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Tony Irene

Can you talk a little bit about the inspiration of Wayne, and if that was perhaps based off someone you know?

Brandon Sanderson

The fun story about Wayne, the beginnings of Alloy of Law were a short story that I wrote where Wayne was the protagonist, and MeLaan was his trusty steed in a horse's body. It was a guy who put on different hats to change personalities, riding into a small town in the Roughs, talking to his horse. Who, then, at the end of the first scene, talked back to him. It was a fun scene. It was way too weird. After I finished that scene, I'm like, "This guy is great. But this guy needs someone else to play off of. And it can't be his talking horse, because this story is just too out there."

Why did I start writing that story? The initial idea is a person who changes personalities based on hats. You put on a hat, and it lets you kind of have a focus for your acting, to get into a role and become someone. That was really fun to me. In fact, in the original story, he was a hatmaker. He was a haberdasher. And he understood people by the headgear that they like.

Which, if gonna be honest and trace it back, probably goes back to Thrawn. I love Thrawn, from the original Star Wars books by Timothy Zahn. And Thrawn was somebody who would look at the art that a culture produces and use that to come to understand them in ways that he could then use to conquer them. Which was just always so cool to me. Like, that's one of the coolest villain concepts, is this art appreciation villain who really gets to know a culture by studying their art, and then crushes them and dominates them. Just wonderful.  I'm always kind of looking for characters who see the world in an interesting way. That's probably it. I don't think I was thinking that when I came up with Wayne.

But then, Wayne needed someone to bounce off against. Wayne needed a straight man, so to speak. And he just wasn't working. So that's when I started plotting Alloy of Law, the actual novel. The short story did not become the novel. The short story taught me that there was enough there that I was interested in that I really wanted to tell a story in this era. And it told me that there's something about this character that's gonna work if I can find the right vehicle to include them in a story.

That's our origins of Wayne. I think I can probably also look at the Sherlock Holmes dynamic, Sherlock and Watson. Any time I'm building a mystery duo or team, there's a bit of Sherlock and Watson going around in the back of my head.

Ryan

Are there any Dark Souls Easter eggs in any of your books?

Brandon Sanderson

I don't think I've put any Dark Souls Easter eggs in. Maybe I should at some point. I don't think I've intentionally -- I stay away from pop culture Easter eggs in the Cosmere books. I do do Easter eggs, but they're usually like people that are my friends and family and things like that. There's a bit of a fourth wall break that happens.

Not that I don't do it in some things. Like, the Krell are an Easter egg from Forbidden Planet. That word comes from that, which is one of my favorite old school sci-fi movies. So I do things like this all the time, but I don't go into it thinking, "I want to find an Easter egg to mention this!"

Even stuff like where Wayne is reading a book about talking bunnies, people are like, "Ooh! It's an Easter egg reference to Watership Down!" I don't really mean it to be that. I mean it to be that talking animal books are just a thing that happens in a lot of cultures, and I felt like it felt natural for this timeframe, there. It wasn't me even referencing -- I try to stay away from references to our world, but I do it on occasion, so it's a very valid question. And maybe there are some things I've done that I don't even remember doing.

Hannah

If video games existed in the cosmere, which current cosmere character that we know would be the best gamer?

Brandon Sanderson

Best gamer? Um...

Adam Horne

I want to see if your statement is the same as mine.

Brandon Sanderson

Whew, best gamer? Who wants to sit down and game?

Adam Horne

That's going outside of mine, my character probably would not want to, but I think they'd be very good at it.

Brandon Sanderson

Very good at gaming, very good at gaming... Lift.

Adam Horne

Oh, Lift would probably enjoy it. Mine is Sazed because he can store his speed and stuff.

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, Sazed would be technically, you're right, would be way, way better. I don't know if Wayne could slow time and put in inputs and then they would come out, I don't know how that would work.

Adam Horne

Is the tv outside of his bubble?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, the tv would have to be outside of his bubble. How would that work?

Adam Horne

What happens to a wireless signal when it hits the bubble?

Brandon Sanderson

Wireless signal is going to have a red shift. Physicist, what happens if a red shift happens? As I understand it, that actually wouldn't change it appreciably, but we'd let a physicist say on that. Regardless, yeah, Sazed would definitely have a big leg up. That's a very good answer.

Questioner

So what would Wayne do with a Shardblade?

Brandon Sanderson

Hehehe... He would have way too much fun.

Questioner

What's Wayne's favorite ice cream flavor?

Brandon Sanderson

The more-- Oh rum. Obviously, come on.

Traaailz

What is Wayne's last name?

I haven't finished BoM just yet so it may be in there but it's been bugging me for a while.

Is it to much of spoiler?

Brandon Sanderson

Dang. Have I never mentioned that? I'll put it in the last one. It's not a huge spoiler.

timi1993

Wayne, his inability to pick up guns, is there anything else to it or is it just psychological?

Brandon Sanderson

It's just psychological, and you'll see Shadows of Self, we talk about it a little bit. It's post traumatic stress disorder.

Questioner

I just wanted to say ... I like how the main characters are named Wax and Wayne.

Brandon Sanderson

Thanks. In all honesty, I was hesitant about the pun. I liked it, on one hand, but also worried that it was too goofy. By the time I tried changing the character names, however, they were too strongly cemented in my head, so changing them proved too difficult and I just left them as-is.

leinton (paraphrased)

Does Wayne have PTSD?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

He absolutely does.

Annabelle

Would you consider writing a short story about Wayne's origins?

Brandon Sanderson

I don't generally do this. The reason being that I construct stories, generally, in such a way, particularly a story like Wayne's story that starts a little in media res, and he's already had quite a bit of life experience and foundational things... I construct a story knowing that I'm going to give you touchstone moments for that character's narrative in a way that indicate to you what happened in the past. And with Wayne, I feel like I've done a pretty good job of that. There's still a little bit more for the next book, but I feel like if I were to go back and tell this story, it would be like going back and telling Rashek's story or Alendi's story from the Mistborn series. Where the epigraphs are there to give you the story, and if I wrote it out, it would just be really repetitive to things I've already done.

The characters that I'm more likely to write short stories or novellas about are ones where there just isn't room in the narrative to dig into something deep about their character. Rock is an excellent example of this, from the Stormlight books. There's just not room. Which is why I plan to write a Rock novella. Be like, "All right, let's really dig into who Rock is, his past, and stuff like that." Because you just don't get those answers. With Wayne, I feel like I have given the answers in such a way that if I did more, it would be boring.

Jonathan McGuire

If Wayne and The Lopen were to meet, would they hit it off?

Brandon Sanderson

They would get along fantastically, absolutely fantastically. Lopen would find Wayne imitating his accent to be the funniest thing that he has ever heard... and Wayne would introduce him to all kinds of interesting modern conveniences like flushing toilets and whatnot and Lopen would find that all just delightful. So, yes they would certainly hit it off.

Brandon Sanderson

So, I don't know how much I've talked about this, but there are two things going on with Wayne in regard to Steris.

The first is that Wayne is a highly instinctive person. He DOES think, and more than people give him credit for, but he judges a lot of what he does by what his gut says. I've known people like this and they can be extremely charming, but have more trouble articulating why they might make a certain decision--or why they don't like a particular person.

Wayne doesn't like Steris. She feels off to him, and his instincts say she's hiding something. Trouble is, his gut is misleading him in this case. Steris doesn't think and react like Wayne does, but it's not because she's hiding something--it's because she doesn't pick up on the same social cues that someone highly sociable like Wayne sees.

There's a second issue here, and that's Wayne's over-protectiveness. Wayne tends to lump people in his head into "my mates" and "those other folks." Once you're "in" with him, he'll do basically anything for you. You'll never find a more loyal friend. At the same time, it's hard to get "in" with him--and if he perceives someone as "stealing" someone from him, he gets very defensive, even mean.

He doesn't realize it, but his subconscious sees Steris as taking Wax away from him and--even more importantly--away from Lessie. He'd be belligerent toward anyone Wax started dating, but the fact that he gets lots of false positives off of Steris doesn't help one bit. If Wax/Marasi had worked out, he'd probably have been okay with it, for example.

Questioner

With Alloy of Law, with Wayne, how do you come up with that character? *laughter* And those things that he says? 

Brandon Sanderson

So, yeah, Wayne's one of those characters. So, there are certain standards to which I hold almost all of my characters in my books. Wayne isn't one of them. He gets away with more.

So, where'd Wayne come from? The original concept for Wayne was, when I was working on the Mistborn books-- For those who don't know, I originally pitched Mistborn to my editor, Moshe, as a trilogy of trilogies: Past, Present, Future. Epic fantasy trilogy, urban fantasy trilogy, science fiction trilogy, set in the same world, with advancing technology in which the magic becomes the foundation for space travel. And the original idea that the epic fantasy trilogy becomes the foundation of myth and religion in the modern day trilogy. So, I told him all this, and he said, "Wow. You're ambitious." This was after he had read Elantris and was trying to figure out what else to buy from me.

And so, as I was working on The Stormlight Archive, I realized I wanted something from the Mistborn world to balance Stormlight, because Stormlight books are big and involved and take, like, years of writing to get done, and I didn't want to be alternating thick, long, books in two series, I kinda wanted to have a shorter, more fast-paced series to balance out the bigger, longer series. And so, the first thing I started doing, the first idea for Wayne, was a person whose personality changed based on hats he put on. And he was actually originally a hat maker. And I wrote, like, three pages of this, and he was just too kooky. He was great, but I was pouring too much into him. I needed: number one, to kinda pull back on the concept in that original; and number two, I needed multiple characters around him. By the way, he was riding around on a talking horse at that point, because he was a kandra.

Yeah, it was a really weird scene. It was wacky. And that's when I said, "All right, I'm gonna sit down and write an actual novel, not just exploratory scenes." And that's where I built Wax and Wayne, and kind of, the play off of each other, and things like that. So, they kind of grew out of each other, and out of that first scene that I wrote. 

Isaac D. Marble

Does Wayne have a first or last name?

Brandon Sanderson

In Mistborn, last names are in flux. A lot of people still don't have them, as they weren't a skaa thing. However, Wayne would have one he could use, if he wanted.

Questioner

Is Wayne the author that's writing the Allomancer Jak stuff.

Brandon Sanderson

No, he's not. Good question, though! Good question!

timi1993

What's [Wayne's] effect from his Twinborn abilities?

Brandon Sanderson

I don't think I've released that yet.

Questioner

They're called "Wax and Wayne." Is that something to do with the moon or is that just...

Brandon Sanderson

It's a pun, it's just a pun on my part.

Questioner

So you did it on purpose but it's nothing in the book?

Brandon Sanderson

I did. Yeah, Scadrial doesn't have a moon so they wouldn't really... The words "wax" and "wane" still mean what they mean, but it's not part of common vernacular the way it is over here. So it's me being goofy and loving the pun way too much.

Questioner

Does the name [Wax & Wayne] foreshadow anything that's gonna happen?

Brandon Sanderson

No. I named them that because the pun made me crack up. It's not meant to be foreshadowing. The fun thing about that pun is, Scadrial not having a moon, means that those words exist in their language, it's not part of the common parlance like it is here, so they don't get the pun.