Originally, I had Vasher make an oblique comment about Bebid's daughter as a way to get him to talk. However, I shied away from this in later drafts, moving to more nebulous indiscretions instead. I felt that a comment about a daughter might sound too much like kidnapping on Vasher's part, even though I was thinking that his daughter had done something embarrassing that, if revealed, would get the priest into trouble.
Vasher Meets Bebid the Priest for Food
Restaurants. They didn't really exist in a lot of medieval cultures. Now, most of my books don't take place in medieval times—they're more preindustrial uchronias, late renaissance if you will. Warbreaker is no exception.
T'Telir seems the kind of place that would have restaurants. Places to sit idly, eating and chatting. It is a successful port city with a lot of trade and a great deal of wealth. There's even something of a middle class, another concept that didn't exist during a lot of periods in time.
Nightblood Origins
I've been wanting to do a book with a talking sword for some time. Sentient objects are a favorite theme of mine from fantasy books I've read, and I think you'll probably see more of them in future books from me.
The magic sword is its own archetype in fantasy, even if there haven't been any good magic sword books among the big fantasy novels of recent years. Perhaps that's because Saberhagen and Moorcock did such a good job with their books in the past. I'm not sure. (I don't count appearances of magic swords like Callandor in the Wheel of Time. I mean books with major parts played by swords.)
Anyway, that's a tangent, and I'm certain that half the people reading this can think of examples and exceptions to what I just said. Either way, this is a theme I wanted to tackle, and the magic system of this world lent me the opportunity.
Nightblood is another favorite character of the readers. I think his personality works the best out of any non-viewpoint character I've ever written. He doesn't get that much dialogue in the book, but it is so distinctive that it just works.
Chapter Five - Part One
Vasher Watches Siri
We get back to Vasher. Showing his viewpoints in the book was tricky. I wanted him to remain an enigma—I didn't want you to know if you were rooting for him or not. But I did want you to think he was interesting.
A related question. When you add to the wiki, do you soften the writing to add more information to the wiki?
Occasionally I do. Usually it’s at the end of a scene; I’ll go and add things. Or now that I have a Peter, I will say “Peter, go put this chapter ino the wiki, and fix whatever problems that don’t fit. That’s what he’s doing right now with his time is he’s going through the whole Way of Kings and making sure that the wiki matches, because the wiki actually contains like 5 or 6 iterations as I was building the world of “No, let’s rewrite the creation myth”, “No, let’s rewrite where this came from”, “No let’s rewrite this.” And it has all the old versions there as well as the newest version, and as I’m writing, I’ll change things because I’ll say “You know, this doesn’t work. I’m going to alter this.” Then I’ve got to stop and make sure that the continuity gets kept.
Also, just in case you're wondering, the Bright Sea and the Inner Sea are both the same place. It's another Idris/Hallandren thing. Most mountains, oceans, and lakes have two names—the Idrian one and the Hallandren one. Originally, this happened because there was bad blood between the two kingdoms, so they'd call things different names in order to differentiate themselves. Ironically, in a lot of cases both names have stuck, and both kingdoms have found themselves alternating between the two names.
Inner Sea was the Idrian name for the body of water, renamed because they wanted to downplay how important it was. (Idris is landlocked, after all.) Bright Sea was the original name.
In the Way of Kings, you have all of these different characters, how do you keep your characters’ personalities straight?
Good question. Keeping characters straight—the thing I do that deviates from most of the way I normally write. I normally plan quite a bit. I normally—my worlds are very intricately planned out, with their histories, and usually the plot of what’s going to happen are pretty intricately planned out before I start the book. The characters are not. And this is why a book fails, like the original Way of Kings did in 2002, it’s because one of the characters is not who they need to be, and they are failing.
This is something I do by instinct more than by planning. I grow my characters, so I often describe it as I “cast” my characters, I’ll put different people in the role, I’ll sit down and say “okay, here is a character to play this role.” I’ll start writing them, and seeing their personality, and seeing the world through their eyes, and I’ll see if that works. If it doesn't, I’ll actually drop that and rewrite that scene with a different personality, a different character, have someone else walk in and try the role. I’ll do that a couple of times till they click. When they click, I basically know who they are. From that point on, I don’t have any problems keeping them right. When I write a book when a character doesn’t click, then that book often fails. Sometimes they click halfway through, and I have to go back and fix them. Sometimes they’re just 90% there, and I just need to keep writing and figure it out as I go. But sometimes, that never quite works, and this is the reason sometimes—there is this book named Liar of Partinel, which I never released, because the character never clicked. And people will say “Let me read it, let me read it!” but it will predispose you to that character, and that character, that personality is the wrong person. So I don’t know how I keep them all straight. It just works with characters.
But that’s just with characters. With plot and things I’ve got to write it down, for setting I've got to write it down. I actually have a big wiki that I build that I reference to keep everything straight. Characters I never have to be that way. They just work.
So I can’t give you good advice on that, because it’s simply how I do it. And they just grow into their own person.
Other Notes
Yes, there are Returned in Idris. There are Returned everywhere in this world that there are people. (The name of this world is Nalthis, by the way. Mistborn takes place on a world called Scadrial, and Elantris on a world known as Sel. See the fun things you learn by reading annotations?)
I'd like someday to do a sequel to Warbreaker, in part because I want to show off all of the different ways people in Nalthis deal with the Returned. They're treated in very strange ways some places. For instance, just across the mountains there's a kingdom where when someone dies in a way that might be heroic, the corpse is immediately purchased by a nobleman hoping to hit the jackpot and get a Returned. You see, since Returned can heal people, keeping one around to act as an emergency insurance plan to restore your health is a great idea.
Undead
I'd been toying for a long time with doing a book with "technological" undead in a fantasy world. A place where a body could be recycled, restored to a semblance of life, then set to work. I'm always looking for ways to explore new ground in fantasy, and I've seen people sticking to the same old tropes with undead. (Mindless, rotting zombies or dynamic, goth-dressed vampires.)
I wanted to play with a middle ground. If you've got a magic that can make a stick figure come to life, what could it do with a dead body? How could a society make use of these walking corpses, treating them as a realistic resource?
The Lifeless grew out of this desire. I developed something like them for use earlier in a completely different novel, but I abandoned that plan years ago. They returned to the scrap pile of my mind, from which I draw forth and recombine ideas to create novels.
Chapter Four - Part Two
Hawaii
Why, yes, I did visit Hawaii in the middle of writing this book. Did you notice?
Following Mistborn, I wanted to do a book set in a place that looked very different from the Final Empire. What's different from a burned-out wasteland? Why, a tropical paradise of course! One of the great things about being an author is the ability to justify going to Hawaii just so I could do research on how to properly describe the plants, landscape, and atmosphere in a place like that. It's really a tough job, but I'm willing to sacrifice for you all. No need to thank me.
What happens if you create a time bubble in a time bubble?
Lots of people are theorizing about that. The time bubble would not collapse, I’ll answer that much.
I think that you said at the Alloy release that it was mul—de...
Multiplicative?
Yeah.
I may have given an answer to that or not. I’m not going to say anything about that. Time travel and find out.
Siri Approaches T'Telir
And we finally get to see T'Telir. I'm still a tad bothered that it's chapter four before we get to see the city. I worry that people will read the book and have trouble getting grounded in it, since we've now had five viewpoints across five chapters and have been in a lot of different locations.
However, I think that the groundwork in the first four chapters is needed to make the book work. I just couldn't figure out a way to cut it all out and still have things work. Perhaps (just perhaps) I could have moved the Vasher prologue into the middle and made it a regular chapter, then moved the original Siri/Dedelin chapter to a prologue. Then, with the decision to send Siri into the city made, I could have jumped straight to this one. However, we'd have lost too much in that. Doing it this way isn't perfect either, but I think it's still the best way the book could have been done.
Chapter Four - Part One
Naming in This Book
The names in this novel, particularly in Hallandren and Idris, follow the concept of repeated consonant sounds.
I wanted to try something a little more distinctive in this book than the names were in Mistborn. In that book, I intentionally backed away from the insane craziness of the names in Elantris. I've written entire essays on how I devised the languages in that book. The names were appropriate for the novel, since the language was so important to the story. However, I know that the number and oddity of many of the names in Elantris was off-putting.
So, instead, in Mistborn I chose names that were much easier to say, and gave everyone a simple nickname. When it came time for Warbreaker, I wanted to try something else, to take a step back toward distinctiveness in the language, but not go as far as I had in Elantris.
I've long toyed with using double consonants as a naming structure. I played with a lot of different ways of writing these. I could either use the letters doubled up, with no break (Ttelir). I could slip a vowel in the middle and hope people pronounced it as a schwa sound (Tetelir). Or I could use the fantasy standard of an apostrophe (T'telir).
In the end, I decided to go with all three. I felt that writing all the names after one of the ways would look repetitive and annoying. By using all three, I could have variety, yet also have a theme. So, you have doubles in names like Llarimar. You have inserted vowels like in Vivenna. And you have apostrophes like in T'Telir.
I think it turned out well. Some members of my writing group complained about fantasy novels and their overuse of apostrophes in names. My answer: Tough. Just because English doesn't like to do it doesn't mean we have to eschew it in other languages. I like the way T'Telir looks with an apostrophe, and the way people will say it. So it stays.
At the end of Alloy of Law, when...
Spoiler! Talk circumloqutically, talk around it.
When that person said that thing at the end of the book, will that lead to future ideas of books?
Things in the Alloy of Law are foreshadowing things that will happen in the modern day Mistborn trilogy.
In Way of Kings, Hoid gives Kaladin a flute. Is that flute going to play a important role in progression, or is it just a trinket?
I can’t answer that right now. That’s too much of a RAFO.
I’ve got a question kind of based off of the train fight. If you have a time bubble, and you were to make it while you are on the train, would the time bubble move with the train, or would it stay at the same spot relative to the planet?
Time bubbles don’t move, so it would pull you out of it, then it would vanish.
If you were to pop up a time bubble and someone were to be stuck halfway in and halfway out, would they go splooch?
No, they would be in the time bubble. The time bubbles will move with the planet but not with the train.
Yeah, I always thought it was relative to the person creating the time bubble.
No, you’ll see Wayne create one, then he’ll walk up to the perimeter, but if he leaves it, it ruins the time bubble.
So is that because it’s linked up to the spiritual gravitational bond between the planet?
Yes, and you’re digging very deeply into stuff that I now can’t answer. Time bubbles have some weirdness to them that I don’t want to dig in too deeply, but yes.
Can Returned feed on Stormlight?
This is definitely possible.
Has anyone other than the Five Scholars and Vasher Awakened Steel?
*photo pause* Not that Vasher knows about. And if he doesn't know about it, then there is a decent chance [that it never happened].
The Horneater names are very similar to Polynesian names...
That is the direct inspiration. I love how Polynesian languages sound, and it's something I've been wanting to use for years.
After a spren has been bonded, what happens if the person it's bonded with dies?
If the person they are bonded with dies, it is an emotional event for the spren, but not a damaging event. As long as their oaths were not <broken>.
Kind of like if a friend dies?
Maybe a little more personal than that.
I guess Helaran was not bonded to a spren then?
And why do you say that?
I was looking at this line here and saw that his [Blade] had a gemstone at the bottom, so that was a clue.
That is a very good clue, yes.
With all the spren, the ones that are developing thought and all that, are you going to have them interact, that we see-- Because you don't really have much interaction between them right now that we know of
Yes, we do not. I think it is safe to say that what Syl and Pattern say about spren in this book implies that there is between different spren that you can look forward to.
Why can only women write?
It has to with a lot of cultural mores, spraying out of a certain sort of essay written a long ago that divided masculine arts and feminine arts, and then some cultural things sort of went along with that ended up gaining momentum.
And we'll find out more about that I guess.
Yeah... I mean, to the characters it's like asking "Why do you guys shake hands?" It's what you do, culturally. But there are reasons for it.
So Ruin and Preservation combine. When Odium slays the Shardbearers [Vessels], why doesn’t he absorb the enemy Shards?
Because that would actually change the way he views the world. The Shard would actually start to influence him, and could actually ruin who he views himself as being. So instead of combining them all, his goal is to destroy them all and be the only one left at his power level.
So by his nature, he can't combine?
I mean he could, but it would change his nature. So he won't.
People are going crazy wondering if there are telegraphs and telephones in Alloy of Law. Are there? And if not, why?
There are not yet. And the reason why is because they haven’t needed them yet. Necessity is the, what the fuel of invention?
The mother of invention
Yes, the mother of invention, and they have messengers who run, Coinshots who are very fast. They also basically don’t need to go outside the City, and haven’t for a long time. They’re close, but they haven’t invented them yet for the same reason that they have very poor navigation techniques. Why do you need to ship anything or sail anywhere when you have some idyllic paradise to live in? And you have allomancers, who in some ways are preventing from achieving that next level, because a Coinshot can get it there really fast, and so you’re only waiting a few minutes for them to come back with your message, so it can actually stifle a little bit of technology by having a not-quite-as-good magical solution.
Is Thinker from the Purelake scene Demoux [from the Mistborn Era 1]?
Demoux is indeed in that scene.
And for those who didn’t hear, about the other one, there is a scene in the Way of Kings. People have been trying to figure out… there are some members of… there are some people there that I have hinted are from other books, and they have now figured out two of the three. I don’t think you’ve figured out the third one, and you won’t because…
Has their book been written yet? Has their book been published?
Their book has not been published yet. I won’t say if it’s been written yet. Is anyone confused at what’s going on there? There is a connection between the books.
Is AonDor Physical, Spiritual, or Cognitive?
AonDor is mixed up in all three. So I would say more Cognitive and Spiritual than it is Physical, but it is mixed up in all three.
Does Investiture warp spacetime like objects with mass/energy do in our world?
Yes--but the warping is not on the Physical Realm.
Why does the Shardbearer-- when they are dueling with Adolin and Renarin-- Why does the Shardbearer freak out when Kaladin grabs the sword? The <Shardbearer> like... He screams, and he's like, "I didn't kill you", and ran away.
Yes.
Why does he do that?
Because when Kaladin was there, and they were touching it, they actually heard the spren that was inside of it. Right? Because when an--
So it wasn't Syl that he heard, it was the sword.
It was the sword's spren... that Kaladin was touching it. When the Knight Radiant touches it-- You can see when other Knights Radiant pick up swords, they can hear the screaming.
With Dalinar as a Bondsmith, what does that mean his power is?
Ah, now that's a good question! That is going to be a R-A-F-O, because you have to read and find out. But I'll give you a card.
Is healing a universal Stormlight power than?
Yes, within reason. Some are better at it. But it is a universal power.
So how did Shallan rescue Kaladin when they fell in the chasm?
She did not. It was actually Syl, but he was in the process of breaking the bond, and so she was able to get some Stormlight to him. But that is what really set it really poorly. Like you can imagine, she-- this bond was really a strain for her to use at that point, so it was her. But doing what she did just about destroyed her, which is why you don't hear from her after that.
How does a world that is wracked by Storms supply food for an entire population?
Well, you um... The thing to keep in mind is, it's not a barren planet. There are lots of plants on this planet. When-- I mean, it's no more barren than a corral reef that deals with the tide rushing in and rushing out. Now, the life has to adapt to it, but it's a really lush planet. You-- I mean, if you go and you look at the Shattered Plains there's grass everywhere and plants growing all over the place. It's just, right before a Storm, it becomes barren and then becomes lush again.
*long pause*
Yeah, that was, um... One of the things I kind of have to overcome with this books is, though it is very rocky and stony, it's also very lush, and it's hard sometimes for people to imagine that. But even if it is a little bit barren, Utah is barren, and it supported people.
In the end of Words of Radiance, Syl is turning into a Shardblade as well as other different weapons, and Kaladin has a whole bunch of windspren around him. I am wondering if that is a precursor to Shardplate?
I think you are a very smart man and you are asking wise questions.
I was reading stuff online about like a Mistborn videogame?
Yeah, we'll still working on it. It's taking much longer than we thought. The developer, that producer of the game and I had chosen, they, ah, had a falling out and split and so we had to start over from scratch and that's what really threw us for a loop. We then took it to a really prestigious one-- game company that I love and they considered it for a long time, but it turned out that they just didn't have the time and couldn't do it. So now we are kind of back to square one finding a third group to do it.
I write as well, and I was wondering what books you use to improve your own writing?
I have found both of Orson Scott Card’s books to be very good. Stephen King's book is very good. I find that my writing improves more when I read people's writing that I admire and then ask myself what they did well. That helps me more than some of the textbooks.
That's kind of how I was feeling too, for myself, so excellent.
Breaking down someone who's really good at this, like Anne McCaffrey, or somebody like that, and saying "what is she actually doing?".
From the very beginning did you already know-- like cosmere? Like was that your goal setting out?
It was my goal very early on. In fact, before I wrote any books I wrote a short story about Hoid. So he goes back to before the very first book that I wrote. So yeah it goes back pretty far. I can trace inspirations back to Asimov tying Foundation and Robots together and feeling like that was really cool and wanting to do something like that, if it makes sense. And so I would say that’s probably like the first seed was when I read the later Foundation books and they tied them together.
I've always thought in Steelheart, or in the Reckoners series, what influenced your characters like that, like was there comic books behind that?
I've read a lot of comics, so you can find--
Any specific ones that influenced you?
Watchman influenced everyone. Kingdom Come is one of first that made me really think about comics. My favorite was the old Eastman and Laird original Turtles. But I don't know if that's as much inspiration as me just enjoying it. I don't know. I like the graphic novels like the Killing Joke... that feel like a self-contained story.
Warbreaker had just come out, and I was talking about how you used more comedy in the book, and I was asking about it and everything else, and I was so pleased that you've done such a wonderful job with it, I enjoyed the humor aspects, besides it just sets everything up perfectly.
I feel that a great book is going to have a wide range of emotions, so I try to stick various different ones in.
What book has inspired you the most?
I'd say Les Miserables.
Oh really, why's that?
I love Victor Hugo’s writing style. His use of character and his use of language.
Who is your favorite Epic, because I have read Firefight.
I would say that, ok it's a spoiler-- Megan is my favorite Epic.
Do we not know that at the end of Steelheart?
You do, but there are people here who have not read Steelheart.
My boy was wondering...I said, what would you want to ask him, and he said, why is Alcatraz a bad guy but he doesn’t do bad things?
You can just say to him that Alcatraz is not a bad guy but he has a poor opinion of himself. He has bad self esteem.
You've touched on [The Emperor's Soul], are you going to write a bigger one about that?
It’s unlikely because I think it works so well as it is. But you will probably see Shai again at some point.
Is there a Hoid cameo in Shadows for Silence?
There is not. I intentionally didn't put one in, because I didn't-- couldn't come-- there was no reason for him to be there, and I didn't want to be doing it just to do it, if that makes sense, like, the Cosmere isn't just a bunch of cameos, it is a story within itself.
How far ahead in the timeline is Sixth of Dusk?
Pretty far.
Can I have a general--
Most people that I'm writing about now are dead.
Is it up into the third trilogy of Mistborn?
It is that era, yes.
Sweet! That's what I thought.
It might be a little bit before that trilogy, but it's that era.
Do you have to have done the third oath before you can convert your spren into a Blade?
In most orders, yes.
What about Shallan then? Did she do it, cause she was a kid when she first--
Yes, um... you will find out more.
With Syl being able to be revived, is Adolin ever going to be able to revive his own blade, or--
Ah, that would be very difficult, because the original-- in most cases, the original person who broke the oath would have to be the one.
Are we ever going to find out who brought Nightblood to Roshar?
Yes.
Are we going to see more of that world [Threnody]?
Yes.
In [Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell], the Evil that destroyed the Homeland, was that Odium killing a Shard?
RAFO.
My brother and I have been debating about Hoid and how he got his abilities. We have a couple theories. One of them is Hemalurgy. The other has to do with the portals into the worlds themselves, because the birds in Sixth of Dusk--
Ok, he doesn't have Hemalurgy right now. He has powers that predate the Shattering of Adonalsium. Not all of his powers predate, but he does have powers that predate.
Ok, so I was wrong on both counts then. Am I wrong on both counts?
I'm not saying that, I'm saying that he does have powers that predate but he has also gained powers since.
