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With all the bad things that we’ve seen the Ghostbloods do so far (like imprisoning Lift) is Kelsier no longer a good or mostly-good person?
Kelsier would say he’s a good person.
I would say: Kelsier’s a complicated individual whose moral compass does not align to my same moral compass. But he never was. He would say that he hasn’t changed; I would say that he has changed slightly over the centuries.
In mistborn you can't access someone else's feruchemical stores. However, what if feruchemist A stores something, and then hemalurgy is used to take A's ability and put into person B. Can person B use A's stores?
Also, what happens when someone burns metal with a hemalurgic charge? Or stores/retrieves something in a spike using feruchemy?
All RAFOs here, I'm afraid.
At Dragonsteel this year, you confirmed that Nightblood is not a Dawnshard. However, its abilities seem to be far greater than that of Vivenna’s blade, presumably made with the same method. This disparity may be due to the person who originally Awakened the swords and leads one to believe that Nightblood, despite not being the Dawnshard, had a Dawnshard involved in its creation. Therefore, is Shashara, the person who Awakened Nightblood, a Dawnshard?
Excellent questions. You’ve got one faulty premise: Vivenna’s sword was intentionally designed differently to not get another Nightblood. So let’s keep that in mind. That said, I don’t know that they could make another Nightblood if they wanted to. But she definitely did not want to, and there’s a different process that they use nowadays for safer swords.
Is Vivenna’s sword better or worse than Nightblood?
Depends on what you want from the sword. Vivenna’s sword does not automatically suck the soul and Investiture out of anything it touches, disintegrating that which it touches, which is both a plus and a minus.
What kind of spren is Oathbringer, the Shardblade?
Oathbringer is not technically a spren. Why I call these things the Honorblades, kind of where the whole Shardblade concept fits in, is that these are literally pieces of Honor's soul that he Splintered off and formed weapons out of for the Heralds. These didn't actually have sentience, in the same way that the spren forming most of the Shardblades are. They're literally a piece of the god who ruled this world turned into weapons. And the spren, who are also pieces of the same divinity, saw what was happening, and this kind of became a model by which Shardblades came about.
So Oathbringer doesn't have a spren. If you wanted to call it something, call it a sliver of Honor that has been manifested in physical form. That does mean the blade would actually be made of Tanavast's god metal, so tanavastium, if you want to call it that.
Yeah, that's just me hearing what I wanted to hear, not what was actually asked. It happens more often than I'd like; I get into this groove of answering questions, and start answering what I'm thinking about rather than what actually gets asked. A lot of times, I'm expecting a question (often because it's one that gets asked a lot, like what are Shardblades made out of) and my brain defaults to the answer I've prepared. I think it might be because I've trained myself to answer questions while doing other things.
Oathbringer's not an Honorblade. It was a Stoneward's blade a long time ago, with the corresponding spren.
Why refrigerate food when you can just stamp spoiled food so that it was stored properly before?
You'll have to ask Brandon how that'd interact with gastric acid breaking down the stamp. Or how porous/loose material interacts with stamps in the first place.
Come to think of it... There's a WoB saying the Nightwatcher could change your species, but have a hard time making a spren bond to you. So... could the Nightwatcher turn you Scadrian and make you eligible for Allomantic powers? Or does the Nightwatcher's boons operate on soulstamp principles?
Hell, let's say you bought a vial of the wrong metal on your field trip to Sel. Could you pay a Forger to stamp the vial into being a vial of the right metal (it's believable that you would check before such an important trip) and then drink the metal contained in the vial to fuel your Allomancy?
All right, all right. Let's see... /u/Aurora_Fatalis, changing metals around with other forms of Investiture is generally going to work, according to how I view the magic right now. The power is there, you just need to align the matter the right way. So forging new metals: not too difficult. This is because Allomancy isn't actually using Investiture in the metals, but using it as a key to get power from somewhere else.
Forging a sword to be a Shardblade, however, would be very, very difficult for multiple reasons. The most obvious one is that the Investiture required would be enormous. A Shardblade is a highly-Invested object, with its own self-aware soul.
If you could overcome the initial resistance invested objects have to being influenced by other magics (something that Forgery is particularly good at doing anyway) you'd theoretically be able to change Shardblade/spren's personality like you could a person's.
Fooling the magic via Connection and Identity is not so hard, under the right circumstances, so making a Forger into an Elantrian (or an Allomancer) for a short time is plausible. Making yourself into a Radiant, however, would be more difficult--because the limitations placed on that magic have to do with persuading a sapient being you are worth the bond.
How about regular food? If I stamp a pineapple pizza into a pepperoni pizza and eat it, what nutrients do I end up with?
The way I have it working now, I believe (though I'd have to do some double-checking, as it's been a while since I've been working on Sel) soulstamps are more fragile than things like Aons, and it would be very hard to eat something with one without breaking it. But assuming you could, you'd get nutrients from what it had become--but those would change back once the stamp broke or ran out.
It is possible to go so far down this rabbit hole, however, that the chemistry of Forging (like the physics of Allomancy) it just can't make sense any more. So be aware.
With things like Stamping metals for Allomancy, you have said that it'd be possible for short time, but then burning it would break the Seal and metal would revert back.
I guess it would be similar with food, right?
Yes, that's the big problem with Forging. Getting the stamp to stay in place once you start to change the object that has been stamped.
Okay, the next question we have (I think this one you might have answered before) but have we met all the main point-of-view characters yet? Or, if not, what percentage are we talking?
You have met almost all of them. Let me do a count... Let's see. The main characters in the book are (in the series) Kaladin, and Dalinar, Adolin, Jasnah, Shallan, and Navani, whom you all met in this book and most of them had viewpoints. Szeth, Taravangian, and Taln. And one of the other Heralds; I'm not going to tell you who that is. But I think you've met...you have, I'm sure, met that person; I know which scene they're in. And so, I think you've met them all, basically. Taln is the person who shows up in the epilogue.
I'm a huge fan of the Writing Excuses podcast.
Well thank you.
I always say it's like a master class in genre writing, so I thought you should—for aspiring writers who are in the room—that you should take a few minutes and tell them about the podcast in case they don't know about it.
Okay. So, what happened is, my brother was taking this class in college. My brother's one of these people who take like ten years to get an associate's degree or whatever it is. *laughter* You know, he's got a good job in IT. It's like, he doesn't need the degree, but he feels like he should have one, so he's like taking a class here, and taking a class there. I see people nodding; you either have done this or have loved ones who have done this, but anyway--
Like doing this ourselves--
Yeah, or doing this yourself. *laughter* So, he's taking this podcasting class for whatever reason. He's like, "Hey, you should do one of these, Brandon." "What? I'm not into podcasting; I'm not a radio personality." He's like, "No, no; you should do this." And he had this great idea—we wanted to do like this web serial that's adventures, like an old classic radio drama, and all of this... writing-intensive stuff, which is why he came to me. And I passed on it; I said, "No, I'm not gonna do that; it sounds fun but I just have too many things on my plate; there's no way I can write all of this for you."
But the idea for a podcast stuck in my brain, and I started listening to some podcasts—I really enjoyed a lot of them I listened to, but it seemed like there was this habitual problem in podcasting where it would be, friends sit around a table and chat, and then, you know, you turn on the podcast and it says one hour and thirty minutes, and you're like, "Ninety minutes, guys? Come on! Is there no editing going on? Can't you stick to a point?" Like, a lot of them are like, you know, the three-hour-long podcast where we're going to, I dunno, drive to Texas and talk about it. And they'll have this topic on, it will be like, "We're gonna discuss the new Batman movie," and I'm like, "Oh good, I want to hear what fellow geeks think about it." And then you see that it's a two-hour-long podcast, and you know they're gonna talk about Batman for like fifteen minutes of that, and then the rest is gonna be like what they had for dinner. *laughter* Because you know, you've been to lots of cons; you've been to lots of panels. You know how it goes; we get off topic. And every discussion of Star Trek turns into an argument of who's the best captain or whatever, and it's the same sort of thing over again.
So anyway, I was thinking about this, and thought, I really would like to do a writing advice podcast. So many people email me wanting advice; so many people would like to try to take my class but can't. Often my class has fifteen seats and I have seventy-five people showing up wanting to add, and we pack as many into the room as we can, but I wanted to do something that would let me give some of this writing advice. So I figured I wanted to do a podcast that was short and sweet. I wanted to organize it more like a little news program where you have one moderator throwing questions at people, and making sure that it stayed on topic, and did it in just a short period of time—I thought fifteen minutes was the right amount of time; just a quick, on-topic podcast—but I can get kind of dry. I've got this university background, right? I just kind of blab—you've been watching me; I do this—and so I'm like, it'll be better if I bring on people who are funny so that people can laugh—that are glib and all this other stuff—and so I went and got the two funniest people I know, which are Howard Tayler and Dan Wells—a horror writer and a comic book illustrator and writer—and I figured that would also give some diversity to the podcast.
And so we started doing this podcast, and it really took off—it was very popular—and so we eventually added a fourth member because we realized that we were not as diverse a cast as we could be, considering we were all three white dudes from the same town. *laughter* So, we called up Mary [Robinette Kowal], who has a very different perspective on life than us, and had been the best guest on the podcast that we'd ever had, and we figured at that point, the podcast now had a sponsor—Audible—so we could afford to fly Mary out, because we do it in person. We can't—this whole Skype thing, you just don't have the same chemistry. And so we started flying Mary out, and so for now, two seasons we've been doing with Mary, so it's the four of us doing writing advice, that we just tackle a topic every week and go at it, and we've had a lot of fun with it. We recorded a bunch of episodes before Dan moved to Germany for a little while, and we did cool things like, for instance, we each brainstormed a story—one episode was for each of us—and then we're all writing these stories which we will then post the rough drafts, and then we will workshop them on an episode, and see the evolution of the story, and then we'll do revisions. I actually, when I worked on my story, I grabbed one of the screen capture technologies—what's it called?—Camtasia, and I recorded myself typing the whole thing. It's like, wow, this is me at the computer going for six hours; maybe we can speed it up or something. But I had screen captures of me just typing the whole story, and then I will do screen captures of the revision process, and then post those so that people can watch a story being built, and watch it evolve, and watch all this sort of stuff. So, it's pretty cool, the podcast, so if you're interested in writing and reading, or if you just want to hear us sometimes be funny, feel free to listen; it's Writing Excuses.
Every Newsletter, I like to sit down and write something for you that will be a little different. Something that gives a window into what I’ve been doing lately, or things I’ve been thinking about.
Today, because of the White Sand release, I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences between Brandon the writer from the late 90’s (when the book was written) and today. I was 19 when I wrote the first draft of White Sand, and 24 when I wrote the second version (the one that was turned into the graphic novel.) Looking through it again, there is a lot about me and my writing that has changed.
The magic system is one. White Sand has a very cool magic system, where people control sand with their mind. The magic is powered by the water inside the person’s body, which is a neat system. You need to drink a lot in order to have power over the sand--but it’s on a tidally locked planet, where the sun never sets on that side of the world. (In fact, the sun recharges the sand’s power.) So everything is connected in a cool way. Sunlight recharges the sand, a person gives water to the sand (it’s actually a microscopic lichen-like substance living on the sand, and giving it its white color, that creates the magic. The Sand Master gives water to the lichen, fueling its magical life cycle, which in turn releases power that allows the Sand Master to control the sand.) But the sunlight also makes you more likely to dehydrate, which in turn stops you from being able to power the magic.
And then, it has the oddball--Sand Masters ALSO have the power to turn sand into water. I did this because it was cool to my then-writer brain. What if people who lived in a giant desert could make water? Wouldn’t that be useful? I use this to great effect in the story, and yet, it doesn’t fit the narrative. The modern me would never have added this power. It doesn’t fit into the entire system in a cohesive way. The rest makes logical sense; this (though I tried to justify it with worldbuilding behind the scenes) just doesn’t.
But in some ways, the old me was more willing to take chances. This is important to realize as well--I can't become so certain I know the way that things SHOULD be done, that I fall into doing the same thing over and over. I don't think the power to turn sand into water, ultimately, works in the novel. (Let me know what you think, if you read it.) But the fact that I was willing to add screwy, out-of-the-box powers to magic systems back then is a reminder that not everything in life is neat, able to be tied up with a bow. As much as I like playing video games, I don't want my books to feel like a video game--and that's a danger when every piece of the book, magic, and setting fits together to the point that it loses any sense of feeling organic.
A good lesson to learn from my old self.
I find a lot of the things I do in my writing now were there in these older books like White Sand, they just weren’t fully formed yet. I can also see my early self striving very hard not to fall into cliches, or to do just what was safe or expected. One of the book's two main protagonists, for example, is a black woman. I was trying hard to make sure my books weren’t only about white dudes. And yet, I was still young in my understanding of how to make a book feel real and vibrant, full of people who see the world in unique and different ways. For example, while I have a strong female protagonist, in the first draft she was basically the only only major female character. I did this a lot in the past--focused so hard on doing one thing well that I forgot to expand it to the greater story. (As a note, we changed one of the characters in the graphic novel version to be female, to help balance this out. It worked very well, and she's now one of my favorite characters in the whole book.)
It's hard to see past your biases in books though--and this is still something I fight against. I think great fiction somehow expresses the way the world truly is, the way the writer sees the world, and the way that people NOT the writer see the world, all at once. In this book, one of the main protagonists is dark skinned,. And yet, if you read the book, you’ll find that some of the villain groups are stereotypical, faceless, dark-skinned savages. While that same culture has some main characters who have real depth and characterization (thankfully) that didn’t stop me from relying on tropes for some of the broad brush strokes of the story.
Writing is a constant struggle of managing clichés and tropes, and figuring out when they serve you, and when they don’t. And the more you write, the more you become aware of things you lean upon--not just tropes like the ones I mentioned above, but things that are individual. I’ve been wondering a lot about these things with my own writing. At what point does, "Inventive magic system, religious politics, and people faced with difficult moral decisions" become a cliche to me any my writing? How can I push in new areas, doing new things, while preserving what people love about my writing?
Well, I'm still thinking about all these things. I'm very fond of White Sand, and when I was going back through it, I often found myself smiling. remember with great fondness the time I had back then to just write. There were no tours, no interviews, and nothing to distract me. I wouldn’t go back for anything, (I like actually having people read my books!) but there was something pure about that time, when I wasn't writing to deadline, I was just writing whatever I felt like at the moment. That's another thing I try to preserve today, the freedom to do odd projects now and then. Without it, I think I'd get very boring, very quickly.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy White Sand! This book needed far less revision to bring into graphic novel form than I thought it would. The dialogue was snappy, even after all these years, and the world was one of my more inventive. 20-years-ago-me wasn’t nearly as bad a writer as I sometimes pretend he was!
Now that we know a bit more about the connection between Trell and Autonomy, can you explain who exactly the person named Trell in White Sand is, and how they connect to the Trell, the avatar of Autonomy, that we see in The Lost Metal? Was this Trell just another person who acted as the Trell avatar after being Invested by Autonomy in a similar way to Telsin?
This is the way I want you theorizing.
You'd talked in your last spoiler chat about this, which was that you had kind of gone back and forth with this idea to have [Taravangian] become Odium and basically this idea of Odium was no longer the threat that he should be or was at the time. Is this something that once you made that decision did you have to go redraw the future plotlines and such?
No, because the future was drawn both ways in my head and it was which path am I going down, if that makes sense. And yeah that'll have implications when I do the detailed outlines for future books, like the detailed outline for book 5. But this has already been in the works right, and so every outline is in bad shape by the time I get to it, every outline from the beginning, right? Because things just need to change, every book big things need to change. And every book you have dividing points, where you're like, am I going to do this, am I going to do this? I talked about in the last stream also, am I going to bring Kelsier back or not? That's a branching point that changes a lot about the future of the narrative. Which of the two paths am I going to walk? So this is something that I'm just very used to in storytelling.
There were some of those in The Wheel of Time. They weren't necessarily the same way. I won't give specifics because we're not spoiling, but there were things where I'm like, I think we'll do this, and then I got to the third one and I'm like, no we can't do that, we gotta rebuild this part from scratch because it just no longer works.
Truthwatcher
I will seek truth
Truthwatcher oaths are themed around seeking to find ultimate truth and sharing it. They are very concerned with knowledge and the proper exploitation of it. Note that this should not be confused with the Lightweavers, whose oaths are themed toward personal truths about themselves, said for reasons of self-actualization. Truthwatchers are more concerned with the fundamental truths of the universe, and whether or not those in power are being truthful with the people they lead.
The Truthwatchers are seen as quiet, largely known as the most scholarly Order of Knights Radiant. They tend to attract scientists primarily, but also scholars or thinkers of all types. This extends to some who might not normally be known as scholarly but instead as someone often consumed by their own thoughts. In general, they tend to be reserved, particularly in person, though a small minority of Truthwatchers are greatly concerned with the actions of the powerful and might be likened to investigative reporters. These make their opinions known loudly and forcefully, particularly if they think someone in power is abusing that power or lying about fundamental truths. Note that, as with all Knights Radiant, there is great disagreement within the Order about what is the truth. However, Truthwatchers tend to approach these discussions with enthusiasm, even if they generally prefer to write their opinions rather than speak them. Among the Knights Radiant, the Truthwatchers tend to be those who hold the knowledge and secrets of Surgebinding and are the ones to discover many of the newer advances in things like fabrial technology.
Shards and Shard intents: Holding a Shard is a contest of willpower against the Shard that, over time, is very hard to resist.
Shards affect you over time, but your mind will not leave a permanent effect on the Shard. A holder's [Vessel's] personality, however, does get to filter the Shard's intent, so to speak. However, if that holder [Vessel] no longer held that Shard, the Shard will not continue to be filtered by that person.
If you were to write Elantris now, with all the writing experience that you've gained over your career, would you change anything?
Yeah, there are a lot of things I would change about Elantris. I have an autistic character in Elantris that I did not do a very good job with. It's more of a pop science version of autism than it is an actual in-depth look at what it is to live with autism. My prose is pretty rough, back then. Prose has never been my strongest suit, granted, but I do think I've gotten a lot better over the last twenty years. (Published fifteen, but twenty years ago, I wrote it.) I think my prose has improved dramatically over the years, and I think my ability to do dialogue has improved, and a lot of things like that.
Would I change any major plot features of Elantris? No. I'm actually fairly pleased with Elantris, plot-wise. There are aspects to it, right? I mean, Raoden's character arc is primarily externally driven. He is not a character who is going through a big change internally. But that was intentional. When I sat down to write it, the book I had written right before was about a deep and angsty character who had one of these very, very dramatic character arcs. And I was tired of angst, and I wanted somebody who dealt with external pressure in a fantastic way and was put into a very extreme situation externally and was someone who was kind of a little more like me in that that didn't really faze him, and he did his best with the situation. And I like that aspect of it. It does mean that some people who read it think Raoden isn't as deep as someone like Kaladin. Which you are perfectly fine in thinking that, but I think they are just different types of characters. I wasn't trying to write somebody angsty in Raoden, and I am pleased with how he turned out.
Sarene, as a character, was always kind of me trying to write someone who was a little more confident than they, perhaps, deserved to be. And that's a personality trait of Sarene. I actually, when I was plotting Stormlight, I once described Jasnah to someone in my writing group as "the person that Sarene thinks she is." And I like that about Sarene. She's young. She's got gumption and grit. And she's not quite as capable as she thinks she is, but you know what? Thinking you're capable can get you a long ways, as long as you have a minimum level of capability. And she does.
And I'm very proud of Hrathen as an antagonist. It has taken me until The Way of Kings and Taravangian to find someone that I feel is as strong an antagonist as Hrathen from my very first book. I'm still very pleased with how he turned out.
Someone from Earth is about to be sent off to the cosmere. They've read your first Stormlight book, but they've never really taken time to really dig deep and find out about how it sits in the overall "cosmere", so they're totally unprepared. What basic concepts regarding shards, magic systems and world hopping do you think are most important?
The first, most important thing to say to the person who's being sent there is to enjoy the story you're in. All of the cosmere stuff, the interconnection between my books and all these wonderful little things, are right now mostly Easter eggs. Which means that if you spend the whole book only worried about that, you're going to miss the beauty and fun that is the book that you're part of. I often say to people, don't worry if you read them "out of order," because it's all Easter eggs right now. Don't worry and stress if you miss something about the cosmere, because while someday that might be important, you first need to enjoy the book that you're part of. But the primer I'd give to this person is that the worlds are connected. If you show up on a planet and there's a guy named Hoid around, then be very afraid, because you're someplace very dangerous.
On several fantasy forums, there have been discussions of "black and white" characters and your name sometimes is mentioned as being one who creates "black and white," good/evil characters. What I'm curious about, however, is how do you think of your characters' traits when you develop them. Are there characters that you think, "well, this 'evil' character has this motivation' for acting like a jerk," or is there something else behind these character creations?
I would certainly say I do black and white more than someone like George R. R. Martin does. I would hope that I'm not doing directly black and white, but...this is a hard question for me to answer because I'm not sure that I look at it this way. I don't look at characters as evil or good; I just look at them as who they are and what their motivations are. I personally don't feel that I generally write all-evil characters, though if I look at it rationally from an armchair English major standpoint, I do tend to write very noble characters. Nobility is something that fascinates me, and something that I think we could use a little more of in our world. So I'm straying fairly often into the good, though I don't see any of my characters as entirely evil. Hrathen was not evil; the Lord Ruler was not wholly evil. I don't even look at Ruin as particularly evil; Ruin was a force of entropy, which is its own different thing. In this book, I would say there is a presence of evil that is on a higher level. Is Szeth evil? Well, I don't know. Is the person pulling Szeth's strings evil? Yes, by most definitions I think he would be called evil, but he certainly doesn't see himself that way. I could point at him and say, "You are doing the wrong thing," but he would not agree with me. I'm not trying to moralistically say here is black and here is white; I'm just telling stories about the characters I want to tell stories about.
You've said that Seons and Skaze contain splinters of Devotion and Dominion. Were these splinters created when Odium killed the shardholders and Splintered their shards? Or are they more similar to how Endowment splinters himself (herself?) to make divine breaths? What is the difference between the two?
First, he said that it was a very good question. Then he said that those splinters weren't supposed to be there, and they were indeed created when Odium splintered the shards. He said that the difference lies in how each magical system works. Endowment's splinters are more similar to how Preservation invested a little bit of her shard into each human on Scadrial.
If Robert Jordan had been able to read [Way of Kings], what do you think he would say about it? What would he really love about it?
You know, Robert Jordan loved (at least, from what I can tell in the notes, and listening to him talk) this idea of blending technology and magic in a lot of ways. If you read the Wheel of Time books, it's about the Industrial Revolution happening at the same time as the end of the world. We have steam technology and things appearing, and this is all background. It's not what the story was about. But I think he would be fascinated by that concept.
Because I was always fascinated by the Age of Legends in the Wheel of Time books, where I wanted to... that influenced me in telling a story about worlds where we are seeing the beginnings of things like this. So, that might be something he would latch on to.
I have no ability to speak actually for him. I never met Robert Jordan. I saw him once at a convention, I still feel stupid for not saying hello to him. There are so many people who know him better than I do. To me, he's kind of like this heroic figure, he's the Odysseus who came before. And he still remains that to me, because I never really got to know him personally. Whereas all the people I work with know him personally, I just know him as this hero.
With Steelheart, every superhero I've worshiped as a kid was pretty much blown to bits and replaced with the scariest bunch of "supers" I've ever seen. How did you come up with the idea to take superheroes (and even today's, not even close to epic level, villains) and make them so amazingly evil?
I was on book tour, driving a rental car up through West Virginia when someone aggressively cut me off in traffic. I got very annoyed at this person, which is not something I normally do. I'm usually pretty easygoing, but this time I thought to myself, "Well, random person, it's a good thing I don't have super powers—because if I did, I'd totally blow your car off the road." Then I thought: "That's horrifying that I would even think of doing that to a random stranger!"
Any time that I get horrified like that makes me realize that there's a story there somewhere. So I spent the rest of the drive thinking about what would really happen if I had super powers. Would I go out and be a hero, or would I just start doing whatever I wanted to? Would it be a good thing or a bad thing?
And so, the circle is complete. Sazed returns to the south and visits the Conventical again, Elend returns to the city wall.
Hopefully, I revealed this well enough for you to understand what you need to in order to make this book work. There are a lot of holes, I know. I've already apologized for that–we'll answer all of them in book three.
For now, understand that something was imprisoned, and it hijacked the Terris religion–the prophesies–and used the Well of Ascension to get free.
Book three is about the real theme of these books. Survival. It's going to be a tough road.
As a wrap up, I guess I'll say that for me, this book was about Vin and Elend testing and proving their standards. In the beginning, they both made certain determinations about themselves and what they wanted to accomplish. Elend intended to make a good government and not be an exception to his own rules.
Vin intended to love the good, kind man of Elend rather than the man of the street–the hard, strict man that was Kelsier. (See Chapter Ten, where Vin snuggles in the chair with Elend, for an in-dialogue outline of her belief system for this book. This is the offering of the challenge. The trial comes later.) They are both tested, then, in these assertions–Elend by losing his throne, Vin by being forced to take a long hard look at her own heart and what she really wanted. To her, Zane represented the past. Did she return to that, or did she look forward to the hope–and the future–that Elend represented?
They both hold strong. That's the true victory of this book. The release of Ruin disregarded, this book marks great success for the characters. They were tested in their absolute most vital of personal convictions, and they passed. This prepared them for the final book. Now that they'd proven their ideals, they could bear the weights and griefs of the empire.
Of course, there is also Sazed. One of my goals in writing this book was to fix Elend and Vin. But another big one was to break Sazed. While they held firm to who they were, he has been forced to reassess his convictions, and he finds them wanting. Chapter fifty-four was one of the saddest chapters for me, personally, to write. In many ways, Elend and Vin have nearly completed their arcs as characters. But Sazed and Spook have just begun. And that is what leads us into Book Three.
In Words of Radiance I think it was Nazh who was collecting the artwork for Khriss, is that the same person who... did the writeup of the glyphs and--
Who annotates. So, Nazh annotates almost all the stuff. That's almost always Nazh. Khriss almost always writes the Ars Arcanums.
So there's not a new person also?
If you think it's Nazh, it's Nazh.
So, specifically the one that talks about the glyphs and [how] he infiltrated--
Yes, that is Nazh.
I have a personal question of my own. I'm LDS as well. After attending this meeting on worldbuilding, the primary problem is my faith that Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon, because he really had six years to work on it, and I think that he had the ability to put that book together himself...
You know, yeah, a lot of people talk about there's no way that he could have done it. Being a fantasy writer myself, I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that he could have written it himself, and I think basing your testimony, in the church, based on a concept like that is the wrong way to go. It is the wrong way to go, basing your testimony on, "Well, it's obviously impossible that he wrote it, therefore it must be true..." That's actually a bad logical way to look at the church.
I look at the church through eyes of faith, and my testimony is based solely on the fact that I believe God has spoken to me. I ask him, I say, "Is this what you want me to do," and I felt that testimony; I felt that burning inside, and for me, you know what, honestly, it doesn't happen that often for me. It's not like, you know, some people, they go to church, and every time it's like...no. I can point to three distinct points in my life where I felt that testimony, and other times I felt a good comfort, but there are three things where I said it was, you know, knock me down, this is true, that....and it wasn't even necessarily focused on the church. One was that I should be a writer, and one that I should be marrying my wife. The other one is very personal, so I won't mention that one, but those two moments I felt a powerful, powerful presence, and it came down to one of two things for me: either this is confirmation bias, which I assume you know about—either it's confirmation bias or it's the truth, and because if there is a God, he's not going to let me have this moment thinking that there....that, you know, this isn't going to be a lie. Either God is real and I'm feeling these sorts of confirmation...it really became that dichotomy for me, feeling those two things.
And from there, I just try to do the best I can. This faith has worked very well for me; I have not received any necessarily, moments saying "don't do this." There are lots of things in any religion—LDS faith is not alone in this—there are lots of things in any religion that are going to raise some eyebrows. You say, look, there's some logical holes here, and it doesn't matter which religion you're talking about; there's gonna be those. And because I've had those moments, those are what I have based, fundamentally, my faith upon, and honestly, for me, it's a choice between atheistic humanism, which has some very valid points, and the faith that I have now, and I only...you know, it's very Cartesian. Descartes, you know, "I think, therefore I am." I have to rely on my senses and my emotions, and feeling what I felt, if I say, "That's just confirmation bias," for me that means that I can't really rely on my senses, and I don't really want to go that way. I want to rely on what I have felt, and you know, on a more lofty scale I think there's more to it than all of this, than just this world. I think there's gotta be.
And that's, you know...who knows? Maybe the secular humanistic approach is right, and I have no problem with the secular humanists; I don't think that there's this....you know, these are generally sincere people who are interested in finding truth, but you know what, I believe that I can follow the scientific method for my faith. I can say, "Is this true?" I can pray. I can feel a confirmation, and it's repeatable. It's, every time I've wanted it, I've felt it. That's enough for me to go forward in faith right now. So, that's my version of a comment to you. I don't mind if you post that—I really don't; it's okay—but you know, I think we just do the best we can, and we soldier forward.
How is it that you’re able to write such real and strong women characters that are feminist in their own way but in very different ways from book to book? Is your wife your inspiration? Can you do a workshop for other male writers?
This is a huge compliment, thank you. It is something that I’ve worked on a long time. I would blame the authors I read getting into fantasy, Barbara Hambly, Melanie Rawn, Anne McCaffrey. They were the first three authors I read. I internalized some of the things they were talking about. I also do have some good models. My mother graduated first in her class in accounting in a year where she was the only woman in the accounting department. She’s currently the accountant for the city of Idaho Falls.
So getting it wrong was a big deal to me, and I did get it wrong on my first few books. The unpublished ones, fortunately. What I realized was, it was a bigger problem than just doing the female characters wrong, though that was the biggest sign that I was doing something wrong. What was happening was I was writing people to roles in the story, rather than writing them as people having a role in the story. That sounds really simple, right? But once I realized people don’t see themselves as the plucky sidekick, usually, and people don’t see themselves as the romantic interest. People see themselves as a person who plays a part in someone else’s life, but plays a different part over here, and a different part over here. Those of us who are extroverts might be introverts in some situations where we don’t know very much. Those of us who are introverts might be extroverts when you put us in front of a room and tell us to do a reading, we’re like “Yeah! I can handle that!”. We all fulfill lots of different roles in different settings, in different people’s lives. Everybody has motivations and passions, and gender identity, racial factors, your upbringing, your culture, these are all parts of who you are, but when you let one of those things define you too much, you become a flat character, in fiction. [Talks for a minute about Lost, where the character who loses his son becomes a flat character because it comes to completely define the character. He’s talked about this before in his lectures so I’m not going to type it out]. When you’re writing people to just a role like that, you end up with these flat characters, you end up with people who don’t really live. And I think the first big revelation for me was that I was doing that. And this was particularly true of the female characters. When you start writing, it’s very normal to just write a protagonist who’s much like yourself and then writing people who aren’t like yourself like, this is this role, this is this role, and then boom. But there was something else I had to learn. There’s still lots of things for me to learn, but there was something else big that I had to learn.
This was the problem that I’ve only recently begun reading essays about it, which is the natural inclination of someone is to first off write everyone as kind of a stereotype, and then you learn and you get better. But then the next inclination is to write the person who is different from ourselves as super super awesome. Just so that we’re not accidentally being sexist. And you’ll see this a lot too, this happens a lot with African Americans, in video games in particular. I was playing a video game once, and it’s a bunch of burly white guys who are awesome with guns and they’re killing stuff. And they talk about their friend, the black guy. You don’t know he’s black at the time. And then they get into trouble and they can’t save themselves. And the black guy bursts through the ceiling with guns blazing, mows down the enemies, says “Alright guys, go for it!”, and then runs off into the sunset. He’s like the coolest guy ever. He only stops short of doing a rap song for the end song, right? They don’t want to be racist, so he’s awesome, but he also doesn’t get a character arc. Everybody else has deep character arc and is messed up. They didn’t want to, and I understand this instinct, they didn’t want to make the black guy messed up because he’s the minority and they are so worried about screwing it up that instead they put him on a pedestal. You see guys do this with women, and you see women do this with the men characters. If you read a book, often the guy, by a female writer, the guy has very few faults, he’s just this guy, and the woman is this messed up, neurotic, interesting character. Same in reverse with the guys. The woman in the book ends up being the one who is very responsible, the one who’s like “We need to go do this”, the kick-ass “strong female character” [he literally says “quote-unquote” about strong female character] who just awesome, but doesn’t have a character arc and isn’t messed up in the ways that make people interesting. That’s another level, when you’re like, we have to make all the characters interesting, and all the characters messed up and individual, rather than even doing that level. And that one’s been even harder to internalize and figure out how to do.
Do you think you'll ever go outside of the established raunchiness of your books? I don't mean a murder sex party, but you know, straying a bit into the dark and gritty. It's just my opinion but I feel like you play it a little safe. Not necessarily a bad thing though!
I don't think I've crossed the line where I'm personally comfortable doing, but I think I'm close. Usually, I give a few characters (like Wayne) the ability to go further than others, as an acknowledgement that there are good people out there who don't happen to have my same prudish nature.
I think the thing you'll see that is the closest is when (and if) I write the Threnody novel.
For everything else, you'll have to settle for knowing that one of my quirks as a writer is that I do indeed play it a little safe--and probably will always do so. I'm very aware that my children, nieces, and nephews read my books. Beyond that, I feel that I'm an intentional and specific contrast to other writers in the genre--I consider it my duty to prove that (like many of the classic movies) you can write something that is for adults, and has depth, without delving into grittiness.
This is not a disparagement of people like Joe Abercrombie, who I think is an excellent writer, or others like him--and I'm glad we have them in the field. However, my own path goes a different direction, and I think it's important that I also publish, proving to those who perhaps wish to be more circumspect in these areas that there is a place for them in the genre too.
Does that mean that you recognize that the stories that take place on Threnody, a world of your creation, are stories that you are uncomfortable exploring because they are too harsh or intense? If that's the case I find that absolutely fascinating and very impressive- it's almost as if the cosmere is a real place with real people and you're just communicating their stories to us. I personally would rather you never told those stories instead of forcing them to be something that is untrue to what you created them to be.
A writer must be willing to do uncomfortable things; I fully believe that. Stories like Snapshot (my most recent novella) have done this before, and if I write the Threnody novel, I intend to do it well. (But also be very clear to audiences that it's darker than other cosmere books.)
It's not about intensity--I feel other books are intense. Or even about violence or darkness. It's about how far the narrative needs to delve into these things, or the relationship of light and hope to the darkness.
Dalinar's backstory in Stormlight is uncomfortably dark, and I won't pull punches from it. But it's balanced by the man he has become. In Threnody, some of the stories don't have that balance.
When Hoid met Kaladin, he said he came chasing an old acquaintance, ended up spending most of his time hiding from him instead. Is he referring to Rayse or Odium? Or someone else.
Yes. Not the someone else. He was referring to Odium.
Can all the Shards manifest the same powers, for example could Honor create an Allomancer?
Yes, but there would be more natural ways for Honor to achieve this.
As a follow-up, do you understand what polymorphism is? If so, could all the Shards meet the same contract?
Yes, I do, yes they can. I understand what you are asking and it is a soft yes.
My question is about writing, kind of.
As an author, you have achieved moderate success. People like you and have heard of you within the genre and you have established a relationship with your publishing company that lets you get a lot of books published.
This is the level of success I want as a writer and I am just wondering how financially viable this is. Like, can you write only or do you need a so-called day job? Are you able to support your family with your writing alone? That kind of thing.
Sorry if that is kind of a personal question. I've just always wondered how much money a writer makes once they've "made it".
I had a lot of questions like this myself during my days trying to break in. Everyone told me it wasn't possible to make a living as a writer—that, like an actor or a musician, I'd spend my life poor and obscure.
One of the big turning points came when I met and talked to a professional writer who had had modest success. Not a huge name, but a person who had done what you hope to do. Publish a book every year, never be a household name, but well-known enough in-genre that a large portion of the readers had seen his books on the shelves, though many still had no idea who he was. (The author was David Farland, by the way.)
I wish I could give you that same experience, though it's going to be harder while not face to face. The main tone of the meeting and his encouragement was this: IT IS POSSIBLE and YOU CAN DO IT!
Not everyone can make a living at writing. But it's very within reach, and for the dedicated author willing to practice and learn, it's not as difficult to make a living as many make it out to be.
I do make a living full time at this, and have for several years now. In the early years, it wasn't what many would call a 'good' income, but it was enough for me. Now, it is an excellent income. Not "Fly to Europe every week" income, but certainly "Take your friends out to eat once in a while" income.
A standard royalty for an author would be to 10-15% on a hardcover, and around 8% on a paperback. Usually, the percentage gets better the more copies you sell.
Now, books don't sell the huge numbers that people usually think they do. If you sell 2k hardcover copies in your first week, you can get on the NYT list. (Though it's not certain—it depends on what week it is and what other books came out. 3k is a pretty sure bet, though.)
Elantris—an obscure, but successful, book—sold about 10k copies in hardcover and around 14k copies its first year in paperback. I've actually sold increasing numbers each year in paperback, as I've become more well-known. But even if you pretend that I didn't, and this is what I'd earn on every book, you can see that for the dedicated writer, this could be viable as an income. About $3 per book hardcover and about $.60 paperback gets us around 39k income off the book. Minus agent fees and self-employment tax, that starts to look rather small. (Just under 30k). But you could live on that, if you had to. (Remember you can live anywhere you want as a writer, so you can pick someplace cheap.)
I'd consider 30k a year to do what I love an extremely good trade-off. Yes, your friends in computers will be making far more. But you get to be a writer.
The only caveat here is that I did indeed get very lucky with my placement at Tor. It's the successful hardcover release that makes the above scenario work. If you only had the paperback, and everyone who bought the hardcover bought that instead, you'd have to be selling around 60k copies to make it work. That's very possible, and I know a lot of midlist writers who do it.
Anyway, numbers shouldn't be what gets you into this business. If you have to tell stories, tell them. To be a writer, I feel you need to have such a love of the process that you'd write those books even if you never sold one. It's not about the money, and really shouldn't be. (And sorry to go on so long. I just feel it important to give aspiring writers the same kinds of help that I got.)
You've talked a bit elsewhere about how this is some of the most personal storytelling you've done. What do you think you've discovered or uncovered through exploring mental health and the mind through the story of Stephen Leeds?
I am often quite certain I know (in general) what a reader's reaction will be when I release a story. That's part of my job—to create something that produces an emotional response. Art is the act of inspiring emotion. Once in a while, however, I do something for the emotion it inspires in me, with less regard for how I think it will be received. Of course, usually these two are one and the same—the emotion it gives me will be the emotion most readers will feel.
This story is different. It is partially about mental health, yes, but it's also about the voice of a storyteller finding balance between all the voices crying for his attention. It's about the unwritten stories.
You see, as a young writer, I never worried if I'd have time to get to all the stories I wanted to tell. I was far more focused on whether or not I'd even have a career. I wrote assuming that if a story didn't work now, I'd eventually find a place for it. But as I've grown older, the realities of aging have begun to whisper to me that I need to stay focused—that if I want to complete my life's work, some other stories will simply have to be abandoned. That has been a hard realization. I don't know if anyone else will see that meaning in this story, or how this even relates—but it is certainly part of Lies of the Beholder for me. That's the part I say is very personal, but which means it's more difficult to gauge how readers will respond—because so much of this is a very individual story.
Chapter Six
In this chapter, we first get to see some of the scars that Hrathen is hiding. Part of what makes him such a compelling character, I think, is the fact that he considers, questions, and seriously examines his own motivations. The things he did in Duladel are a serious source of guilt to him, and his determination to do what is right–even if what is "right" to him isn't necessarily what we would consider right–gives him a strength of character and personality that is hard to resist.
He combines with this sincerity an actual force of logic. He's correct in his examination of Arelon. It has serious problems. It has weak leadership, weak military forces, and a weak economy. Hrathen's logical explanations in this chapter of why he feels justified in trying to overthrow the government should sound fairly convincing.
On the other hand, we have his whole "Tyranny in three easy steps" discussion with Dilaf. It's this sense of twisted goodness that rounds out his personality as a villain. He's not just earnest, he's not just logical–he also has an edge of ruthlessness. That's a very dangerous combination in a character.
Speaking of the "I will show you the way to destroy a nation" line, this concept–that line, actually–was one of the first things I came up with in my mind while imagining Hrathen. The way that he logically approaches something that would seem daunting–even impossible–to an outsider is a strong part of what defines who he is. I also really enjoy finding opportunities to show how Hrathen sees the world. Whenever I place him on the Elantris city wall and let him inspect the defensibility of the city, I give a clue as to how he was trained, and how he thinks. I don't believe that Sarene ever pauses to consider just how weakly fortified the city of Kae is–but Hrathen thinks about it on at least three separate occasions.
Is there a reason for why so many early Radiants were family? Including theorized ones, we have Tien and Kaladin, Jasnah and Elhokar, Dalinar and Renarin, Shallan and Helaran...
Yes, so I can give you the "how the sausage is made," I call this the narrative reason vs the in-world reason. I can give you both.
In-world reasoning is that, when these bonds are forming, these human beings have bonds to other people, and that naturally leads the spren along those bonds. When Kaladin is forming a bond with a windspren [honorspren], and windspren [honorspren] start looking, or even other sapient spren start looking for people, they're going to notice. Remember, they're coming into the Physical Realm, it's very hard for them. They're doing this partially from the Cognitive Realm, searching and trying to get pulled through by the attention and the bond that is forming. They're naturally led to other people who are related. You could even say that, because of Tien, Syl found Kaladin.
I built this in for a narrative reason, and the narrative reason is: we generally are going to want to have a larger than average number of people among the core characters, who are involved in the magic system, and involved in the narrative. Because the magic system is so important in my books, I knew that I was gonna have a lot of friends and family of main characters end up with spren bonds.
But I don't think this is unusual. In fact, I think this is more true to life. It's not one of those coincidences we make up for a book; it's one of those coincidences that happens in life that seems unusual. It seems unusual if you look at it and say, "There are five people who became full-time in the publishing industry during the year Brandon was a senior at BYU. And they are all friends; in fact, they were all friends before they got published." This seems unusual; like, why didn't anyone else? There is nobody else that I know that broke in into the industry from that year. Maybe it happened, but nobody I knew who wasn't in our immediate friend group. Well, this is not that surprising if you actually look at it, because when one person breaks in, it becomes so much easier for everyone else that knew that person. Not just for networking reasons. (Networking reasons: obvious). The other obvious one is: the people are gonna know each other because they're all gonna be moving in the same circles, looking for each other without knowing it. They're gonna be looking for other good writers, and they're gonna be making connections with them. They're gonna notice when people ask questions in a class that are the right kinds of questions to be asking about getting published.
But even beyond those two things, once I broke in, Dan Wells has said before he realized, "Brandon did this; this is real. He actually did this. I can do this." And indeed, he went and broke in. Once this thing that seems impossible, whether it's becoming a full time novelist, or forming a spren bond and becoming a Knight Radiant; once you've seen somebody do it, it becomes way easier for you to conceive of yourself doing it. This is why C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were in the same writing group. This is why you see this sort of thing happening all around the world and in all sorts of professions, that people who were friends together... Every time that people are like, "Wow, these three major Hollywood stars knew each other in high school." Well, yes, that is actually more likely to happen than not, because of all these reasons I've talked about.
if Kelsier were to take the shard Odium, how terrifying and dangerous would he be?
I could see Kelsier being very dangerous with Odium. His hatred of certain groups of people would lead him down bad paths.
Spensa comes across as overconfident and bombastic at times, while her AI sidekick, M-Bot, is both comic and tragic. What else can you tell us about developing characters?
They really play off one another. With M-Bot, I needed both a friend and a foil for Spensa, since there's a lot of conversation between them. I also needed an outside perspective. Spensa's culture has problems. Humankind crashed on this planet decades ago, and has been subject to these alien invasions and air raids for so long, that their entire society is built around the machine of war to protect themselves. The technology and temperament revolve around getting pilots into the air at all costs, and it’s skewed everything as a result. I needed an outside voice to ask questions and raise concerns, even if it's through humor.
Because Spensa is such an extreme character, one of the challenges was to depict that a person who's spent most of her life alone, hunting rats, while imagining herself to be a great warrior, is going to have a warped perspective on what it means to be a fighter pilot, weirder than the rest of the society might.
In a way, she's a stand-in for someone like me, who enjoys larger-than-life action movies but has never experienced real violence. She’s like the person in the seat with the popcorn, who’s confronted by the reality and discovers it’s not what she imagined.
When Odium and Dalinar were having their meeting in Oathbringer, Odium seemed kinda freaked out by something. Could it possibly be related to how Lift can interact with spren in the physical world, and that might cause some problems for him, <seeing the impossible>?
He is weirded out by Lift, certainly. Lift is something that shouldn't exist, let's just say that. You'll find out why, probably in book 6? But she should not exist.
Vivenna's Thoughts on Being a Drab
A lot of what happened to Vivenna—how she saw the world and how she acted—was influenced by being a Drab. As I've said before, the Hallandren aren't right when they say losing your Breath does nothing to you. Most Drabs struggle with depression, and the fact that they're almost always sick doesn't help either.
And so, Vivenna's time on the streets was artificially made more dreary and terrible than it truly was. Being a Drab, being sick, the shock of being betrayed—these things combined to give you the person you saw in the previous two chapters. It's a way to cut a corner. I wanted Vivenna to feel like she'd been on the streets for months, but for it only to have been a few weeks.
She is able to make her hair change colors again. This is a representation of the fact that she has started to pull out of the nightmare. She's slightly in control of her world again, and the roughest time for her has passed. There's also a clue in that hair, one that Vasher mentions. Because of it, and her heritage, and something very mysterious in the past, every member of the royal line has a fraction of a divine Returned Breath in them. That makes it much easier for them to learn to Awaken than a normal person.
I have a question about emotional Allomancy and ways it can affect things that aren't from Scadrial. Specifically, I had a conversation about what it would do to Lifeless.
Emotional Allomancy would have a more compelling effect on Lifeless than on a regular person.
Like breaking Lifeless with Allomancy?
Oh... to break Lifeless. This... I'll RAFO that for now, just because the actual details there I'm gonna RAFO. So, you're really asking, "Can emotional Allomancy bring back the person behind the Lifeless," and that I'll have to RAFO.
I meant like breaking the Command.
Oh, breaking the command of a Lifeless. Ohhhh... I'll still RAFO that. *laughter and applause from audience* That's not nearly as difficult a question, but yeah... I would say if you're doing that in a roleplaying game, I would call that a viable use of the magic as currently understood. So you could make that happen and have my authority to do it.
Hey, I've been trying to figure out how Elhokar was 'broken', and I'd like to check if I'm on the right track. Obviously he isn't paranoid (since his fears of assassination and the people he sees in the shadows are very real), so i looked a little closer at his behavior and I noticed he never feels bad about how his decisions impact other people, and doesn't react to his sister's death/resurrection but does constantly worry about how people talk about him.
Combined, that really seems like he's somewhere on the spectrum of narcissistic personality disorder, what with "an excessive need for admiration, and disregard for others' feelings,"
Am I in the right ballpark?
Yup, you are right on target.
Do note that the idea that a person needs to be somehow 'broken' is an in-world theory that isn't 100% validated by the people chosen as Radiants. People have, however, noticed a trend in-world, which is valid.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Vivenna and the Mercenaries Wait in the Safe House after the Lifeless Attack on the Slumlords
Why does Jewels bother sewing up Clod? Why fix Lifeless at all? Denth's answer is a fairly good one, but it could use some more explanation.
You see, when one makes a Lifeless, the reason the Breath stays and won't come back is because the body of a recently deceased person is too "sticky" for Breaths. One Breath attaches to it, and because the body so clearly remembers being alive, it can use that Breath to power it. (Assuming you have the right Commands and can picture them correctly in your head when you make the Lifeless.)
However, the more the Lifeless is damaged, the less like the shape of a living person it is, and the more difficult it is for the Breath to keep that body going. Powering a body with only one Breath is hard—it requires the body to work mostly on its own. When you power a cloak or something like that, the Breaths need to provide a lot of energy, since there's no real muscles to use or skeletal structure to rely on.
So the more wounded a Lifeless becomes, the less well its Breath can keep it going. Eventually you'll need to stick a second Breath into it, then a third, all the way up until that Lifeless is nothing more than a bunch of bones you've Awakened. At that point, you might as well be using sticks or cloth.
Are Bondsmith spren created as a matter of intent by Shards or are they 'natural' insofar as any spren made of enough Investiture would create a Bondsmith bond? That is, for example, the Everstorm is clearly a giant mass of Odium's Investiture, if someone were to bond its spren (which is presumably very young and insensate currently), would it form a Bondsmith bond as a matter of (super)natural laws or would Odium have to tweak something on a metaphysical level to allow a Bondsmith bond to form?
It wouldn't naturally become a Bondsmith spren, as it's not JUST the amount of Investiture that makes one. (For example, there's that odd spren in Iri that has a ton of Investiture, but didn't become a Radiant spren.) To become a Radiant spren requires some different things.
The fact that Odium has bested other Shards implies he is more powerful. Is Odium inherently a more powerful Shard or is it a matter of his nature?
Both factors play a role.
I've seen in reviews of Mistborn that a criticsm that pops up from time to time is that you tend to repeat the basic principles of the magic system. I've seen that some feel hit over the head with it. Personally, I liked that fact since the magic system was new and it helped me to remember and understand.
I'm also seeing criticsm now with Warbreaker that the magic system isn't explained enough to thoroughly understand it. I've pointed out in discussions that not even Vasher understands it all.
But here's my question: Did criticsm of the magic system's explanations in Mistborn have anything to do with Warbreaker having considerably less explanation in its magic system?"
Wow, that's a very detailed and interesting question. The answer is no.
...Okay, there's more to that answer. I accepted the criticisms of the Mistborn books with the knowledge that there was really no other way around it—the way I was writing those books and the complexity of the magic system made me feel like I needed to give those hints. It's not like I'm trying to write down to the lowest denominator, but at the same time I want to make sure that the complicated magic system is a force driving the book—and is something interesting rather than something confusing. Across a three-book epic like that I wanted to make sure that I was not leaving people behind. That's always a balance in a book series. And I don't know where to set that balance. In fact, I think the balance is going to be different for every person. Any given book that you read, some people are going to find it overexplained and some people are going to find it underexplained. I'm always trying to strike the right balance, particularly for the tone of a given book, to make that work for the novel.
With Warbreaker, as you've pointed out, the magic system is much less understood by the poeple taking part in it. In the Mistborn books the magic system is very well understood. Even though there are little pieces of it that people don't know yet, those peices are easy to grasp and understand and use once people figure out what they are. In the Mistborn books the world is in a state where people have spend 1000 years using this magic system and perfecting it and understanding it. In Warbreaker, they haven't. They still don't know much about what's going on. It's very mysticized. People haven't sat down and spent enough time pursuing scholarly research about it, figuring it out. Beyond that there's no immortal Lord Ruler figure explaining it all to them—or if there is, it's Vasher and he's not telling anyone. And so the magic in Warbreaker has a very different feel to it. I wanted it to be a little confusing, because it is confusing for the main characters.
I wouldn't say that the criticism of the Mistborn books is what drove me; the needs of the various plots is what drove me.
Where did the inspiration for Kaladin's fighting style came from?
Classic spearman fighting is based off of rank and file spear formations. Nothing too spectacular. I did mix it with a little bit of Eastern spear-fighting, specifically some Chinese spear-fighting, but really your classic spear-fighting technique is pretty multicultural, what you're gonna want to do with a spear. I add flourishes, which come more from katas now and than than they do from actual real-world fighting.
Though a good resource for this is Matt Easton's channel on YouTube, Schola Gladiatoria, because what he will do is he will have people doing historical martial arts, and they will do ten bouts of a person with a spear versus a person with a spear. Most of these are European, but spear-fighting tends to be pretty similar across cultures. And just watching some short spear fights, or spear versus sword... I specifically watched a bunch of those bouts for Adolin's spear-versus-knife fight that we had in Oathbringer. Just really handy, the fact that he films large bouts like that and puts them on the internet.
Okay, maybe also Alcatraz one since I just finished Dark Talent few hours ago (it's excellent, by the way): Why did they need Dif in the first place? I mean, Alcatraz still knows more about Hushlands than any person from Free Kingdoms would, even a person who went deep undercover for a long time. What did they need a specialist in Hushlands for? That part didn't make sense for me.
Alcatraz knows what it is like to live in a small town in the US. Would you pick him as a guide to show you around DC or NYC, a place he'd never been? He's a thirteen year old kid. But I'll say, at the same time, Dif was working hard behind the scenes to get himself involved.
You have books that contain three completely different magic systems, that they're little or no resemblance to anything I've seen before. Where do they come from?
This comes from my personal philosophy on the fantasy genre. I've been reading it for 20+ years now. I love the fantasy genre. But I personally feel that the genre hit some points in its career where it stagnated a little bit. It was not branching out as much as it should. And that was part of the drive behind me writing what I write. Now, I'm not pointing any fingers, it was just on us of the new generation to say, "All right, where can we take this genre?"
That's what happened in science fiction. If you go back, science fiction was one thing. And then the next generation made it something else. And then the next generation made it something else. It's why science fiction has such depth to it. And you can still find all the original stuff, and people are writing things like that right now, but you can also find this whole wide variety. And so the genre is extremely varied. And fantasy is a newer genre. It really is epic fantasy, really though. Fantasy goes all the way back. But epic fantasy was a genre that did not have enough of this variation to it, in my opinion.
The trick is that being really varied with your plots, you can do it, it just makes generally bad plot. You can do completely unexpected or completely depressing, you can do weird things with plot, but they're either confusing, or they aren't very fun to read. That's not to say nobody has ever done it, people do, but I really felt that fantasy, rather than plot, the place that it needed to innovate was in setting, and maybe in style. I really like how fantasy is kind of inching toward this... you see more gunpowder fantasies nowadays, you see more fantasies set in an African culture or an Asian culture, things like this. And this sort of expansion has really helped the genre quite a bit.
So, the magic systems, where do they come from? They're what I'm most excited about in the genre, so it's what I do naturally. Mostly, when I buy books and I read them, I'm like, "Come on. This same magic. Again? Can't we do something new?" So, it just happens naturally. I do want to say, at the end of the day, a generic magic system and a generic setting plus fantastic writing and characters is still better than the best setting you can imagine with boring characters. So, as writers, I would say to you, keep that in mind. You really need to learn to write killer characters and an engaging plot. But then, I suggest a lot of variety with the setting or the style, and ways that you can approach your writing.
Was it moral for Adolin to kill Sadeas?
Which morality scheme are you looking for?
Yours. Your personal morality.
My personal morality. It depends on the day. That one's on a line. I would say yes. There's a little bit of-- there's enough chaotic good in me. I would generally put myself in neutral good. But there's enough chaotic good in me to say, "Yeah, that guy asked for it. He betrayed you, he was threatening your family." I would side on Adolin's side, I think.
I had a question about Odium's intent for going after Ambition. Obviously, with Devotion and Dominion teaming up, he didn't want a twosome over there. Are we ever gonna learn more about the background on Threnody? 'Cause Khriss implies that there was always Investiture there, before the clash. So I'm looking for a little bit of information about the Evil before the Admiral's background story.
Before the clash, the Evil was not the Evil. It is the clash that warped it. And Secret Project Five has a splintered piece of Ambition as a plot point. Some of these books... All that stuff I said about not having to know multiple magic systems? That goes out the window for things like Secret Project Five. Those are books that are about that. You will find out some more there; it's gonna take me a long time to get to what actually happened with Ambition, why, and things like that. Know that Odium was not expecting it to be as hard as it was and ended up severely wounded in that clash.
This is an interesting topic, and though I saw this early, I wanted to wait to post anything because I prefer to let discussions like this happen without author intervention, at least not immediately.
I do I like talking about topics like this, though. Humor is such a curiously subjective thing. There are people who just don't get Pratchett, whom I find the funniest thing ever. Conversely, I don't generally like stand up comedians, and actively dislike some of the comedies that people on reddit love. There are people who tell me that my Mat scenes in WoT are the funniest they've read in the series; there are others who consider them absolute duds.
Humor is more subjective than what we find heroic, tragic, or even beautiful. It also depends a great deal on audience buy-in and mood. This makes comedy one of the trickiest things to do in a book, because some people are just going to hate what you do. My approach has generally been a kind of shotgun blast--I try to include multiple different kinds of humor, stylized to the individual character. That way, if you don't find the humor itself funny, you at least learn what the character finds funny--and learn something about them.
In Stormlight, my personal favorite is the bridge crew humor, as it is distinctly character driven. Syl's humor is a different flavor, based on innocence mixed with sarcasm. Wit is another style entirely, though I usually only let him really go when he meets someone he dislikes strongly. I have to be careful, as he's one of the few characters I allow to stray into the vulgar, and letting him go too far risks letting such things overshadow the rest of the book.
Shallan's humor is based upon regency "women sit in a circle and trade witty comments" humor, of which Jane Austen was a master. Much of what the OP said in his post is correct--Shallan's fault is that she over-extends. She uses the humor as a coping mechanism, and to her, it doesn't matter if it's actually funny so long as she's stretching toward something more lighthearted than her terrible past. She tries very hard to prove herself. And she fails. Often.
However, her type of "wit" is to exemplify what Vorin lighteyed women consider to be amusing or diverting. And there are people who genuinely find that kind of thing to be a blast--though Shallan isn't exactly the best at it yet. (She's not terrible either, mind you. If you don't smile at some of the things she says, it's likely this isn't your type of humor, which is just fine. Hopefully, there will be other things in the books that make you smile.)
Though, that said, I'd love to read passages from other fantasy novels that people on reddit find to be actually laugh-out-loud funny. I know which ones I personally like, but it would be useful for me to see what you're liking. Feel free to PM them to me or to post them here.
If a person with Breath (let's say 100 Breaths) dies. After a while (let's say a hour), are the Breaths still in the corpse ? If yes, are those destined for the same fate as an object with Breath inside ?
If a Returned dies for mundane ways (let's say a dagger in the back) and therefore he has still his Divine Breath.Would the Divine Breath keep the CS stampled to the corpse until he run out of fuel/Investiture ? (Like a Ghost in the CS anchored to his corpse until the Breath lasts)
Breaths in a dying person usually escape with the soul.
Can you talk a little bit about why you changed Khriss's personality so much between the White Sand prose and the White Sand graphic novel?
I felt that the biggest weakness to a lot of my early writing (this encompasses White Sand, Dragonsteel, and Elantris) is that my worldbuilding was really working, my magic systems were really coming together, and my characters were flat and kind of boring. And this early work of mine, I look at and there's a lot of external conflict to characters.
And it works in Elantris. Raoden is a bit boring, compared to some of my other characters. But he has an enormous external conflict to deal with, and that actually kind of works. There are lots of movies, I mentioned Mission Impossible earlier. Like Tom Cruise's character in those: not the most interesting character. But he doesn't have to be, because in fact it would probably make the movies worse if you spent a lot of time on that. That's not what those movies are about. So if you have lots of tension and lots of external conflict, then you can have a character who doesn't change as much, who doesn't go through big character arcs and things. And it's not just fine; it's a selling point of the story. It's just a different type of story.
But the problem with mine is, they were all kind of the same person. They're all kind of the same level of boring in a lot of my early works. And so, when we approached the graphic novel version, one of the things I wanted to do was see if I can liven up the characters a little, if I can make them more like I would write them now. And that's what happened with basically all the changes in White Sand were attempts to do that: make the story more like I write right now. And I'm pleased with those changes.
The only thing I don't like about White Sand is, as we were new into doing this, we did not get the worldbuilding across in a visual medium the way we wanted to. I don't think that the worldbuilding made the leap. And we're trying to fix that with future things that we're doing. We're hoping that we can play to the strengths of graphic novels and not have them lose some of the coolness. Some of the things that were working in the White Sand prose didn't make the jump to the graphic novel as well as we wanted them to.
People generally don't recommend this kind of book
This chapter has my favorite of all twenty chapter-intro essays, by the way. I’m somewhat passionate about this one in particular. I think that we put too much emphasis on certain books while ignoring others. I don’t think we should ignore the books about boys and their dogs, but we should know that they just don’t work for some people. People like me.
Fantasy books made a big difference in my life. I didn’t find traditional “literary” books, even ones for kids, to be challenging. Fantasy engaged my imagination, however, in ways that no realistic book ever could have. Fantasy made me think, made me dream, and now I’ve become an author of it.
Things aren’t as bad for kids now as they were when I was growing up. However, they’re still pretty bad for older people. I have a friend who was in a creative writing class last week where the professor said–in reference to popular fiction–“You have to decide if you want to write for the most people, or for the best people.”
“Best people”? What the crap? This is the sentiment that has always bothered me. If a person likes a certain type of fiction, they’re a better person than someone who likes popular fiction?
People are equal. People’s interests are equal. Not all fiction may appeal to all people, but who is anyone to judge another based on what they read?
That said, maybe someone someday will give me one of those shiny circular awards just to make me eat my words.
Dilaf
I really wanted to bring these Dilaf scenes in and make them personal. That was my prime reasoning behind sending Sarene with him. I wanted the reader to care, and I wanted Hrathen to care–which, hopefully, would make the reader care even more.
Dilaf was very interesting to write as an antagonist. By the time he finally came to his own, I didn't have to worry about developing him as a viable threat. His personality through the entire novel had prepared the reader for the awful moment when he finally got the other characters into his power. And, because Hrathen was so sympathetic a villain through the entire novel, I think I can make Dilaf more raw and unapproachable. It's nice to have sympathetic villains, but with Hrathen in the book, I didn't feel that I needed much sympathy for Dilaf. Also, with one such well-drawn villain, I felt that if I tried to do the same with Dilaf, the comparison would make him come off very poorly. So, I went the other direction, and the contrast gives the readers someone that they can just hate.
If they didn't hate him already, then this last scene with Sarene was meant to push them over the edge. Here is a man who kills for pleasure. No matter how wronged he was in the past, he has no justification for the cruelty and enjoyment he displays in anticipating Sarene's death. This is an evil man.
Chapter Thirty - Part Two
Here's my original journal entry for this chapter, written right after I finished the chapter itself:
Chapter Thirty: Vin saves Elend at the party.
Finished 5-19-04
It's wonderful when a chapter turns out just the way you envisioned it.
I worked on this chapter for a long time–from the beginning of the planning process, I imagined this as one of the major action sequences in the book. I began with the image of Vin shooting up through the air as the rose window twisted and fell beneath her in the mists, then I expanded that to her protecting Elend, giving Vin a real scene of heroism. Originally, I wasn't intending her to fight the Allomancers, just to lead them away, but I decided that I needed a pure Mistborn-on-Mistborn fight in the book. Every other Allomantic battle involves Inquisitors.
The scenes in this chapter are some of my favorite so far. Though, oddly, it took me a long time to get into them–I hedged over what the first part of the chapter should entail. Eventually, I decided that this would be a perfect place to give Vin some abandonment issues. This is a hold-over from the original Vin from the first Final Empire [Prime] write–the fear of abandonment was a large part of that Vin’s personality. It worked well in this setting, and I think I'll emphasize it just a bit more in the rewrite. The next chapter really plays off of this idea.
It feels a little bit weird to be writing about a young girl running around killing people in her skivvies, but I don't really see any reasonable way for her to fight in one of those bulky ball gowns I'm using in this book. So, underwear it is!
Kliss and Shan have both come to have much larger parts in the book than I'd intended. Kliss was intended to be a throw-away character used in one chapter, but now she's become an informant and a conspirator. In a rewrite, I think I'll have to introduce her sooner and try and give her a more distinctive personality. As for Shan. . .well, I only added her a couple of chapters ago. Obviously, she'll need more time in the rewrite as well. Vin's battle will be much better if I can have her fight a named character that's been an antagonist in a few chapters. The Vin ball scenes have become a larger part of the book than I had thought, and adding Kliss and Shan as recurring characters will help flesh out that plot-line, I think.
Like how I ditch Sazed in this chapter so that I can have Vin's "grand" entrance in the next chapter? Pretty smooth, eh? I was worried about how I was going to deal with him. . . . As for the actual fight and the scenes, I think everything flowed quite well. We'll see what readers think!
(Note, when I wrote this, Elantris wasn’t even out yet–it was still over a year away from publication–so I really had no idea if people would be responding well to my writing or not.
