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Questioner

So far, the Stormlight Archive's book titles have the abbreviations: WoK, WoR, O, and RoW. Will Book Five's abbreviation be KoW, making the complete ketek?

Brandon Sanderson

Great question. Way back when I started working on the Stormlight Archive, I wanted to do this. And then I just didn't think it would work out, for various reasons, and I backed away from it, coming up with my kind of working titles that were not a ketek. After I changed Book Two to Words of Radiance, I realized I might have a chance to do this, and it started to kind of get in my head, that maybe I do it, maybe I wouldn't. I waited to see if Book Three would work as a single-word title, which it did. And so I am intending to do this.

The question we have internally is where we put the "T." Because Way of Kings actually has a "the" in it, where Words of Radiance and Oathbringer do not, and neither does Rhythm of War. So, is it going to have a T at the end, or not? That is subject to debate, even internally, right now.

Lyndsey Luther

Ok, last question. It was really difficult coming up with three questions that haven’t been asked already...

Brandon Sanderson

OK... you’re not going to ask me the “what would you ask me” question?

Lyndsey Luther

Not quite...

Brandon Sanderson

OK good, because I hate that one! (laughs)

Lyndsey Luther

My question is if there’s anything that you’ve never been asked that you would like to talk about?

Brandon Sanderson

Oooooh, ok. Hm. That one is so hard! Every time people ask me something like this... What have I never been asked that people should be asking, is basically what the question is? Something that the fans have just missed... They pick up on so much, that it’s hard... I do wonder if, you know… all the magic systems [in my books] are connected and work on some basic fundamental principles, and a lot of people haven’t been asking questions about this. One thing I did get a question on today, and I’ll just talk about this one... they didn’t ask the right question, but I nudged them the right way, is understanding that tie between AonDor [the magic system from Elantris] and Allomancy [Mistborn’s magic system].

People ask about getting the power from metals and things, but that’s not actually how it works. The power’s not coming from metal. I talked a little about this before, but you are drawing power from some source, and the metal is actually just a gateway. It’s actually the molecular structure of the metal… what’s going on there, the pattern, the resonance of that metal works in the same way as an Aon does in Elantris. It filters the power. So it is just a sign of “this is what power this energy is going to be shaped into and give you.” When you understand that, Compounding [in Alloy of Law] makes much more sense.

Compounding is where you are able to kind of draw in more power than you should with Feruchemy. What’s going on there is you’re actually charging a piece of metal, and then you are burning that metal as a Feruchemical charge. What is happening is that the Feruchemical charge overwrites the Allomantic charge, and so you actually fuel Feruchemy with Allomancy, is what you are doing. Then if you just get out another piece of metal and store it in, since you’re not drawing the power from yourself, you’re cheating the system, you’re short-circuiting the system a little bit. So you can actually use the power that usually fuels Allomancy, to fuel Feruchemy, which you can then store in a metalmind, and basically build up these huge reservoirs of it. So what’s going on there is… imagine there’s like, an imprint, a wavelength, so to speak. A beat for an Allomantic thing, that when you burn a metal, it says “ok, this is what power we give.” When it’s got that charge, it changes that beat and says, “now we get this power.” And you access a set of Feruchemical power. That’s why Compounding is so powerful.

Questioner (paraphrased)

Do you every drop hints for things that never come to pass as you change and tweak the story?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Oh ya, all the time. Best example is Arcanum Unbounded originally had a different story that was foreshadowed through Mistborn Era 1, among others, but it just never fit in the story. It just didn’t jive once you start putting the jig saw together. You learn not to get too disappointed when that happens.

Letters Words

For a theoretical Stormlight live action adaptation, it seems like it would be difficult to accomplish filming outdoor scenes while eliminating any signs of plant life that would be completely out of place on Roshar. Would you be open to changing elements of Roshar's ecology to make adaptation easier?

Brandon Sanderson

I would not have to do that, considering the budgets that we have been regularly offered. We can digitally remove plants. The real answer to that is, we digitally remove plants; and that's expensive, but that's what we do. There's some places in southern Utah that we can film that are gonna look real good for the Shattered Plains. And then the other places that we would have to film, we can do volume stages for, or things like that. I don't think it's as hard to do as you say

The bigger issue we have discussed, when some people have been pitching on Stormlight live action, is the spren. How many spren do you put into a scene? Those are pretty expensive (as these things go) effects, and how much are we gonna use, and how do you adapt that? And how do you not make the spren look like Looney Tunes, with someone getting hit on the head and stars spinning around their head, right? We all imagine them not being that, but you gotta make sure that it works. A lot of what's happening with spren is pretty surreal. How do you adapt that and and what's our budget for that? Those are questions that have come up.

Fantasy Faction

In The Way of Kings, when Shallan zones out and draws a picture of a dead noble at a dinner table, was she drawing her own father after she killed him with her Shardblade?

Brandon Sanderson

Ooh, good question! You will want to read Words of Radiance, where her flashbacks may indeed involve this scene that she drew.

Questioner

What happens in cosmere terms with Parshendi? Like, they Connect to a spren. And then, by it do they change their Identity, or what?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. Basically what's happening is, that symbiosis has a similar effect to Hemalurgy, but not so nasty. And it's being reflected there in the Physical Realm.

Himenss

So originally book 3 was Szeth and book 5 was Dalinar? Good that it changed...I cannot imagine book 3 without Dalinar's flaskbacks. The story wouldn't be so powerful.

Now I am curious, did Dalinar get his memories back in the original planning for book 3?

Brandon Sanderson

As others have theorized, this wouldn't have worked quite the same way.

Oathbringer's ending would still have been its ending--but we wouldn't have had the flashbacks and some of the revelations about Dalinar's character. It quickly became obvious to me, however, that the confrontation with the thrill, the reveal regarding the ancient Radiants, and the solidification of the new Radiants as a unified(?) group needed to all happen alongside Dalinar's flashbacks (and his recovered memories) instead alongside Szeth's flashbacks and his plot, a big chunk of which was moved to book five.

Badloss

I love, love Brandon Sanderson but I feel like every time he needs a "magic word" he just takes two regular words and jams them together.

Dreamshard, Shardblade, Shardplate, Lightweaving, Mistborn, Coinshot, Pewterarm, Coppercloud, Surgebinder, Soulcaster, etc etc etc

Sorry u/Mistborn I still love you

Brandon Sanderson

It's done intentionally. Let's look at our options.

I can create all-out fantasy words for terms like this. (Lait or crem from Stormlight are examples.) Problem is, the more you do this, the more you pile a difficult linguistics on top of a reader. The more words like this they have to learn, the more difficult it is to get into a story. If you were doing it, perhaps you'd go this direction. I feel that overloading on these terms is dangerous. Already, the main reason new readers put down my books is that they feel overwhelmed by the worldbuilding.

So we have the second option. Use a latin, germatic, or greek root and create a word that FEELS right, has some mental connection for the reader, but which isn't a real word. Allomancy/Feruchemy/Hemalurgy. Veristitalian. To a lesser extent, Elantris.

This so called "Harry Potter Spells" method gives some familiarity to the naming, makes them stick a little better in people's heads, which makes the books a little easier to get into. But they're also distracting to some readers who say, "Wait. There's no Latin in this world, so where did Latin root words come from?" And for others (particularly in translation) those roots mean nothing, and so these all end up lumped into the first group.

The final method is the pure Germanic method--creating compound words. It works in English very well because of our Germanic roots--and is one of the main ways (other than turning nouns into verbs or the other direction) that we create new words. Supermarket. Masterpiece. Newspaper. Thunderstorm. Footprint. Firework. Heartbeat. Yourself. None of those look odd to you because they are words that are "meant" to go together in your head.

I use some of batch one, some of batch two, but I do favor batch three--it does what I want it to. Works in the language, has an "otherworld" feel but is also very quickly understood by someone new to the series. There are arguments for all three methods, however.

Phantine

You can also just go the route of using an English word despite it clearly not being accurate.

"He tied a ribbon around his horse's third antennae, and patted its chitinous flank."

Brandon Sanderson

Agreed. Re-contextualizing English words can work too--I find it particularly useful to do what I mentioned above. Take a verb and make it a noun or vice versa. Or use a verb in a way that you normally don't. (Awakeners or Lashings are examples from my work, though Spice from Dune is one of the grand-daddy examples of this. As it is for a lot of fantastical linguistics.)

Blightsong

Can Odium change written word on Roshar like Ruin could on Scadrial?

Brandon Sanderson

*apprehensive* This is not really a thing that Odium does. Um, yea.

Brandon Sanderson

Something massive crashed through the wall of my house

Some notes on the chapter itself. First off, the car crashing into the room was one of the later edits to the book. Originally, I just had Alcatraz go with Grandpa Smedry in that scene when he looks out at the car on the curb.

This scene–the original–bothered me for a couple of reasons. It seemed out of character, for one thing. I mean, why would Alcatraz go with the crazy old man? He didn’t believe Grandpa Smedry, and thought he was crazy. I needed more of a reason. On top of that, it seemed like the pacing of the book was just a bit too slow at this point. I needed something to increase the tension. So, poof. A gun (this guy was originally going to show up later), a car crashing through the wall, and an escape. I’m pleased with the changes.

Chris King

How and when are you planning on releasing Sixth of the Dusk, the cosmere short story you wrote for Writing Excuses?

Brandon Sanderson

Once the entire Writing Excuses team have finished their stories. If you're not familiar we did this thing were each brainstormed a story on air and then we went and wrote them and now we are doing revisions on them. Well, Mary went and I wrote ours, Dan and Howard didn't write theirs... but they're catching up... Once they are all done, we will release them together in an anthology. We will do, the workshopping episodes that we did, we workshopped each others stories, and you'll be able to on Writing Excuses read the rough draft, because that will be included in the anthology, listen to the episode where we workshop it and then read the final draft, which will be in the anthology and get the whole— see what we changed and things like that.

Bobby2797

You once said that you want to explore in your books how humans change in their behavior and personality when living several hundred or a thousand years. Many of these characters in your books go mad: for example, the Heralds or the Lord Ruler. But still, Hoid seems as "normal" as someone can be after such a long time. Is there any reason why he didn't become "mad"?

Brandon Sanderson

It's more that what happened to the others, something is wrong, if that makes sense. What's going with the Heralds, the supernatural madness of the Heralds is related to their specific situation. With the Lord Ruler, I don't think what happened to the Lord Ruler... His is a really interesting situation. I would say that it is not supernatural; it is his isolationist attitude, the pressures placed upon him, and things like that. It's a very normal type of mental... I don't want to call it mental illness, but you know what I mean. A conventional mental illness, if you will, exacerbated by extreme periods spent alone and isolating self. And that's where you get what happened to him.

Questioner

Had you planned to write... the whole Cosmere when you initially started?

Brandon Sanderson

So, I wrote Elantris, had a bunch of the ideas. I started planning right then, and it has evolved a lot since. A lot of Elantris kind of got retrofitted into the things I came up with over the next four or five years... By the time I did Mistborn, I had most of this in mind, but it changes so much, even while I'm writing it. 

Questioner

So, like, when you had Warbreaker, it was--

Brandon Sanderson

Warbreaker, I wrote as a prequel to Stormlight. I had already written Stormlight One by that point, but I didn't like it, so I wrote about Kaladin's swordmaster, who was in the first book in that version.

Argent

You mention... No you didn't mention Arthur Clarke. The guy with the "Any sufficiently advanced technology is distinguishable from magic" ...In, at least, one of the Mistborn trilogies you are probably going to have to deal with the distinction between magic and technology. So can you talk a little about how you are going to address that?

Brandon Sanderson

So yeah, addressing the-- This is a really good question, thank you. So Clarke's Law says that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Right? And this is kind of a science fiction truism that we use in writing. It's a really cool concept when you think about it. But he asks "Well we're pushing the Mistborn trilogy more and more towards science fiction--"

For those who don't know, I pitched the Mistborn trilogy to my editor, long ago--this was 2003 when I pitched it to him-- I pitched it as a trilogy of trilogies. An epic fantasy trilogy that then after the epic fantasy trilogy we would jump hundreds of years and do an urban fantasy trilogy in a more modern setting, where all of the events of the epic fantasy trilogy became the foundation of religion and superstition and even culture to a modern society. What if our heritage were something like The Lord of the Rings? And then I was going to write a science fiction trilogy where... magic became the means by which space travel is possible. So there is, built-in to Allomancy, Feruchemy, and Hemalurgy, FTL-capability. *audience mutters* *nervously* It's not there yet don't worry. *laughter*

Argent

Somebody found the rabbit-hole.

Brandon Sanderson

That's all RAFO's. I'm not answering any of that.

So I did Alloy-era, by the way, as a stop-gap between the epic fantasy and the modern because I wanted something smaller-- The modern trilogy is going to be very thick books, and I wanted something to balance Stormlight while I was doing the first five Stormlight...

So he's asking how I'm going to deal with this whole collision... between science and magic. So there's a-- I don't know if corollary is the right term. Probably not, but there's a version of Clarke's Law which you inverse. And you say "Any sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from science". In the cosmere the magic is science. What I would call-- say is science fantasy because we've added to the Laws of Thermodynamics. We have this other thing called Investiture, which is what powers all the magic. Which is the souls of the things they call gods, their substance. And you can change matter or energy into Investiture and back. And so we've got a third circle in the old Laws of Thermodynamics and so because of that it's science fantasy. I would still call this fantasy because science fiction is where they go "We're going to take the Laws of Thermodynamics and try to explain what we can do using them" I'm like "No, we're just going to add to them, right?" But yeah that's where we're going. There will be a collision of that but it's really going to be-- To them it's indistinguishable, once you get far enough along, that it really is science.

Kurkistan

<Gives text of original conversation with Brandon>

To restate the scenario in more understandable terms (phase 2 is to use diagrams, if it comes to it and I still don't manage to get it across):

Say Cory the cork-thrower is standing besides a train track. Cory is facing North and the train is running from West to East. Cory tosses a cork North up over a passing train. Normally, this cork would go over the train and land on the ground directly opposite Cory to the North.

From the frame of reference of Cory and his cork, the train is moving West->East. From the frame of reference of the train, the train isn't moving at all and the cork is moving both South->North and East->West (i.e., Northwest). So if we were to draw a line describing the cork's movement, Cory's line would have the cork moving South->North over a moving train. The train's line would have the cork travelling Southeast->Northwest as it described a diagonal across the train.

If there's a bubble on the train, that's where things get complicated. When the bubble hits the cork, does the train's frame of reference "take over" so far as it's direction of travel goes? So far as the train is concerned, nothing really changes: the cork is still describing that same diagonal, just more quickly/slowly. But so far as Cory and his cork are concerned, all the sudden the cork is moving laterally (East->West) corresponding to the train's frame of reference. The question, then, is where the cork lands when all's said and done: does it still land directly North of Cory after it passes over the train, or does it land a bit to the West or East as well?

-----

My thoughts/model on this would be that it also lands West/East. If the bubble was a bendalloy bubble, then the corks diagonal passage would be accelerated, meaning that it pops out of the bubble off to the West of where it would have otherwise. A cadmium bubble would still move the cork to the West according to its frame of reference, but because of how slow the bubble itself is in motion the cork would still end up East of Cory.

Peter Ahlstrom

The bubble's frame of reference would take over while it's inside. But you also need to include the fact that bubbles deflect things. The cork would be deflected both when it enters and when it leaves the bubble. So you can't completely predict the path it will take.

Kurkistan

<At this point the conversation kept on for a bit as things grew... complicated. We misunderstood one another [which I take the blame for] on several crucial fronts and ended up talking past one another. Long story short is that I'd been implicitly assuming absolute relativity of reference frames in the cork-bubble system—so while both types of bubble would drag the cork along for a bit, that dragging would also be offset (to varying degrees based on bubble type/compression) by lateral movement of the cork within the bubble. This is wrong.>

Peter Ahlstrom

If the train is moving east, and he throws the cork over the train, a bubble that slows the cork down will mean the cork ends up east of him.

If the train is moving east, and he throws the cork over the train, a bubble that speeds the cork up will mean the cork ends up on the other side of the train faster than it would have with no bubble. It doesn't move west.

If the speed bubble only very slightly increases the flow of time, then the cork could even end up slightly east of him, depending on the speed of the train.

So depending on the speed or slowness of the bubble, and the speed of the train, the cork will either end up exactly where the thrower expects it to, but more quickly, slightly east of where he expects, but more quickly, or quite a bit east of where he expects, more slowly. The cork doesn't move west.

In fact, I think it's safe to assume that the train is always moving to the east faster than the thrower is throwing the cork to the north. In that case, both types of bubbles will always end up pushing the cork at least somewhat to the east.

Let's do the math here.

Say the bubble is 10 feet in diameter and the cork toss hits the bubble right in the center. He tossed the cork at 5mph. The bubble is 2x speed. That means the cork goes 10 mph across the train (measuring from the frame of reference of the tosser). The train is moving at 50 mph. The cork crosses the train in 0.682 seconds. In that time the train moves 50 feet to the east. So the cork ends up 50 feet to the east of where the tosser expected it to.

If the bubble is 100x speed, the cork goes 500mph across the train, and in that time the train moves 1 foot. The cork ends up 1 foot to the east of where the tosser expected it to, but much faster than he expected.

If the bubble is 1/2 speed, then the cork goes 2.5 mph across the train. The cork crosses the train in 2.727 seconds. In that time the train goes 200 feet to the east. The cork ends up 200 feet to the east of where the tosser thought it would end up.

If the bubble is 1/100 speed, then the cork goes 0.05 mph across the train. The train moves 1.9 miles in the time it takes the cork to cross the train. The tosser has no idea where it ends up, but he watches it hovering over the train as the train goes off into the distance.

...

As far as the cork is concerned, it can't tell the difference whether it's moving through a stationary bubble or a (laterally) moving bubble. From the cork's point of view it moves in a straight line either way.

Kurkistan

<Some doodles got involved at one point or another, and it was also confirmed that the path of the cork (barring refraction) would stay the same once it left the bubble, still going directly north>

17th Shard

Ok, fair enough. Do you have a scene you enjoyed more than the rest, and on the flip side, was their something that you did not enjoy?

Brandon Sanderson

I will say that I really loved doing all the interludes because they gave me a sense, when I was writing this book, of jumping to something new, which is part of what kept me going in all of this. Are they my favorite scenes in the book? No, but they were probably my favorite to write because it's like I get to take a break and write something whacky and looney, so to speak.

Hmm…is there anything that was harder? You know, revisions are always hard. In the next to last draft I changed Dalinar's arc very substantially, and that was a hard write. And, you know, Adolin was not originally a viewpoint character, so there was a lot of hard writing there. So, poor Adolin probably gets the badge for hardest to write. Not because he as a character was hard to write but because I was having to repurpose scenes and toss out scenes and rewrite them with Adolin as the viewpoint character and so on to add just a little more dimension to Dalinar's plot arc.

Questioner

How is the Mistborn screenplay going? What's it like adapting your own work from over a decade ago?

Brandon Sanderson

I've been running the screenplay through my writing group, and they've got some great feedback. The biggest challenge right now with the screenplay is actually with Vin's character. This is because a lot of what you get to know about Vin in the course of Mistborn is really internally motivated. She's actually pretty quiet, rather shy for someone who does what she does. And keeps a lot of her emotions and thoughts close to her heart. That is hard to show in a screenplay. And really difficult to pull off in an action/adventure screenplay, where you need people to be moving and things like this. And the danger is having Vin come across as just an Artful Dodger. As this confident street thief. Which was the first version of Vin that I wrote, trying to pull of in the books and then failed. This is just one chapter, before I wrote the book. She was kind of your more generic street thief, your Aladdin, your Artful Dodger. And Vin didn't work that way. It, partially, was too generic. Not that those characters are generic; they've just been genericized, they've been done so much. So I tried this other version, this non-self-confident version of Vin that had this really interesting dynamic going on inside of her about wanting to trust, but not being sure if she could. And that really made the book work. Getting that across in the screenplay: super hard. So that's been the challenge.

Fitting it into screenplay format has actually not been hard. I haven't written the screenplay yet; this is all in the treatment stage.

How is it adapting something that I wrote over ten years ago now? It's actually been, in some ways, liberating. Because I have enough distance from it, I can see structurally the things that I can change, I think, easier than if I'd been closer to it. But also a little bit hard, because it is something so long ago, I have to keep going back to the book and reading sections of the book and reminding myself of things that I wrote in the book. Like, the scene where Vin and Elend meet is one of my favorite scenes in the book, but I still had to go back and reread that scene to get it into the treatment, because I had forgotten the actual dialogue cues, and things like that.

So, yeah, it's a challenge, but it's also liberating.

learhpa

Far in the future, after all the people in The Lost Metal are dead and gone, does someone maintain the ritual of changing Wayne's hat every year? Does it become some sort of civic custom like the ceremonial lighting of a Christmas tree?

Brandon Sanderson

*laughter* Absolutely. That's what I imagined.

Questioner

Is Eshonai going to be a Radiant? You mentioned in the beginning that there's going to be ten books, ten Radiants - and Eshonai's book is one of them...

Brandon Sanderson

So. In the past, parshmen were - Parshendi were not allowed to become Knights Radiant. However, what I said, might imply that that could change.

Brandon Sanderson

Elend and Vin Visit Sazed in Turn to Ask about Relationships

I didn't want this scene to feel too much like a sitcom, and I tried hard to make it realistic. But having both Vin, then Elend come to Sazed with their problems has some inherent issues. It feels a little comedic, and perhaps too coincidental.

However, despite those problems, I really like the scenes. They show off the difference in the two characters, and particularly show how Elend has changed over the course of the book. He comes in, confident, ordering people about even as he asks for advice. Vin is more hesitant. Her confidence is in other matters, and here she has trouble expressing herself. It's a nice reversal.

However, the fact that both of them think first of Sazed, and that both of them just really need to speak their minds—without him doing much more than confirm things they already felt—shows again how similar they are.

And I really do think the key and lock speech is one of the most wise things Sazed has ever said.

Jake 1802

Has writing any of the Secret Projects changed any of the plot points or plans for upcoming Cosmere books?

Brandon Sanderson

Not appreciable, except for: I've been able to expand a few worlds, I've been able to build out some side characters that I'd had in the back of my head. I am sure you will see references to these planets in future books, where you wouldn't have if I hadn't written these, almost assuredly. That's part of it.

And then, Secret Project Four, which you guys don't know much about yet (but you will get to, coming up soon), that does have more Cosmere implications. It's something I've been wanting to do. But once I get a book done, I feel way more confident in... because all the various things that could happen, one of them has solidified into actually happening.

Cheyenne Sedai

I'm really curious about Boatload of Mummies because Brandon did mention on his updates that you'd worked on it for NaNoWriMo for the past couple of years which is really cool. And the title is incredible. I don't know if that's gonna be the final title, but that's what it's always been referred to. How have you been doing with that?

Isaac Stewart

Thanks for asking us. It's a project that I love. So I finished it. Finished a draft in September of last year. It's rough. It's a really rough draft. There's a lot of things that I'm still working through. I'm trying to narrow down the shape of the plot in a way because there's a little bit of--it wasn't inspired necessarily by these things, but it was after the fact that I realized, "Oh, it's part this, part that." It's sort of begins King Kong, if you imagined getting people on a boat. And then it continues as Death on the Nile. Then you get to a portion on an island. And then it ends The Mummy. And throw in a healthy dose of Venom. So it's like, "Okay, am I doing too much here?" And that's kind of where I'm at. You know, is this even a thing? Have I thrown too much in? Is this too much of a storyline? And i don't think it is. It really is in the end kind of a Raiders of the Lost Arc sort of story. You could pull out those some of those same elements and say, "Raiders of the Lost Arc starts out King Kong." But the basic plot line is there. There's going to be scenes in the current draft that are basically finished. I don't think they're going to change too much from the version that it is right now to the end.

Will it be called Boatload of Mummies? Probably not. I can't see that as a title of a Cosmere book, right? But we can affectionately call it Boatload of Mummies as long as we want. The working title is Book of Nails. And whether there's a series title or not, we'll have to figure that out if it's a story that people want to continue learning about.

But let me tell you Nicki Savage is so much fun to write. Don't expect exactly what you get from the broadsheets because she is writing to a particular audience, and has learned some skills from Allomancer Jack--though I do think Allomancer Jack's stories might be closer to the truth than Nicki's are.

You will see parallels between this story and some of the elements that are in the broadsheets. But she's basically: if you can imagine a Mary Poppins. who is incredibly interested in the supernatural, and is not afraid to beat up people. That's basically your character right there. And she's just, she's a load of fun. A boatload of fun.

Cheyenne Sedai

I imagine from what you've said that you still wouldn't be ready to give us what could eventually function as a back of the book blurb?

Isaac Stewart

During the first NaNoWriMo that I worked on it we had to come up with our elevator pitch on that, and I wrote the Readers Digest, TV Guide version of it, and it was "A woman with a strange, magical power journeys to an island to find a mythical book that might raise the dead." Something like that.

This particular book is interesting because... How do I pitch this when it's a spin off of a different series. It's a spin-off from Mistborn, technically. But it's not a Mistborn book. You can't pitch that to somebody who doesn't know Mistborn. And that's been some of the fun in trying to figure this out is "How do I tell a different story here, but then have to reintroduce how Allomancy works? But now in this era, we know about Allomancy, we know about Feruchemy, we know about Hemalurgy. We have crossovers from other worlds. How do you write this book without confusing somebody entirely without... "There's like 50 magic systems in here, and I don't understand." And that then goes into the pitch. How do you pitch this book? People who know the Cosmere, you just say it's set on Scadrial, but it's not really a Misborn book. It's just hard to encapsulate and someday I'll figure it out.

BrandonColevander

Is Dalanar just Seeing visions or is he visiting/interacting in the past a-la Quantum Leap?

Peter Ahlstrom

They are essentially visions. They don't change the past or create alternate timelines or anything like that.

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Twelve

The Alcatraz Smedry you think you know is a farce.

And now we get the cynical side of Alcatraz’s character growth. It was an interesting experiment, writing this book from the perspective of someone looking back. I knew what I wanted to have happened in Alcatraz’s life (remember, when I changed the book to first person, I’d done a lot more worldbuilding and planning for the series than I had when I originally wrote it). And I knew where he would end up by the time he was older. (I peg the narrator at about eighteen years old.)

So I knew that he’d look at some of these events–such as Alcatraz learning to be a leader–with a sneer. I had to get that across without undermining the power of the actual event, which is why I’ve worked so hard to make the narrator seem a little untrustworthy. You see how he reacts to his young self, but hopefully you don’t see the young Alcatraz in the same way.

Brandon Sanderson

Part Three: Updates on Primary Projects

Stormlight

Book Five (now called just Wind and Truth) is basically done in rough draft form. I’m writing this update on the 2nd of December, and I assume by the time this goes live on my birthday that I’ll be very, very close—if not done already.

I do want to warn you that Horneater (the novella about Rock) will not be part of the Words of Radiance crowdfunding campaign. Why not? Well, I’ve realized that I would like to be able to write that sometime in the next couple of years when I’m missing Roshar, and want to jump back to tell a story there.

I don’t know when this will be though. It will likely be between one of the upcoming Mistborn Era Three novels. So…we’ll see. But I don’t want to offer it to you in the campaign since I don’t know when I’ll be writing it. (Sorry.)

Once I finish Wind and Truth, the Stormlight Archive novels will go on hiatus as I write the next few projects listed.

Mistborn

Era Two is finished as of last year, and my next mainline Cosmere project after Wind and Truth is Era Three, along with the long-awaited Elantris sequels.

I expect to start Ghostbloods (the name of the Era Three series) on January 1st, 2025. Half of next year will be revisions on Stormlight, and the rest I’ll spend catching up on things (like doing a White Sand prose novel update) that I’ve let languish a little too much lately.

Cytoverse

Skyward is done! Please, if you haven’t picked up a copy of Defiant, consider doing so. This has been my best received, best selling, and best reviewed non-Cosmere work. I’m extremely pleased with how it turned out.

Janci is taking the reins for a sequel series we’re calling Skyward Legacy. And so I’m going to let her put a section in here talking about it!

Janci Patterson

Janci here! By the time you’re reading this, I should have turned in the first draft of the first book in the Skyward Legacy trilogy. I’m working on the end of the climax now, and I’m thrilled with how it’s turning out. I’m very happy with the book, and am looking forward to revising it over the next few months to get it into publishable shape.

The series begins a few months after the ending of Defiant. The working title of book one is Blightfall (this is not the final title, so don’t be surprised if it changes!), and the book follows Skyward Flight, now a special forces unit, from the perspectives of Sadie and Arturo. The humans of Detritus are no longer prisoners or rebels, but full citizens ready to take their place on the galactic stage. Skyward Flight’s first responsibility is to help the DDF Diplomatic Corps make contact with other humans in the old Superiority human preserves—and what they find there may pose a new threat to their alliances, their galactic reputation, and the future of humanity itself.

My intention for this series is for it to be all the things you love about Skyward while continuing the stories of many familiar characters. I hope you’ll give it read when book one comes out!

Brandon Sanderson

The Four Secret Projects

I thought I’d put this here to interrupt any questions. I do intend all four of the Secret Projects to be standalone stories! You might see these characters again, but for now let’s just allow them to be something currently rare in the fantasy/sf world: books meant to be read on their own, and enjoyed without sequels.

Questioner (paraphrased)

Do you prefer writing epic fantasy or young adult?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

My first love is epic fantasy, but if I only did that, I'd go crazy. I have to change basically every other book and like to be able to jump around.

Djarskublar

So, say you have a gold/gold Twinborn and they worldhop to Roshar and they study the magic and do the whole Khriss and Nazh thing for a while so they know a lot about the magic, but they've also left themselves a lot of options with what they can do. So then they manage to pull up a gold shadow of them having actually become a Surgebinder and then kind of meld themselves with that shadow a bunch, could they change their Cognitive Identity enough so that they could, like, tap a lot of gold and grow the spren and actually be a Surgebinder?

Brandon Sanderson

Unfortunately, no. It's a good question, but no. That won't work for a couple of reasons. One of which is, simply creating Investiture is not something that can happen, right?

Djarskublar

They are a gold Twinborn, so they can tap a lot of gold...

Brandon Sanderson

They can tap a whole bunch, that's true, they can do that, but simply having it is not gonna create a spren because the spren is from a different god, right, a different Shard.

Djarskublar

So if they had Regrowth cast on them, would that do it?

Brandon Sanderson

*hems and haws for a second*

Djarskublar

A really, really big Regrowth, like in the middle of a Highstorm.

Brandon Sanderson

Hmmm, this, you are getting to the realm of plausibility at that point. I still don't think gold is the way to do it. I think you just get all that Investiture. It would become sapient by you sticking a whole bunch of Investiture in, and then you can bond to that. But it's not like people gain what you would have done. Does that make sense? That's just what's going to happen, is you're gonna, you can create a, potentially create a spren that way, but you are more likely to end up with something like Nightblood. But you could potentially create a spren, but I mean you're just gonna end up...

Djarskublar

So there are other, more optimal ways to do that?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, go bond a spren. (evil grin of course)

Djarskublar

But you can't easily bond multiple, and if you did this you could maybe get multiple.

Brandon Sanderson

Nyeaaahhh... The spren still has to choose. If you want to be a Surgebinder, the choice is being made. You can't fake your way into it. Decision and Honor are too much a part of Surgebinding for you to be able to fake your way into that. Other magics you might be able to do that. Other magics that don't require, like... Surgebinding works because a piece of Honor or Cultivation or a mix has chosen you specifically. There is will from the actual Investiture involved in it in Roshar. So it's not something you can cheat your way into, right. But cheating your way into Breath might be easier.

MoriWillow

Hello, I was hoping to find out whether some stuff I found vague in RoW was supposed to be vague or not.

In part one, Navani says that some of the fabrials they found in Urithiru worked in ways they understood, but had "spren trapped in Shadesmar" (which by the end we know refers to spren that have manifested as a fabrial), with Soulcasters being the only ones that confuse her.

Is the intent here supposed to be for us to make the connection that the older fabrials they found use the different types of metals used in modern fabrials? Or is it supposed to be vague how exactly they compare for now?

Brandon Sanderson

The confusion here is that Navani didn't realize that Soulcasters were a version of something like a Shardblade. She thought that by seeing spren in Shadesmar, it meant that the soulcasters had somehow trapped a spren--but they didn't seem to be trapped in a gemstone anywhere in the physical realm. This is what bugged her.

It's less about the metal, and more about "where is the trapped spren? I know it's there--I can see it in Shadesmar."

MoriWillow

Does this mean that all the old manifested spren fabrials, like the attractors and conjoiners they found in Urithiru and were able to improve, had weird metals like Soulcasters and it was just their identifiable functions that kept them from being confusing?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, that is correct. (This was regarding old manifested fabrials having weird metals as part of them.)

Questioner

Syl always sees Shardblades as dead spren, these terrible things. But she never mentions the same of Shardplate. Is Shardplate made of non-sentient spren?

Brandon Sanderson

RAFO

LoneWarmonger

If you take Bondsmith Honorblade, will you be able repeat Dalinar's Perpendicularity trick, or it is something special only Dalinar can do for a different reason?

When Dalinar repairs temple does he use Bondsmith power or...something else? If first, which Surge does he use?

Brandon Sanderson

RAFO!

LoneWarmonger

I expected to get RAFO...But is Oathbringer a Bondsmith book or Skybreaker book? I know it was supposed to be Szeth/Skybreaker, but changed to Dalinar/Bondsmith. And still we learnt more about Skybreakers than Dalinar and his strange abilities. Will book 5 have more of Dalinar?

Brandon Sanderson

Books 5 will have a lot of Dalinar. Once it is out, you'll be able to see why it could have been a Bondsmith book--but I think it's better this way, with Book 3 being the Bondsmith book.

LoneWarmonger

Thank you, Mr Sanderson, I'm pleased with the choice, but I guess, I just wanted to learn more about Dalinar's powers in his book, he's my favorite character. Even after HIS book, his abilities are a mystery. But I'm exited to hear I'll get more in the future. Please, don't keep Dalinar on the background, he's the best.

Brandon Sanderson

Note that book four may see less of him, as he steps back a little (like each of the characters will for a book or two here and there) but book five has him as a focus again.

Wantsometrufflesmate

Nale’s nuts sounds like something a world hopper would say...... I mean there aren’t any nut producing plants on Roshar so how would. (Someone’s) nuts be a saying?

Brandon Sanderson

In these cases, you should assume one of two things.

1. It's a linguistic holdover. I like using a lot of these in Stormlight. Human languages still have a lot of terms in them that reference the world they used to live on. (See Hoid's discussion of the word "hound" in one of the books.)

2. We're doing our best to translate into English a phrase that doesn't really work in our language.

Basically, whichever is easier for your suspension of disbelief. With this, I'd say it's likely they said "Nale's Rockbuds" but it's just awkward in English, so when the book was changed from Alethi to English, the translator (me) picked something that conveyed the same meaning.

Pagerunner (paraphrased)

I asked Isaac to personalize my cosmere system chart set with snarky comments from Nazh complaining about every planet.

Isaac Stewart (paraphrased)

He said that they were not canon, but he would write them. For several, he made interesting comments about them.

Threnody: "Would love to get back here, if you'd just loan me that thing." This is the one that's the least canon of all of them. Isaac has some ideas about what the "thing" might be that Nazh wants, but he hasn't run any of them past Brandon yet.

Taldain: "Darkside parties are the best!" After he wrote it, Isaac noticed that it wasn't a complaint, but he said that it was true and that we'd see why.

Sel: "I cannot tell you how much I hate Sel. Yet you keep sending me back, you sadist." Before he wrote it, isaac said that Nazh had been stuck on Sel before, so he had a special dislike for this planet.

Nalthis: "Too colorful. It makes me sick... Shadows!"

Drominad: "Do not skinny dip on First... just warning you!"

Scadrial: "This place just hasn't been the same since the change in management."

Roshar: "Aggh... This place again? It smells like fish."

Overlord

Now that you are self publishing - has it given you a new found respect for those who have been self publishing from the beginning? I mean, now you are no doubt speaking with printers, typesetters, cover artists, reviewers, convention organisers. I guess you are having to market your own titles as well (although you've always been a great author for self promotion). Also, has the amount of work surprised you?

Brandon Sanderson

Well, I get to cheat. I've done well enough that I have a full-time assistant with a lot of experience in desktop publishing. So, I can hand him the book, and he can take it to design town. That said, we on the more traditional track have had to do some eating of our words in recent years. Once upon a time there was a large stigma to self-publishing, and we all kind of got infected by it. So when it became viable as a real, serious alternative for authors, we had trouble getting rid of our biases.

I wouldn't say the amount of work has surprised me, as I've paid attention to those self-publishing. I teach a writing and publishing class, and I've found that as publishing changes, I've had to keep my eyes on what it takes to publish reasonably on your own. I also know how much work goes into publishing a book on the publisher's end, and had no illusions about how much work it would take us.

Paleo

The people in the Central Dominance speak a sort of French accent. Is that still the case in the Wax&Wayne era?

Brandon Sanderson

It has mostly changed. I mean there are still some French regions, but there are some Germanic regions also and things. It is no longer just the same positioning, it's more kind of, well, like your family heritage and things like that.

Pagerunner

I was at the Houston signing, and Brandon referred me to you on a few technical questions that I was asking him, since he he was quite "brain dead."

First was what Surges the Bondsmiths have. Based on the ordering in the Ars Arcanum in WoR and OB, they should have Tension. But the application of the shared Surge we saw for both Stonewards and Bondsmiths in OB looks to line up more with Brandon's previous description of Cohesion from the Words of Radiance tour. (https://wob.coppermind.net/events/223/#e6061, although he did identify it as a Willshaper Surge there.) Brandon believed it was an error in the Ars Arcanum, and that Bondsmiths do have Cohesion, but he told me to confirm that with you.

Peter Ahlstrom

What power did you see in the book that Bondsmiths and Stonewards share?

Pagerunner

In Chapter 38:

The Shardbearer pressed his hand against the incline leading up to the Voidbringer, and again the stone seemed to writhe. Steps formed in the rock, as if it were made of wax that could flow and be shaped.

...

"And that Shardbearer I saw? A Herald?"

No. Merely a Stoneward. The Surge that changed the stone is the other you may learn, though it may serve you differently.

Which seems to align with how Brandon has previously described Cohesion in the past, as opposed to Tension.

I assume this Surge is what Dalinar used to repair the temple of Talenel in Chapter 59, but that's not actually essential to the point.

Peter Ahlstrom

I think this has to be an error in the text.

Pagerunner

Sorry, which do you think is the error? The order of Surges in the Ars Arcanum? Or the Stormfather's statement to Dalinar?

Peter Ahlstrom

The Stormfather's statement.

Peter Ahlstrom

I have verified with Brandon that what the Stormfather said here is wrong and will be corrected in the future.

Questioner

So Wayne is my absolute favorite character. What was your main inspiration for him?

Brandon Sanderson

Wayne started with a character, I wanted to do someone who changed personalities based on the hat they wore, and it actually started as a haberdasher, a hat maker, and as a character staring in his own story in the Mistborn world and it didn't work. He needed somebody to play off of and so I shelved it and started The Alloy of Law where he could have somebody to play off of. Wax actually grew out of Wayne.

Questioner (paraphrased)

In Shallan, in the beginning and middle of the book it's 10 heartbeats, and in the end of the book it's none...?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

The 10 heartbeats is required to revive a dead Shardblade.

Questioner (paraphrased)

But he wasn't dead the whole time.

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

He wasn't.  But perception-- all magic systems in the Cosmere are based on perception-what you think you can do. For instance, Kaladin can't get healed because he sees himself as having a wounded forehead with the scars and that can't vanish because his perception is in the way.

Rasarr

Could a Seeker detect a Shardbearer? For example, could Vin detect Adolin's Shardblade?

Brandon Sanderson

That detects Kinetic Investiture, Investiture that's being used actively, so in the summoning process, you'd probably get a blip on that, but not just looking at someone and seeing it.

Windrunner

/u/Mistborn (Brandon) said that Eshonai will be the flashback character in Book 4. (source), which would indicate that she's probably still alive in some form.

But we'll see. He could've changed it or that could've been a diversion from Venli being the actual flashback character.

Brandon Sanderson

Eshonai is the flashback character--but she is dead in the present. I've warned people multiple times that we WILL have flashbacks to the viewpoints of characters who have died.

Questioner

If Shardblades were spren, then what is Shardplate?

Brandon Sanderson

Good question. It's a great question.

Questioner

And you're not going to say are you?

Brandon Sanderson

I'm not going to answer you.

Brandon Sanderson

Interrogation And Torture

“Foolish, foolish Alcatraz” is a nod to Jeff Smith’s Bone. Give it a read, if you haven’t.

Also of note is Sing’s comment when Alcatraz is talking to Ms. Fletcher. Sing notes that Alcatraz is a little bit snide. That quip, for some reason, has been a favorite of readers ever since the first draft. I’m not completely sure why. Yes, it’s fun, but it seems to have gotten undue attention as a laugher. Sometimes you just can’t judge what will work for people and what won’t–or what will work really, really well.

And since I’m talking about little things here, let me mention Grandpa Smedry. Of course he shows up late, after Alcatraz gets tortured.

I worried that having the main character get tortured like this might be too graphic for a children’s book–but then I remembered some of the things I’ve read in children’s books lately. It seems to me that you shouldn’t pull punches because of the audience. There are words I change to make the vocabulary work for the age group, and some types of humor don’t work as well, but I don’t like talking down to anyone, even babies who can’t speak yet. Successful novels are ones that treat their readers with respect, regardless of age.

Alcatraz needed to go through this (and I know, it’s not really that graphic). It’s what the story needed. Heroes do get themselves into trouble. If standing up for people were easy, what would be the point of bravery?

Questioner

Aether, is that how you say the book? ...Aether of Night? Is that going to get published at some point?

Brandon Sanderson

I will probably bring that into the mainline Cosmere. Right now, it's not in continuity because I've changed enough things about the way that Shards work, and things like that. The aethers themselves are in continuity. Mraize has some aether-- some bits of aether, in his little collection. They are in continuity somewhere, but I haven't dropped them into the actual continuity.

Peter Ahlstrom

Elhokar's eyes were described as two different colors in different places in the first book. It also said that he looked very much like his father. So we decided to change his eye color to match Gavilar's. We need to update the first book.

Questioner

In all the Cosmere books, on all their worlds, the only thing <brazenly> different about the ecosystems than Earth are the things affected by magic. So, in one of the books, you mentioned, like, a dolphin. Why is everything the same?

Brandon Sanderson

So, there's an in-world answer and an out-of-world answer. The out-of-world answer is that every book has something we call a learning curve, so that is what makes it harder to get into the book. And learning curves, usually, if they're written well, have great payoffs, but also act like a brick wall when getting into your book. And so certain books, I have designed to have shallower learning curves, so you can focus on learning all these new characters, and the situations, and the political situation, but not have to learn entirely new terminology for the setting.

In-world, most of these worlds were created by people or... who came from an original world. For instance, there was a planet that the gods from Scadrial (the planet of Mistborn), they came from this world, and they created what they had seen there. So the animal life there, they just created in their own world, because that was what they had a pattern for.

So in-world, there's a reason, they're all connected. But you'll notice that some of the ones with the steeper learning curve are the ones that have the weirder world, and Way of Kings has the steepest.

Questioner

On Roshar, the only area that isn't affected by the Highstorms, Shinovar, is basically like Earth, where everything else has changed.

Brandon Sanderson

That gives us a little bit of a frame of reference to contrast things with. There's some in-world things about that you'll learn eventually, but it gets us some ways for you to be like, "Oh. The grass looks like this because it is so different from the grass that this girl is pointing out. It's grass like ours." It's very helpful for establishing a conversation topic.

Questioner 1

Lashing really hurts my mechanical, engineering brain because the math is off with your descriptions.

Brandon Sanderson

What do you mean?

Questioner 1

So, a full Lashing changes your gravitational pull, right?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah.

Questioner 1

Well if you were doing the math on that...

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah...

Questioner 1

...a full Lashing would be two times.

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, yeah. That's just their shorthand. *interrupting questioner* It's just their shorthand. I'm fully aware of that.

Questioner 2

Drives him so mad!

Brandon Sanderson

Does it?

Questioner 1

I always see the statics *inaudible* in my head.

Brandon Sanderson

If it helps, in the third book where Bridge Four is practicing, they have an argument over that very point.

Questioner 1

Oh, do they?

Brandon Sanderson

So there are certain people who think the way you think.

Questioner 1

Uh-huh.

Brandon Sanderson

That a full Lashing should make you float.

Questioner 1

Mmm-- it's-- yeah.

Brandon Sanderson

Mhm. But it's-- when I wrote it that way it was so confusing for alpha readers and they thought a double lashing should make him go up double speed.

Questioner 2

*in the background* They're not as technical.

Brandon Sanderson

And so I figured Szeth doesn't have the mathematics background to have that argument. But you do get to have it in the next book.

Questioner 1

Yeah, okay. Every time I... *interrupted*

Brandon Sanderson

So there's at least an acknowledgement of it for you.

Questioner 2

Thanks Brandon.

Brandon Sanderson

So a full Lashing means double gravitational pull upward.

p0staldave

I believe I've heard you mention more than once that you weren't happy with WoK, could you explain a bit exactly what you would change or love to do-over with it or expand on your comments?

Brandon Sanderson

The original draft of The Way of Kings had some big issues. One of the largest ones was that I was trying to do too many characters with too many separate plots. (Jasnah and Taln both had full sequences with as much complexity as the three main characters in the current draft.) Beyond that, Kaladin's character (he had a different name there) was bland and never worked. I needed to rebuild him from the start.

I'll post more explanations of this in the KINGS annotations, which I'm working on right now. As for teasers for the second book, one of the interludes is from Taln's viewpoint. (He's the guy who shows up in the epilogue of the previous book.)

Questioner

Do the political relationships between Idris and Hallandren have a model in the real world? Do you think authors of fantasy are free to deal with current political issues in their work or is that something of a no-go for you?

Brandon Sanderson

In fantasy, we can often approach things like this in a way that is non-threatening. We can change things a little bit and focus in a little bit more on the issue that is interesting to us. I won't say that I never do this, though again character and story are most important, but what I write about grows out of what I'm interested in.

With Idris and Hallendren, I noticed in my own work that I'd been painting religion in a somewhat less than favorable light in recent books; this is partially because I as a religious person think that the misuse of religion is one of the most purely evil things that can happen in the world. So I thought I wanted to play off of some of those sensibilities, and I built what I did in Warbreaker in part to actively show a different side of things. And when I was writing that book, the politics of the United States' invasion of certain countries and other things going on were not something that anyone could really ignore. So I would say that there are themes that grew out of that.

I didn't write the book to make a political statement. Yet at the same time the potential political statements of "Think twice about what you're doing" and of the nature of war and what it can do is something that I'm sure grew out of my own thoughts on the issues.

Nathan Morris

You mentioned that one of your most popular series is the Mistborn trilogy. How did those books come about?

Brandon Sanderson

The evolution of a novel is such a complicated, complex, and strange creative process that it's hard to step people through it. I don't think even I can fully comprehend it. But by the time I was writing the Mistborn books, I was in a different situation with my career. I'd sold Elantris by that point and the publisher was saying, "We want something else from you." Rather than taking one of the thirteen books that I'd written before, I wanted to write something new. I wanted to give people my newest and best work. At that point I had time to sit down and ask myself, "What do I want to be the hallmark of my career? What am I going to add to the genre?" I want to write fantasy that takes steps forward and lets me take the genre in some interesting direction. At first I wanted to play with some of the stereotypes of the genre. That's a dangerous thing, though, because, as any deconstructionalist will tell you, when you start playing with stereotypes, you start relying on something that you want to undermine, and that puts you on shaky ground. I was in danger of just becoming another cliché. A lot of times when people want to twist something in a new way, they don't twist it enough and end up becoming part of the cliché that they were trying to redefine. But I really did want to try this and went forward with it anyway.

A lot of fantasy relies heavily on the Campbellian Monomyth. This is the idea focusing on the hero's journey. Since the early days of fantasy, it's been a big part of the storytelling, and in my opinion it's become a little bit overused. The hero's journey is important as a description of what works in our minds as people—why we tell the stories we do. But when you take the hero's journey and say, "I'm going to make this a checklist of things I need to do to write a great fantasy novel," your story goes stale. You start to mimic rather than create. Because I'd seen a lot of that, I felt that one of the things I really wanted to do was to try to turn the hero's journey on its head. I had been looking at the Lord of the Rings movies and the Lord of the Rings books and the Harry Potter books, and I felt that because of their popularity and success, a lot of people were going to be using this paradigm even more—the unknown protagonist with a heart of gold and some noble heritage who goes on a quest to defeat the dark lord. So I thought to myself, "What if the dark lord won? What if Frodo got to the end in Lord of the Rings and Sauron said, 'Thanks for bringing my ring back. I really was looking for it,' and then killed him and took over the world? What if book seven of Harry Potter was Voldemort defeating Harry and winning?" I didn't feel that this story had ever really been approached in the way I was imagining it, and it became one idea that bounced around in my head for quite a while.

Another idea I had revolved around my love of the classic heist genre. Whether it's Michael Crichton's The Great Train Robbery or the movies Ocean's Eleven and The Italian Job, there are these great stories that deal with a gang of specialists who are trying to pull off the ultimate heist. This is the kind of feat which requires them to all work together and use their talents. I hadn't ever read a fantasy book that dealt with that idea in a way that satisfied me or that really felt like it got it down. So that bounced in my head for a while as well.

One more of the ideas for the Mistborn series happened when I was driving home to see my mom. She lives in Idaho Falls, and after passing Tremonton on the I-15, I just went through this fog bank driving at seventy miles an hour. Even though my car was actually driving into the fog, it looked like the mist was moving around me instead of me moving through it. It was just this great image that I wrote down in my notebook years before I ended up writing Mistborn.

After a while, all these different ideas, like atoms, were bouncing around in my head and eventually started to run together to form molecules (the molecules being the story). Keep in mind, a good book is more than just one good idea. A good book is twelve or thirteen or fourteen great ideas that all play off of each other in ways that create even better ideas. There were my two original ideas—a gang of thieves in a fantasy world, and a story where the dark lord won—that ended up coming together and becoming the same story. Suddenly I had a world where the prophecies were wrong, the hero had failed, and a thousand years later a gang of thieves says, "Well, let's try this our way. Let's rob the dark lord silly and drive his armies away from him. Let's try to overthrow the empire." These are all the seeds of things that make bigger ideas.

After I outlined the book, it turned out to be quite bit longer than I expected, and I then began working through those parts that weren't fully developed yet, changing some things. I ended up downplaying the heist story in the final version of the book, despite the fact that it was a heist novel in one of my original concepts. But as I was writing it, I felt that if I was going to make it into a trilogy, I needed the story to have more of an epic scope. The heist was still there, and still the important part of the book, but it kind of became the setting for other, bigger things in the story, such as the epic coming-of-age of one of the characters, the interactions between the characters, and dealing with the rise and fall of the empire. But that happens in the process of writing. Sometimes the things that inspire you to begin a story in the first place eventually end up being the ones that are holding it back. Allomancy, the magic system in the book, was a separate idea that came about through these revisions.

I wrote the books in the trilogy straight through. I had the third one rough drafted by the time the first one had to be in its final form so that I could keep everything consistent and working together the way I wanted it to. I didn't want it to feel like I was just making it up as I went along, which I feel is one of the strengths of the series. I don't know if I'll ever be able to have that opportunity again in a series, but it certainly worked well for the Mistborn books.

Rebecca Lovatt

Switching topics, your battle scenes are completely epic. Do you have to do a lot of research learning different battle stances and techniques?

Brandon Sanderson

I've done a lot of that in my life up to this point, so I draw on that. I write the scene and then I go to the experts. I read through sources and try to look for where I've done it wrong. I can usually do it right enough on the first write because of my experience, so that the first write is not fundamentally flawed, it's only flawed in little places.

I do a lot of reading of tactics and things like The Art of War, which was a very big help. A great place to get this type of thing is from good historical novels, but there are some good pop culture books as well. There's one I'm going to look up and email you about because I always forget the author, that you can read to give you an idea how different cultures have approached war.

It's sitting on my shelf--I can picture the cover, but now the name escapes me. Guns, Germs, and Steel is a famous one that is very good, but there is a better one on the history of warfare. I'll have to send the name of that to you later. [Confirmed later: it is A History of Warfare by John Keegan.]

Anyway, the pop science, pop history books I look at are more accessible than straight history books. They're written to be readable, for a mass audience, and they give me just enough to write the basics, and then I can polish the edges by going to an expert.

Rebecca Lovatt

Not one where you have to read through the dry crusty pages.

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, and really what you are looking for is the concepts. How different cultures fund a war, how they treat a war, and then you really only need some basic tactics. What are the different types, why would people use cavalry and what was the importance of cavalry. You get that from reading the history of warfare. I remember when I read how important the stirrup was as an invention, being able to fire bows from horseback, and why that changed warfare.

Suddenly I could construct a battlefield where I could say oh, okay, now that I understand why the stirrup is important, I see why this unit is important, why having a cavalry is important. I can now have them enter my battlefield in a way that undermines what someone else is trying to do, because I know the importance of the stirrup. Learning just a few fundamentals like that is essential. What the difference was between the way the Romans approached war and the way a medieval army approached war, and why the introduction of peasant warriors was so important, and things like that.

Rebecca Lovatt

As well as the importance of stirrups, and how they can support the huge magical armor.

Brandon Sanderson

I still needed magical horses for that armor, but it's nice that I can have magically enhanced armor and make it all work together. The other big thing people have to remember about Roshar is it's point-seven gee, which helps a lot with things like this. 70% Earth gravity.

Rebecca Lovatt

Yeah, I feel like it might be a big more difficult with our gravity.

Brandon Sanderson

It would be definitely more difficult. In fact when they get off the planet it's going to be a different experience for them, going to something like Scadrial where they have Earth gravity.

Rebecca Lovatt

So is that something we are going to be seeing?

Brandon Sanderson

Eventually, but not for a while.

Rebecca Lovatt

Because I was thinking when the Cosmere starts concluding, just multi-Cosmere world battles kind of things...or?

Brandon Sanderson

These are in the works.

Rebecca Lovatt

No worming out information by coming up with theories on the spot?

Brandon Sanderson

You may come up with all the theories you want, but I'm not giving you any information.

Questioner

How has the process of portraying women changed from Elantris to the more recent books?

Brandon Sanderson

Portraying women? A couple of things. I would say the primary one is just getting better at characterization all around. And the other one has been kind of this-- *sighs* struggle to figure out how to make every female character's conflict be about her role-- Not just her relationships, that one's not as big a deal because-- I mean if you look at the male characters, they all have relationship issues too, right? But it's more like fighting against-- Like if every woman is fighting against society's expectations of her that becomes a cliche very quickly and there are plenty of people, of both genders who are fighting against society's expectations but people of both genders are like "This is my society, I'm part of this" it's not fighting against it it's "finding my place". It's very difficult though when you are writing characters in states of conflict. So, I don't know.

Questioner

I read Shadows of Self and Elantris back-to-back, and that was really interesting to see the differences between the first published and most recent published.

Brandon Sanderson

Right, yeah. Those books will have some very big differences.