CP: How do you manage—it’s easy for editing to feel like it’s an attack on yourself, your ego. You’ve created something you care about deeply, and now here are people—whose advice you’ve solicited—who are telling you every single thing they think you did wrong. How do you keep a sense of success through that process?

BS: My beta readers know to talk about what they like, also. Cause, it feels like getting punched in the face.

CP: Yup.

BS: But a good editor knows to periodically tell you what they like as well. You get this carrot and stick sort of thing. But your mind is going to naturally ignore it, it’s going to gravitate to the one-star reviews. It is rough. But, I asked for this, and I know it’s going to make the book better. I wrote thirteen books before I sold one—and when I actually started selling was when I started listening to feedback, and learning how to take it.

CP: As Stephen King says, “No one gets it right the first time.” We all edit, we all revise—what’s the saying in the military? “Embrace the suck.” Go toward the hardest bit because that’s how you get better.

CP: You’re coming up on the fourth book of the Stormlight Archive coming out—is this the end of the first cycle of the series?

BS: Yeah. It’s really two five-book series, but ten is so mythologically important to the books that I had to call it a ten-book series. There will be some character continuity between the two series, but I kind of have them very separate in my mind. I’m coming to the first ending.

CP: And, how does that feel? Where are you at with it?

BS: The Stormlight Archive will be the defining series of my career. It’ll be the longest, and the one I’ve spent the most time on. If I’m going to be finishing the next six books of this, and doing them every three years, there’s twenty more years of writing on this series. It’s inseparable from what I wanted to do with fantasy. This is where I set out to carve my space in the genre. I’m on a very long journey to finish. Each of those five books have things built into them, in my original outline, which I’m really excited to share with the readers. There are secrets and character moments, and big set pieces that I’ve designed now for twenty years, which I finally get to write when I write each book.

CP: [delighted laughter]

BS: I’m looking forward to people finally being able to read it.

CP: You told me the final scene! Was it for the Stormlight Archive or for the Cosmere as a whole?