One of the great things about Brandon's writing philosophy is that he's not afraid to take those bits of stories that didn't work somewhere and put them somewhere else where they work better. He's not married to the integrity of a work; when Mistborn Prime and Final Empire Prime didn't work, he wasn't afraid to scrap them and build something awesome from the scraps. That's a huge example of killing your darlings.
Even knowing that as long as I have, it didn't really sink completely home until tonight how far Brandon is willing to go to make a book as good as it can be. Brandon told me at dinner that he's just decided to cannibalize something from Dragonsteel to put it into Way of Kings—one of the best parts of the book. I honestly never thought he would cannibalize Dragonsteel, but now that he knows he's not going to get back to Dragonsteel for at least ten years, even that is fair game in order to make Way of Kings awesome. (Inkthinker is also partly responsible for the inspiration to do this.) I was always kind of ambivalent about Way of Kings—it didn't quite gestalt for me like his other books such as Dragonsteel did. But now—now I'm really excited for it.
