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Is there any sort of civilization on Braize?
Braize is the weirdest one because it's kind of like a prison. So, is there any civilization on Braize? Kind of. It's like a prison. That's all I'll say.
For characters like Hoid, who travel between worlds-- Do you have a timeline set out for them, so that they aren’t in two places at once?
I do [...] But it’s easier to keep this straight by making sure that the books aren’t, so far, happening simultaneously. But the more short stories I write, the more simultaneous things will get, and so that’s where we need it. Like, I realized I had a contradiction-- Fortunately that I hadn’t canonized in any of the books, when I wrote Secret History. I was like “Ah, I need to make sure he is where he needs to be.” And stuff like that.
Are there any chances we are going to revisit Vin and Reen's story? They are such fascinating characters! '-'
Not much of a chance, I'm afraid. I don't love prequels. But anything is possible.
Is this hemalurgy table also a speculative in-universe document (like how the RPG had atium spikes only stealing temporal, because that's what the steelies believed)?
It is an in-world chart according to the knowledge of some people at a certain stage in the history of Scadrial. [Edit: not Roshar, sorry. Also it’s not Khriss.]
One more question about the Girl Who Looked Up. It says she wears a long pack, so would this be a long pack or no. *gestures to pack*
That is not long enough.
So would said large pack hold a Shardblade or an Honorblade?
You'll have to see.
Perhaps.
Perhaps.
We might be doing a picture book of it.
Somebody whispered that to me earlier. Would it be illustrated?
Yes.
I generally write on only one books at a time. This is different, some writers aren't like that, Ray Bradbury famously had a big filing cabinet of half finished stories and he would, every morning, get out one and get out the typewriter and type more lines on it until it didn't work for him anymore and then he put it back and grabbed another one and started typing on it, which blows my mind. I cant imagine that; I can only usually do new fiction for one at a time, though I'm often panning in my head or working on the outline for the next one while I am writing the prose for this one. It uses different parts of the brain usually.
Would you mind answering these? What defines a high Epic? How does Tia's tier system work?
A high epic is one where you have to negate their powers somehow to kill them.
Is there a link with the fact that we know that Szeth is truthless and the fact that Honorspren are what cause Surgebinding? Is there a connection there?
There may be. I won't say. That's a RAFO.
If the Nightwatcher was asked to bond a person with a spren, would you just kidnap a spren and force a bond, would she create a spren...?
The Nightwatcher is unlikely to force a spren to bond.
Are Steelpush and Ironpull strictly momentum conserving
I believe they are, Peter has the math, but I believe that they are. You are not losing anything to the cognitive and spiritual realms, if that’s you are asking. You are pulling energy from those places, but only to cause the push/pull.
How did the whole cosmere come about?
Oh that's a good question. The cosmere came about because- there's really two genesises of it. First off I'm a big fan of Asimov's work and if you know Asimov's work, he tied his two universes together later in his life and I thought he did a brilliant job of it, though patching it together later in his life as he did there were certain continuity problems in doing it and I always thought, "Boy, I bet he wished he'd done it from the beginning".
So, as I started to work on things, I thought, "Well why don't I try something like that from the beginning." Once again I got to see what one of the masters did and learn from them, stand on their shoulders.
The other thing is, early in my career I realized that if I were writing mini-books, writing them all in the same series would be a bad for getting published. Let's say I wrote five, I'm gonna write five books and a publisher rejects the first one. If the other four are in the same series, it's going to be very hard to convince that publisher to read book two if they've already said no to book one. However, if they are five standalone books, set in different worlds, then I can say if someone says, "I liked this book but not enough to publish it," I could send them another one and say, "Hey this one is different but similar, maybe you'll like that." It just increased my chances.
The problem with that is I grew up reading the big epics and I love big epics and they are the books of my heart, are things like the Wheel of Time. I wanted to write big epics and so I started writing a secret big epic. It started with Elantris, which is the first one that I wrote in the cosmere and right after it Dragonsteel, which is actually a prequel but in a different universe [world]. I started putting characters from each of these books in the other books to have what I call a hidden epic, mostly for myself, because I had all these books I was going to be selling and marketing separately. But when Elantris sold, all of that stuff was buried in there, and I said, "Well, I love it, I'm not gonna cut it, I'm just gonna put it in there to see if people notice." I'm going to keep telling my hidden epic because eventually I will be telling the greater story with Dragonsteel and the third Mistborn trilogy dealing with these things and so that's where the idea for the cosmere came from, those two pieces.
How important is Intent to Hemalurgy? If two people who didn't know about Hemalurgy were running and tripped, falling perfectly onto a spike, would Hemalurgy occur? What about if it was a sick psychopath who liked stabbing people with spikes instead of an accident?
Would the planet these events occurred on matter?
Location is not relevant to most of the magics.
As for those specifics of Hemalurgy, I will RAFO for now.
How many waves of human populations have migrated to Roshar? So I'm thinking the Ashynites coming from Ashyn, right? Was that just the only humans that ever came as a population?
It depends on if you count the Iriali?
That's specifically the one I'm thinking of.
They came in a separate migration.
Not from Ashyn?
Not from Ashyn.
From whatever the Third Land was.
Primitive doesn't always mean useless.
The other big thing in this chapter that I wanted to mention is the editorial about why Sing’s guns are useful. Some early readers had difficulty understanding, if swords were so advanced, why they should care about Sing’s guns. I felt it important, then, to point out that weapons are still weapons.
I’ve intentionally reversed things in this book. Guns have taken the place of swords, and swords the place of guns. This is a time-tested tradition in the fantasy genre–just look at Star Wars. We all like swords. They have a stylish coolness; we think of them as more elegant, more heroic, than a pistol.
However, the thing I want to mention here is that a weapon is still a weapon. A knife or sword can easily kill you in the real world. In the same way, a gun in the Alcatrazworld is very dangerous–even if they’re not used as often.
And, if the convention of printing books disappeared tomorrow and every one began reading ebooks only do you think the way you write books would change (i.e. being able to disregard wordcounts or even being able to consider serialising a book)?
I think that would offer some very interesting opportunities. I think I would be unwise not to try to take advantage of them, if such a thing did happen. In fact, it's possible to try right now. I've got thoughts in my head about how I would do this. Because the form of the story is a very important thing to me, if you can't tell from the way I was talking about everything before. The form of the book, looking at the book and saying, what am I doing with this actual thing? What is the shape of it? Elantris had a specific shape, with the chapter triads that were happening at the same time as one another. These things are interesting to me, and I want to do things like this with e-books also. But there are other things we would lose. Just like if you go and you can compare, a great example of this is the US cover of Words of Radiance, which was hand painted in oil by Michael Whelan. It has a certain feel to it.
In fact, you can see the oil. You can see the brush strokes if you look very closely at the painting. You look at the gorgeous digital painting that Stephan Martiniere did for the US edition of Elantris. But if you look at these different covers, one is digital only, and has this interesting use of digital light, and the other has texture and feel. Those are two different forms for creating art, and they both have awesome things to them. I think if we lost the book as a form, we might lose some of that idea—the book as a texture, and what it feels like to hold it goes away. I'd be sad to lose that. But I can't tell right now if that would be the sadness of someone watching an antiquated technology that no longer really matters in life go away, or if it would be losing something that will very much negatively impact society. We will just have to see. Time will tell.
Is Ingenuity a Shard?
Umm... *long pause* Maybe. *smiles slyly*
I love *inaudible* this series. How did you come up with Elend?
So, I wanted an idealist *inaudible* revolutionary stuck in a world that wasn't ready for one yet, and that was my pitch to myself, right? Like if you took, you know, someone like... one of the great *inaudible* like Hamilton or somebody and just stuck them in a world that just was not ready for their ideas. How would that go?
That sounds like the *inaudible*. Don't you have that in mind, like...
Yeah, but he-- he that was-- yeah, yeah. His plan was-- be an idealist. The second book is where he realizes he can't make the same path he wants to, and third book is kind of reconciliation of how he can create this step that will eventually lead to Democracy and things like this, which you eventually then get to see in later books.
Does Hoid have all of his fingers
Hoid has had fingers chopped off on occasion. I doubt he's kept them around after the new ones grow in.
Have you ever thought about making your writing class open?
Yes I have. There are some back and forths here. One thing, about the classes, I really do like teaching at BYU. I like being a BYU teacher, I like being involved a little bit in our Alma Mater, I like coming here, and if I were to make the class open, basically, what I would have to do, I would have to stop teaching at BYU and go to a library or something like that, and just do it in an Auditorium, and I like the class as it is. BYU has policies that say “You have to be a BYU student to go to the class” and that’s not something I can influence or change. So as long as I have it at BYU, it kind of has to be that way. Does that make sense?
Though I’ve tried to let them get me to record it and like Webcast it, but they have requirements and rules that so far we haven’t been able to make that work. But Writing Excuses is basically the way that I do my class without doing my class, if that makes sense.
How do you feel about fans naming their kids after your characters? My wife knows two people with kids named Kaladin?
I find it a mark of great respect and honor that people are naming kids after my characters. It also means that, maybe, some of my names aren't terrible. My very first book, Elantris, when I published it. Elantris was the book where I kind of went out there with my linguistics. And several of the reviewers noticed. They were like, "These names are just so hard to say and so weird. Sanderson needs to calm down on the naming!" So, when people name their kids after characters then I'm like, "Oh, good. At least they're not so weird that people won't name their kids after them."
It's really cool. I remember when I met my first Rand, my first Perrin, which both happened before I was working on The Wheel of Time. It's always been really cool to me. I like it. I like meeting Arwens. I wish that fantasy names were a little more frequent in our society. I think that they're very cool.
So, it's awesome. I will try to live up to the respect you have shown me by naming children after my characters.
So, I've been wondering for a while, which does Surgebinding classify as? Surgebinders don't use their own native investiture to power magic so I suppose that's the case for being classified end-positive, but they do have to go get some investiture and once they use it it's gone and they have to go get more, so that almost seems end-negative. Thanks in advance for any answer even if it's a quick RAFO!
The more picky scholars would argue it is end neutral, because the power must be in the system before the Magic can initiate. But others would admit that the spheres are a delaying response for an end-positive system. You're looking too much past the mark with your read. Look at the work done as part of what is in the system. Investiture is not leaving the system in surgebinding, it is doing work, creating potential energy in most cases.
Obviously, you've written different styles of books, with Rithmatist and Alcatraz and the Librarians versus huge epic fantasies and how big the Stormlight Archive looks to be. I want to know, how did your approach differ between those two books?
I approach each book a little bit differently. There are a few things I'm trying to do with each book. With each book, I will pick something I generally want to work on to get better at as a writer, to practice. And, of course, I want to get better in all areas, but each book has a theme. If you read Warbreaker, I wanted to practice humor, and different styles of humor. That was a big part of Warbreaker. Specifically humor in a non-humorous book, character humor. Whereas, Way of Kings, it's obviously worldbuilding. I wanted to bring the worldbuilding up a notch. And so, each book, that's a big difference. When you see me writing things like Legion, which is contemporary, often it's saying, "Can I do this genre? What is this genre like? Can I practice this genre?" One big difference between the Alcatraz books and other book is that I freewrite, I discovery write the Alcatraz books. I don't plan a big outline. I have, like, a sentence for each book. And then I brainstorm all the goofiest things I can think of that make me laugh, and I write them all down and say "I've gotta use all them in the book somehow." So, if you've seen Whose Line Is It Anyway, where they're like, "You must take these things and use these props and design a story," that's what I do with Alcatraz, is I brainstorm all these props, and say, "I've gotta have talking dinosaurs, and I've gotta have this and this and this, and at some point people have to ride on a giant pig." I've just gotta make all these things work in a story, it's a creative exercise on my part, and I think discovery-write them. I don't outline, I just go. Which is why they feel so different in tone. It's my goal to make them feel different in tone. I stay productive as a writer by doing very different projects sequentially. What I'm doing, after I finish a book, is I've gotta usually do something very different from that book in order to refresh myself, stay creative, and be doing new things. Which is why you see stuff like Legion and Alcatraz and what-not. And I'm never gonna be one of these authors that's only in one world, because I would get burned out too quickly on that.
[My mother] has been a little bit of an inspiration for calling Lopen "The Lopen." Because she is not just Goober, she is "The Goober." And that's just how it is.
Do powerful magnets affect metalminds or metal reserves in metalborn?
Yes. But... that has an "*" on it.
Would you be able to get any kind of additional power from burning a Hemalurgic spike?
There would be power there, but you wouldn’t be able to access it. Like burning someone else’s metalmind.
Chapter Forty-Three
The Ball at the Canton of Resource
I didn't want this chapter to be a repeat of the previous ball scene, so I kept the nostalgia to a minimum and focused on the plan. I hope I've established why Vin and Elend are willing to take this risk—a mixture of Elend's desire to avoid attacking the city and the general recklessness being a Mistborn can foster in a person.
Either way, we avoid dancing and small talk in this chapter. I didn't want to write that, and I'm assuming that the reader doesn't care to read it. The tension of the infiltration is what matters now.
You said the The Rithmatist is a little ways out, the sequel.
I do mean to keep meaning to get to it sooner than I have. It's one of the-- It's the one that's been the most difficult to figure out how to do the sequel. I'm confident-- Let me get Alcatraz [6: The Worldspire], which-- it should be done pretty soon here, cleared off my plate. The last book of that one is-- had significant progress on it lately. Once that's done I'll look at Rithmatist, which is the other thing that's been dangling over my head.
Favorite Joke
By the way, favorite joke this chapter: “In that way, grandfathers are kind of like kangaroos.”
Does Tia know Professor’s weakness?
Yes. Tia does know Professor's weakness.
You're an avowed Magic: The Gathering lover. What is your color combo deck of choice? Also, preferred edition? I've always leaned towards Revised/Fourth as later editions focused on counters too much for my liking
I would say Black/Blue/White is what you find me playing most often, and usually Blue/White. Favorite editions? I’m going to disagree about the focus on counters. They’ve actually taken counterspells down a notch or two in recent years, which is nice. Besides, I play casual games, where I don’t run into a lot of counterspell decks, land destruction decks, or card discard decks—you know, the “un-fun” decks. My favorites recently—I really like Eldrazi, the set they released this year, which I’ve had a blast with. Other than that, probably Ravnica and Time Spiral were my favorite of the recent sets.
If a time bubble is raised in a vacuum, is the diameter larger than a bubble raised in atmosphere.
No, atmosphere has no effect on bubble diameter.
The Way of Kings is certainly a great first book of a series. It does, however, leave one hungry for more. What's the best guess on when for #2? And does it have a name?
I'll try to write it so it can be published in late 2012, but it really depends on how long it takes to write A MEMORY OF LIGHT, since I won't start until after that is finished. As for the title, if it ends up being a Dalinar book it will be titled HIGHPRINCE OF WAR, but if it ends up a Shallan book it will have a different title.
I recently picked up the Mistborn Adventure game and am loving it. I made a character who is a blind Mistborn because hey, I thought it would make for some interesting possibilities. As I understand Allomancy, he can hear/sense well enough to get around with Tin, plus even though he's blind he can still "see" steel lines (like the inquisitors), and I assume Atium would work the same way- that is, he could still "see" Atium shadows. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
No, you're right. That works. He'd have to burn metals a LOT though. It might warp him a little. :)
I don’t know if this question will come out right...is there a difference between being an author that works for Tor and an author that Tor works for?
Yes. Most authors, you'll find, are actually independent businesspeople who license their books to a publisher for various languages, and so I don't actually work for Tor. Now, Tor and I get along really well, and they've done very well by me, but I've also done very well by them, and so we have a very good working relationship. But actually I, as a businessperson, license them the books, and that means that I control all the characters, they can't insert or change anything without my approval—they can't even change commas without my approval—and that's the way it goes for most people. Now, everything outside the cover I have is theirs, their packaging, so that's why authors don't get a lot of say in cover and things, because the marketing copy on the cover, the picture and stuff, that's the publisher's. They license the works. So, there is a difference. There are some authors who will do a work-for-hire sort of thing, like I did with the Wheel of Time. I work for Harriet on the Wheel of Time. I am employed by her. It's a very good contract—I mean, she was very awesome to me—but at the end of the day, I am an employee working for her, a contractor working for her, and in that case, it's a different sort of business relationship.
Is it possible for Heralds to have children?
So yes, asterisk.
So, when Cenn dies, and he says "The Black Piper in the night, he holds us in the palm, playing a tune no man can hear." Is that a reference to Hoid?
No. Good question!
Is Shallan's mother, the one that she kills, is that her birth mother?
It is. Good question. Good question. You had a theory there that I may have just killed.
That's okay!
Captain Goradel, by the way, is named after my friend Richard Gordon.
Chapter Thirty-Four
I know it seems like I'm setting Shaor up for a return, but I really don't intend to bring her back. At least, I didn't when I wrote this chapter. The truth is, I just didn't want to write a scene of the madmen returning with the torn up body of a little girl.
However, every time I read this section, I can't help noticing that I left one of the book's most dangerous villains alive (potentially.) Ironically, because it seems so obvious from the text that Shaor is still alive, I think I'd avoid doing anything with her in a sequel. It seems like in fiction, any time you don't see a body, you automatically assume (often correctly) that the villain is still out there somewhere.
However, in this case, it really doesn't make sense to use her again. Shaor wasn't a threat because of any special skills on her part–I see no reason to bring her back.
Have the Bondsmiths ever had a Shardblade? Have any of the Bondsmiths had Shardblades?
RAFO! Good question. Good question.
I'd not realised Isaac had written some of the broadsheet stories - if anyone can trick me into believing something they've written was written by Brandon, then that makes them an awesome person!
The broadsheet columns are usually a mix of four people: Brandon, Peter, Isaac, and myself. Though I mostly write ad copy.
How do Lashings affect fluids like water or air?
Hard to Lash a fluid. It works poorly. How about that?
You can make it work best with the Reverse Lashing which would make sense I assume, but you can't Full Lash onto air or really a liquid. And a Gravitational Lashing, you could maybe do it on a liquid but it would disrupt real fast.
I recently reread Elantris and I came to an interesting conclusion: that the seons are similar to the spren.
They are.
And are they Servitude, broken pieces of Servitude.
So, they are actually broken pieces of Devotion, which is a similar concept, but yes.
And then the Elantrians are based off of Dominion then?
Dominion are the skaze. They are referenced briefly.
Then Hoid talks to them, or--
Hrathen references the skaze in his thoughts. I show a skaze I believe in the extra bonus scene, don't I?
Where Hoid is going to jump into the well?
Yes, there is a skaze there, that's a skaze.
...I'm assuming then, we can look forward to the skaze!
You can look forward to the skaze being involved in things, definitely .
I have my own theory but I thought I should ask, if the koloss reproduce through Hemalurgic spikes how can there be half koloss in Alloy of Law.
I am holding this answer back for future books, I'm afraid. I have said some things, but the full truth is still subject to debate. I will answer this eventually in the books.
I think I saw on Facebook that you are involved with a Mistborn movie and game. Can you tell us about that?
Ah, yes. The Mistborn movie and game. The movie rights were optioned to a production studio called Paloopa Pictures. We'll see what happens with that. I mean, they have a screenplay—if you don't know, getting a film made, there are a lot of ways that it happens; most of them seem kind of chaotic. One of the primary ways is a production company will option rights on something or option a screenplay. In my case, they optioned the rights, they write a screenplay, they do a big pitch, then they go to the studios. And the studios have to fund the thing. The production company would then become the producers on it, with the studios funding and make the film.
That's why what'll happen, often you'll see a film that'll [have] these five production studios at the start. Those are the people who did that sort of thing. So that's where we are there.
Sometimes you'll get lucky and a film will just get optioned by a studio directly. That doesn't happen as often. For instance, the Wheel of Time books got optioned to Red Eagle Entertainment, which is a production company. They did all of this, then went to Universal and got Universal to buy the rights and fund the movie... We have that. We also have some people with a video game that I can't announce yet, because I'm sure they want to announce it, but we had a nice offer on a video game that would be slated for around 2013. It will be cross-platform, so it would be on PC, Xbox, and PS3. I will probably be writing the story and the dialogue for it.
What's the process of making a map? How much info does Brandon give, and how much do you adapt it to yourself?
I think there's a lot of give-and-take on our maps, really. You give me a lot of freedom. And really, I just come up with something nowadays that fits once I've read the book, and then we just adjust from there until it matches, it works for you and it works for me.
Knowing that I don't have to do all of that, there's one thing that I can basically outsource, right? There's somebody I trust who is able to do a really good job with this. Frees my brain to think about other things. These days, I just let Isaac work his magic, and know that, at times, I'm going to have to revise the text to actually make it fit.
We do that sometimes. If we get a piece of art that somebody did something cool in it, but it wasn't necessarily in the book, but we like it, he'll oftentimes go and change the description a little bit to match, if we think it works a little better.
I did that for the Elantris cover, way back when Stephan Mantiniere gave me the cover. I was like, "Ooh, readers would ask 'Where is this cover scene?'" So I actually put the cover scene into the book.
Brandon recommended the writings of Brent Weeks and Brian McClellan multiple times to various questioners asking for authors with a similar writing style to Brandon. Especially the book The Black Prism.
In reading the Way of Kings a very Ben Hur vibe can be felt from Kaladin., was this intentional and what other genres were your inspiration?
I wouldn’t say that I was specifically shooting for that vibe, certainly I am influenced by all the things around me, I was just looking to tell a really great story, and this is the story that came out. It was Kaladin's story in specific, it was - the genesis of the story was actually the Shattered Plains themselves, the area. I write fantasy and one of the reasons that I write fantasy is I want to tell stories about places that don’t exist, that maybe couldn’t exist in our world and so the geography of the shattered plains is sort of what appealed to me. I’d actually been planning this for many years and extrapolated from there, how would warfare be like in this place and then I extrapolated from there, what are they going to need, what types of troops. And Kaladin as a person was growing separately, and I just wanted the best place to put in- the place of most conflict and it ended up being that.
Plot-wise to be perfectly honest I was looking more at- when I was building this plot- underdog sports narratives. To be perfectly honest, I like to, when I look for inspiration in plotting sequences I like to look far afield to try and take things and pull them into my books so that we aren’t getting some of the same repeated dealings over and over again. But certainly historical works like the ones you mentioned are a big part of my make up as well.
You'll notice that I start this chapter with a block of narrative, going over what has been happening since our last triad. I do this with some frequency in the Raoden chapters. Not everything in a book can be "in scene," and I sometimes find myself throwing in these narrative sections at the beginning of chapters. It's a bit of a triad-break, but not a huge one. After all, you can just assume that the narrative is coming from Raoden as he thinks back about previous events.
Speaking of that, I haven't really talked much about viewpoint in these annotations. You may or may not have noticed that I'm a big fan of strictly-limited third-person viewpoints. Third person past tense has pretty much become the industry standard during the last fifteen years (before that time, you saw a lot more omniscient–look at Dune, and to a lesser extent, Ender's Game.) You almost never see it these days, though, and I personally think that's a good thing. Omniscient is a little better for plotting in some places, but limited is far better for characterization.
Any time you read one of my books, you should remember that I'm almost always in strict limited. Whatever you read in the text, it is something that a character feels or has observed.
Using the Atium
I hope that the use of all that atium in this chapter was spectacular enough for you—after all, I waited three books to finally have them find the Lord Ruler's cache. I think that discovering it before this moment would have been anticlimactic. In books one or two, it would simply have meant wealth. The characters getting rich is all well and good, but I think that would have meant a letdown for the reader. All of that anticipation for something so mundane?
Instead, I wanted to use an entire army's—or at least a large platoon's—worth of Allomancers burning atium to fight two hundred thousand koloss.
