculous. It can’t all happen on one day.” And so, I changed
it to several days. But it was kind of this, like, Karen doing the work and showing how it had to
lock together to get everything on one day. Yes, it could happen, but it was so—there were so
many—we were bending over backwards in so many different directions, if that metaphor even works,
that I realized, OK, let’s go ahead. Sometimes it takes me seeing that to make me say, “OK, that is
more unrealistic than the changes I have to make.” Which are still slightly unrealistic, but
they’re less unrealistic to make those changes. KAREN: Another big timeline thing we had in
this one was the flashback sequence. Because we’d already had a lot of those scenes, and
even some of them as flashbacks. And so, weaving in what we know from old stuff and
what we’ve got here, sometimes I’m like, “OK, if we do this this day, and then there’s
a highstorm, and then this the next day, we can make this match the old one that
kind of spread over a couple of days.” But that was a big, tricky one in this.
BRANDON: This is a hard series because we have flashbacks in every book. We know what
they’re going to be, but until I write them, I don’t know exactly the shape they’re
going to take. And because of that, the narrative timeline of all of these things
gets a little sticky. And sometimes we just say, “You know, we’ve got to go back and change Way
of Kings.” We didn’t realize we had this problem until we wrote the things. Dalinar can’t be here
and here at the same time. We do sometimes make those calls where we’re like, we’re just going
to change it. And we hope that you all understand that we try to keep it as neat and tidy as we can,
but 10 years ago now, when I wrote the first book, and I’m still writing flashback sequences
that need to be in continuity with things said in that first book, and sometimes we’re
just like, you know what? We’ll go ahead and give ourselves a mulligan on that one.
PETER: There’s a few changes in the 10th Anniversary edition that—
BRANDON: Yeah. I keep meaning, and maybe we should do this, every time we do changes, to have
a bug fix, like explanation of why we made the changes. I think maybe that would be worth doing
when we release this book, is at some point have Peter and I get down and say, “OK, we changed this
line in Way of Kings because of this. This is the new continuity.” And just kind of be upfront.
I don’t know if we have the time to do that. PETER: That’s the question.
BRANDON: It’s another thing to do. But all right, so this all comes back to me,
and this is the big draft. This is the hard draft. Because instead of having five people’s feedback
on this one, I now have 60 people’s feedback. And it has been culled down very expertly, but
it is also me seeing if things I tried work. Things that you try don’t. Usually, most things
work. But there’s always going to be things that you tried that didn’t land. Most of the time
when I’m making revisions in this it’s because something I wanted to happen didn’t land. It’s not
that people are changing my vision of the book, but things that I thought would work just didn’t
work for the audience. Some subtle changes in the style of the story can make these
things land. If want some example of this, if you did the kickstarter, you
will get for Dawnshard the revision, like, me explaining the different revisions and
why I made the changes I did in all the different drafts. So, you can kind of pour through that
and see. You can see the kind of subtle changes in that book. Like, there’s a character whose
personality I just need to bring much more to the forefront to make them relevant for you
caring about what’s happening. And I knew that needed to happen, but I didn’t know the extent
of what it needed to happen until I got the beta read. And this beta read really lets me see the
shape of the novel I created, and the emotional impact it’s having on my readers, and see if
there are better ways to make different plot sequences land. I’ve talked about changing
the way that Shallan interacts with her personal psychology and her mental illness
in this book. And that required me having people read the book who share Shallan’s way
of seeing the world, and saying, “No, no, no. This is how it would happen. This is how people
like me are presented poorly in media. This is how I wish they were presented because it would be
more accurate.” That’s just not something I could do until I had those reads. And it required some
extensive rewrites and revisions to get it right. But the fun thing about this is, by getting
it right for those subject matter experts, universally people who read the new
versions liked it better, whether or not they knew anything about dissociative
identity disorder or anything like that. Universally they were like, “Wow, this
chapter reads so much better now.” And it is interesting that by trying to make it more
accurate, we also just made it way more readable, way better, way more interesting. And so that
revision is the big, difficult one. Often when I’m doing a revision, I can move at 10,000-15,000
words a day in a revision. When these revisions happened, I optimistically would be like, maybe I
can get to 10,000. Usually, it’s more like 7,000, 8,000, maybe 6,000 words in a day of work.
But then when that one is done, then I get to do another easy revision. Because at this point, I do
the final polish. And so, I’ve finished the 4.0, and the 5.0 is just me trying to trim and tighten
the language. This is where we use a line editor, which Kristy is not here right now. She is now
our primary line editor. Used to be that Moshe, who was my editor for most of my books, would
do the line edit, as well as the content edit. Devi does content edit. Line editing is not
really Devi’s thing, and so we kind of split that into two people. For this book, the primary
line editor was Kristy. She goes through the book, looks for awkward sentences, looks for grammatical
problems. It’s not really a proofread. It’s more of a, this sentence is awkward. This doesn’t make
sense on a paragraph or line level. A lot of times what she’s catching is during all this revision
process I’ve introduced errors, because I’ve cut out half of a sentence and half of another and
stuck them together. And in my brain, they work, but sometimes you just miss that it doesn’t
read well anymore. And she highlights those. Peter does a very helpful thing on this, where
he has--. Do you have a script that does this? PETER: Yeah, I have a script in Microsoft Word,
essentially, that it’ll go through and highlight a certain type of word.
BRANDON: Looked is one. PETER: For example, looked, or places
where there’s adverbs and stuff. BRANDON: And a word that
usually indicates passive voice. PETER: Right.
BRANDON: And he can just run these scripts and it highlights in
brackets all of those words for me. I would say half of them don’t need to be changed, I’m using
correctly. About half the time, though, it’s like, “Oh, I can use a much better word here.” Or “Wow,
I have used that word a ton.” And Peter actually does some actual line by line fixes where he
notices, even if they’re not on this list, that I’m using a word that’s not that common a
word twice in two pages and will bracket them for me and things. And this is just to try to make
the prose more readable. Number one goal is more readable. Number two more evocative, interesting,
and well written. This is the final polish, and this is actually an easy revision. I look forward
to these revisions, even though I’m really tired of the book by this point. Because that other
revision is so hard, doing one that I can just focus on “Is this a good line or not? Nope. Let’s
make it a good line. OK, I’m done with that one.” It’s just a really relaxing edit to do.
PETER: And you also tend to, I mean, you tighten things up. You keep the
spreadsheet of what percentage you’ve cut off. BRANDON: And I don’t have to do that on every
book. It’s if a book is feeling really fatty to me, I’ll keep a spreadsheet and force myself
to keep it--. These days, I cut 5% naturally. And if 5% to 7% feels the right amount, I don’t
need the spreadsheet. If I have to get up to 10% then I will use a spreadsheet. I used it on
Oathbringer. I didn’t use it on Rhythm of War. It just is my instinct for how much
needs to be cut. Because these days, in each draft I am cutting some of that. It’s
just this is my last time to really focus on it. And so, at that point, the book gets
handed over to Peter. And do you want to explain the copy edit and the proofread.
PETER: Right. Sure. At that point, it goes to TOR, and then it’s copy edited. But TOR does
all their copy editing using freelancers. Our copy editor, who has done all of Brandon’s books at TOR is Terry McGarry.
BRANDON: We really like Terry. PETER: She’s also an author in her own right and
has written several fantasy novels. But yeah, she’s really good. Basically, I have a screenshot
here of the prologue that’s come through. The copy editor, one thing they do is they change
all the styles in Microsoft Word and stuff, so that when they, after this the publisher will
take it and put it in a program called InDesign, and these styles will transfer over so that they,
in InDesign, will know how it’s going to look on the page. She’ll go through and basically this
is where the grammar—well, mostly it’s--. OK. So, spelling here is definitely where she will fix the
spelling if we haven’t fixed it already. And then if there’s something, the grammar just doesn’t
work, she’ll try to fix it, or say, “The sense of this sentence isn’t coming together.” So, she’ll
do a query here and say, “Does this mean what it appears to mean?” She’ll have a lot of queries
on the side. In the past, this was done on paper. BRANDON: Yeah. Before I had Peter, I had to go
through on paper, and I would have to STET any changes I didn’t want made. It was assumed that
if the copy editor made the change, it was going to be made unless I said, “No, don’t make that.”
PETER: That’s true. And that’s still the case, but it’s all done in Microsoft Word
now. I’ll go through and I’ll mark it. If we want to do what Terry has written there,
I’ll just leave it the way it is. Oftentimes I’ll say, “Yes, this is an issue, but
we’re going to fix it a different way.” And I’ll just fix it a different way.
BRANDON: Yeah. PETER: Occasionally there are things where
I have to go to Brandon and say, “You know, Terry actually found a continuity error here where
this thing’s in this chapter, but 12 chapters later it’s this other thing.” And so, we have to
do a little brainstorm and figure out how to fix it. Usually, it’s something very easy to change.
BRANDON: Yeah, I sit on Peter’s couch. Actually, I sometimes just lounge on it, and sit there.
And he throws things and says, “All right. Do you want this word to be capitalized all
the way through? You’ve done it both ways. Which one do you want? All right. You’ve used
this term and this term. Are both terms correct, or do you want to standardize as one of
them? Oh, this is a continuity error. You say this. You say this. Which one do you want
it to be?” We just kind of work through them like that. And usually, they are a really easy
fix where I’m like, “Uh, go with that one,” or “I don’t care. You pick it.” And stuff like that.
KAREN: Can I add something here? BRANDON: Yeah.
KAREN: One of the things that I do in my process is that I have a spreadsheet called
Rhythm of War Terms. In it I will list all the names of the people that are in this book, and
all of the parshmen rhythms that are in this book. And then I give that to the copy editor so that
they have correct spelling of all the names, and a lot of what should be capitalized and
what shouldn’t. Other things like that. PETER: For a lot of authors, actually the copy
editor will just make that list themselves. We’re just giving the copy editor a little hand.
BRANDON: We’re overachievers in some of these things. Or you could say control freaks.
PETER: Well, it’s four times as long as another book, so really--.
BRANDON: And it’s four books in in continuity. Because we don’t expect Terry to
catch continuity errors between books and stuff. That’s not the copy editor’s job in
this case. But then the proofread happens. And the proofread we do a different way from most
people. Like most things we do a different way, we do the proofreads differently.
PETER: Yeah. We talk about beta readers. After beta readers then we
have gamma readers, just because that’s the way the Greek alphabet goes.
BRANDON: Yes. PETER: Basically, I just make another spreadsheet
on Google, and I divide up the book then into--. With the copy editor, it was still in the
manuscript form. But then after I go through and I improve the entire copy edit for the whole book,
then it goes and it’s composited. Compositing is where they put it into the final form where words
look the way they look in the final book. So, they’ve got headings, if the book has headings.
These books are so long that they actually got rid of the headings in order to fit more words
on the page. No, wait. No, they got rid of the--. Sorry. They didn’t get rid of the headings.
They put the page number over in the corner in order to fill more at the bottom. OK. The pages
look the way that they look in the final book. And then I will get a bunch of gamma
readers together, and we’ll send them a PDF. For this book we divided it up into 50-page
sections, and I had on the spreadsheet where they’d go through, and they’d claim a 50-page
section. Just to make sure that all the sections are claimed and then that each section gets two or
three other people who look at the same section, as many as they can look at within the couple
weeks that we had to do. It’s like about 10 days. BRANDON: We do not get a lot
of time on these because--. This is mostly my fault. I pick when the books
get published, which is rare for an author. But I kind of get to pick my publication dates.
I feel that we need to be releasing Stormlight books every three years or we just won’t finish
them in my lifetime. And so, because of that, and because they’re so big, it’s usually a scramble
the whole time through. It’s basically, we get 18 months off, and then 18 months of Stormlight
that is just kind of crazy. We try to do what we can to decrazyify that as much as possible. But it
would be very easy to let each book slip another year. You’ve seen this in other book series where
it just gets longer and longer between releases. And that could happen with us. And so, if there
are problems, it’s my fault because I demand this aggressive schedule. And I think you guys would
all rather us finish the series in my lifetime. But it does mean that Peter doesn’t get the time
he needs to really make the book as continuity problem free and as typo free as he would like.
PETER: Well, so far, I mean, it actually worked out pretty well for this book. Since we
turned it in, I’ve only found seven errors. BRANDON: Any of them on the table of contents?
PETER: Well, there was one on the table of contents, but it’s not as bad as the one
from the previous book. Probably people won’t even notice this one. And there are
actually two in the acknowledgements. But out of the seven, three of them are in the front
stuff that most people won’t look at anyway. BRANDON: That’s right.
PETER: But, I mean, so on this spreadsheet, people will, this is basically they’re looking
for the errors that have slipped through. They’ll write in what they think the
error is. If I think it’s not an error, I’ll just strike it out, as you can see in the
screenshot here. And then if it’s something where I definitely need to do it, I mark it green. If
it’s something where I need to take another look, I mark it yellow. Then I go through at the end and
change all those to either strikeouts or greens. BRANDON: Is this fun? Do you enjoy that part
of it? Like, which of the editorial drafts is the most fun for you to work on?
PETER: It’s hard to--. I mean, it would be more fun if I weren’t so rushed.
BRANDON: Yeah. This one would probably be the most fun for you if it weren’t so rushed?
PETER: Ah, I don’t know. There are so many different parts of my
process that are so different from each other. It’s hard to pick favorites.
BRANDON: The nice thing about the job we do is it’s always changing. Like, even if you’re doing
the same thing, you’re doing it on a different book, which has different problems. This is not
a job, and this is part of the reasons I love being a writer, is there’s always something
new to do, always something different. And it really keeps you sharp, and it really
keeps you engaged. But we are also tired of the book by the time it’s done. So tired of the
book. I’m glad that you guys, I hope you guys will enjoy it. But we are at this point where
I’ve had now three months where I’m like, “Oh, I’m done with that book. It’s OK.” But you are
just finished where you’re like, “Urgh.” This is where the book gets thrown down the stairs.
PETER: Yes. After I get that spreadsheet thing, then I transfer all of the things onto the
actual pages, and I scan those in and send them back. I’ve got a couple screenshots here,
one where I fixed that first green thing, and then the second one where it’s an example of errors
that are caught only at the proofreading stage. This is a thing called a stack, where
three lines in a row end with the letter Y. BRANDON: It looks weird on the page.
PETER: Yeah, it looks weird on the page. BRANDON: It kicks people out of books.
PETER: Yep. And so that’s something that gets fixed.
BRANDON: And they’re not always just proofreading. There’s widows and orphans,
which writing terms for, like, words or lines that are awkward at the bottom of the page by
themselves and just look strange. Things that will kick people out of the book for reasons
not to do with the actual content of the book, but to do with the formatting and layout.
PETER: And at this point, you think that this is the end. But they have to send me a
couple more PDFs after this, and I make sure the corrections were made correctly, and occasionally
while I’m checking a correction I’ll say, “Oh, I found something else.”
BRANDON: When is the time when you read the book backward?
PETER: That is while the gamma readers are doing their read, I do
the entire book, I read it backwards. BRANDON: Paragraph by paragraph.
PETER: Well, I go page by page. Usually, I do about half a page. I start at the last page of
the book and then I work my way to the beginning. I do about half a page reading down, and then I
go back up to the top of the page and read down. When I’m reading it like that, I’m able to keep
myself from getting too engrossed in the story, which is always a danger with Brandon’s books.
BRANDON: Oh, I appreciate that. Emily, my wife, has trouble being an alpha or beta reader
because she just gets lost, and she’s like, “Oh, it’s three hours later and I haven’t
written a comment down as I’m reading the book.” KAREN: And I have a music collection
with, like, 20,000 songs in it, and I’m always changing my rating of how much I
like the song. Every two or three minutes a new song comes on, and I’m like, “Oh, have I just been
lost in a paragraph? I really need to go and--.” BRANDON: That’s a handy tip.
KAREN: Yeah. BRANDON: Yeah, go ahead.
PETER: But after we’re finished with the text, then we move on to the audiobook. And
after we’re done with the audiobook, then we actually move on to making the eBook look
really good and have the best color images and all that sort of thing. I just sent in my
latest feedback on the eBook yesterday. BRANDON: Because we have so much art in these
books, sometimes publishers don’t take the time that they should to make sure the images look good
in the eBook. It’s getting better and better over the years. But early, the first books, there was
a lot of things that Peter needed to do, to go to them and say, “Look, this is just not going to be
readable. You can’t put this map in like this.” PETER: Yeah. Basically, Brandon
is the author who’s doing this. And so, the eBook people just aren’t used to that.
BRANDON: There aren’t other authors doing this extensive of an artwork
integration into a long prose novel. PETER: But because the book has been
turned in for several months now, oh, when did we turn it in. It was like--.
BRANDON: I don’t know. I finished July, right? PETER: Yeah.
KAREN: So, it was the end of August. PETER: Basically, we were able, those seven
errors, we were able to get all of them except one fixed in the audiobook. So, the audiobook
is slightly better. Then the eBook we have all seven of those fixed.
BRANDON: Awesome. Well, we actually--. PETER: And we will get them fixed
in reprints in the print version. BRANDON: We have a few questions. We aren’t
going to be able to take a ton of these. But we got a few interesting questions on our
Facebook that I want to try to address. First question is, “How often do I push
back on advice from an editorial team?” It depends on who among the editorial team
is making the comment and at what stage it is. For instance, the only people I push back on,
meaning that I write to, are generally going to be Peter, Karen, and Devi. Everyone else,
they’ll make feedback, and it goes into the void that is Brandon Sanderson and maybe
I’ll make the change or maybe they won’t. These three I will write sometimes a rebuttal.
And if I write a rebuttal it is me wanting them to respond. If it’s just something that I’m just
not going to change at all, I often won’t write anything, which is kind of frustrating for Peter,
and I realize that. It’s part of the time crunch thing. In an ideal world I’d be able to respond
each way, because by responding and saying why I’m not making this, it would probably explain to him
so that future feedback would be better. Or there might be things that I would change if he would be
like, “Oh, no, you misunderstood this. It’s this.” But a lot of the changes are just very simple
things that I just make. I’m just like, “Oh, yeah. Change this word here and it fixes this.”
Other things are like, “I’m OK with that response. I’m OK that a segment of the population will have
that response because I think I gain something from this in tandem with it.
Yeah? KAREN: In Dawnshard, there is a change that I
fought you on over and over and over. I’m like, “I cannot believe that these people did this.
This is absolutely not OK.” And in the last draft you added a little bit of what this character
is seeing and a little bit of a concession to my complaints, and I have zero problem with it.
BRANDON: Oh, really? I’m happy to hear that because I thought you still had a problem with it.
KAREN: It’s just fine. BRANDON: OK. Yeah. It was actually a
different problem I changed that also mitigated your problem. But oftentimes, so
I try not to push back in the writing group. It’s hard, because pushing back in the writing
group sometimes gets them to fix the problem for me. But also, if you push back too much against
people, they will stop giving you feedback, because they’ll be like, “Well, he’s just not
going to listen anyway.” That’s particularly problematic in a writing group where you want to
have people making a discussion about your books. But I will push back against my alpha readers if I
feel like me pushing back is going to get them to either understand what I wanted and be like, “Oh,
that sounds right. Maybe you should do this to fix this.” Or to get them to say, “No, no, no.
You’re misunderstanding. I don’t think that works at all.” It just gets me another viewpoint
on it. I would say that happens though in, like, one out of 10 or 15 of these problems. From
alpha readers I am generally taking, I would say, of the things that Peter and Karen put in I’m
taking 75% to 80%. In some way I’m changing because of something they highlighted. From
beta readers, because they have collated them, I’m taking an equal percentage by that point, or
even maybe a higher percentage. Because people have already culled those down. But you’re missing
from that the 50% to 70% that don’t even make it into the document because Peter sees it and
says, “No, Brandon doesn’t need to change this.” And Peter’s really good at that. Writing group,
I’m probably taking about a third, I would say, which is in line with what the beta readers would
be doing that I’m taking. But I’m seeing all of them, and those ones I’m consciously discarding,
where the beta readers I’m just not even seeing the feedback that I would be unlikely to take.
PETER: And there was one chapter in this book where you actually, right after the beta readers
read it, you wrote a revised version, and we had a four or so, a very small number of the beta
readers take a second look at that one chapter, and the tweaks that you did really helped them.
BRANDON: And I actually am going to write an essay on that chapter to go along with
the book release. You can see that essay. There’s some things I want to explain.
KAREN: A thing that I hear from the betas because we’re friends and we chat online.
BRANDON: They have a secret chat that they talk in.
KAREN: They get frustrated when other fans are like, “This thing that is in
this book, Brandon never would have put this in except that you guys made him do it.”
The book isn’t written by committee. BRANDON: No.
KAREN: It is a collaboration in a lot of ways, but Brandon writes the book. We tell him how
we feel about the book that he’s written, but he writes the book.
BRANDON: Right. There’s not a secret cabal guiding. They are a test
audience, and if I’m changing something, it’s because a significant number of beta readers
are having a reaction I didn’t intend, expect, or want. Or one beta reader or two raises an issue
that I’m like, “Wow, I totally want to change that.” I didn’t know until they’d mentioned it.
There is never any pressure. Like, they don’t have that opportunity. I see a document, but they’re
not interacting with me as they’re writing it. They’re just giving their feedback. And I tell
you, you should be really grateful to these beta readers. You’ll be able to see in Dawnshard.
Dawnshard’s going to be a great example, because I would say it has equivalent changes to Rhythm
of War, just in smaller form. And you can go read the draft before the beta readers and after, and
I think you will find the types of changes that they are inspiriting me to make are very—very
much contribute to the success of the story. “What is the funniest or most interesting
error that almost went out but didn’t?” I can tell you one that did. No, I think we caught
this one. My favorite, well, maybe you’ll have a different one. My favorite is when I said that,
so the Mistborn books have ball scenes and lots of cool things. There’s a scene where Vin and
Elend are talking, and it’s in one of the later books, it’s either two or three, where Vin’s
talking about how different their lives were, and she says, “You’re a man of magnificent
balls, and I’m a child of the streets.” I didn’t see it. But writing group sure did, and
they’re like, “Oh, yes, he is a man of magnificent balls.” I think that one got changed.
PETER: Well, to follow up that one, one of the beta readers favorite ones
is when Shallan was complimenting Adolin’s tight shirt, but there was no R.
BRANDON: Yeah. Those are the typos that are hard because they don’t get a wavy line under them. So,
yeah. Glad you caught that one. I often mention the one that—the first one of these that happened
is Elantris I had named Adonis first. And I’d just done it creating out of—it was called the Spirit
of Adonis then. And it just read, Adonis reads the same as Adonis, the Greek mythological figure.
And I had not put two and two together. I’d created this Aon that meant this thing. I was all,
like, this happens, you name something something, and you don’t even make the connection that
it is actually a word in our language or our shared experience that means something.
KAREN: Because his nicknames are made up, he thinks of them as a specific sound.
BRANDON: I just think of the sounds, and then I write the words. That’s why Dalinar
is spelled differently in Way of Kings Prime. KAREN: So, when I hit some of these names,
I’m like, “You can’t name a person that.” BRANDON: When you sound it out a different way
from the way I’m saying it, the way it works on the page, it just doesn’t work the same.
KAREN: Yeah. BRANDON: So yeah, that happens.
“Are there any scenes,” a fan asks, “that I wanted to include that got cut
and didn’t make it into the story?” This doesn’t really happen. It happened in
Wheel of Time. And as I spoke of earlier, this was Harriet’s instinct being better
than mine for what belongs in that series. It doesn’t happen on my own series because if I’m
cutting it it’s because it doesn’t belong. I never regret that. I do regret once in a while, like,
things I’ve done where, as I get more experience, I’m like, I could have told that part of the
story better. But they’re not things that get cut that I don’t want cut, not anymore. And
actually, it’s never happened, even on my first book. All the things I cut, I cut because I
believed they belonged on the cutting room floor. PETER: But some of the ones that you cut
from Elantris later ended up, there was a scene about the ball game, throwing the balls.
BRANDON: Uh huh. Yep. Just ended up in Warbreaker. I call it the woodchipper. I throw things
in the woodchipper, which is this idea of it turns it into its constitute pieces
that you can then recombine in a new way. Nothing’s ever cut completely. Everything’s
always there to maybe be reused at some point. “How much does the structure of the book
change from draft one to draft five?” Usually not a lot. If the structure is changing, something significant is wrong. The structure
of Starsight changed, the second Skyward book, because of while writing the book I came to
realize that I needed to remove some characters because they were working as a crutch too much
for Spensa in the story. And that required major significant rewrites to the structure. That was a
really hard revision. Normally structure doesn’t change. Character’s tone perspective changes and
new chapters get added. But the whole overall feel of it usually I’m pretty good at that in the
outline. That’s what the outline is doing for me, is it’s giving me the shape of a book, and the
shape of an arc that I can then build my story on. It’s like if you see someone do a model out
of clay, they will put in a skeleton, usually out of wires or tinfoil or something, that they mold
the clay upon. And a great outline, for me, is that structure. And I’ll know the equivalent if I
have to have two legs and two arms for this model. And that stuff doesn’t generally change.
KAREN: One thing that I’ve had people ask, when you write draft one, you don’t write chapter
one, chapter two, chapter three. You write Kaladin chapter one, chapter two, chapter
three, and then Shallan, and then in second draft you start putting them
together, and which scene should go before. BRANDON: And that hops around a lot. So, it’s
a good thing to bring up. Certain scenes, like the smaller scale structure of what the order
things are in, that does change around a lot. Like in Dawnshard, I had to move—make a big kind of—a
small structural change to the last few chapters in order to change the pacing. Basically,
the pacing bouncing between a very serious scene and a not so serious scene was really
off. And beyond that, I wanted the tension of the two scenes to kind of align. So, I needed
to move a scene before another scene. That sort of stuff happens a lot. But the structure of
the story is still the same. So not a lot. Last question we’ll do is “Were there any
unexpected hurdles when editing Rhythm of War?” Yes and no. You always expect there to be
hurdles. You’re not sure what they’re going to be. You hope that the book will not have any big
hurdles, any big things that need to be revised. But you always know that there’s a possibility.
There’s a possibility that I send the book out to alpha readers and it comes back and
they’re like, “This just doesn’t work at all. Something hugely wrong with this story is
happening.” Doesn’t happen very often. In fact, I can’t think of it happening for us on a
major book. This is in part because I show my whole team the outline for the book before
I do it so they know and can give me red flags. But there are always things that you don’t expect.
And in this book one of the things that was an unexpected hurdle that maybe I could have
anticipated, and I anticipated it a little but not to the extent, was that a number of the
readers found the flashback sequences boring. This is because, because of revisions early
in the series we had added a lot more of the Parshendi’s culture into those books, when I kind
of had planned to save some of that for this book. And what it meant was that a lot of the Venli
flashbacks then were retreading the same ground for people. And so, to revise that, I needed to
make Venli’s character change more dynamically, so the progress was not you were learning
new things, it was the progress of watching Venli change. And that’s a subtle shift. But in
the original flashbacks, I kind of started her as she was, as you expect her to be. And in
the new version, I backed her up, made her more sympathetic, and kind of showed more of a
downfall, which gave more motion to her scenes, which then gives something else to latch onto
in those scenes, because a lot of them are the scenes, just seen from a different perspective,
that you’ve already gotten. Now the reason I say I did anticipate this to an extent is because I,
going into it, had realized this was why I split the flashbacks to Venli and Eshonai because
they all originally were going to be Eshonai, but those would have been even more so the same
that you got before because we got so much Eshonai in previous books. So, by adding in half Venli
scenes, I thought maybe that would shake it up and add more diversity. Which I think it did, but it
wasn’t quite enough. So, I made this other tweak as well. These are the sorts of things that you
know something’s going to happen, but you don’t expect it. I also added multiple scenes to Venli’s
viewpoint in the present day to kind of help contrast and balance those scenes, which I think
gives more of a view of how much she’s changed, which also helps with that sense of we’re watching
change, we’re watching motion, we’re engaging in a story, not just getting a list of facts.
You’ll have to tell me what you think of those. I appreciate everyone hanging out with us for
this launch party. Thank you for dealing with the digital version of a launch party. I think we
can get a lot more to a lot more people this way, so it does have a silver lining. But I know a
lot of you were looking forward to coming and seeing me in person. You’ll have to settle for
this instead. But I really appreciate Peter and Karen joining me. And you guys should all
appreciate them for all the work they do, because there is a lot of work that goes on
behind the scenes, and a lot of frustration and hair pulling out. Peter didn’t used to be bald.
And then the books came along. Thanks very much.
