BS: Robert Jordan got one out a year in the first part of his career! His first books were like one out a year. I could do that! . . . no I can’t do that.

CP: [laughter]

BS: I pushed for that for a while, and it just kicked me in the head. So eventually I was like, let’s try a three-year cycle: eighteen months on Stormlight and then eighteen months on whatever else I want to do—the weird wacky stuff. I’m on draft number four right now, I finished it yesterday. And I do five drafts on most of my books. I have the final polish left to do and it’s due July 1st.

CP: How do you manage that amount of material? You have your team, and of course the folks at Tor, but I know [revisions] get exhausting, I’ll finish 300, 400 pages and say “I just finished a book! I still have another book to go!”

BS: I’ve gotten to the point where I know how much I can do in a day without burning myself out. Lots of practice has gotten me there. I look at the word count, and right now Rhythm of War is 474,000.

CP: Gaaaah.

BS: I usually cut 10 percent in the last pass so it’ll end up at 430,000.

CP: Is this your biggest book?

BS: Oathbringer is 460,000—it started at 540,000, and it needed a lot of trimming. I need that final pass to rein it in, to tighten everything up. I cut 10 percent from each chapter. If I’m doing actual daily new prose writing I can do between 2,000 and 3,000 words a day. Stephen King does 2,000 words a day, and I always thought that was a good model for me, I really admire King’s work, and his work ethic.

CP: How much are you getting through when you’re editing or revising?

BS: In Draft 2.0, 20,000 words a day. It’s fast because I haven’t gotten any feedback from anyone else yet, I’m only fixing things I know I need to fix. Drafts Three and Four are alpha readers, my team and the Tor team, and beta readers, who are the first audience test. My team goes through all of those and insert the comments in the actual document.

CP: And how do you manage to not get overwhelmed by the feedback?

BS: With beta reads it’s a matter of submerging myself in the main feedback. Give me a twenty or thirty page document, and I’m going through beginning to end, reading, absorbing, and changing what I need to change. Really it’s a matter of bug-hunting. I list the problems from most important to least important.

CP: I do the same thing.

BS: I’m trying to cross things off the list, and there will still be things at the bottom of the list, but I can fix those during the publishing draft.