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

Kingkiller Chronicle author Patrick Rothfuss explains how his revision process is contributing to the long wait for The Doors of Stone.

For a lot of fantasy fans, it’s hard to talk about Patrick Rothfuss’s elegantly penned epic The Kingkiller Chronicle without mentioning the elephant in the room: we still don’t have our hands on The Doors of Stone, the third and presumably final book in the trilogy. It’s been over a decade now since the last book in the series, The Wise Man’s Fear, came out, and while the wait goes on, the author has at least gotten in the habit of giving us little updates during regular live streams. Below, he talks about how his writing process has contributed to the delay:

“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.”

"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."

Rothfuss sounds a bit like A Song of Ice and Fire author George R.R. Martin, who’s also known to rework scenes he doesn’t feel are working, which extends the time it takes to write a book. And to hear Rothfuss tell it, he’s needed to rework some big chunks of the story:

"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."

Progress?

Rothfuss also talks a bit about his love for Neil Gaiman and Lin-Manual Miranda, who was working with the author on adapting The Kingkiller Chronicle for the screen, although those projects have stalled.

The wait continues.

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