Brandon Posts Large Oathbringer Progress Report
This week, Brandon posted a large progress report on Oathbringer, the third Stormlight Archive book, on the Stormlight Archive subreddit. To talk about how far he has gotten, he went into a detailed explanation on how he structures Stormlight books, so people understand what his word count means. I'm going to talk about what Brandon said, and do some analysis as well!
Long story short, Brandon is 180,000 words through Oathbringer. (For comparison, the first Mistborn book is about 200,000 words long.) 130,000 of those are for Part One of the book. Like the other Stormlight books, this will have five parts, and Brandon said that Part One will be longest. He's also written Dalinar's flashbacks in its entirety. Most interestingly, he's finished a novelette from a new character that we will see in Part Two of the book, and he's partially through the novelette that will be in the vein of Szeth and Eshonai interludes. Confused yet?
To truly understand what that means, Brandon talked about the structure of the book, as Stormlight books have a particular structure to them. Each Stormlight book has a central "focus" character which has a big arc with flashbacks. The Way of Kings had Kaladin, and Words of Radiance had Shallan. In the initial work on the flashbacks for this book, Brandon decided on Dalinar--before, he didn't know whether Dalinar or Szeth would get the flashbacks. After he decided on Dalinar, he finished Dalinar's flashbacks in entirety. While Dalinar gets a larger plot in this book, Brandon did say that we will see Kaladin and Shallan on the level that we saw Kaladin in Book Two. The flashback character gets a role in all five Parts of the book, so we'll see a lot of Dalinar.
In addition, we of course have the interludes in between each of the five Parts of the book. There are two different kinds of interludes: ones that are short stories, and then a recurring interlude character in what Brandon calls a novelette. The recurring characters in interludes were Szeth and Eshonai. Book three is going to introduce a new viewpoint for the interludes here, which he hasn't finished writing.
Brandon restricts the amount of viewpoint characters carefully in this way so he doesn't have the problems of other huge fantasy series--like, say, The Wheel of Time--where we just lose sight of the main characters. In addition to Dalinar, Kaladin, and Shallan, we'll also see some Szeth, Eshonai (to no one's surprise, she's alive), Adolin, Jasnah, and Navani.
What interests me most is that Part Two has a second novelette from a character we haven't seen viewpoints from yet. This person's viewpoints will be across six chapters in Part Two. Because of this, Part Two actually has the least amount of focus on the main characters, though Brandon said that Part Two is shorter than Part One. Like the first two Stormlights, Oathbringer's Part Five is very short as well.
If you think this all sounds confusing, so did I at first. My reaction to that sentence was, "Man, it sounds like we really need a spreadsheet to visualize this."
Well, the joke's on me, because that's exactly what Brandon did.
(And people make fun of me for using a spreadsheet to outline my books! Well, take this!)
I have to imagine that in Brandon's actual spreadsheet or outline, these names are actual characters. We have "Flashbacks" and "Primary Character" which of course refer to Dalinar. Secondary Main Character 1 and 2 are surely Kaladin and Shallan, respectively. Perhaps I am reading too much into the coloring (entirely possible!), but considering Kaladin is a Windrunner, associated with blue, and Shallan is a Lightweaver, associated with red, we could say that Shallan is Secondary Main Character 1, and Kaladin is Secondary Main Character 2. It is interesting that Secondary Main Character 2 vanishes in Part Four, and that in Part Two, we only get one chapter from Secondary Main Character 1. This isn't that unusual. In The Way of Kings, Shallan totally disappeared from Parts Two and Four, and Dalinar and Adolin weren't in Parts One and Three. In Words of Radiance, Dalinar had much fewer viewpoints than in Book One. So, don't be concerned that you won't see your favorite character for a while. Brandon's been doing this juggling the whole time.
For tertiary characters, this is kind of interesting. Brandon does explicitly mention--as I did above--that we will see "moderate amounts" of Szeth, Eshonai, Jasnah, Adolin, and Navani. That's five characters, but on this spreadsheet we only have four tertiary characters. Perhaps this means one of these five will be people we see, but not get viewpoints from. As for Adolin, Brandon later confirmed that Adolin won't have as many viewpoints as other main characters. He will be in about as much as he had in the first two books.
That's about it from the big characters. Brandon did also said there will be "a few surprises regarding other characters who have slightly larger places in the plot," but anyone not on that list won't have more than a viewpoint occasionally. At least, until the second five books, where we will have a different set of main characters--of which Renarin is one of them. So that's pretty cool.
Next on the writing agenda for Oathbringer is to revise Part One, which he normally doesn't do, but he wants to make sure continuity is correct before he moves on. From there, he plans to write Dalinar's Part Two segments, mixing in the flashbacks and the Part Two novelette, and getting the rest of Part Two's main characters done. He hopes that this will put Part Two to 70,000 words, which will put the book at 200,000 words--right at the halfway mark!
Brandon's certainly got his work cut out for him on books this huge. I am really appreciative of him updating us on his progress, and he's clearly working hard. But seriously, there's so many characters and plotlines that no wonder these books are a massive undertaking!
I've also compiled a bunch of things Brandon has said on Reddit and Facebook regarding this. I've integrated a few quotes into what is above, but here are some others:
Q: Would you be willing to answer if characters such as Rysn an Lift will appear in interludes?
A: I'll RAFO that for now.
Q: (In response to "Until the second five books, where our primary characters will shuffle. So you Renarin fans will have to be patient.")
Do you worry that assuring us that a character will likely survive the first arc of the series removes some of the tension in their scenes?
(While you've discussed the idea that a main character can have a book about them while they are dead when Dalinar was expected to be central to book 5, this seems different)
A: I have said many times before that Renarin and Lift are main characters for the next five, but--as you point out--I've also said that I have no problem having a main character who is actually dead, and their story told through flashbacks and the stories of the other characters. Renarin is not safe, but you will see a lot more from him in the future, even if he does die.
To say more would be to give too many spoilers about the nature of the back five books.
Well. That's a thing. I mean, Brandon has said that main characters can die, and has said this frequently. But "spoilers about the nature of the back five books"? Please let me travel in time to discover this now.
Q: Brandon, I've noticed some other books are starting to come out more regularly. Specifically the reckoners and newer mistborn. Any chance you are going to start pushing more on stormlight as well? Or does the scope of the books hinder you writing them as fast?
A: It's exactly what you say, Shane. I started working on the detailed outline for Stormlight 3 right after I finished 2, but it just takes a LONG time to get it all right in my head to be written. There are so many moving pieces. So you can't expect Stormlight too often--even if I weren't writing the other books, I don't think these would be much faster.
Q: Um, what about us (Wit fans)? Will we see any more of him in this book? RAFO?
A: Well, he hasn't skipped a book in the cosmere yet...!
Brandon clarified that he means that Hoid hasn't missed a main sequence cosmere book.
Q: Will Thinker+Grump appear again? Or is this a RAFO?
A: They will appear in the cosmere some day again.
There were some other writing-related comments, which you can check out by looking at the full Reddit thread.
One last thing that I thought I'd mention. An AutoModerator bot on the Stormlight subreddit actually flagged Brandon's post because: "Your submission has been automatically removed because the title does not include one of the required tags." Fortunately, Brandon was able to approve it himself, since he's a moderator of the subreddit. What a cheater.
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