re: The Kingkiller Chronicle - Discussion and Theories

Funny you should bump this thread. I'm actually re-listening to the audiobook right now.

And I'm guessing because of that I started getting Rothfuss articles popping up in my newsfeed.

Exhibit A, an article I read this morning:

Patrick Rothfuss has “dismantled a big piece” of The Doors of Stone

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“Sometimes over the course of a day I will start working on the book, and I’m like ‘Okay this chapter isn’t working,’ and I’ll pull out a scene or I’ll move some things around,” Rothfuss explained. “I’ll reword some stuff and then I put it down and I go have some lunch, I come back and I read it and the book is worse.”

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I gotta put everything back, or try a third thing. You know, there’s a reason it took me 14 years to get the first one published, [The Name of the Wind]. Part of that is because I’m a perfectionist and part of is because back then I was doing it as a hobby. And part of it the fact that I focus on my language a lot more than a lot of writers. But a big part of it is, I think, structurally I don’t think about stories in a lot of traditional ways. And because of that, it keeps me from kind of just doing like a three-act structure or a five-act structure. There’s ways that other authors think about story and it’s very easy for them.

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I do think the book is better now, but if you’d asked me that a couple of months ago maybe it was only three stars in my head. Although truthfully right now, honestly, the book is probably at best a star and a half because I dismantled a big piece of it and it’s not put back together again. I had taken apart a bunch of scenes so that I could rework them.

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I'm currently on a re-read of the first two books and I wanted to see if anyone has any thoughts or theories on what is to come in book 3.

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Will there ever be a book 3??? If there was an announcement I missed it.

I’ve been under the impression that we might actually get Winds of Winter before the next Kingkiller book.

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How do authors like Rothfuss survive financially with not publishing a new book for 10+ years?

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Contracts with publishers, advances, book signings, sales, royalties, etc...

Writing a book in your own house isn't exactly big overhead so his expenses are probably lower than your usual sole proprietor