Spoiler policy: This post discusses character arcs and structural patterns through roughly the first two-thirds of The Way of Kings. I've avoided the novel's late revelations. If you haven't finished it, read on; nothing critical is given away.
Most writers, when they want readers to feel a character's pain, write a scene showing that pain. Sanderson does something harder. He writes the same kind of scene several times, at different points in the story, and he changes one variable each time. That's the technique worth stealing from The Way of Kings, and it's less obvious than it sounds.
The Repeating Unit
Kaladin's arc in the bridgeman sections follows a clear shape: he starts with some fragment of hope or agency, something happens that strips it away, and he has to decide whether to try again or stop trying entirely. That's not a spoiler; it's visible from the second or third time the pattern completes. What makes it work is that Sanderson doesn't vary the shape. He varies the stakes inside the shape, and he varies what Kaladin risks each time he chooses to act.
Early on, Kaladin tries to help a fellow bridgeman and fails. The cost is low. The gesture is small. Later, the gesture is larger, the cost is higher, and the failure lands harder because the reader has already watched him absorb a smaller version of the same blow. By the time the pattern reaches its emotional peak, you don't need a paragraph of interiority explaining why this moment matters. You've been trained by the earlier repetitions to feel the weight yourself.
This is a technique borrowed from music, not from screenwriting or literary fiction: theme and variation. Establish a motif. Repeat it. Change the key, the tempo, the instrumentation. The listener (or reader) tracks the variation because they remember the original.
What Most Writers Do Instead
The temptation in a long novel is to keep inventing new situations to show character. New settings, new minor characters, new crises. The reasoning is sound: you don't want to bore the reader with repetition. But the effect is often a protagonist who feels inconsistent rather than complex, because each new situation reads as a separate introduction rather than a deepening of what you already know.
Sanderson trusts the pattern. He doesn't worry that readers will notice Kaladin is being tested in a structurally similar way for the fifth time. He worries, instead, about making each instance feel earned and specific. The details are different. The people around Kaladin are different. The emotional register shifts. But the underlying shape holds, and that consistency is what creates the sense of a character with genuine interiority.
If you're drafting a protagonist right now and you feel like you're throwing new problems at them without getting traction, ask yourself whether you've established a repeating unit yet. What does your character do when under pressure? What do they reach for? What do they refuse? Define that pattern, then put it under increasing strain.
Contrast as the Other Half
Repetition alone isn't the full picture. The Way of Kings also uses Shallan's chapters as structural contrast to Kaladin's. Their situations are different in nearly every way: social class, gender, type of danger, tone of voice, even the pacing of their chapters. Shallan's sections tend toward wit and observation; Kaladin's toward endurance and physical reality.
This contrast does something specific for both characters. It stops either arc from becoming monotonous, yes, but more importantly it creates a kind of argument the novel is having with itself about what strength looks like. Kaladin's version of survival is relentless and costly. Shallan's is adaptive and sometimes comic. Neither is framed as the correct answer. The contrast invites the reader to hold both in tension.
If you're writing multiple POV characters, the question worth asking isn't just whether their voices are distinct. It's whether their arcs are in conversation. What does one arc say that the other complicates or contradicts? That's where multi-POV structure earns its complexity.
The Interlude Problem
One structural choice in The Way of Kings that deserves honest assessment is the interludes: short chapters following minor characters who exist outside the main POV structure. Some of them are excellent; one in particular (featuring a character named Szeth) does real thematic work and reframes what you thought you understood about the world's power systems.
Others feel like world-building that couldn't find a home in the main narrative. If you're writing a long novel and you're tempted to use interlude-style chapters, ask yourself whether each one does something the main chapters can't. If the answer is "it shows the reader a different part of the world," that's not enough. It needs to shift something: a reader's assumption, a thematic lens, a piece of information that changes how they read what comes next.
Working With a Coach on Structure This Complex
A novel structured around repeating patterns, multiple POVs, and interlude chapters is genuinely difficult to plan and revise alone. This is where Writing Nexus's in-app coach, Nexa, is worth knowing about, especially if you're new to the platform. Nexa works as a developmental editor in your drafting process: you bring your project, your structural questions, your character arc problems, and she helps you think through them with targeted questions, structural suggestions, and short scene-level feedback. She doesn't write your novel; she helps you see where your decisions are or aren't working. For a project with the architectural complexity of The Way of Kings, that kind of ongoing structural conversation matters more than any single piece of advice.
If you're planning a multi-POV epic or a long single-POV novel with a demanding arc, you can start working with Nexa at Writing Nexus.
What to Take to Your Draft
Three things worth trying directly:
- Define your protagonist's repeating unit. What shape does their response to pressure take? Write it out plainly, then find three moments in your outline where that shape can appear at increasing stakes.
- Put your POV characters in thematic argument. They shouldn't just have different voices; their arcs should complicate each other's implied answers about what the novel is really about.
- Audit any interlude or break chapters ruthlessly. Each one should shift a reader assumption or reframe something already established. If it only adds information, cut it or fold it in.
The way Sanderson builds Kaladin isn't magic and it isn't just patience with a long page count. It's a structural commitment to repetition with variation, and you can apply that commitment to a 90,000-word novel just as well as a 1,000-page one.
