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LewsTherinTelescope

Cecil G. Bagsworth III is a rather specific name. Is the author of the in-world Frugal Wizard's Handbook the same one that is Alcatraz's editor?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. This is the same individual.

Cecil is a joke among myself and Dan and several others of our writing group. Cecil is also the editor of A Night of Blacker Darkness, canonically. That's one of Dan's books. And so, Cecil is an individual that I've wanted to be filling out and using, and he is an interdimensional explorer and things like that. He is the person that is being referenced, but he is-

Karen Ahlstrom

I suppose if Alcatraz is in a different dimension, then he wouldn't have to be necessarily...

Brandon Sanderson

The same Cecil?

Karen Ahlstrom

Well, no. The era that Alcatraz appears to be in-

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, it doesn't have to be in... Regardless, I'm referencing the same individual. That's an easter egg that I don't intend you to read much more into than "Brandon loves this name and there's this weird interdimensional explorer that shows in his and Dan's books," and we actually have a picture of him, a real photograph of Cecil that will be used in this books. Look forward to that; Cecil was at my wedding, in a top hat and monocle. So you will get to have a picture of Cecil, who is based off of a person that we know.

Cecil G. Bagsworth III, and of course there is also Stet Cannister. He's a space hero that grew out of our joking at Leading Edge and our writing group. And Cecil grew out of that as well.

A. Martinez

You talked about the prologue and the promise. I am a discovery writer by the way, but sometimes I like to walk outside while listening to epic music to get inspired. The thing is that I don´t really feel comfortable doing a prologue because that could spoil a little bit the story. However, I am concerned about the readers. If I don´t make a prologue and I start with chapter one… well, of course, it will not be that interesting as the magical battle or evil growing on the prologue.

So what should I do? Spoil a little bit? Or just start showing my character from 0. I’ve had this dilemma for a while. I can assure you, Mr. Sanderson, that my story is going to be epic and different from the conventional. Just mindblowing. Transcendental. It will have a lot of scaling so I have to start from 0. But how can I lure my readers on the first pages without spoilers?

Brandon Sanderson

Well, I’m proud to have been able to chat with you before you make it big! I like how you talk and how you think. Stay confident, but also to be willing to listen to feedback and criticism. If you want to become the great writer you dream of being, you do so (in my experience) by listening.

As for prologues, I should say that you certainly do not need them. In fact, many authors use them as a crutch. It is perfectly acceptable (even recommended by some editors I know) to skip the prologue and go right into your story. (Though it’s not something I often do myself, so perhaps this is a “do as I say, not as I do” sort of situation.)

The important part is not what you call your opening, but in making certain your opening is making the right kinds of promises. You say you want to start at zero and ramp up–that’s great, and you can totally do that. But try to devise an opening to your story that is engaging, and gives foreshadowing of the type of story you want to tell. Figure out how to start small, but make big promises. Some stories do this with a prologue. But other stories start with the protagonist trying something bold and beyond their skill, to show that they are challenging themselves–and this can be something as simple as running a foot race, or boldly speaking when others remain silent. It doesn’t have to actually include something epic to imply epic turns are coming.

Best of luck to you! I suggest just starting where it makes the most sense, then writing your story. Once you are done, you can look back at that opening and see if there are revisions you could make to better align it with the story you ended up wanting to tell.

Brandon Sanderson

So, today I think I’ll post part of a proposal I’m working on for Tor. I’m going to send this to them, so that Tom Doherty can read about my plans and goals for the future before he and I meet in New York next week.

Enjoy.

Introduction

Writing is art, but publishing is business.

I’ve always believed that in order to succeed in this field, I would need two things. First, I’d need an excellent work ethic. Second, I’d need an eye toward my eventual goal of becoming a professional writer. When I started writing in earnest seven years ago, I realized that the chances of any one book getting published were slim, even if it was a superior manuscript. Therefore, I didn’t let myself stop writing–I figured that the more books I had to send out, the sooner I would get published. When Moshe finally called to purchase ELANTRIS, I was working on my thirteenth novel.

This background gives me an advantage, I think, over other first-time authors. I understand my writing style far better than a writer sold the first book he wrote. I know what I do well, I know what people enjoy from my books, and I have had time to hone and practice my craft. I also have a great wealth of intellectual property in the books I’ve already written. I don’t want to publish any of those books themselves–readers deserve to get books that represent my best and most current skill level. However, the ideas and settings I developed in those previous works can provide models for what to do in the future.

My foremost distinguishing attribute as a writer is my ability to create interesting settings and unique magic systems. I don’t use the standard fantasy setting–nor do I even use an iteration of it. I strive to push this genre to its full potential, giving my readers something new with each book. Another of my strengths is my ability to push my books’ plots toward dramatic climaxes with well-foreshadowed surprises and twists. I also think that I have a flair for witty side-characters and powerfully-motivated viewpoint characters.

My weaknesses are offshoots from these strengths. My books build slowly sometimes, and so the first quarter or so of a given novel tends to be the slowest. My books also have very steep ‘learning curves,’ meaning that because they have original settings and magic systems, it can be difficult for readers to grow accustomed to all of the new elements. Finally, I’m not a brilliant prose craftsman, though I think I’m getting stronger in this area. One of the things I’ve learned during my years practicing is how to focus my books around my strengths as a writer, while at the same time minimizing the effect of my weaknesses.

I’m at an interesting point in my career. My original goal, that of getting published, has been met–indeed, I’ve succeeded beyond what I dared dream was possible. I’ve been picked up by the most prestigious publishing house in fantasy, and am releasing a book in hardback.

However, getting published was always just a step. My real goal is to build a career as a writer. You don’t do that by publishing one great book–you do that by publishing a great book, then publishing an even better one the next year, then an even better one the year after that.

I can do this. However, I realize the need for a plan. Therefore, I’ve begun to look at the various books and series that I’ve written recently (within the last year) or am planning to write very soon. I’ve never published before, so I’m not sure which direction to take my career. Therefore, I developed this list of my most promising new and upcoming works so that I could get your advice on what plan I should use during my next five to ten years of writing.

Summaries of five series I’ve been developing follow. At the end, I’ll give a summary of my thoughts regarding my future.

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Sixteen

Seems like a good place to talk about my philosophy on how I choose viewpoint characters for these books. I've been getting DMs saying, "Why no Dalinar viewpoints?" or "Why no Adolin viewpoints?" And I can understand frustration there.

When I started this series, however, I dug into the multi-book epic fantasy stories I'd enjoyed in the past, as well as the more popular examples, and tried to really nail down the pitfalls of the format. A main one felt, to me, to be character sprawl. These series tend to end up with so many interesting characters that the author, in turn, ends up having entire sequences (and even books) that don't move the storyline forward, but instead investigate new storylines.

While I do appreciate some of that, I wanted to do what I could to mitigate that. Which meant limiting my viewpoints, even among main characters. This helps prevent sprawl, at least for me, because when I'm in someone's head, I naturally begin working on subplots and character arcs for them. In this case, I needed to keep my focus, and limit myself. To not try to do full sequences for every character in every part of every book. While I know some of you would have enjoyed that, I would really rather finish this series before I am a hundred--and feel that the books need to be as focused as is reasonable for their length.

That's why when I outline, I look at all the characters that COULD have a viewpoint in a given section--then narrow my scope to a few of them. Dalinar most certainly could have had viewpoints in Part One of this book, but I decided it was Navani's perspective that made the most sense for this story. So, while you get to see a healthy dose of Dalinar, we don't have his viewpoints.

Those will come later in the book, in a part where it makes sense to have his perspective on things. I need to look for the characters that are adding the most to a given sequence--that usually means the ones who are changing the most, learning the most, or who have the most tension in their sequence. I do feel bad for this somewhat cutthroat use of viewpoints at times, but I believe it is the right decision--it's either this, or watch the series balloon to many more books while at the same time slowing the narrative down to the point that books pass, and you wonder what was actually accomplished in them.

Only three more chapters left in these previews before you get the entire book! (Also, apologies for those who found this annotation repetitive from things I've said before. It is difficult to judge, sometimes, what is new information to the majority of readers and what is becoming well-worn, so to speak.)

Questioner

I heard earlier, through people I know, that Syl will eventually develop her memories from before the Recreance. Does that mean any spren that are alive currently have been alive for that long as well? Or are they--

Brandon Sanderson

Not necessarily. Some spren-- The thing about spren is that when does the energy become conscious? So yes they will have all existed before but at what point is consciousness attained. That's kind of their birth. It happens much more rarely than it does on the other-- on the Physical Realm, like regular people and things like that. But there can totally have been spren who have been born since then. And they would count most of the spren that you see as not being alive, well not being born. Not conscious. What's the word for the difference between humans and animals, it's not just sentience, there's another word. Starts with a C. Sapient, you're right it starts with an S.

Anushia Kandasivam

Stories are one of the most powerful ways of bringing about change. In your opinion, how can authors strike a balance in their storytelling between raising awareness about things like violence against women, while telling an engaging story, without being pedantic or preachy?

Do you think it's important for influential authors such as yourself, who are read all over the world, to make a conscious effort to include characters in your stories that show reinforcements of respecting women as people and as human beings?

Brandon Sanderson

Definitely a big "yes" to your last one.

This is a big issue, and I'm glad you asked it, because it's something I've thought about quite a bit. At its core, it comes down to, "How do you write a story that explores difficult questions without preaching." Because, at the end of the day, we're picking up an epic fantasy book because we want to go to a new world, enjoy this new world, and have an interesting adventure. And we're not picking up it up because they want Brandon Sanderson to lecture them. And certainly, there are authors I do read to be lectured. So it's not a blanket statement, "This is how someone should do something."

But for me, there's a couple of core tenets. One is the one I've already mentioned. Which is, if I'm going to put a character in (which I think I should put a wide variety of characters in) approaching questions from different directions, make sure that I am researching that person's viewpoint, people who have that viewpoint in the real world, and make sure I'm doing the job that they would want me to do with their position, their subculture, their belief structure, and things like this.

But that kind of plays into another big... pillar of what I think my duty as a writer to do, which I've expressed it in the books, I've gotten it through things I've heard other authors write. Which is "Raise questions. Don't give answers." I believe that if you are raising questions, and having multiple people who are all sympathetic disagreeing on this question, or struggling with this question in different ways, it innately makes the reader start to say, "Well, what do I think about that? And is it something that I need to think about more?" And not dodging these topics, but also not coming down with long sermons about them, I think, is the way that I want to be able to approach them.

I often share this story, so I apologize if some of you heard it before. But the book that got me into science fiction and fantasy was Dragonsbane, by Barbara Hambly. And Dragonsbane, by Barbara Hambly, is criminally under-read in the science fiction/fantasy community. I have read it again as an adult, it holds up, it is a fantastic novel. What made Dragonsbane work for me? I was a fourteen-year-old boy who was handed this novel by his English teacher, and she said, "I think you are reading below your level. I think you would like something a little more challenging. Why don't you try one of these books on my shelf." And that's the one that I ended up picking up. This book should not have worked for a fourteen-year-old boy, if you read the Cliffnotes on how to get a reluctant reader to read books.

Dragonsbane, if you haven't read it, is about a middle-aged woman who is having a crisis as she tries to balance having a family and learning her magic. Her teacher has told her she can be way better at the magic if she would dedicate more time to it, but her family takes a lot of her time. And this is her main character conflict through the story. Now, it also involves going and slaying a dragon, and things like this. And it's a wild adventure with some excellent worldbuilding, and a really interesting premise. The story is about having to kill a dragon, her partner has been asked to slay a dragon, he's the only person who's ever slayed a dragon, but he killed a dragon when he was in his 20's, and now he's middle-aged, and he's like, "I can't do that like I used to anymore." And together, they go down and try to figure out how to kill a dragon when you're an old person. But this story should, on paper, not have worked for me, but it was the most amazing thing I'd ever read in my life.

Meanwhile, my mother graduated first in her class in accounting in a year where she was the only woman in most of her accounting classes. She had been offered, as she graduated, a prestigious scholarship to go become a CPA. And she actually turned that down because of me. She was having me as a child, and she decided that she would put off her education and career for a few years. She is now the head accountant for the city of Idaho Falls power plant, so she did go back to her career, but she put that off for me. Now, as... a middle school kid, if you told me the story, I'd be like, "Of course she did. I'm awesome. I'm me. Of course she would do that. That's the right thing to do." I read this book, and I'm like, "Oh, ditch your kids, woman. You could be a wizard!" I got done with this book, and I realized: I just read a fantasy book about slaying a dragon. High fantasy, all the stuff that should have just been brain popcorn. And yet, I got done with this book, and I understood my mother better. And it hit me like a ton of bricks, that a story could teach me about my mom in some ways better than living with her for fourteen years, because I was a stupid kid who wouldn't listen, and assumed he had the answers. But when I saw through someone else's eyes, who was very different from myself, that changed the way I saw the world.

This is why stories are important. This is why it is important-- if you're writers out there, it's why your stories are important. When you ask, "Well, what can I write that's new?" You can write who you are. And that will be new. And that is valuable in and of itself. Those stories have value because you're telling them. And this is what stories do. And this is how, I think, I want to be approaching telling stories. I want people to read the stories, and I don't want them to feel lectured to. But I want them to see the world through the eyes of someone who sees it in a very different way. Maybe that'll make them, make you, make all of us think a little harder about some of the things in our lives.

Brandon Sanderson

The book [Oathbringer] did great, and I'm doing just fine. US and UK publishers are both very happy. I achieved financial independence through my writing years ago at this point, and I have plenty of money. I have enough in investments that my passive income would be enough to live for the rest of my life at my current standard of living--I write purely for artistic satisfaction. (Which has kind of been the way it's always been, but it IS far less stressful now.)

We're generally really coy about talking numbers in the book industry, perhaps because we don't want to brag. There are a ton of authors out there who sell less than 1k books on a new release, and so flaunting my numbers...well, I don't know. It makes me uncomfortable.

That said, remember that books and records don't sell as much as people assume they do. Taylor Swift, one of the most popular singers of our time, sold...what, 1.5 million albums the first week of her last release? Granted, album sales aren't what they used to be (it's all about streaming now), but film numbers tend to make us inflate book and album numbers in our heads. 2k book sales is enough to get on the bestseller list, many weeks of the year.

(As an aside, when Elantris sold 400 copies its first week, and I was devastated until my agent told me that was actually really good for a new author hardcover.)

That said, we did WAY more than 400 copies, and Oathbringer is the bestselling book I've ever had out of the gate. It's probably more like double or 2.25 the opening of Words. (When I said 3X I was forgetting that my Words of Radiance figures didn't include audio, while my Oathbringer numbers did.)

Oathbringer will likely crest a million copies across all formats--but it will take a number of years. I'm not sure if TWOK has hit a million yet, for example. (Though if it hasn't, it's in that neighborhood.) Very few books get to 10mil without some kind of film or television franchise to propel them. I'd guess that the only single sf/f book sitting at over 10mil copies without a major adaptation is Foundation.

Anyway, Oathbringer's success won't stop the publishers from griping just a little that the books are too long. (Bookstores complain that they don't fit on shelves very well, and take up too much space, things like that.) But the book will still sell more copies than any other new release the publisher has this year, and if they do gripe, it's mostly just habit at this point. They're actually quite pleased. They just can't help imagining a world where they could split Oathbringer into three smaller books, and make the bookstores happy while making more money.

(And note, you shouldn't be annoyed at them for this. The publisher's job is to point out financial realities, as authors tend to be very bad at such things. They didn't try to force me to cut or split the book. They just always ask, very nicely, "Is there a way the book could be shorter?" and I reply, "Sorry. But this is how it has to be." And then they go about making it work.)

Be warned, though, we might have to go from hardcover straight to trade paperback (skipping the mass market paperback) because of printing realities.

alexanderwales

One thing I've long been curious about: how much does putting out a new book in a series increase sales of the first in the series? I would assume that Oathbringer caused a bump in sales for The Way of Kings, but I'm not sure to what extent, or if that assumption actually holds true.

Brandon Sanderson

The assumption holds true. Bookscan for last week proves it. This is only print books recorded by retail chains, so it's only a small glimpse, but it's most of the print numbers. (As it does include Amazon and B&N.) I'll put numbers from six months ago in () after, so you can see the growth.

TWOK: 1500 copies (700)

WOR: 800 copies (450)

TWOK: Trade Paperback: 650 Copies (156)

TWOK Hardcover: 454 (123)

Mistborn 1: 450 Copies (350)

Mistborn Trilogy Boxed Set: 450 Copies (350)

Words of Radiance Trade paperback: 380 copies (Not out yet)

Words of Radiance hardcover: 270 copies. (130)

Steelheart: 325 copies (274) Arcanum hardcover: 280 Copies (180)

Bands of Mourning, Shadows of Self, Warbreaker, Alloy of Law: All right around 230-260 (Maybe 10% different.)

Elantris, Firefight, Calamity, Mistborn 2, Mistborn 3: 160-200 (Same.)

Lowly Rithmatist at the bottom with 113. (85)

Note that some things, like the hardcovers jumping up in sales, are because bookstores ordered them special for my signings.

Innoculi

What about digital copies?

Brandon Sanderson

They tend to run 2X the print, but I don't get an email with them every week like I do print--so I don't track them as closely.

Brandon Sanderson

Sarene's half-breakdown in this chapter was intended as both a simple reminder of the stress she's under as well as further characterization of her. She's far more volatile than Raoden and Hrathen, and I think that is part of what makes her my favorite character in the book. She doesn't always keep it all in–nor is she perfect. Occasionally, she makes mistakes, and things well up inside her. In this way, she's very real to me.

Steven Bohls

The most exciting project I'm working on right now. I discussed before getting to know Brandon Sanderson, and we ended up becoming really good friends. And he has a book series, the Reckoners series: Steelheart, Firefight, and Calamity. And he was approached a little while ago by Audible. They saw a lot of success with those books on Audible and wanted him to write a spinoff series for it. But he's got a lot on his plate right now, and he actually asked me to pick it up for him. It's been really exciting.

He's been fairly hands-off, which has been both good and bad. I wish I had a little bit more direction, but it's also been nice to have full autonomy. He just kind of said, "Take it where you want." Right now, we have this spinoff series of a different team of Reckoners set in that Steelheart world. But we decided just a few weeks ago that we wanted to consolidate these books when we go to print and kinda change them a little bit to actually be Book Four and continue the series. Four, Five, and Six, and stuff. It'll hopefully mash together these two different Reckoners teams.

It's pretty exciting. They have kind of a demanding schedule for these three novellas, but it'll be shorter books for Audible. But once we can go to print (Audible's gonna hold the rights on them for two years, and then we get to go to his press, Delacorte), that's when it'll be released as Book Four.

Take Me Away

That's a really interest project to be taking over and moving new direction at the same time.

Steven Bohls

It's tricky because, when he approached me about the project, he said, "Okay. We want this to be a series that people don't have to have read any of the Reckoners books before, and they can just pick it up fresh. But we also want it to be satisfying to everyone who's read it before. And also we want it to be three independent books that are following a new team. And also we want it to be a sequel." So it was super intimidating. I kept telling myself, "Okay, I can do that." And then it got more involved and more involved, trying to simultaneously make it a sequel as well as a spinoff has been a little bit challenging.

So far it's going really well. I'm almost done with the first one in the spinoff trilogy.

Glen Castergene

Where did you research addiction, and what made you put a character into your books who was battling addiction?

Brandon Sanderson

So, this character that was battling addiction actually started, first appearance was in Mythwalker, which is the book that became Warbreaker. It was my ninth novel. (During those days, for those who don't know, I wrote thirteen before I sold one.) This character really stuck with me; it was me trying to do something that is very different from my own personal experience, looking to try to make a character sympathetic who struggles with something that a lot of people struggle with in our world. And one of my goals in putting characters like this into my books is to try to help humanize, because we all have these issues we deal with, and we all have different things to our psychology, and some of them can be pretty difficult to deal with. Some mental illness can just be a real kick to the head. And I see a lot of fiction that does a poor job of humanizing people like this.

And this was a character that, when I wrote him, I didn't know what I was doing, but the character really connected with me. And so, I put the character back in, I added them to the Stormlight Archive, and then I started to do my research. You can read, in the acknowledgements, some of the people that have been very helpful in me understanding addiction to the point that I hope I can get it right in the stories. But it is really important to me. There was something about writing this character that made me understand addiction, and people who were dealing with addiction, in a way I hadn't before. And that's something that I love about writing.

The other thing is, I didn't want magic to become a panacea, to get rid of hard things in people's lives. That's kind of important to me, because I think it can be very dangerous to write, "Well, the way to get over this sort of thing is just to get some magical powers!" (Which, of course, doesn't work in real life, in the real world.) And I don't want to not give people who deal with things like this the escapism that some of us will get my being able to read a book about someone who has a magical cure to an affliction they're dealing with. That is part of why they read, is this ability to escape from our problems into a world where the problems become different, and perhaps more surmountable. I acknowledge that what I'm doing does make that difficult, but I feel like the humanizing of people who are, maybe, not psychonormative or who deal with serious issues like addiction is more important to me.

And the writing felt right. At the end of the day, there's all these reasons that we can give for why I do things, that are intellectual reasons. But at the end of the day, it just feels right. The characters I'm writing feel like themselves, and that's who they are. And to not write them well would be a betrayal of trying to tell this character's story.

Questioner 1

Is Dalinar clean-shaven or does he wear a beard?

Brandon Sanderson

It depends on the day, and the time. Dalinar is clean-shaven through most of the books you have seen.

Questioner 1

That's what I thought but he thought not.

Questioner 2

The audiobook reader just gives me an impression of a wizened person with a well-kept beard.

Brandon Sanderson

Let's see if I've got... if I've got enough internet...

Questioner 2

I get the impression that Sadeas has a creepy mustache from the audiobook as well.

Brandon Sanderson

Beards are not in fashion in Alethkar right now.

Questioner 1

Which is why Kaladin shaves it off.

Brandon Sanderson

Let's see, Way of Kings, I've got the artwork I used as-- *shows secret canon drawing* So there is the concept art we used for Dalinar.

Questioner

Does Roshar have plate tectonics?

Brandon Sanderson

Roshar does not have plate tectonics, good question.

Questioner

Well when I met you in Orem, I was asking about frequencies. And you said it was more the shape of the plate-- The frequency. We've got no plate tectonics, we've got people who like to sing.

Brandon Sanderson

Good question. Now the weird thing that we would have is with the crem, we have to do some weird geology gymnastics, because Roshar is moving...

Roshar, the continent of Roshar, it's moving, right? As it gets weathered and things like this. Making Roshar actually work requires some really interesting scientific gymnastics. But one of them is I just didn't think plate tectonics, or even volcanoes and things, is just not something that is going to work on Roshar the way that I built it. So I just stayed away from all of that.  It's a pangaea.

Questioners

Is the pangaea built up of crem?

Brandon Sanderson

 It's a pangaea built up of crem.

Rubix

Over a long time--

Brandon Sanderson

Well no, because it was created at first.

Bystander

And then crem was on top of it?

Brandon Sanderson

...The whole idea that this is a fractal-- The whole point of that is, somebody built this. Somebody built this using mathematics that you know. They said "Oh. Boom. Bing!" and grew themselves a continent.

Questioner

Given equal footing with weapons, who would win in a fight: Batman or Kaladin?

Brandon Sanderson

...Batman or Kaladin?

Questioner

Given that they have equal weapons.

Brandon Sanderson

Does Kaladin have Stormlight?

Questioner

Only if Batman gets Stormlight too.

Brandon Sanderson

Batman can't use Stormlight.

Questioner

Then Kal-- Equal footing. So if Kaladin gets to use Stormlight, so does Batman.

Brandon Sanderson

But he can't use it. See this fight doesn't make sense, because it's like-- You know-- Well, I mean, if you give Batman Stormlight does it make any sense? If you give a bunch of Batarangs to Kaladin, he's like "What do I do with these?" I don't know. Does Batman have time to prepare? Because if Batman has time to prepare... If Batman has time to prepare then he's in good shape.

Questioner

Maybe Batman just gets Shard-Batarangs and nothing else.

Brandon Sanderson

If he meets Kaladin on the field of battle, Kaladin's a soldier and Batman's not. Batman's not going to do well in a war.

Questioner

Yeah-- But if Kaladin doesn't have any powers, Batman has extensive hand-to-hand training.

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, yes he does.

Questioner

Do you have any updates on the Dark One TV series?

Brandon Sanderson

It's got an interesting history. Dark One is one I've been working on for a long time, and I actually wrote out a big pitch for it when I pitched Apocalypse Guard to Random House, and I said, "Here's one of the other ideas I'm gonna write someday." They're like, "Woo. We'll keep this in our binder." And that binder made its way to their TV department, who read the pitch and was like, "We have to have this!" and came to me and said "Can we buy this?" I'm like, "Well, I haven't written the books yet." They're like, "We don't care. We want this pitch." And the pitch, the idea is that a young man in our world, a knight shows up to assassinate him, and he finds out that there's kind of a Narnia-esque fantasy world that his father visited when he was a kid and screwed up, and they are super mad. And they have prophecies that this kid is gonna be the next Dark One, and so they're gonna assassinate him before the whole epic-fantasy-thing can happen, and the Dark One tries to conquer the world. They're just gonna take him out first. And so it's kind of this twisting the story on its head idea. And it's a really fun pitch.

So they bought it from me. I expanded it to a 30-page outline, sent it to them. I can't tell you who they got, but they've got somebody very big attached to it, which I'm very excited about, someone who I was excited about that my assistant Peter just about fell over dead when he heard the person attached. And we should be flying out to do pitches to studios and places early part of next year. We wanted to be doing it now, but I have a book launch, and they want me there with them.

It's going really well. It's been a wonderful experience. I'm very hopeful with that, I think it will be a very interesting story if it happens.

Questioner

It’s really heavily implied in the first Oathbringer letter that the Shards made a pact not to settle near each other. Given that a full half of the Shards ended up doing that, what is the cost for them breaking that oath? You implied earlier that there’s always a cost for Hoid, for taking his protections.

Brandon Sanderson

The wording of those things allows them to agree together, but it also gives them a little bit of power over one another, and you’ve seen the side effects of that on the planets where it’s happened. It has not gone well for any of them, if you kind of run the numbers on that. But the wording of it allows two, later on, to say, "Okay, we both agree." (If one said no and one said yes, then they were in trouble.) This should imply to you that Odium did get permission, as well.

Marc Aplin

So, Brandon's always been a big fantasy fan, and he calls his characters from other fantasy novels that he's read buddies of his from college and university years. We wanted to know from Brandon, what five epic fantasy series would you recommend to the Fantasy-Faction.com readers?

Brandon Sanderson

Five epic fantasy series I recommend people to read. Tigana by Guy Gavriel Kay is my go-to recommendation; I think it's one of the most brilliant standalone epic fantasies ever written. Melanie Rawn's Sunrunner books are nowadays a little less known than they used to be, and I think that they are fantastic and people should read them. I really enjoyed Jim Butcher's Codex Alera books, and I would heartily recommend them to any reader of fantasy. Let's see. Other great epic fantasies...there are so many. I just finished The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N. K. Jemisin, and I really, really enjoyed that. I think I can recommend that one whole-heartedly; it's a Hugo Award nominee, so I'm not the only one that's really enjoying that. And fifth...let's see. Let's pick one more. Well, you know, I can recommend Pat Rothfuss, but you've all already read that. I can recommend Brent Weeks, but you've already read that. Let's see if I can find something you haven't all already read, that I think is great. Um... Well. I mean, I mention Dragonsbane all the time, and so people have already heard that recommendation from me, but that's a fantastic book. I absolutely, highly, strongly recommend that you read Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly if you haven't.

Marc Aplin

This was the first, one of the first fantasy books...

Brandon Sanderson

First fantasy book I ever read, and the book that turned me into a fantasy writer, just simply because it was the one that...you know, it was the first. And I still very much love that book. So...I think that's a good list. Those are always the ones I recommend, though. And so...it's hard to think of new things, because you guys all read so much, you are already aware of all of them, but there you are.

Brandon Sanderson

Me making a book about someone is not a promise they'll live until that book. So the fact that Jasnah gets book ten does not mean necessarily mean Jasnah survives until book ten.

Questioner

Would the works you have not yet published ever be published?

Brandon Sanderson

Probably not, because they're bad. I found ways to fix some of them and release them in some form. White Sand was the best of them and we did graphic novels of those. Because the bad parts of White Sand was I went too long on the same ideas over and over. So we were able to trim those out and make graphic novels out of them and it worked really well. It's not impossible that the other good one, which is Aether of Night, could work that way. The problem with Aether of Night is, and you can find this online. We let the forum, the 17th Shard send it out to people. So if you go there and ask, you can get it.

It feels like two books that are woven together. There's a romantic comedy, and an End of the World Apocalypse. And they just don't mix real well. And that's the big problem with that book. You can read White Sand by signing up for my mailing list. Most of them just aren't that good is the problem. Maybe Ill release them for free on my website or something.

Questioner

Why in the world would the Lord Ruler spike himself?

Brandon Sanderson

...Because he needed to give himself the powers that he didn't have. He could have done it like-- gained the knowledge but the power was gone so fast he actually needed to-- Well no no no, the spikes, the spikes, the spikes. So, it doesn't matter if he was spiked because he was hiding the metals inside himself so people couldn't Push or Pull on them. That's the real reason he was doing that. Does that make sense?

Questioner

No.

Brandon Sanderson

Metal that's inside of him--

Questioner

Ruin influenced him, what did the spiking do?

Brandon Sanderson

Well, the metals that were stuck through him were so people couldn’t Push or Pull on them. If they were outside his body people would know he was a Feruchemist. Which is the very thing he was-- so he would stick the metals inside of himself to hide them.

Questioner

And he did that as Hemalurgic spikes?

Brandon Sanderson

I'd have to go back and look because-- Lord Ruler is he spiked or has he just got--

Isaac Stewart

I thought he was... spiked but I can't remem--

Brandon Sanderson

You're asking something that I wrote 12 years ago.

Isaac Stewart

Peter, was the Lord Ruler spiked?

Brandon Sanderson

Lord Ruler was spiked, right?  Or is it just--

Peter Ahlstrom

I don't think so.

Brandon Sanderson

--piereced with metalminds, right? They're not actual spikes, just metalminds.

And I want to ask the Sharders on there [the recorder] about that Lord Ruler question, because I didn’t think he was spiked but--

Isaac Stewart

I think I recall him having the bands with spikes in them?

Aurimus

Are you saying that Elantris has other worldhoppers in? I just finished the prose version of White Sand as well (i've never been a fan of graphic novels but didnt want to miss anything from the Cosmere) and didnt even notice Hoid in it, let alone other worldhoppers there.

So you created Vasher and then made them a worldhopper, and the magic system and Nalthis stemmed from there? I actually have another question related to that. Have you ever thought about something you wanted to add to the Cosmere - say, an idea or an ability or something - and then built from there, or do you always write a cool story because its a cool story and the Cosmere stuff comes after?

For example, did you write Mistborn E1 to introduce the idea of Shards or did you write the plot and then realize you can wiggle the shards in there?

Brandon Sanderson

Hoid's part in White Sand was very minimal. I believe he's only referenced, and doesn't even appear on screen. Though Elantris has the famous mural depicting worldhopping.

You have it right. I was designing Vasher, decided he was a worldhopper, and then filed away "I'll tell his backstory some day" in the back of my brain. The magic for Nalthis grew more out of the idea for a sympathetic magic than it did for him, but the book was always intended to be his backstory world, so knowledge that Shardblades (or a version of them) being involved was part of my core creation of that setting.

Every story happens differently. Shadows for Silence happened from a writing prompt, for example. But at the same time, I'd been imagining for years a world to delve more into Cognitive Shadows. These things just kind of fit together as you work on them in your brain. But I've started with story first, and I've started with world first. Mostly, though, it's a mixture of both.

By Era One of Mistborn I was already very certain what I was doing with Shards, and so they were there from the get go. I'd say in the cosmere canon right now, White Sand is the most oddball, since it was the only world I designed and wrote a book in (the 1997 version, which is different from the 2000 version) before I had settled on the mechanics of the cosmere. I then placed it in the cosmere when writing the new version.

All of the published novels were written with the cosmere mechanics fully locked in, however, and the interactions of the Shards set forth.

Aurimus

Where is that [Hoid's part in White Sand]? I totally missed it? Is it possible to read the 97 version too, and LORD MASTRELL as well?

Brandon Sanderson

I don't send out the 97 version. It's just too bad. (Sorry.) Maybe some day, but not right now. It's the first book I ever wrote.

Brandon Sanderson

The next segment from my Tor proposal talks about a book some of you may have heard of: THE WAY OF KINGS. Originally, this was going to be the second book I published, but I’ve decided to put it off in favor of MISTBORN. The reasons are explained below.

This decision was met with a great deal of disappointment by some of the manuscript’s fans, but I really think it’s best for my career right now to delay KINGS. It’s a magnificent story, but it needs some more time before it’s ready for the general public.

—————

THE WAY OF KINGS (Book one of the Oathshards Series.)

KINGS was the book I was working on when Moshe first called me to buy ELANTRIS. While we were in contract negotiations, he asked to read a bit of my current work. I sent him KINGS, and he decided he wanted to purchase it as well. I don’t think, however, that he knew what he was getting into.

The OATHSHARDS is a massive war epic centering around ten angelic beings who have been driven insane—each in a slightly different way—by millennia spent protecting, fighting for, and dying for mankind. The first book, THE WAY OF KINGS, follows six separate viewpoint characters (one of them an immortal) during a time when the three peninsulas are thrown into a massive war. It is an intensive character piece coming in at over 300,000 words, and can be quite brutal with its characters.

It still does the things I do well—it has several original magic systems (though magic isn’t a focus in the first book.) It has a very interesting setting (which is one of its strong points) and has an array of interesting characters from all walks of life. (One a young peasant soldier, one a middle-aged sister to the king, one a battle-hardened nobleman general, one an honor-bound assassin serving an evil master, one a young lady-in-waiting, and the final one being an immortal protector of mankind who is slowly breaking beneath the pressure of his station.) The central theme of the book is that of leadership, and each of the six viewpoint characters are defined in one way or another by how they lead others.

KINGS has a lot going for it. It’s the kind of story that people remember—it has a grand scope, meaningful characters, and an expansive plot that would have to cover at least five books. However, I don’t know that it’s the best thing for my career right now. The book needs a lot of work before it could be published—at its current length, it would have to be cut into two pieces or slashed by a third in order to work. I also have to do some serious revisions to the plot. I like how all of the characters work, but I worry that the book is too slow (even for me) at the beginning as I establish six viewpoints and six separate plots. I need to find a way to combine some of the plotting so that several viewpoints can work on the same problems.

I think this series could really make an impact on the genre. However, it would take far more work than MISTBORN to get to a publishable level. Perhaps it would be best for me to publish a few books like MISTBORN or ELANTRIS before I do something this ambitious.

Oudeis16

If you burned gold allomantically, who do you think you would see?

Ben McSweeney

Hmmm... well, there'd certainly be a version of myself that joined the US Navy at 19, 'cause that was a thing that very nearly happened. A classified ad and one phone call made the difference that day.

It's hard to imagine a version of myself that isn't an animator, but it's easily feasible to imagine that I could have stayed in illustration and never split the XP to go dual-class. I have no idea what I'd be doing now or if I'd even still be drawing at all, but it'd certainly be different.

Somewhere down a leg of the Time Trousers is a version of me that never discovered Brandon's work, or decided to draw up some fan-art, or posted it to his fan-forums... or tried doing any of those things at a different time in life, because I happened to cross Sanderson's path at just the right time.

The thing about gold shadows is that they show you "a version of who you could have been", but there's a near-infinite set of possibilities for that.

Oudeis16

Yeah, the default seems to be pivotal moments in your life, but life isn't exactly short on near-pivotal moments. It's sorta a rorschach test; when you think about gold, what are the moments in your life that you think are pivotal?

What do you think the Sailor would think of you if you met him via gold? From our limited sample (Vin and Miles) goldshadows haven't shown a tendency to get along very well...

Ben McSweeney

Hard to guess. If military discipline took hold, he might be a different kind of person not just in terms of life history, but also personality and views. If he saw combat, he'd definitely be a very different Ben.

Daniel Greene

Has there been something [with worldbuilding] you decided to put in that inadvertently has pigeonholed you in a way? Where it’s like, “Oh, that element shouldn’t…” Basically, any regrets, in terms of worldbuilding, that now, in hindsight, that was a little too solid; something you wish you had left a little looser?

Brandon Sanderson

I think one of my big worries for a long time was in the White Sand books. I made a bunch of mistakes there, because it was the first world I ever built. So the magic system in that, there are some very cool things about it; there’s some very non-cohesive things. I had people have the ability to turn sand into water for no good reason, that does not fit the cosmere magic system as it developed. That one, I’m like, “Why did I even put that in?” I think I tried… I can’t remember if we got that cut out, or not. It was in the early drafts of the White Sand graphic novel scripts. I remember trying to cut that out, and I can’t now remember if we got it cut out. It might have been too integral to the story. But regardless, there’s things like that that I’m like “eh…”

I wish I, at the end of the Mistborn trilogy, had been more clear about how many metals there were left to discover. That’s definitely a mistake. But I just went ahead and was like, “You know what? I made the mistake, I’m just gonna explain it after the fact. I made a mistake, and we’re doing it the way I intended it to be, rather than the way it came across.” And I’m okay copping to mistakes and letting people know.

One of the things I keep wanting to do is have Peter, every time a book comes out, release a notes file that’s kind of like… you know how, when a video game gets an update, you have the bug fixes and power rebalances? I want to release a bug fixes and power rebalances thing for this. Where we’re like, “This little aspect of the world just never made sense. We’ve retconned this out. Now you can understand.” Stuff like that, I feel like we should be doing that.

Way of Kings is a great example. Way of Kings ended up using more Earth metaphors than the rest of the Stormlight Archive. If you read Way of Kings, there’s more references to grapes, there’s more references to ravens, because I just was not into the world as well (even after doing all this worldbuilding) as I eventually got into it. I’m like, “They wouldn’t use a raven metaphor here. They wouldn’t say something looks like a flock of ravens. They don’t see ravens.” And finally I said to Peter, “Go ahead and bug-patch these out of Way of Kings, for the newest version.”

I see in the chat, “flock of chickens.” Well, really, it should be “debris flying in front of a storm.” Something that they have seen a lot that becomes a natural metaphor for their language. Not even a flock of chickens, because they don’t see a flock of chickens.

Questioner

Are the graphic novels of Dark One still supposed to be prequels to the eventual television series? Or will the television series be an adaptation of the graphic novel?

Brandon Sanderson

If I get my way, television series is an adaptation of the graphic novel. Let me talk you all through the long history of Dark One. I, as you might know, I really like to take sort of modernist, deconstructionist looks at the epic fantasy core idea, the Hero’s Journey you might call it, the epic fantasy of it. And in a lot of ways, you might call this my foundational myth. The idea of the young man born to a peasant family who has a noble heritage, who goes on a question, becomes a king, gets magic objects, saves the world. Like, this is the story of the David Eddings, The Wheel of Time, Memory Sorrow and Thorn, Sword of Shannara. I read a ton of these works when I was a young man, and it is kind of the core fantasy myth of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Fantasy really doesn’t do as much of that anymore, ‘cause it was done quite a bit and quite well. But I really like looking at that and deconstructing it. It’s not religious, but it’s very similar to that for me, the thing that kind of is my origin as a writer.

So, like you see authors deconstructing, in the Middle Ages or even the Renaissance and later, the Adam and Eve story, you see me deconstructing the heroic journey in fantasy. Mistborn was doing this to an extent. And after doing Mistborn, I found that I really wanted to explore another version of this, and it started to take shape in my mind as just being called Dark One. Obviously a nod to The Wheel of Time, but also a nod to a lot of these stories that have the Dark Lord who is the antagonist of this sort of monomyth. And I really wanted to do a story about, “What if you found out that instead of being prophesied to be Harry Potter, there was a prophecy that you would become Voldemort. And how did you deal with that? And what did that do to your life?”

Well, I tried this story multiple times until I cracked it. The first version I can remember writing was in its own complete fantasy world, and was a Young Adult/Middle Grade attempt at it. This is because Harry Potter was one of the inspirations for it, so it had a very Harry Potter-esque sort of… I was kind of using some of J.K. Rowling’s prose constructions. Not, hopefully, plagiarizing them, but looking at how she wrote and trying to do something a little more light-hearted and whimsical, like hers. And it just did not work. Just completely flopped on its face. Though, it’s the first place that Pattern, that eventually ended up in Stormlight Archive, showed up. Something like Pattern. And I set that aside and left it for a few years.

A few years, I came back to it and said, “What if I did this as a portal fantasy?” Fantasy where you start on Earth, and then transition to the fantasy world. And I tried it again, and I got, like, two or three chapters in, and it still was not working. It felt better. I felt like it made a step forward, but I had not cracked it. It was still a Middle Grade story; young YA, old Middle Grade, kind of like where Alcatraz sits.

I left it alone again.  Years later, this would be, like, 2014 maybe, I thought, “What if I tried setting this in the cosmere?” I moved it to the cosmere. Go three or four chapters in. And it still didn’t work. This is not unusual. I mean, this is the most unusual one for me in that it’s gone on the longest. But a lot of times, you try something and it just doesn’t feel right, doesn’t work. So I set it aside yet again.

And when I came back to it, the big change I made in my brain is that I’m like, “I think that the problem is that this is a book for someone who grew up reading these stories, but who is not still themselves a young person who hasn’t experienced these stories.” This story works way better if you share, kind of, in this foundational myth that I love so much. So that you can understand how it’s kind of trying to deconstruct it. And I realized I needed to write this as an adult property, not a Middle Grade. Or, if YA, it had to be old YA.

And that’s when I sat down and I wrote this treatment that really, finally, worked. When I say “treatment,” it is the plot outline, pretty detailed plot outline. And at that point, I decided it would probably work best as a television show. And I outlined it episode-by-episode. I went really into detail on all the characters and things, and it just sang to me. It worked; it really clicked. And that’s when I said, “Let’s try to get this made.”

So I took it to Hollywood, and there was a lot of excitement immediately surrounding it. Didn’t go anywhere, didn’t go anywhere… then, some things happened with Random House, my publisher, and one of the people that worked in their film department got ahold of the treatment and was like, “Wow, this is amazing. Let’s do something with this.” And then it just started to go “Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.” That is when I decided to do the graphic novel.

So, the graphic novel is taking my original outline for the TV show, which does include chunks of dialogue and things like that, and doing it as a graphic novel format. Meanwhile, the television show started to take on a different life. This was when Joe Michael Straczynski was brought on, and he had some things to add that are very cool. But the television show really started to drift away from the original property. So we’re still kind of in talks about how much this will look like the graphic novel. But the graphic novel kind of turned into the way to express my vision for what this would be.

I don’t know what will happen with the TV show. I honestly can’t say. Joe is great to work with. I really like Joe. I am hopeful that something very cool will come out of it. It might look completely different. And in fact, there’s a chance we will rename the project property Joe and I are working on into something else, and call it something else. Who knows. Hollywood is weird, as we probably all already know.

Regardless, this is my vision. Graphic novel is not the prequel. Graphic novel is the actual outline that I wrote, taken and adapted really faithfully. They did a spectacular job with this. They focus a little more on Mirandus. The actual outline has more with Lin, Paul’s mom, and Mr. Caligo. And they focused their attention a little more on Mirandus. It’s not like they added anything; it’s just that there was too much there, I think. (Because it was meant to be a full season of a television show.) And so they focused their attention there. But Lin is still in it. There’s still plenty, and the scenes that are still there are all ones I had in the outline.

If I do a novel, it would be the prequel to this. Because the prequel, not giving any spoiler stuff, would be the thing that would work in an epic fantasy novel sort of form.

There’s the short version of the long history of Dark One.

Brandon Sanderson

My Year

This year was almost completely dominated by the writing of Oathbringer, Book Three of the Stormlight Archive. The first files I have for the book were Kaladin scenes, written in June 2014. But the book didn't really start in earnest until July 2015, when I wrote the Dalinar flashback sequence. (See State of the Sanderson 2015.) I had those done by October, but November was when I really dove into the novel.

I spent most of 2016 working on it, with only a few interruptions. It was an extremely productive year spent writing on something I'm very passionate about—but it was also a monochrome year, as I poured so much into Stormlight. There were far fewer side projects, and far fewer deviations, than the year before.

I've come to realize I can't do a Stormlight book every year, or even every two years. You can see that this one took around 18 months of dedicated writing time (though that does include some interruptions for edits and work on other things.) My process is such that, when I finish something like Stormlight, I need to move on for a while to refresh myself.

That said, Oathbringer is done as of last week! Here's a quick breakdown of the year.

January: Oathbringer

A lot of this month was revisions. I decided to do something unusual for me, and revise each chunk of the book as I completed it, which let me get my editor working on his notes early in the year—rather than making him wait until this month, when the whole thing finished. That means I'll soon have a second draft of the book completed, though I only completed the first draft a little bit ago.

Also squeezed into January was a trip to Bad Robot, where I had a cool meeting with J.J. Abrams. (In conjunction with a video game my friends at ChAIR Entertainment are making—the Infinity Blade guys. I just gave a few pointers on the story; I'm not officially involved.)

February: Calamity Tour

I toured for Calamity, the last book of the Reckoners. The whole series is out now, so check it out! There is a nice hardcover boxed set of all three available in most bookstores, and it makes a great gift.

While on tour, I read from Stormlight 3, and some kind person recorded the reading for you all. Also, here's another version from FanX in SLC.

March: Trip to Dubai

I was invited to, and attended, the Emirates Festival in Dubai, then traveled south to Abu Dhabi to visit some friends. This was an extended trip, and I often find it difficult to work on a main project (like Stormlight) while traveling. I have too many interruptions. I can write something self-contained, but have more trouble with something very involved.

On this trip, I wrote a novella called Snapshot: a science Fiction detective story where people solve crimes using exact recreations of certain days in the past. It's a little Philip K. Dick, a little Se7en. This one's coming out in February, and will likely be my only release in 2017 other than Oathbringer (which will be in November). More details here.

April: Oathbringer

I got back into the groove of writing, and did a big chunk of Oathbringer Part Two. If you missed the discussions on Reddit, here are my various updates there spanning about a year's time, talking about the book: One, Two, Three, Four, and Five.

May: Edgedancer

I took a short break from Stormlight 3 to write…Stormlight 2.5, an extended story about Lift, with smaller appearances by Szeth and Nale. If you want to get your Stormlight fix before the release in 2017, you can find Edgedancer in Arcanum Unbounded: The Cosmere Collection. (There will eventually be a solo ebook release, but that's a number of years away, as required by my contract with Tor.) I also wrote essays and annotations for each world and/or story in the collection.

When I decided I wasn't going to kill myself (and my team) trying to get Oathbringer out in 2016, I committed to writing this novella to tide people over. I think you'll enjoy this one, unless you're one of the people that Lift drives crazy. In which case you'll probably still enjoy it, but also want to punch her in the face for being too awesome.

June-August: Oathbringer

I finally got a good long chunk of time dedicated to Oathbringer.

I do love traveling, but it takes a big bite out of my writing time. So please don't get offended when I can't make it out to visit your city or country on tour. I try to do as much as I can, but I'm starting to worry that has been too much. Last year, for example, I was on the road 120 days for tours or conventions. This year was a little better, clocking in at about 90 days.

September: Alcatraz Release & Writing Excuses Cruise

Book Five of my middle grade series, Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians, came out this month. (A long-awaited book.) You should read it.

The cruise was a fun time, but very unproductive for me. There is too much going on, and too much to organize, for me to get much writing done. I did finish one chapter of a potential novella on the single day of writing time I got. (The story, called "The Eyes," is a space opera inspired by Fermi's Paradox.)

I might do something with the chapter eventually, but for now I'm sending it in to be this month's Random Hat reward for the $10 patrons of Writing Excuses on Patreon.

As a warning to those planning on attending the cruise in 2017: we'll have a ton of awesome guest instructors, and it will be well worth your time and money. I, however, won't be attending. I'll be on the cruise other years in the future, but (like JordanCon, which I love) I can't promise to go every year. Once every two or three years is more likely. It's just a matter of trying to balance touring/teaching with writing.

By the way, JordanCon, FanX, and Dragon Con had some amazing costumes this year—but I'll save those for another post.

October: Europe Tour

Though I had a few good weeks of writing between the end of the cruise and the start of the Europe trip, I quickly lost steam again as I visited France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal on tour. I had an awesome time, signed a ton of books, and met many people in excellent costumes.

November: Arcanum Unbounded Release

Finally, I released Arcanum Unbounded: the Cosmere Collection. The tour for this was short, and I apologize for that, but…well, there's this writing thing I need to do sometimes…

December: Writing Excuses and Oathbringer

I got about half the episodes for next year's writing excuses season recorded at various locations, and then finally managed to type "THE END" for Oathbringer.

There's still a lot of work left on the book, but I'm confident we'll hit our November 2017 release date.

Questioner

So I know your kids are probably too young to have actually read your books but are they familiar with your characters and if so do they have favorites?

Brandon Sanderson

They're not familiar with my characters. They-- Seven, five, and two.  The seven-year-old is starting to get old enough where I could maybe read him books, but I don't want to read him my books first. *laughter* I want to read him stuff like Dragon's Blood by Jane Yolen and things like this.  We'll let him read my books if he wants to.

I remember I was reading an interview with Tad Williams once and he said "People ask, you're a famous author, how do you stay humble" and he said "Well the other day we all went out to dinner as a family because I finished a book.  And my son said 'What's the celebration?' and he said 'Well I finished my book' and his son said 'That's a good job, finishing reading a book.'" *laughter*

Cognizantastic

Did any countries not pass an equivalent of the Capitulation Act?

Brandon Sanderson

Some did, some didn't. For example, Canada didn't… and things didn't go very well for them.

Cognizantastic

Are the areas where they didn't livable?

Brandon Sanderson

Well, livable is a broad definition. For some people, Newcago is livable.

Questioner

Why have we not seen strong emotions like love or hatespren?

Brandon Sanderson

So. *pause* That's a good question, it actually is something I've considered a lot. Spren, it's hard to explain, but I'm going to try and vocalize it. It's partially that s-- that emotions that are like that are so individual to each person that you can't as easily create an identity for the Rosharans in their collective unconscious, if that makes sense? That they're just so-- and they're so ubiquitous that it didn't end up working the right way. That doesn't mean that they don't exist, but it's just not the same sort of ubiquity of some of the other ones. And I treat spren like races. Of animals. It's like saying "Well why didn't an animal grow that looks like a cat but has floppy ears?" or something like that. Well it just didn't happen, right? The organic nature of it-- There's no reason it couldn't have happened, and maybe you say "That's a fox, Brandon" but there's certain creatures that could have grown in our world that didn't and it's kind of a mixture between those two things. I kind of had to decide I didn't want a spren for everything for those reasons. And I wanted some spren to be really, really rare. And so you might see like a lovespren, but it doesn't pop out for puppy love, does that make sense? Or you might feel it, but there are none of those in the Cognitive Realm nearby, so they just don't show up.

Chaim

I understand that although Shadesmar is a Rosharan term, Brandon sometimes uses it generically to refer to the Cognitive Realm. But I would not have expected Khriss to do the same (AU, Drominad system). Is that a mistake or deliberate?

Peter Ahlstrom

As far as I know, it is not a Rosharan term.

Chaim

My understanding came from several WoB, such as https://wob.coppermind.net/events/221-words-of-radiance-omaha-signing/#e7199 … and https://wob.coppermind.net/events/225-words-of-radiance-san-diego-signing/#e5814 … . While obviously not canon, can you clarify with Brandon?

Peter Ahlstrom

Eh, well the first quote actually answers the question. Whatever word people use throughout the cosmere, Brandon translates it as Shadesmar in the books. I still think the word is widely used though.

Chaim

I think that in the first quote when he says "these books" he is referring to Stormlight. Hence the reference to Wit, whose words are translated to Rosharan and Cognitive Realm is thus translated to Shadesmar. Have you found Shadesmar anywhere else in the cosmere?

Peter Ahlstrom

Well, clearly Khriss calls it that too. :)

Questioner

I know that Mistborn, Stormlight Archive, Elantris are set in the same universe, and they've all kind of got certain Shards and I was reading that, like, you might do a book about that? 

Brandon Sanderson

I will eventually, there's no 'might' about it, but I always try to talk somewhat timidly about it because I don't want the focus to be on that, I want the focus to be on each story that's happening. For instance, The Stormlight Archive will only be about The Stormlight Archive. I will be upfront when I do a crossover, but it is many years in the future. For now, I like it being a behind the scenes thing for fans who really want to get into it. I don't want to scare a reader who'll be like "I can't read Mistborn because I haven't finished all of these other books". You can read Mistborn on its own, and there will be cameos that you will notice as you do more, and the more I write, the more to the forefront some of these things will come, but I will lead you gently into it. But yeah, I will be doing crossovers eventually.

Questioner

And when did you kind of-- was that something you wanted to do from the very beginning, or were you halfway through--

Brandon Sanderson

No, that was something I wanted to do from the beginning. I was inspired by Isaac Asimov combining his Robots books and his Foundation books, and he did it late in his career. It kind of felt a bit hacked together a bit, but it blew my mind when he did it and, as a writer, I always thought, what if somebody did this from the get-go.

The actual origins of the kind of worldhoppers for me was reading books as a teenager and inserting Hoid into them. I really did this.... Do you read books and you like change what is happening in the book, or maybe it's just a me thing? I would have my character interacting with the characters in the books, in my head, as I played the movie of that book in my head, while I was reading it, and there was this character hopping between worlds, with this knowing smirk on his face.

And so, when I was working on Elantris I said, "OK", I knew I had something in that book that was good, that was important, that was relevant, I was very confident in that book. It was my sixth novel, by the way, so I kind of had a handle on these things, and so that's when I decided I'm going to start doing some of this, I'm going to insert Hoid into this and I'm going to start planning this larger epic. It was particularly important to me because I knew I was not going to write a sequel to Elantris immediately, but I wanted to be writing epic stories, and the reason I didn't want to write a sequel to Elantris is because, if an editor rejected Elantris I wanted to be able to send them another book, because when you're getting close to publishing you'll start getting rejections that are like "This is actually a really good book, it doesn't fit our line, you just wrote a great mystical llama book but we just bought one of those, do you have anything else?". I wanted to be able to send them "here's my next thing" rather than "oh, I've got a sequel to the one you just rejected". And so I sat down and wrote the sequel, which was not a sequel, it was called Dragonsteel, which was Hoid's origin story. And then I jumped forward and I wrote White Sand which is another book connected to all these things and it went on, you know, it went crazy from there. And then when I actually sold Elantris it was already going and already in there, and I was able to sit down and write Mistborn, well in hand, knowing what was going to happen. That's why you find Hoid in Elantris and Mistborn and the sneaky, the scary-- well, it's not sneaky and it's not scary-- the moment in the third book when Vin gets creeped out by Hoid is a very important moment, Cosmerologically, but I'm not going to tell you why!

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Fifty-Two

In a later draft, I added a bit of padding to this chapter–in particular, I included more explanations by Raoden regarding how he'd been trying to meet with Sarene. I was worried that I was pushing the bounds of plausibility too much with Raoden's false persona. One of the main reasons that he left Elantris was to see Sarene again, and it just didn't make sense that he would try to keep fooling her. Moshe noted this as well.

So, we have Sarene refusing Kaloo's letters, and not wanting to let him get her alone. Perhaps this is a little implausible as well–I can't see Sarene avoiding anything that smells of politics. Fortunately, Sarene is also far more impetuous than other "political" character's I've used. I can see her sending away Kaloo's letter because of a mood, or simply because she thought he was trying to taunt her.

Either way, I had to find a reason to maintain the charade through this chapter, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to pull off Raoden's dramatic appearance in the next chapter.

Questioner

So you've written a lot of books. Of all the books that you've written, which do you look back gives you as the writer the most personal satisfaction?

Brandon Sanderson

Oooh, wow. Satisfaction. See I like all of my books for different reasons so picking a favorite is impossible, but you were smart and asked for something more specific than favorite. I would say finishing The Wheel of Time brought me the most satisfaction. Starting reading those books when I was fourteen and then having it be such an enormous challenge and then having it be well received and not screwing it up-- because I was really worried I would screw it up. And for the majority of people I didn't screw it up, for some I did, there are a few that really didn't like it. That's fine. But for the majority of people I didn't screw it up and for myself I didn't screw it up. So at the end of the day I'm very satisfied those books turned out as well as they did.

Questioner

I write as well, and I was wondering what books you use to improve your own writing?

Brandon Sanderson

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. 

Questioner

That's kind of how I was feeling too, for myself, so excellent.

Brandon Sanderson

Breaking down someone who's really good at this, like Anne McCaffrey, or somebody like that, and saying "what is she actually doing?".

Brandon Sanderson

We might do Cosmere children’s books. The most likely thing that I would like to do is adapt Wit’s stories. Do Wandersail, do maybe Fleet. Fleet doesn’t work as well as The Girl Who Looked Up, which works really well. Stuff like that, I could see. Cosmere storybook.

Brandon Sanderson

Will the Cosmere persist after I retire? I like to be deliberate about my career, and I have noticed something. Authors who hit a certain success level, once they retire, books continue coming out from them for many years. This seems an inevitable part of the way that media works today. This makes some authors uncomfortable; Robert Jordan, for instance, said to Harriet he did not want to become what he called a "legacy series." This is something like Conan the Barbarian, where not just years after the author's retirement, but decades and even potentially centuries, you see more things coming out. This is part of what influenced me in saying "I want to only do the three Wheel of Time books that I signed up to do." In fact, Harriet and I had a meeting very early in the process, somewhere in 2008, where she said "what do you think?" Granted, this wasn't my decision, but she wanted to know what I thought. And what I said is, "I think we should finish his series and be done." Because I knew how uncomfortable he was.

I am less uncomfortable, but at the same time, I don't know that I like the idea of a giant legacy series. I think it is good that these things have a shelf life, because it opens up opportunities for new authors and new concepts and new stories to happen. What I'm doing is I'm very deliberately building my company in a way that, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I want to have the people in place to finish the stories for you all so that you have endings. This is something that was a great honor for me to do for Robert Jordan, and I stand by that being something that should have been done. I do know there are some people who disagree with that, and I respect their choices. But Robert Jordan wanted it finished, Harriet wanted it finished, and the fans wanted it finished. I want to be in the same position. I also want to have a position where we are doing this deliberately and having control over it. Some of you know, I have hired Dan Wells as VP of narrative, my longterm friend and collaborator Dan Wells. This is so that I can have another brain in the Cosmere, so to speak. My goal is to create something that a lot of people love for a long, long time. But at the same time, I am not trying to create something that continues forever, if that makes sense. Hopefully the books will; hopefully the books that I've written will be read forever.

It's kind of a wiggly, wishy-washy answer. I think it's inevitable, at this point, that my books will continue past my retirement. I want to be deliberate about it and have an endpoint to them scheduled. And maybe we'll hit that before I retire, in which case none will need to be released. But maybe we won't. And who knows what the future will tell and how I'll be feeling about this in twenty years. I think it is likely the Cosmere will continue, but hopefully we do it in a deliberate way and in a way that is creating very high-quality stories and that is finishing up things so there is an actual ending.

Questioner

Can you talk a little bit about writing your action sequences?

Brandon Sanderson

Writing action sequences, alright, alright... So writing sequences. The trick to writing an action sequence as a novelist is to not try to do what Hollywood does well, on the page. Instead do what a book does well. What I mean by that is, I can watch, like I assume most people can, Jackie Chan, he can fight for an hour and I'm loving it. He can introduce physical comedy into it and just the punches and stuff are just great, the blow by blow is fun. But if you tried to write a blow by blow in a book, you know "he punched him", then "he kicked him", then "he punched him really hard", and then "he jumped over and kicked him" it would just get boring. And so the way I think to write and engage the action sequences is, number one, make sure the reader knows very soon on what's at stake and have them care about what's at stake. Number two, get them inside the head of the character, so what the character's thinking, feeling and what connections they're making. In other words, make the fight sequence into a puzzle. Your main character's got to solve this puzzle in some way, and maybe the way to solve that puzzle is to just stab a bunch of people really hard, but you want to follow that thought process and have motion in the scene that involves the character's desires, goals, and thoughts, and things like that, and you'll have a stronger action sequence that way. It's the sort of thing that movies can't do. They can't show you the thoughts unless it's David Lynch doing Dune, and then-- have you seen that movie? You know how that turned out, it was really weird.

Questioner 1

In The Way of Kings, when Hoid is talking to Kaladin and he says his name is Hoid, he said that he took the name from someone else.

Brandon Sanderson

He did.

Questioner 1

So why is he Hoid in everything else?

Brandon Sanderson

Hoid is not his original name.

Questioner 1

So...

Questioner 2

Does he still go by his original name ever?

Brandon Sanderson

I don't know if you've ever seen his original name.

Questioner 2

I've read your Master's thesis [Dragonsteel Prime].

Brandon Sanderson

Oh, he doesn't go by the name that is in there very often but there are people who know him by that name.

Questioner 1

What is his original name?

Brandon Sanderson

Well he's assuming that the name he is using in there is actually his original name. He's using the name Cephandrius. Which you're assuming is his original.

Questioner 2

Closer to the truth than Hoid is.

Brandon Sanderson

It is closer to the truth...

Questioner 2

Cephandrius is closer to his original name than Hoid, it's an earlier alias.

Brandon Sanderson

Well Hoid was one of his very first aliases.

Questioner 2

So I stand corrected.

Brandon Sanderson

But, Cephandrius is more him.

Questioner 2

Does he still go by his nickname he got.

Brandon Sanderson

To some people, Topaz.

Peter Ahlstrom

Cephandrius Maxtori.

Comatose

Kind of a similar question about the Midnight Essence, now that we have seen that crop up in Tress as well as in Stormlight Archive. Is something similar happening with the Midnight Essence? We have also the nightmares, in Yumi, that appear similar, they're also mimicking things.

Brandon Sanderson

So, there's a couple of things getting interwoven here. The actual idea of Midnight Essence is a concept like Lightweaving that predates the Shattering of Adonalsium, that various magic systems are basically "borrowing" a law of the cosmere and creating a parallel effect from the same basis, if that makes any sense.

Yumi is a little distinct from that. It's feeling similar; I would not call it true Midnight Essence. It's an awful lot more like a Lightweaving that has--because Lightweavings can have mass to them, because investiture can have mass to it--so you're looking a little bit more like... imagine a bunch of Stormlight becoming tangible, you can touch it, because of a powerful Lightweaving or something like that. Of course, these things all bleed together because I'm using the same fundamental principles to make them. But, for me, Midnight Essence has this personality that comes prefixed. What the Midnight Mother is making, what you're seeing in the Midnight Sea and things like this, you're gonna get some similar personalities to these things, and not necessarily the same with the nightmares.

Comatose

So it's more of a autonomous-- a Lightweaving that's become autonomous and has kind of broken down a bit?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah...  the problem is it's also got the Cognitive Shadow, right? It's a really invested Cognitive Shadow that is borrowing this Investiture to interact with the world. Because these are their shadows; these are their Cognitive Shadows, all of these people's Cognitive Shadows. But the power is not themselves. Remember, a Cognitive Shadow is a little bit like a fossil, like Vasher describes it. You've got this pattern there, and then the power kind of makes it manifest and be able to interact, and things like that. And, when that personality asserts itself with that power in the right place, you end up with a person that is the shadow running it. But at the same time, you've got this mass of power and energy that the machine is kind of controlling, which pulls back and overrides the personality sometimes. You've got a very weird set of circumstances going on here.

But it was very fun to figure out all the backstory and the behind on it, and get it all working. This one was a little complex, to get these things all working behind the scenes. I like how they turned out. Yumi, if you dig into it, it has both pluses and minuses. The minuses is - from the beta readers and the alpha readers - the ending for non-arcanists was really overwhelming, which is why we have those Hoid scenes where he's like, "Okay, let me explain." It seems pretty obvious, I would expect that this is, like, "Alright, Brandon needs to do better explanations, Hoid's just gonna do it." But, because of all the work I did behind the scenes on Yumi, Yumi matches kind of cosmerological magic system stuff in ways that a lot of the side projects that I do just don't. Yumi is very deeply intertwined and following all of these processes in a way that works really well for me. But it also gets you into where you start to need a master's degree in the cosmere to figure it all out, which is why to make it easier, we have Hoid just spell it out for people. It is a little clunky; I prefer the clunkiness to the previous version where you needed a master's degree in the cosmere to understand even what was going on.

SonOfOnett

Do you think illustrations in books are going to become more common in the future? Sanderson seems to be enjoying exploring the idea of using them as part of his writing process and as another way for the reader to interact with the work (particularly with Elantris and Rithmatist).

Ben McSweeney

Gosh, I sure hope so. I'm a huge fan of illustration, and I think when it's done well that it really adds value.

I just picked up the George Martin collection of his Hedge Knight shorts, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which has 160 beautiful pen illustrations by Gary Gianni. And I love the huge, hardbound Kaluta-illustrated of A Princess of Mars that came out last year.

Beyond that, I'm a huge fan of what Brandon's been doing with specifically illustrating in-world documents. We don't really do "scene illustrations" in Stormlight, and we only do spot illustrations in terms of the chapter icons. Some of those are more contextually descriptive, like Lift's pile of food (which is doing double-duty by being both thematic of her power and hinting a little at Rosharan food typs. Lots of gourds, shelled meats, berries and seed-breads) or the straightforward picture of Adolin's Plate, but for the most part we're pretty careful about making every illustration also serve as an artifact.

A page of Shallan's represents a page in her collection. A map of a location is a map on someone's table. An image of Alethi fashions is part of a regular delivery of correspondence that Adolin recieves because that's how damn rich he is.

Not every book would benefit from that sort of supporting content, but some might. I'm reading Jim Butcher's magical airship adventure The Aeronaut's Windlass and enjoying it, but I could really go for a series of illustrations on just how these ships are meant to look. He gives a pretty good description of one of the main vessels... 190-some pages into the novel, after a couple action scenes involving that ship, and I'm still kinda unsure of what the other ships look like.

Lastly, given that there's plenty of precedent for books that are well-suited to be adapted for other media, it's not a bad idea to establish aspects of the property as the author intends while he's still got some input. Once it gets licensed, that opportunity is often reduced or lost.

Brandon Sanderson

I thought I'd do a post on pacing, chapter length, and pulling readers through a story. This is something I've been thinking about. Specifically, I’ve noticed at many authors in fantasy seem to be adopting a more thriller-style (genre, not the music video) of pacing. Shorter chapters, with cliffhanger endings that make for a quick turn to the next page.

Perhaps it's always been this way, and I'm just more sensitive to writing methodology now, as I'm a writer myself. But it does seem to be happening more. A good example are the Codex Alera books by Jim Butcher. But I've noticed some of it in your own books, Brent. It makes me wonder if this is a reaction, on our part as a genre, but the huge teen-fantasy bubble that happened surrounding Harry Potter. YA and middle grade also tend to be more quickly paced, more tight in this regard.

Oddly, I've found myself reacting against it. Not that I don't like this style of storytelling—in fact, I think it works very well. Jim's novel that I mentioned above was a real pleasure to read. Terry Pratchett does this in his books, and they're excellent. But I don't know if it matches every project and every story.

Conventional wisdom in writing is that you don't want the reader to stop and take a break, otherwise they might not return to the book. You always want to leave them hanging. And yet, I don't know if this kind of pacing works very well in the very long form novels. When I write my books these days, I WANT to give the reader some breathing room. Some time to step away from the book, if they want, and digest what has happened. I feel that if I pace them absolutely break-neck, the experience will be exhausting and draining across the long haul, and the book will end up unfulfilling.

Questioner

Do you actually know what's wrong with Stephen Leeds?

Brandon Sanderson

Do I know what's wrong with Stephen Leeds? I do know what's wrong with Stephen Leeds. Thank you for promoting that one. Legion's another of these novellas I did. It's got a fun story behind it.

So I was in a writing group with mutual friend Dan Wells, he writes twisted books about people who are messed up, and he was doing a book about schizophrenia.  He was deep into a schizophrenic’s mind, Dan does a lot of research hits these things really well and meanwhile I'm over here being me and I’m like “Oh this would make a great magic system” *laughter* I'm like “No, no, no, really if you had a schizophrenic and what if they heard voices and saw hallucinations, but the hallucinations helped them.  Like their superpower was seeing hallucinations." He's like "That's weird." I'm like "No, you should write this” and I tried to convince him to write it and I tried to convince him to write and finally he said “Brandon, write the dumb book, it’s not my book it’s yours” So I wrote it, it’s called Legion.

It is indeed about a guy who is a genius and he can become an expert in any topic but that knowledge manifests as a hallucination that he sees, which can than talk him through things. Like if he studies, say, computer programming, he can't program computers, but a hallucination could walk him through programming a computer...

I'm going to warn you, they only do limited editions of the hardcovers on most of these. So they're expensive. But if you buy that I will send you the ebook for free. The only thing I can do that on are my novellas, that and Emperor's Soul, but it is also online for a couple bucks as an ebook. Or you can buy the very nice edition by Subterranean Press.

Questioner

So he gets worse...

Brandon Sanderson

*hesitates* Over the course of the series he is getting worse and worse, despite what he says.

Brandon Sanderson

Lashings

I'll be referencing the original draft of The Way of Kings (AKA Way of Kings Prime), written in 2002, as I feel it will probably be fun for readers to see how the book evolved over time. Every other book of mine you've read was conceived and executed over a relatively short period. The Way of Kings is different—it had a lot of evolving to do before hitting the state it's in now.

One of those evolutions was the magic. Mistborn had one of my best magic systems to date. In Way of Kings Prime (written before Mistborn) we only had two types of magic: Shardblades and Soulcasting. Shardblades were great, but not really magic. Soulcasting didn't work so well. [Assistant Peter's note: There was also something called Windrunning, but it was completely different from the version we know now.]

Mistborn really upped the ante in terms of magic in my books, and I wanted The Way of Kings to have a more dynamic, interesting magic system. That is one factor in why I waited so long to release it.

I finally worked out Lashings while on tour for The Well of Ascension. (That was the tour I went on following the call from Harriet, asking if I was interested in finishing The Wheel of Time.) What I liked about the Lashings system was the visual power and the means of manipulating gravity and pressure in interesting visual and creative ways. I had already built into the sensibilities of the world the idea that there were ten fundamental forces I had based on the idea of fundamental forces in our world's physics. It all fit together nicely.

Anyway, Szeth (named Jek in the first version of the book) was a more ordinary assassin in the original. He didn't have powers beyond being a really, really good killer.

Questioner

Who is your favorite female character?

Brandon Sanderson

Favorite female character? Jasnah, probably. It's hard to say, it's like they're all my children, right? Whose your favorite child? but...Jasnah, maybe?

yahasgaruna

So assuming that the other novels in the White Sand trilogy were meant to be the same length, that means White Sand will take about nine years to finish?

Brandon Sanderson

Well, there's a big "IF" in there. We don't know how the book will be received in the first place. If it IS well received, and people want more, I will sit down with the person who adapted my book and see if we can take my notes and do them justice in an adaptation for another graphic novel.

We'll see how things go. I'm hoping they come out faster than one a year, but I can't promise anything, as I really don't have much experience with this. My only mandate to the publisher was that we do them as graphic novel collections, instead of individual comics, as I didn't want to risk a repeat of the Wheel of Time comic situation (where one issue came out, and then a LONG delay came before the second appeared.)

yahasgaruna

Hah! As one of the people who've had the fortune to read a copy of the White Sand manuscript you sent, I have to say I find the likelihood of it not being a hit close to zero.

So we're getting at least 3 graphic novels, with a possibility of more depending on reception right?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, that's correct.

Aurimus

Hold on, so there are 3 GN books being made from the 1 manuscript? nice!

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. The book is long enough, that the script turned out to be quite long. I don't know if they're planning an omnibus eventually or not.

Questioner

So for the Old Magic, in this classification system of end-positive, end-neutral, and end-negative, where would that fall under?

Brandon Sanderson

So, almost every magic in the cosmere is end-positive, almost every magic is relying upon an external source of Investiture to power it. So that phrasing is mostly more relevant to Scadrial than anywhere else, because that concept is how I'm dealing with things like the laws of thermodynamics, and even what they call end-neutral is relying a little bit on the power of Investiture to facilitate. So even an end-neutral magic system as they define it on Scadrial is actually not end-neutral. What you get put in you get out, but the power is facilitating that transfer… So that phrasing is kind of a... Take that as a science on.. Scadrial that does not extrapolate well, and may not even be 100% accurate.

Moderator

That would have been a great thing to know before we did the cosmere magic panel. *laughter*

Brandon Sanderson

I look at it as, is an Investiture externally powering the magic, and if you look at Allomancy, yes it is. You are drawing that power out. Feruchemy, you are putting Investiture in from your own body, it's your energy transferring to Investiture, which is being stored, which you are then drawing out, and things like that. But that changing forms is facilitated by the magic. Whereas you're stealing stuff with-- So you could look, for instance at the magic on Nalthis, you could look at that one as being-- as kind of working as end-negative, meaning "I am taking it away from someone else", or end-positive depending on if you're the one receiving it or not. So again, it's a phrasing that can be useful as a tool but doesn't scale well to the other magics.

Mateo Fileti

Do you have any plans of writing coauthored stories for the Cosmere?

Brandon Sanderson

Basically, my coauthorship slate is full, right now. I've found about where I can handle it, and it's about three people. Right now, it's Steven Bohls, Janci, and the Dan Wells projects we're working on. That's about all I can handle, where I can get back to people at a reasonable time, and things like that.

That said, I have left one asterisk on there. Well, I guess I'm gonna put two asterisks. Two different, separate asterisks. Number one is that if this is successful and people like it, then probably. There's a reason I'm trying this out, that the first one I did was not connected to any of my worlds, at all. (That was The Original, with Mary Robinette.) And then eased into picking up a series that I was planning just not to be able to get back to. The finally easing into one I'm actively working on. And I kind of eased into that, just to see what people are enjoying. And they seem to be enjoying the active, working-on one the most, of all of those. Which is a plus for doing Cosmere-related things. But, again, it's kinda gonna be: do people like this?

The other askerisk is: I have told Isaac Stewart he is welcome to write, in the Cosmere, anything he would like to, and I will coauthor it with him. I will work on it to make sure. Because Isaac was there from almost the beginning. Peter was the person who was working with me before the Cosmere was released, but I met Isaac in 2004, and Isaac started working with me on Mistborn art right then in 2004. I've told Isaac he can do whatever he wants; he's got a blank slate to be involved in the Cosmere in any way he would like.

Janci Patterson

There's one he's had kicking around for a long time that I really hope he writes sometime.

Brandon Sanderson

We're trying to find time for him to be able to do that.

I would say that there's a good chance you get some Cosmere stuff in the future, but it's not near-future. Near-future, I want to make sure that I'm supporting the things that I'm doing. It would be very easy, I think, to go all James Patterson, where suddenly I'm not writing anymore, I'm only doing this. And I don't think I would enjoy that. Not a dig against Patterson, but I don't want to go that direction.

Brandon Sanderson

Remember next week we have the new Reckoners novel, which is audio only right now. Why audio only? Well, Audible actually funded it. Audible’s the one that paid for us to spend the time and put this all together. There will be a print edition eventually. But right now we’re pretty happy with the fact that Audible, who had the audio rights to the previous Reckoners novels, they wanted more. They were really excited by the idea of getting more, and they’re some of the ones that pushed for it. This wouldn’t exist without Max at Mainframe who is my business partner over there, who is running that side of things really well and making audiobooks. And without Audible wanting a fourth Reckoners novel, which I wanted to do but just didn’t quite have the time or motivation or things like that. Eventually we’ll get an eBook and an audiobook, a print book, and an eBook out eventually. For now, audio original.

If you want to see more sorts of things like this, let me know, like by go purchase the book. Let me know what you think of it. Lux is a big experiment. I really want to hear from you guys on if this is the sort of thing you want me to be doing more of.

Questioner

In the early 2000s, you started toying with this idea of the cosmere, these interconnected stories that are separate, but you've got your little Easter eggs. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Marvel movies started coming out. Were you like, "Wow, I can't believe this got so popular, this idea of--"

Brandon Sanderson

Like, it had always been in their comics. I didn't invent interconnected universe. I didn't even invent them in books. Like, Michael Moorcock, I don't know if you guys have read Michael Moorcock, but I really like Michael Moorcock's work, and he connected a bunch of his things together. And Stephen King famously did it. I think the one that first blew my mind when someone did this was when Asimov connected Robots and Foundation together. 'Cause I had read the Robots books, then I read the Foundation books, and then I read the later Foundation books and I'm like, "They're the same world?!?" That was a very mind-blowing moment for me.

But when I was writing a lot of this stuff in the late 90s, early 2000s, the rule of thumb was, "People don't want continuing narrative." Like, I still remember watching the DVD extras on the Deep Space Nine DVDs. (Which is the best Star Trek, fight me.) And in Deep Space Nine, they would talk about how they would have to-- they had this big arc they wanted to do for seasons. Go listen to it, it's hilarious. They're like, "But we couldn't tell the executives about that, because they would say 'People don't want continuing story arcs, they want individual adventures.'" So, they would write the Ferengi episodes, which were standalones that were goofy and funny, and sent those as their samples to the studio execs, and hide the fact they were making this big, interconnected epic out of Deep Space Nine. And that was the conventional wisdom. That's just where storytelling was going. So, I'm like, "I have to be really hidden about this, everybody's gonna--"

But, Marvel wasn't the first case we have. It was the television show 24. When 24 came out (this is old news to a lot of you, it's like 20 years ago), but when that show came out, people were like "Wow, a continuing narrative. Some people really like this." And then Marvel did their thing, and Marvel became Marvel over the next years. And that was, like, a thing. And then Netflix started doing stuff where it's like, "We're releasing a whole season at once so you can binge. It's like a nine hour movie." And meanwhile, this whole time, I'm like, "Yes! I was born at the right time!"

I will tell you that when DMG came to buy the Cosmere, it was with stars in their eyes, because shared universes were suddenly the thing, and I had the only one on the market for sale. They're all really really stretching, they're like, "Universal Monsters universe?" They're always trying to make some shared universe. And meanwhile, they're like, "There's a guy who already has one. We'll just go buy it!" That was a big part behind them grabbing that. I think that now, people are more wary, because so many of them that they tried to make failed. But the reason they failed, at least in my opinion, is because they did it the wrong way. Instead of starting with something great, that people would want more of, they started saying, "You are going to get 30 of these. You'd better like the first one. Oh, you think it's mediocre? Well, you'd better like the second one, right?" Where this has always been a theme for me with the Cosmere, that I really want each individual story to stand on its own, and if you want to dig into the connections behind them, there is that depth for you to dig into, and you can start making all of these connections and being part of the fandom. But if you just want to read Warbreaker, it is a standalone. You don't need any of this other stuff, it's all Easter egg, and I think that is part of the issue with some of these. It's this thing I told the writers the other day. This magic phrase of, "Everybody wants to start a book thinking it's a standalone and wants to finish it thinking, knowing it's a series." Like, you want to pick up that first book, or whatever it is, and have it be so good that it wraps up and just knocks your socks off. And at that point, you want a sequel. You don't really want the sequel when you start, you just want a good well-told story. So, I tell a lot of writers, try to make sure that first story is really good, and then worry about sequels. So, that's been my philosophy, and hopefully it has worked out.

Questioner

What is the process for you to create a symbol or map for a book?

Isaac Stewart

Both of those have kind of a different process. If you look at the overview, the process is the same, and it's the same process that a lot of time is used for plotting the book, where you start macro and then go down to the micro level. So, I'll talk about each of those separately.

For a symbol, it's usually Brandon coming to me and saying, "We need a symbol for this series." Or I realize we need a symbol for this series. Let's say the Nalthis one. We just came up with that, we put it on the spine of the Warbreaker leatherbound.

So we said, "We don't have a symbol for Nalthis. What do we want that to be?" And I talked to Brandon, and we said, "Maybe a symbol of the Tears of Edgli." And so, we talk about, "What are the Tears of Edgli? What do we know that's canonical? What do you have in your head?" And we kind of came up with a story about them. And then I just start drawing.

Brandon Sanderson

So, if you don't know what these, the Tears of Edgli are flowers that they get a specific dye for that are briefly mentioned in the books. But they are where the Shardpool is in Warbreaker. So it's actually pretty relevant, although in the first book, it doesn't actually pop up all that much. But they are Invested flowers, basically.

Isaac Stewart

So we thought that would be a good symbol for the world of Nalthis, you take one of its Investitures and make that into a symbol. So I draw a bunch of flowers at this point, and we say, "What looks cool? What is going to be symbolic?" So you can see there's five lobes sticking up, five lobes sticking down. There are references to the number five in this book that have different meanings. Like the Five Scholars, and there was five something else. Anyway. So you'll see that one is sticking up, and one is sticking down. And there's more symbolism in that, as well.

But I do a bunch of symbols, I show them to Brandon, and I say, "Okay, which ones of these do you like? What don't you like?" And then we narrow it down. And then I iterate on that, and I do another version where we get a little bit closer. And once we get it close in the sketch realm, I take it into Illustrator, make some nice vectors so it can print out really well on the foil or as we're doing decals or different things like that.

Another thing that I have in the back of my mind when I'm making is symbols is that I want them to be cool. Because we've noticed (and this was not something I noticed early on), but I noticed people will want to get stickers and put them on their laptops. Or they'll want to get them tattooed. And if somebody's gonna do something permanent like that, I want them to be cool. So that's something that's always in the back of my head, is: "This has got to look cool, in case somebody wants to tattoo it on themselves. I don't want to responsible for something dumb."

Gabriel Rumbaut

How did the whole cosmere come about?

Brandon Sanderson

Oh that's a good question. The cosmere came about because- there's really two genesises of it. First off I'm a big fan of Asimov's work and if you know Asimov's work, he tied his two universes together later in his life and I thought he did a brilliant job of it, though patching it together later in his life as he did there were certain continuity problems in doing it and I always thought, "Boy, I bet he wished he'd done it from the beginning".

So, as I started to work on things, I thought, "Well why don't I try something like that from the beginning." Once again I got to see what one of the masters did and learn from them, stand on their shoulders.

The other thing is, early in my career I realized that if I were writing mini-books, writing them all in the same series would be a bad for getting published. Let's say I wrote five, I'm gonna write five books and a publisher rejects the first one. If the other four are in the same series, it's going to be very hard to convince that publisher to read book two if they've already said no to book one. However, if they are five standalone books, set in different worlds, then I can say if someone says, "I liked this book but not enough to publish it," I could send them another one and say, "Hey this one is different but similar, maybe you'll like that." It just increased my chances.

The problem with that is I grew up reading the big epics and I love big epics and they are the books of my heart, are things like the Wheel of Time. I wanted to write big epics and so I started writing a secret big epic. It started with Elantris, which is the first one that I wrote in the cosmere and right after it Dragonsteel, which is actually a prequel but in a different universe [world]. I started putting characters from each of these books in the other books to have what I call a hidden epic, mostly for myself, because I had all these books I was going to be selling and marketing separately. But when Elantris sold, all of that stuff was buried in there, and I said, "Well, I love it, I'm not gonna cut it, I'm just gonna put it in there to see if people notice." I'm going to keep telling my hidden epic because eventually I will be telling the greater story with Dragonsteel and the third Mistborn trilogy dealing with these things and so that's where the idea for the cosmere came from, those two pieces.