The character who became Dalinar actually began life back in the very first novel I started writing when I was a teenager. He’s the aging warlord, the man who was a bloodthirsty berserker in his youth but is now beginning to question his society’s concept that war is an end unto itself. I have always had a firm sense of him in my mind, and I’ve been saving him for the right book. The Stormlight Archive s is where he fits.