I’ve talked about something my friends jokingly called “worldbuilder’s
disease.” That’s the affliction a writer can get where they spend all their
time worldbuilding, and never actually tell their story. For The Way of
Kings, I decided to GIVE myself worldbuilder’s disease. I let myself just
think and plan about the world for months and months before writing—far
more than I normally did.
At the time, I was working the graveyard shift at a hotel and would write
during downtime. I bought a three-ring binder, and I started printing off
pages of Roshar’s worldbuilding each day after I finished. I filled that thing
up with some three or four hundred thousand words of ideas for the setting
—more words than the book itself eventually had. In part, this was to give
myself time to deal with all the rejections I’d been getting.
Things eventually got better. I finally got accepted to a graduate school.
(BYU let me in; I hadn’t wanted to apply there initially because that’s
where I’d done my undergraduate studies. However, out of twelve
applications the first year and another eight the next year, it’s the only
school that accepted me.) I started to see some small successes in
publishing. And right around the time I finished The Way of Kings Prime, I
finally sold a book.
The Way of Kings saw me through it all. It shepherded me through my
transition from an amateur to a professional writer—and the text, as you’ll
soon find out, shows that. This book is a failure, but a spectacular one.
I’d never attempted something on this scope before, and so I tried to
write too many different viewpoints, with too many different plotlines for
me to juggle. The end result, as you’ll read, is a book that lacks focus—it’s
trying to do too much. What it envisions is awesome, but because of my
limited skill at the time, I ended up with a large number of fragments of
different stories told together in one book—rather than something that tells
a single narrative.
Everything is going to feel just a little off to you in this novel. Indeed,
themes like mental health, which I later learned better ways of addressing,
are . . . handled less delicately in this book. Also, in reading history, I found
that many arranged marriages happened between people of extremely
disparate ages, and I wanted to explore that kind of strange relationship. (I
did it in a way that didn’t involve anything uncomfortable happening—but
it still came off poorly in the book. Fair warning.)
