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Crumbling Arches: How Brandon Sanderson Establishes (and Bucks) Expectation in The Stormlight Archive
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The Stormlight Archive
Crumbling Arches: How Brandon Sanderson Establishes (and Bucks) Expectation in The Stormlight Archive
Thoughts on the series’ pacing, structure, and “breaking the formula in uncomfortable ways…”
By Drew McCaffrey
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Published on February 17, 2026
Wind and Truth cover art by Michael Whelan
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Wind and Truth cover art by Michael Whelan
Given the recent news about adapting The Stormlight Archive as a TV series, and just having finished a chapter-by-chapter reread of the latest book, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way this series has been structured…
Starting with The Way of Kings, Brandon Sanderson slammed the proverbial gauntlet on the table. He wrote a massive book—nearly 400,000 words, the kind of thing even readers of The Wheel of Time rarely saw. But unlike The Shadow Rising (or A Storm of Swords, or The Wise Man’s Fear), The Way of Kings was structured in a very rigid, specific way, and came with both explicit and implicit promises from the author:
This series would be ten books long. It would follow certain patterns, and you could get comfortable with the five-part structure (separated by short story interludes that build out the world). Each book would feature a new character whose backstory is gradually illuminated through flashbacks, building a dual-narrative mystery.
Even the artwork established a precedent, with consistent in-world sketches and journals and maps accompanying the now-classic chapter headers, featuring stone arches with engravings of thematically appropriate Heralds.
And Sanderson stuck to his guns. Words of Radiance came out four years later, featuring the same setup. Then Oathbringer, in 2016. And Rhythm of War, in 2020.
Then in December 2024, Sanderson released Wind and Truth, the climactic book in the first arc of his magnum opus series. And it flipped everything on its head.
Gone is the five-part structure. Instead, the book is split into ten days, as the (now very large) cast of characters braces for the apocalyptic impact of the oncoming duel of champions between the god of hatred, Odium, and Dalinar Kholin’s coalition of Knights Radiant and free kingdoms. Instead of widely spread short stories told via interludes, revealing hints of the larger world, most of the interludes in this book focus on characters and places directly connected to the main narrative. We also get a second set of flashbacks from another, totally unexpected character, condensed into a long thread of revelations over one day instead of a structured as a mystery that builds bit-by-bit throughout the book.
Even the comfortable, familiar artwork of the chapter headings begins crumbling. After seeing that stone arch and the faces of Heralds at the start of several hundred chapters across four previous books, cracks begin appearing in Chapter One. By the final chapter of Wind and Truth, we’re left with nothing but a pile of dirty rubble (and another surprise).
And to cap it all off, the book ends not with the now-standard Hoid epilogue, but with “Postlude to the Stormlight Archive,” bringing things full circle with another Kalak point-of-view as he meets the newest Herald.
Sanderson knew when he wrote this book, departing from the safe and comfortable standards of the first 4000 pages of The Stormlight Archive, that he would be playing with metaphorical fire.
The goal here was to give a sense of disquietude to WaT by breaking the formula in uncomfortable ways—leading to a sense of uncertainty while reading the book, a sense that something was off, that the average reader […] wouldn’t pick up on directly except for a sense of something being ‘out of tune’ as they read.
Judging by the reception Wind and Truth has received, Sanderson certainly seems to have achieved that “disquietude” among his readers.
The pace of the book is different, too, and not just in the overall progression of the plot. While The Stormlight Archive has seen a fairly gradual increase in point-of-view characters—going from the very limited selection of Kaladin, Shallan, and Dalinar/Adolin in The Way of Kings to including mainline arcs for characters like Jasnah, Navani, Szeth, and Venli—there are far more POVs and POV switches in Wind and Truth.
Here, Sigzil is a major character. Adolin stands alone, away from Dalinar and/or Shallan for the first time. Kaladin is almost a supporting character in Szeth’s arc—another decision Sanderson expected would be controversial.
During the first four books, chapters were traditionally allotted to one character at a time, with occasional POVs from side characters appearing where necessary. During the climactic sequences, Sanderson would start introducing quick-cut POV switches, heightening the pace and tension.
In Wind and Truth, those quick cuts and scene breaks occur much earlier in the book, often including three or four POVs in a single chapter. We might go from Adolin fighting on the front lines in Azimir to Shallan exploring her childhood in the Spiritual Realm to Renarin worrying about his relationship with Rlain to Dalinar uncovering the history of Roshar—all within a 10- or 12-page span.
This is the sort of scene construction readers of The Stormlight Archive might have come to expect for a major battle set piece, like Thaylen Field or the Everstorm on the Shattered Plains. It’s not at all what we’d been taught to expect from a typical chapter 30% into the book—and certainly not chapter after chapter after chapter, over and over again, for well over a thousand pages.
This is not the first time that Sanderson has attempted structural sleight-of-hand to heighten tension or elicit a particular emotion from readers. Most famously, he wrote the epic, 80,000-word “Last Battle” chapter in A Memory of Light—something for which he had to ask permission from Harriet McDougal. The intention there was to cause readers to feel a shadow of the exhaustion the characters themselves felt during that climactic battle, forging through dozens of POVs across a single chapter that’s longer than the first Harry Potter book.
But where “The Last Battle” was only a portion (if a significant one) of a 365,000-word book, the climax-style approach in Wind and Truth covers nearly ALL of a 500,000-word book. It’s Sanderson swinging for the fences on a whole new level.
Even the epigraphs at the start of each chapter come in a new kind of packaging. Traditionally, they come in cohesive sets at the start of each Part; with Days instead of Parts in Wind and Truth, we get ten sets of epigraphs instead of five. And for the first time, many of the epigraphs come from previous titular in-world books: Days Two, Four, Six, and Eight feature excerpts from The Way of Kings, Words of Radiance, Oathbringer, and Rhythm of War. We still get the expected letters, as Hoid converses with Shards about the present threat of Odium, thankfully.
Altogether, the result is a book that throws off all of the established conventions for the series. It’s unrestrained in a new way. The question remains: What of symmetry? Will Book Six also feature ten days?
It will be fascinating to see how or if these changes will continue into the back half of the series, especially as we look ahead to the upcoming television adaptation and how it will tackle Sanderson’s vision. Will it reflect the structure and pacing of the books, or go its own way in terms of telling the story? Will we see an inversion of the first half, with the theme of symmetry carrying through?
But I’m curious: How did Sanderson’s deliberate departure from the norm affect your reading of Wind and Truth? And what are your hopes and expectations for future books, and for the eventual TV series? Sound off in the comments below![end-mark]
The post Crumbling Arches: How Brandon Sanderson Establishes (and Bucks) Expectation in The Stormlight Archive appeared first on Reactor.
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