Welcome to Throwback Thursdays on the Tor/Forge blog! Every other week, we’re delving into our newsletter archives and sharing some of our favorite posts.
Words of Radiance came out earlier this week! Brandon Sanderson celebrated his new book by writing about his personal history with epic fantasy in the Tor/Forge Newsletter. To continue our immersion in the world of the The Stormlight Archives, we thought we’d revisit this September 2010 article, in which Sanderson introduced his new series. We hope you enjoy this blast from the past, and be sure to check back every other Thursday for more!
I’ve been asked to introduce The Way Of Kings to you. And I have no idea how to start.
This is an odd position for me. Before, I’ve found it easy to explain my novels. Each one was built around one or two central premises. The gang of thieves who want to rob an immortal emperor. A man cast down by a terrible, magical disease and forced to rebuild a society among those similarly afflicted. A boy who finds that librarians secretly rule the world.
Kings has stymied me each time I’ve tried to describe it. I often end up talking about its creation. (How I started work on it over fifteen years ago. How I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words worth of worldbuilding for it. How much the project has come to mean to me over the decades.) But such things describe the book but don’t actually tell you anything. And so this time, I’m going to try to talk about what The Way Of Kings is.
It’s a book about characters I love. I’ve begun to build a reputation as the “magic system” guy. The author who creates interesting types of magic for every book he writes. On one hand, this delights me, as I do put a lot of effort into the magic in my books. But a great book for me isn’t about a magic, it’s about the people that the magic affects.
The book started its life many years ago being about a young man who made a good decision. I wrote the entire book that way before realizing I’d done it wrong. So I started over from scratch and had him take the other fork, the more difficult fork. The fork that cast him into some of the worst imaginable circumstances, ground him against the stones of a world where there is no soil or sand on the ground.
My goal: to prove to myself, and to him, that the ‘good’ decision was not actually the best one. The Way Of Kings is his story, though he shares the space with several others. They’ll get their own books later in the series.
I want to tell you more, but I don’t have the space here. I want to talk about the art in the book (it’s ambitious, unlike anything I’ve seen tried in an epic fantasy novel before.) I want to talk about the scope of the series, the distinctive world which is so much larger and more real than anything I’ve worked on before. I want to explain the book.
But, for now, I think it’s best to just show you instead.
Enjoy.
The Way of Kings (978-0-7653-2808-3) by Brandon Sanderson was released August 31 from Tor.
This article is originally from the September 2010 Tor/Forge newsletter. Sign up for the Tor/Forge newsletter now, and get similar content in your inbox twice a month!
Mr. Sanderson, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this series. Not too long ago, I read “The 8th Habit” by Stephen Covey and found myself having flashbacks to WoK, and Kaladin’s journey, as I read. Are you familiar with it?
Either way, the series has been stellar. If I have to wait 4 more years for the next one, so be it. My copy of WoK is dog-eared in the best parts, and has been read over and over. You’ve hit a nerve with this one.