Mistborn meets Till We Have Faces. That sounds AWESOME!

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Thanks for the article, Daeus. I’m really not an epic writer, but it was interesting to read about your process. You remind me of Orson Scott Card’s section in “Writing Fantasy & Science Fiction,” in which he spends a ton of time talking about how he comes up with ideas—and, more importantly, how they ferment and develop over months and years.

“All but a handful of my stories have come from combining two completely unrelated ideas that have been following their own tracks through my imagination. And all the stories I was still proud of six months after writing them have come from ideas that ripened for many months—usually years—between the time I first thought of them and the time they were ready to put into a story.” (Card, 33)

Interestingly (to me), though Card describes Ender’s Game coming about in the long term like this, over the course of years, he didn’t apply a terribly perfectionist attitude to it, publishing it first as a short story and then later as a novel, and then updating that novel with more modern politics six years later. Which, like the concept of the ansible that’s the core of the Ender saga, was a hugely precognitive concept considering the very modern “patch a finished product after release” strategy we see more in game, ebook, and even movie release strategy these days.

Also, have you read The Wheel of Time? I haven’t, as I’m not an epic fantasy fan, though Towers of Midnight has been holding up my computer monitor for years on account of its oatmeal-like thickness.

*bounces* Yes! Yes! Yesssss!

*kudos* Thank you! I was starting to wonder if the public would accept a series comprised of thirteen series.

Thank you for this article! I’ll definitely be coming back to it a lot in the near future. I’ve always been a Tolkien fan, but after reading Sanderson last year, I fell in love with epic fantasy all over again. I’m encouraged to hear that rewriting and outlining and compiling ideas for a single story for the past five years means it’s halfway through the maturing process 😉

Are there any other epic fantasy books you’d recommend? Like I mentioned, I’ve red LotR and Stormlight Archive, but I’m having a hard time finding other books of the same type (preferably ones with somewhat moral characters, too).

I thoroughly enjoyed this post. Though I’m not enough of a writer to even consider writing intricate, massive stories, someday I’d love to come close enough to imitating Tolkien to have people say that it just barely reminds them of LOTR in terms of world building and memorable characters and beauty. That would be enough for me. 🙂

Oh my goodness, YES, Charles Dickens and his huge casts of characters that come back to haunt the rest of the book. XD I read David Copperfield last March, and then I listened to Richard Armitage’s reading of it on Audible (which was pure bliss), and every time Mr. Micawber came back into the story, I just thought, “Oh is it you again? I thought we’d had enough of you and your pecuniary troubles.” But don’t misunderstand me. I did really love that book. I’m just not sure I’ll read it again. 😀

Your story sounds fascinating, judging from the information that you’ve shared! And thank you for this post.