Brandon's Writing Speed

[Pagerunner he/him]

Buckle up. It's graph time.

Brandon made a comment recently at a convention that his writing career is now almost as long as Robert Jordan's was while he was writing the Wheel of Time. The first Wheel of Time book was published in 1990, and the last one before Jordan's death was in 2005. Brandon's first book was in 2005; by 2020, he'll eclipse Jordan's tenure. So, I decided to crunch some numbers and compare them. (I'm including projections for Skyward 2, assuming it's the same wordcount as the first book, and Stormlight 4 at 400,000 words for a November 2020 release.) Brandon has essentially had three writing careers in this time: 1) the Cosmere, 2) his non-Cosmere stuff, and 3) writing the final Wheel of Time Trilogy. Here's a comparison of Robert Jordan's writing speed to each of Brandon's careers, and Brandon's total speed.

Notice that each line has a dashed average. This represents the average writing speed for that career.

A couple things I found interesting:

• Robert Jordan had a significant drop off. You can see that sharp angle about five years in, between WoT books 6 and 7. He maintained that later speed fairly well, up til the end. I suspect you'll see that with many other successful authors, for reasons creative or personal, but...
• Brandon's total writing speed has remain essentially unchanged. He has matched Jordan's initial pace fairly well, and his total wordcount (solid line) stays pretty true to the average (dashed line). There's some funky stuff going on around WoT, where Brandon was working harder than usual, but that was making up for a bit of a slower start. (More on that later.) After WoT, his total writing speed and each of his career writing speeds have tracked their average very closely.
• Brandon's Cosmere career has remained remarkably consistent. Even though there was that huge slowdown with Cosmere books during WoT, the initial post-Mistborn push, with Warbreaker and Way of Kings releasing, was enough to keep things averaged out until Brandon could finish up WoT and write Words of Radiance. (The solid blue line gets well above the average at the 5-year mark, but stays pretty flat until the WoR release.) As he's settled in to his groove after WoT, it gets a little choppier, but that's an effect of writing bigger books. He's still writing the same amount of words.
• Brandon's non-Cosmere career has.... remained remarkably consistent. This career actually has two regimes, which is why I included multiple averages. The uppermost red dashed line is the total non-Cosmere average, and it rides well above the solid red line. This indicates that the trend is concave up; Brandon is writing more and more non-Cosmere than he used to. But it's not a gradual process; after WoT, he started working on stuff like Reckoners and Skyward. So I gave non-Cosmere another average trendline with two segments; you'll see the inflection point right around 3000 days, with the release of Rithmatist. Since then, he's been pretty consistent in the amount of non-Cosmere he wrote.
• Brandon's Wheel of Time career is pretty obscene. The green dashed line is essentially the same slope as the blue dashed line. Brandon wrote twice as hard as he used to when he started working on Wheel of Time. My man.

I crunched the numbers. I can't deny them. Brandon's pumping out Cosmere books just as fast as he used to.

But 2019 is the second year ever we have had no Cosmere stories published. (Not counting White Sand, since Brandon didn't write anything for those.) The first time it happened... 2018. It feels like we haven't been getting as much Cosmere, and so many stories have been waiting years for their resolutions. (The gap between Bands of Mourning and Lost Metal will be larger than between Alloy of Law and Shadows of Self. Rithmatist and Alcatraz have been hanging out forever, with the end always just around the corner. Even Legion, a novella trilogy, took seven years to complete.)

I think the answer to this is scope creep. Brandon's not writing any slower, but his plans are getting bigger and bigger. Each Stormlight book is larger than the last. Plans are changing - Skyward was a secret project, followed up by Children of the Nameless as another Secret Project. We'll still get as many words; but waiting a long time for 1 Stormlight book book feels more painful than 3 Mistborn books totaling the a similar amount of words. Same thing for the non-Cosmere projects waiting for their finales; it's not that Brandon doesn't have time, it's that he devotes his time to a different project, instead.

If we take Brandon's average writing rates (Cosmere: 191K words/year; non-Cosmere: 134K words/year), and we assume he's gonna be writing Stormlight (400K ea), Mistborn/Elantris (250K ea), and W&W/YA (120K ea), that gets us projected release dates of:

This is all assuming he sticks to the average. Which, so far, has been a good long-term bet, but not a good short-term bet. So I'd expect these releases to be more clumped together, as he'll alternate what's getting focused time. My final projected Cosmere completion date is 2055. A nice, round 50 years. (My last estimate I put together, back when Brandon was working on Oathbringer, was in 2052. Over three years, the projection has moved back three years. Uh oh... let's not focus too much on that. I was much less rigorous in my analysis.)

What we've seen from the Wheel of Time excursion, though, is that Brandon is not writing at his maximum capacity. About one-third of his WoT writing speed was transferred over to his current non-Cosmere work. (I'd guess the remaining two-thirds turned into family time, since he started having kids right around then. [Well, his wife started having kids. You know what I mean.]) If push comes to shove and Brandon decides to make a focused effort to knock out more Cosmere books, his pace can increase considerably, even without cutting back on his non-Cosmere writing hours. If he were to go full-speed ahead, nothing but Cosmere, I'd project a 2037 completion date; 32 years from start to finish. Obviously, it won't be that. (At the very least, he'd have to fit Rithmatist 2 in there, which would push the whole thing to 2039, somehow.) But based on Brandon's 15-year career so far, it looks like the Cosmere will last between 32 and 50 years. Which doesn't seem terribly unreasonable.

In conclusion, please don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to say anything about what Brandon should or shouldn't be writing. I just like the data, and I think we can learn a lot based on what Brandon has accomplished so far. He prides himself on his consistency. (That's his canned answer about how he writes so much; he's not fast, he's just consistent.) And that's exactly what the data shows.

Edited October 26, 2019 by Pagerunner
I can never get my images to work right the first try...

[Honorless he/him]

So... Brandon is a Bendalloy Allomancer confirmed? 

Edited October 26, 2019 by Honorless
Oof, wrong metal

[Wander89 he/him]

Came here to say that graphs are violently underrated and under-appreciated. I love a good graph! It would also be great to see his work compared to others. This is an awesome contribution!

Edited October 26, 2019 by Wander89

[Truthless of Shinovar he/him]

Yes... I get 35 more years of the Cosmere!!!

[Tesh Any pronouns]

I both love this and hate it at the same time. I love the variation in his work, but it definitely gets frustrating at times. But (hopefully) tLM and tRoW are getting closer, as well as Alcatraz 6. And about the Rithmatist... Fingers crossed.

[Ghanderflaffle she/her]

These releases feel like they are taking forever to me, but I haven’t had to wait for many Sanderson books until I finished Arcanum this year. I've been done with Alcatraz and Rithmatist for a long time, but oh well.

[Toaster Retribution he/him]

On 2019-10-28 at 0:40 AM, Truthless of Shinovar said:

Yes... I get 35 more years of the Cosmere!!!

This prospect is honestly scary. I’m 20 at the moment, and so I’ll be 55 when Brandon finishes, if the data is right. I feel old now :-(

[Mushroom Catalog he/him]

I've been reading his books since 7th grade. I'm in 11th and 16 right now. If the trends hold, I'll be at least 48 years old. I'll be reading his books from middle school to college to family life! That's crazy.

[IcaroRibeiro he/him]

I find your prediction kinda optimistic honestly. He's getting old, the truth is one time he won't write as much as he do now

My hope lies on their books becoming smaller. We have at least 6 Stormlight books, 7 Mistborn books, 2 Elantris sequels, a Warbreaker sequel, plus many minor stories, and probably a Dragonstel trilogy as well. And lets not forget we need to see another 6 more shards, so probably more books or parallel projects Sanderson can't overlook. So lets say 20 more new books plus other possible new series

It's overwhelming. Maybe Mistborn don't need 7 books at all, neither Stormlight need 6

[Wander89 he/him]

I think he just enjoys writing. He loves what he does and when that happens you take pleasure in doing it, even in your spare time. He's an honest person, it's not just his books that make him the people's favourite. 

[Angsos]

@IcaroRibeirohe seems to be one of those people that won't slow down because he won't know what to do with himself otherwise

[IcaroRibeiro he/him]

9 hours ago, Angsos said:

@IcaroRibeirohe seems to be one of those people that won't slow down because he won't know what to do with himself otherwise

Yes, but he's relatively young, in 20 years he will be at 63 and with a lost of cosmere to write. When age strikes him he'll slow down, it's a fact 

Also, hope he cares about his healthy. He need to reach his 80's to end cosmere work 

 

9 hours ago, Wander89 said:

I think he just enjoys writing. He loves what he does and when that happens you take pleasure in doing it, even in your spare time. He's an honest person, it's not just his books that make him the people's favourite. 

I honestly love this man. He's so careful about this work, and so respectful with us fans. Always kind and attentive, even make us to know their current writing stages. Honestly I've never see any book writer so dependable before

Edited November 10, 2019 by IcaroRibeiro

[Karger he/him]

On 11/9/2019 at 9:36 PM, IcaroRibeiro said:

Also, hope he cares about his healthy. He need to reach his 80's to end cosmere work 

Sad face.  That is above life expectancy.

[Eluvianii he/him]

Knowing that I will be following the same author, and not only that but the same storyline for at least the next 35 years is both exciting and terrifying.

I can imagine being 56 and posting in a thousands of pages long memes thread or making theories about the very last Mistborn book.

[Ghanderflaffle she/her]

I started these books in 5th grade and I’m only a sophomore this year. I just read the cosmere last year and I haven’t read White Sand yet. I reread his books every month to every other month (if I’m busy) and can’t see how he’s going to fit so many books into one series. But at the same time, I know he will do it because it's storming Sanderson.

[Gak he/him]

according to the about the author tab in alcatraz and the evil librarians Brandon Sanderson was executed for taking too long write the fifth book of a series, and then ending it in a horrible way, and that these days the tittle is held by a clan of shadowy book writing ninjas, with the goal of owning all the worlds mac and cheese, therefor, "Brandon Sanderson" is not going to die anytime soon, because their is an entire clan of them.