My goal: to prove to myself, and to him, that the “good” decision was not actually the best one. The fork that cast him into some of the worst imaginable circumstances, ground him against the stones of a world where there is no soil or sand on the ground. So I started over from scratch and had him take the other fork, the more difficult fork. I wrote the entire book that way before realizing I’d done it wrong. The book started its life many years ago being about a young man who made a good decision. But a great book for me isn’t about a magic, it’s about the people that the magic affects. On one hand, this delights me, as I do put a lot of effort into the magic in my books. The author who creates interesting types of magic for every book he writes. I’ve begun to build a reputation as the “magic system” guy. And so this time, I’m going to try to talk about what The Way Of Kings is. How much the project has come to mean to me over the decades.) But such things describe the book but don’t actually tell you anything. How I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words worth of worldbuilding for it. (How I started work on it over fifteen years ago. I often end up talking about its creation. Kings has stymied me each time I’ve tried to describe it. A boy who finds that librarians secretly rule the world. A man cast down by a terrible, magical disease and forced to rebuild a society among those similarly afflicted. The gang of thieves who want to rob an immortal emperor.

Each one was built around one or two central premises.

Before, I’ve found it easy to explain my novels. I’ve been asked to introduce The Way Of Kings to you. This post originally appeared on Tor.com.

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