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One of the things I wanted to do with these books was to slowly transform characters so that their weaknesses became strengths. It's an odd little theme, hardly visible, I think–and not really that important. However, it's there. Vin is learning to be a scholar, despite how much she protests and fights against the transformation.
After finishing Oathbringer I started a reread of Warbreaker and noticed something.
Page 427 of Warbreaker:
Susebron: "Didn't you eat before you came to my chambers?"
Siri: "I did, but growing that much hair is draining. It always leaves me hungry."
Sounds similar to our favorite Edgedancer, but I thought she was supposed to be one of a kind on the whole getting Investiture through food? I'm assuming the Royal Locks have something to do with Investiture.
FWIW, i asked this question in my Warbreaker book and got RAFO
So in war beaker Siri is able to convert food directly into hair growth through the Royal Locks, we know that the Royal Locks are somehow related to investiture, so my question is, can Siri/Viv convert food into investiture to use in Awakening (or Surgebinding or any other uses of magic in the cosmere) similar to Lift and her awesomeness.
As far as I know, you were the first to catch on to this. (Or at least ask about it) so that should be a very proud RAFO. There is something here, but it's not as deep as you might assume.
Could you have trapped the mists from Scadrial in a gemstone.
Theoretically possible.
Which book was the hardest to write?
Which book was the hardest to write. A Memory of Light, the last of The Wheel of Time books by a LARGE margin is the hardest book I've ever written because the last Wheel of Time book mixed with a lot of war scenes that--I don't have the history in warfare that Robert Jordan did so all this stuff I had to do, there was a lot of research and a lot of going back and forth with Alan Romanczuk with Team Jordan. It was by far the hardest.
Does Wit specifically treat people differently when he knows they're going to have a spren bond? (E.g. Renarin, Dalinar)
Yes, Wit treats people differently, but it is not because of present or nascent spren bonds. He has an opinion of what each person needs to hear. He isn't always correct in this opinion, but he tries to give people what he thinks they need. In Dalinar's case, he simply has too much respect for the man to be glib. In Renarin's case, he believes that the boy has had more than enough breaking down, and is much more in need of building up.
In Elantris, you have this array of people who are essentially gods, immortal, but they appear with absurdly high frequency. How come they basically don't take over the planet?
...There are a couple reasons for this. One is that magic on Sel is very strongly tied to location, and was even back when the Elantrians were at the height of their power. So, this is a big part of it, location-based magic. Meaning, the further you get from Elantris, the less powerful your magic was, and the Elantrians really didn't like going places where they were not super-powerful. And so this is certainly part of it, and I explored this idea in Warbreaker, where the people who happen to be gods are really aggressive and kind of slowly conquering outward and things like that. It felt right for me in Elantris to be doing it that way.
Why can't they just increase their numbers. Because their numbers increase over time?
...The number of Elantrians had certain thresholds and upper limits, that I haven't described in the books yet.
I think you may have answered this one before, but where do you come up with your names for all your characters?
It depends on the series. For Mistborn, I build a 'feel for certain regions and develop names using the linguistic rules of that region. The Central Dominance (and Elendel in this book) had a slightly French feel to the linguistics, and many of the names came from that paradigm.
However, unique to the Mistborn world was the need to give people simple nicknames in a thieving crew sort of way. Wax, Clubs, Breeze, Mr. Suit, all of these are along those lines.
Do you ever feel limited by the commitment you've made with the massive writing of the Cosmere, or is there enough variety within the Cosmere to keep you happy and feel like you have some flexibility to do what you want to do with your writing ideas and preferences, especially as they change.
The answer is no. Fortunately, I designed the Cosmere as the thing I wanted to do, and I had essentially been writing the Cosmere for like, eight books before I sold. So I knew pretty well that I would have enough flexibility and things like this.
I am very excited by large-scale continuity connections between stories - watching eras come and pass in epic story-lines and things like that. I've never felt constrained by it. If anything, once in a while I feel constrained by contracts coming at the wrong time when I'm super excited by something else - like when a deadline is coming due and I'm like "I need to get off of this and write this other thing".And that's just a matter of - it's a function of the popularity that we enjoy that I've talked about before. I think that if I were - I'm not going to go back to this, but when I were a little less popular, the publishers would sit on books for like, two and a half years after I turned them in, to find the right place to publish them, or the right time. The bottom-line of the entire company was not appreciably affected by my book releasing.
Nowadays, the bottom-lines of companies are appreciably affected by my books releasing, so they don't sit on them. You don't turn in a Stormlight book and have it come out two and a half years later. Fans would probably have a heart attack if they knew we were doing that. But what it meant was that this buffer that I had vanished unexpectedly out from underneath us and so suddenly everything I'm writing is at the last moment that it could get - the last possible moment for it to be turned in, to be published, is generally when it's getting turned in. And this is just because people are really excited to get the books out. What that means is that things will happen where it's like, in an ideal world I don't think I would have gone straight from Rhythm of War into Dawnshard. It turned out to be okay because I was writing different characters, but I really like space between books in the same series as a way to refresh myself, and ideally I would have written the next Skyward book and maybe the next Wax and Wayne book and then done Dawnshard and then written the next Skyward book, and then come back to Stormlight.
But that just wasn't possible because of the timelines that I've set out. Dawnshard really needs to be out before Rhythm of War comes out, and because of that tight deadline then I'm on another tight deadline, which now means that writing the next Skyward book has to happen next because my YA publisher has been waiting very patiently without a book for quite a while, and while I probably would want to go to Wax and Wayne 4 next because I've been away from that even longer, Wax and Wayne 4 is for the same publisher that's now publishing Rhythm of War and they've got plenty to do and are plenty busy, and I need to get something to the other publisher.
These sorts of things are the annoyances of the reality of being a professional writer, but I never feel constrained by the Cosmere. I've never felt constrained by "Oh I promised ten Mistborn books or whatever" (30 seconds of figuring out how many Mistborn books. 13?)
So do I feel constrained by that? No I feel excited by that. That's never been an issue. Do I feel constrained by the fact that I really need to get Skyward 3 and 4 and Wax and Wayne done in time to get back to Stormlight 5 to have Stormlight 5 come out on a reasonable timescale - that, I do feel constrained by.
With the Heralds we know that there's only one left... one Herald that's still bound to the Oathpact--
OK, only one Herald was about, was abandoned-- You'll find out the mechanics of that in the next book.
So are we going to see more of Taln...
You will see more of-- the Oathpact is not completely broken, the others are still bound to the Oathpact.
Even though they kind of sort of said they were abandoning it?
Yes, so there's still connection there, so you'll find out more about all of this and how it works.
Is there gonna be any more Arcanum Unbounded-- like collections of short stories?
Yeah. I'll release short stories and every, you know, decade or so I'll collect them all into a collection.
Was Taldain one of the planets of the Iriali Long Trail? Was Scadrial?
RAFO
All right, I'm gonna pull upon the cloud here, and I'm gonna go to my archive, and let's see what I can find in here that I have outlines for that I haven't written.
There's one I know of for sure. I'm not gonna tell you what that one is. It's a secret project. One that I haven't talked about.
I don't know if we count Death By Pizza. I have a full outline for that. But that's a book I didn't write, and then I passed the worldbuilding off to Peter Orullian, who was writing a book based on it. Not using my outline, because the outline had some problems. But that would probably be number two.
Dark One became a graphic novel. So I don't know if you count that. That's, like, half of one.
Starburner would be number four-ish. That's the first full outline that doesn't have a book attached to it right now.
Don't know if you count Stormlight Five. The outline for Stormlight Five is very detailed. Six through Ten is less detailed; I do have them, but they're more like a paragraph or two about each book, so I wouldn't count them as a full outline.
Five in my "Novels to Write Someday" one. Which, most of them, you guys haven't heard about. One's the magic that uses kites; I've talked about that before.
I've got "Totally Not A Rewrite Of Episode I" that I wrote nine years ago. I just could not help it.
I have the five I mentioned earlier. In addition, in their own folders, I have I Hate Dragons. (Which I actually outlined the whole I Hate Dragons book, but I only wrote the little piece of it that was a writing exercise.) I have... six.
Six plus five, so eleven outlines in my Novels to Write Someday. And then two half ones that I passed on to someone else. And then all the Stormlight and Mistborn and things like that that don't quite count. So there you go, eleven. It's eleven only, right now. That's not very many. I would say that I've got at least that many in my head, maybe a few more.
Oh, and Secret Project, so that's twelve. And all of those are Secret Projects in a way, I guess. You've heard about some of them. One of them is The Lurker, which became Adamant, which I wrote one novella of, but I have the outlines for the rest.
Which author would you like to meet and get a book signed by him/her?
Alive? Terry Practhett. Dead? Robert Jordan.
Does Vivenna/Azure's sword have a name?
Yes. Asterisk*.
Are there still six different types of Aethers in current canon? Or has that changed?
They have expanded. I’m using the Aethers behind the scenes for a lot of space age things. And because I’m doing that, I am adding in a few more Aethers. There’s going to be some limits on this. I’m tweaking which Aethers I’m actually making, ‘cause some of them didn’t work as well as other ones.
There will end up being more, but I won’t canonize the number until I have the Aether book ready to release.
How can splintered seons like Mraize's leave their planet, while spren cannot?
That is a big mystery in the Cosmere, so it is a RAFO. This is actively... The answer to that question is a big step toward doing what Mraize wants to do. And they haven't figured it out yet. There are lots of theories. And indeed, Elantris and its magic systems tend to be the oddball among Cosmere magic systems in a lot of ways. This is all related to how things work and the various things that are odd about the Elantris magic system. So I'm going to RAFO that with a "why don't you theorize along those lines?" They are trying to figure it out, and obviously they do, because (spoilers) I have read things that indicate that this is possible in the future.
My friend asked for Brandon to write something about Harmony in her Alloy of Law.
There's another name Harmony could go by if he weren't able to control the conflict between his halves… *to Zas* Have you guys figured that one out yet? Oh, I'm not going to say anything. You have it on recording… I was pretty sneaky with that one so I don't know if you have it or not.
How the heck do regular people on Roshar tell the difference between Ruby and Garnet spheres??
So. Really. If you hand be a Ruby and a Garnet... I guess I could guess at which was which. But if you just handed me a red gemstone and said "that's a ruby, so I'll need change back" I'm not really sure I could.
But imagine being a busy merchant. That's just too much of a real chance at error.
I'm sure the stormlight is a different color, but still, it's gotta be close.
I'm sure there are experts that can easily tell these things. But I'm talking about regular people, since this is a currency after all.
Is there any theory on this at all?
I assume that the stormlight-holding garnets are violet rather than pure red.
But what if I infused this guy with stormlight? The color keeps changing!
I'll write something up about this eventually. The hue is more important than the actual crystalline structure on Roshar.
When Adolin snapped, I noticed your wording. Those... The term snapping...
No. Good question. He did not gain Allomantic abilities.
Well - Spren bonding abilities...?
Well no. That was not used magically.
What happens if a kandra eats Nightblood?
That would be bad for them.
At the end of The Way of Kings, was Wit the actual Herald or was it somebody else *inaudible*
The Herald's the guy who collapsed to the ground all shaggy-haired holding a Shardblade. He claimed to be Talenel, who is the one they talked about in the Prelude. Whether or not he actually is is yet to be seen.
Did he just collapse or did he form out of the air?
No, he walked up and fell down.
Which of your characters do you feel is the most misunderstood by fans?
If I'm doing my job, people won't misunderstand characters.
The one I usually answer on this question is Kelsier, who... Kelsier is definitely a heroic figure. He did a lot of right things. But Kelsier is much closer to being a villain than people see, because he was in the best place for him possible, which is being capable of burning something down. He is just really good at tearing stuff down, and he is a great agent of chaos in that regard, and great at coming up with masterful ways to mess up what other people are doing to get what he wants. And what he wanted in that story happened to align very well with the needs and interests of the general population, and he genuinely wants to do good and right by them. It's not like he's some antihero who is accidentally doing the right things. But he is arrogant; he is very, very driven; and he is very, very dangerous; which are a combination that could have led to disaster in other circumstances.
Do you feel there's anything different when writing for a video game?
Writing for a video game? You know I haven't truly written for a video game yet. What I've done is I've written novellas that bridge between video games, and that's kind of the single thing that I've done. So I can't really say yet. You'll have to track down some people who have actually written for video games.
I expect that it's lots of dialogue, and you have to understand that people might skip part of the story so you have to have a lot of refreshing on plot.
With reversals fabrials, if one fell and sat on the ground will the other one continue to rise due to the gravity affecting the one on the ground?
No, good question.
*inaudible* find yourself foreshadowing in any of your books.
All the time. Like, the thing I love to do the most.
Anything you found that we haven't found yet?
Oh, yeah. But they can't really find it yet because the foreshadowing is for books way in the future. One thing I've mentioned that you can keep an eye on is the shapes the spren sometimes take, sometimes unconsciously, is related to certain connections that are going on.
Can you tell us the equivalent Heightening she [Rysn] now has? She seems to be at least Third Heightening equivalent but I'm not sure how much else she has gained from holding a Dawnshard. Do ALL Dawnshards grant these Heightening-like effects?
All Dawnshards would grant the same effects in this regard.
As for specifics, I think I'll leave that as what is mentioned in the text, for now. (Sorry.)
Sort of off-topic here, but it would be super cool to see all 9-10 Stormlight novellas (assuming you do one between each main book as hinted) bound up into a single leather-bound collection.
I'll consider it, though I think it's likely we do an Arcanum leatherbound--so I wouldn't want to ask people to buy two copies of the same story. But maybe we could eventually bind them all as a different option for people.
In Secret History we learned a little about how the Cognitive Realm...could bleed into the Physical if the person was slightly broken.
Broken as Kelsier’s term is not right, and he realizes that over the course of the book, but yeah.
My thoughts were on Wayne, so he seems to notice--and it might just be kleptomania--a connection between items that makes him feel as if he’s not stealing, just trading things for equal value. And I’m wondering if he’s noticing something in the Cognitive-- in one of the other Realms that is actually noteworthy.
He’s just goofy.
What would happen if a Radiant spren went to the Physical Realm through a perpendicularity instead of the natural transition they usually do?
RAFO. It would normally just not work, but RAFO? ... You have some stuff in Rhythm of War that's like *various sounds of disgust*, but yeah.
Are going to do anything else in that world [of Dreamer]
Probably not. She [Charlaine Harris] wanted me to write a horror story, and I'd never written one before so I said, "All right, what is the most frightening thing I can think of?" The most frightening thing I could think of was the kids who play Xbox having power over real people’s lives, and that’s where that story came from.
Is it possible to reliably deduce what a Shardworld's Cognitive realm will look like if we knew a lot about its Physical realm? For example, mists in Scadrial, spheres in Roshar etc.
Yes, but it works in odd ways. So it may not work in the logical way that you think.
Why spheres on Roshar? Something related to the highstorms makes more sense, right?
Yes there is a reason for them being spheres. RAFO
So I've noticed a pattern in the way that the Radiants learn their surges. They seem to learn their anti-clockwise surge before their clockwise surge?
They do.
Excellent, everyone thought I was a crazy person!
They do tend to-- Now, I'm gonna give you some behind the sausage stuff on that. That is partially for writing expediency reasons.
How do you mean?
I designed that partially because I didn't want to overwhelm people with too many magic systems at once so I came up with a little bit of a pattern so that I could have a little bit of an in-world reason why we were slowing that down. It's not a hard fast rule, it's something that I've kept to in order to not overwhelm readers so it's more of form following function than the other way around.
Some statistics/fun facts on [Calamity]:
Could you make a spike from a Lifeless?
"Oooo interesting!" He said their soul is so drained there wouldn't be much left, so you could only get the barest hint.
But you COULD technically get a charge?
Yes, but it would be very weak.
At the end of Oathbringer, *inaudible* Are they getting Shardplate anytime soon?
That is a Read And Find Out, unfortunately... There are hints that-- if you look, there are certain people that it's implied already do have it. But I'm not gonna delve into that for another book or two.
I'm sorry, but I cannot help but wonder if throughout the book [Rhythm of War] we will get more answers about this in-between year.
I want to know how or where all these Edgedancers come from, for example, because it's a huge jump between "there are only 7 Radiants we know about, and Kaladin and Shallan are training more" to "a whole Order coming out the ship and being advanced in their Ideals and forming like a healer batallion."
I do give a little context, but at the same time, I think the previous books have set this up well. We've followed in close detail how a Windrunner initiated his oaths, found a group of squires, and then started an order. We got the same for a Lightweaver. In the story chronology, that all happened in a span not so different from the year between.
Because we don't have any major viewpoint Edgedancers or Stonewards in these five books, I have to leave most of this to the imagination--as you can take the model of Kaladin and Shallan, then extrapolate from comments mentioning that this sort of thing was happening all across the world, not just at the Shattered Plains.
I think the narrative leads you to the answers that connect this all. I do try to give some additional mentions of what was happening through the story, though I don't know if I'll explain enough for what you're asking here.
You’ve mentioned a few times the concept of the “in-between” book. Did you plot the events of that time skip out in detail to give yourself the starting point when planning RoW? Or did you just know where you wanted the characters and the world to start from?
It's not as detailed as a full book outline, but at the same time, it's more than just starting where I felt was right. So kind of between the two ideas you offer?
Was the reason Radiants could safely break oaths before the Recreance, without resulting in deadeyes, because the Bondsmith broke the bond for them?
RAFO! Good question!
Will we see any information, book, story, or just Word of Brandon in general on the fourth Shard that Odium has vanquished?
Eventually I will talk about it. I don't want to talk about it now, but I will talk about it. So no, that’s a RAFO.
Is Hoid like-- Would you say he's generally well known in Silverlight? Most people know who he is?
Yes. Yes, I would say he is fairly well known in Silverlight. If you went to your average person in Silverlight and said, "Do you know this guy?" odds are they would know. There are some people who wouldn't, but odds are they would.
Is the Well of Ascension Preservation’s Perpendicularity? Or at least related to it (i.e. one is in the Physical Realm but the other is in the Cognitive but are still essentially different aspects of the same “thing”)?
You're on the right track.
Elend on the wall
Now you can see why Elend's proposal–giving him power to hold the city until he met in parlay with the kings–was such an important plotting device. Don't worry; I'll get into the problems with the proposal soon. It's by no means hard-fast, and I realize that a simple promise like this is not going to hold for long in the face of something like a siege.
Still, it lets me set up the siege. This section here is actually one of the very newest in the book. I wanted a section that officially began the "siege of Luthadel" making it firm and fixed in people's mind, so that they would know for sure what the conflict was.
Adding scenes like this one increased the size of some chapters far beyond what I normally write. This is one. It's interesting to note that, for a given book, my chapters tend to end up being around the same length. It's not completely intentional; it just happens that way. This book, however, has that rhythm thrown off quite a bit now.
Updates on Secondary Projects
Alcatraz
Contrary to last year's State of the Sanderson (where I didn't expect movement on this series this year) there have been developments. I have tried working on the sixth and final book (which will be from Bastille's viewpoint) and have found that I didn't like the test chapters I did.
The story went the wrong direction, and beyond that, I didn't feel like I had Bastille's voice down. In some attempts, the book just sounded too much like the previous ones—but when I exaggerated her voice, she felt a bit Flanderized. I've been toying with how to make it work, and I've come up with a somewhat outside-the-box solution. My long-standing friend and former student, Janci Patterson, is also a big fan of the series. She's been offering feedback since I wrote the first book back in…2006, was it? I've gone to her and asked if she'd be willing to collaborate on it.
The goal is that by bringing in another author to write it with me, I'll be able to get the book to work—to have it feel different enough from the others, yet still be in the same theme and spirit. The goal is to do an outline in early February once I have book one of Skyward done, then hand that off to Janci and let her toy with it a while before sending it back to me.
So you can watch for that, and I'll post updates.
Status: Outline to be written in 2018.
If Kaladin wasn't in the arena in Words of Radiance, would Zahel have intervened to help Adolin?
I will RAFO that, but a different kind of RAFO—in that I don't think Zahel himself knows what he would do in that situation. The better part of him would want to have, but he is not living his best life right now, shall we say. He is not living up to his potential, and he knows it. And so would he have? He should have. But would be have? Good question. Even he doesn't... I don't think that he could answer.
Did every Order of Knights Radiant have Shardblades?
Every Order was capable of Shardblades.
Why is going into the Spiritual realm like Kelsier did damaging, as Leras seemed to suggest?
The thing is, Leras didn't know that Kelsier had a broken brain, that is how Kelsier wasn't damaged by doing what he did. You can break your brain by doing that though, worse than how broken Kelsier is.
Also, does each of the Unmade have a corresponding order of the Knights Radiant?
Eh... Kind of.
Ok. So there are nine Unmade right, so which one is left out?
Bondsmith. But it's not as one to one, there's some fuzziness in there.
I assume a lot of people believe Taravangian's story that he killed everyone 'except Gavilar' is a polite fiction to prevent Dalinar from being honor-bound to kill him?
Yeah, I'd suspect that you are right.
Ooh, I think that's a really good point, Marsh probably should have flared steel or iron or something? /u/mistborn ?
Yes, you're right. Good catch, /u/Thevulgarcommander! I believe we caught this already, however, and tweaked future printings.
So does this mean that tin doesn’t enhance Allomantic senses when burned? You’ve said before that windwhispers can store Allomantic senses, so I’m surprised at the difference there
I just think the passage is confusing, and was better of being tweaked. The new version, if you find it, makes it clearer--I believe he flares both tin and steel/iron.
This is the most overt and obvious of my savior-imagery scenes for Kelsier. I hope you didn't feel like I was hitting you over the head with it. (I didn't actually realize the similarity between Survivor and Savior until I was part of the way through the book.) Either way, yes, the Christian imagery is intentional. I didn't put it in simply because I'm religious (after all, if you look at it, Kelsier isn't really all that Christian in the way he deals with people.) I put it in because I think that the images and metaphors of Christianity are deeply-seated in our culture, and drawing upon them provides for a more powerful story.
Part of this is to intentionally make people uncomfortable–for discomfort (when used right) leads to tension. The Christians who read this might be made uncomfortable by how strikingly un-divine Kelsier is. He's acting in some of the same roles as Christ did, but he's not the man that Christ was. He's kind of a pale imitation. The non-Christians, in turn, might be made uncomfortable by the fact that Kelsier is manipulating the people in the way that religions often do, giving hope in something that could very well prove to be false.
Either way, he is what he is. The truest Kelsier is the one we see near the end, where he's standing in the kitchen, smoldering in his black clothing. He is a dangerous man with powerful beliefs.
