Comment by selykg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by selykg | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

To be fair, game of thrones, the first book in the song of ice and fire series came out in [1996](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Song_of_Ice_and_Fire#Overvie...)

The TV show started in 2011.

Kingkiller Chronicles is only 3 books, hardly epic. It's a trilogy. The first book came out in 2007, second in 2011, and nothing has been seen of the third, and presumably, final book.

Brandon Sanderson treats writing books as a job, thus he writes every day. Now you could argue that his books aren't as entertaining to you (subjective) or that his prose isn't as good (a bit less subjective), but he does treat his job like a job. Whereas Rothfuss and GRRM seem to try to do literally anything but continue writing their books.

Sanderson isn't a bot but he has something a lot of people lack, work ethic.

Stephen King sits down every day and writes x amount of pages. 10 or 15 maybe, been awhile since I've read on writing but he talks about it in there. He is not super concerned about the quality of it, he just wants to get it out there. If those pages end up as part of an actual book then he'll obviously be going back over them etc. I assume Sanderson operates very similarly.

GRRM on the other hand agonizes over writing out perfect rough draft pages and thus never gets anything done.

Yea, there's usually two general types of writers, and they can be on a teeter totter so to speak:

Those that outline and plan ahead of time using the outline

Those that write the story as they write

Sanderson is very much an outliner, I think GRRM is more a it'll come together as I write it kind of person. He probably has some sort of plan, but it isn't as fine tuned as Sanderson's I suspect. Sanderson does multiple drafts as well, which works with how I write. My first draft may be complete trash, but getting it on paper helps me a lot in at least getting the ideas out and then I can fine tune or start over if I'm not happy at all.

But yes, I think Sanderson is very much a "I write regardless and I'll refine it over time" type of person and doesn't agonize over the little details until it's time to actually do that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com