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EHyde

Shinovar seems more earthlike than the rest of Roshar; does this occur naturally or was it somehow changed to be that way?

Brandon Sanderson

RAFO.

Brandon Sanderson

One of the big revisions I did to Dawnshard was: I didn't have viewpoints from him originally, Nikli, because I wanted to maintain the mystique of them [Sleepless]. I realized after the beta read that the coolness of seeing through their eyes was more important, and indeed there was an issue with Dawnshard. I expected, because people had read Oathbringer, and the scene in Oathbringer, that they would immediately pick out who the horde, the Aimian, on the crew was. The tattoos were suppose to make it very obvious what was going on. 

The emotion I was looking for in the book was not mystery, but instead suspense. These are two kind of complementary emotions, and suspense is - at least as how I'm defining it right now - "Oh no! This terrible thing is going to happen. How are they going to deal with it?" And mystery is "What terrible thing is going to happen? And who is going to cause it?" These are two different emotions.

If you go into Dawnshard with mystery being your primary expected experience, then what happened to beta readers is, they're like, "Well, Brandon's always tricky about these things. So the fact that he has a person with tattoos on this says that's not the person. That is not the Aimian; that's too obvious. So let's watch and see how he tricks us about who the Aimian is." When my intent was "Here's the Aimian. Be scared because he has a good relationship with Rysn, and terrible things are probably going to happen." That's sad and scary and tense. I realized after reading the beta read, "Oh this is not landing. I need to add a viewpoint as early as I can realistically get it in the story that says 'No, no no no. This is the Aimian. This is the horde. You're right, you're suppose to be worried about that. Not questioning about that.'" So I added that scene. I'm really glad that I did, because I enjoyed writing it. I think it adds a lot to the lore, and it is a fun scene to read, I think.

I'm very happy for the beta readers being confused on that point, because I think the story landed way better for a lot of the readers, because they could let go of wondering who the Aimian is and focus on the emotion the story is actually stoking in them (or it's trying to), which is the suspense of watching what's going to happen when it happens. 

This is the reason why I really depend on beta reads, is for reasons like this. When what I'm trying to do doesn't land. A lot of the people talk to the beta readers, I hear, and say, "Why did you talk him into changing this thing that I love!?" That's not what beta readers do. That's not what they're there for. They are there so I can see if what I'm trying to do actually lands, and if it doesn't I can reassess and find a way to make it actually land. Because if you read all of Dawnshard, thinking that the mystery of who is the Aimian is suppose to be the big reveal, and then it just turns out to be the most obvious person, you'd be like, "Wow. That mystery was lame!" Hopefully instead if you read it saying, "Oh, there's an Aimian on this crew. I see who it is. They are gonna try to kill the people on board. That's sad. Hey! I'm kind of liking this character. That's even sadder! How is this ever going to get resolved?" Hopefully that's the emotion you had.

OddBen11

Is the secret way that the God King in Warbreaker can have children the same way that the Heralds can?

Brandon Sanderson

*long series of uncertain sounds* No...? But there could be... I'm just gonna say no. But interesting theorizing, and it's possible that I could change my mind.

PrincipleFriendly205

Mare's Flower.

*a tattoo of the Ghostblood symbol*

montezuma300

Can you confirm either yea or nay?

Ben McSweeney

I had not thought this was the case before, but Brandon don’t tell me everything and some of what he tells me changes over the years (we used to have a hard rule with fur on Roshar, for instance). And I was not part of the design process for this symbol, it was handed to me ready-to-go when I put it on the Shallan page.

I would not be surprised to learn what we have here is a symbol based on the picture of the flower, that whatever flower she had a picture of, it had three petals of a somewhat diamond shape.

But I don’t actually know, and I’ll have to ask around. Might be a RAFO.

montezuma300

What's the fur rule?

Ben McSweeney

Waaaay back at the start, the rule was "no fur" in designs, full stop. The idea being that any fur-bearing creatures were too rare to be used for their hides. At some point he relaxed that rule... fur is still relatively rare and expensive (I think) but it's not unheard of.

Haverworthy

What would happen if you tried to soulcast a shardblade-wounded limb back to regular flesh with a heliodor? Would it regain function?

Brandon Sanderson

That's a partial RAFO, I'm afraid. Soulcasting to flesh is complicated, and the level you're asking for is well outside the skills of any living soulcaster. Most likely, you'd end up with a lump of nondescript meat instead of an arm.

Brandon Sanderson

Sazed and Goradel Discuss the Skaa Farmers

The conversation between Sazed and Goradel in this chapter is an important one, as it shows the importance of a character's perspective. Two men looking at the same scene see very different things.

Sazed, fighting depression and close to giving up, sees the skaa laboring and notes that nothing much has changed for them. They still have to work themselves near to death, and their lives are still gloomy.

Goradel, who spent his youth being despised by his family and their friends, is now a captain in Elend's army—and is known among the skaa as one of the men instrumental in helping Vin kill the Lord Ruler. He's become something of a local celebrity in some segments of Luthadel. He looks on these same working skaa and sees hope and victory.

As Sazed says in this chapter, being happy and optimistic isn't simply a choice one can make—at least, not a lot of the time. However, I think it's possible to find hope in very dark situations.

nvita (paraphrased)

Was Phendorana’s soul obliterated?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

He said the soul of Phendorana wasn’t obliterated and it could’ve reached the Beyond he also added that nothing can be obliterated in the cosmere; things can be changed but not destroyed.

Questioner

I wanted to ask-- So you--I think more than almost any other fantasy author--you create universes and then you leave them behind. Entire uni-- I almost feel like you could sit down-- you could have like pages of a physics lecture in each of your universes and you would have equations for how it works. Do you have-- Have you always had these ideas for these various universes with gods and magic systems and things like that, or are you always creating them, sort of as you go? 

Brandon Sanderson

It's yes and no. A lot of the ones you're seeing in the cosmere are things I created at the beginning to be kind of what the cosmere was. But I left some holes intentionally cause I knew I would come up with cool things that I wanted to add, and so I built in that wiggle room, and I'm always coming up with new ones. And there are way more that I want to do than I can write, like the one I keep wanting to find a chance for is--

Do you guys know how Nikola Tesla tried to create wireless energy? I think I've talked about this one. Like, he tried to create wireless energy, and I'm like "What if there were a world where that happened naturally?" Where you had a natural current going, and you could like set your lantern on the ground and it would create a current from the sky to the ground and your light bulb would just turn on. You don't need electricity. And how would-- What if we have giant toads that could shoot out their tongues that would create a current,  and they're like taser tongues? *makes zapping noises* Stuff like this. And so, I started jumping in to looking at electricity and things like this, and current and whatnot, and that's just all back there and I'm like "Aww, someday I need to be able to write this." But there are so many things that I want to write that I just don't have the time for, so it's a yes and no.

Questioner

So do you have, like, "what if" questions and then you build a universe from there?

Brandon Sanderson

Usually they're "what if" questions, but Sanderson's Zeroth Law--I've got these laws on magic you can look up,  they're named humbly after myself--so Sanderson's Zeroth Law is "Always err on the side of what's awesome". And usually it's less even a "what if?" and it's a "That's so cool, taser toads!" Like if you really want to know the truth of where The Stormlight Archive started, there's all this cool stuff, like part of it was like "What if there was a storm like the storm on Jupiter". And then I eventually changed it to a storm that goes around the planet, something like that, but the real truth was "Magical power armor. YEAH! Magical power armor is cool! Plate mail power armor! Why would you need plate mail power armor?" Y'know, and it starts with the really cool idea. Mistborn started by me drifting in a fog bank at eighty miles per hour in my car and loving how it looked as it drove past and saying "Is there a world where I can imitate this feel, where you look out and it streams by." It's those early visuals or concepts that make me say "Oh yeah, I wanna do that!". That is where my books really come from, and then I layer on top of them the "what ifs?" and trying to build a realistic ecology based around these ideas.

Questioner

Does it feel like your own work when you hear [a translation]? Is it recognizable in any way? What do the translations do with your work? I suppose you get a lot of questions by your translators about the magic, about invented words. How does this reflect on your writing?

Brandon Sanderson

You know, I’m not sure if it changes the way I approach my writing at all. But I do find it fascinating. Hearing a reading, in particular, is in some ways, it’s a double interpretation. Because first, you have the translation to German. And then you have the narrator... will give an interpretation, as well. But one of the things about writing that I believe is that I’m not completing the story. What I do is, I write a script. And every person who reads that book is going to finish the story in their head. I give descriptions of the characters, but even with those descriptions, every person who reads the book is going to imagine those characters [in a] slightly different way. So I’ve always viewed myself, as a writer, as kind of like the screenwriter. Where the reader is the director, who’s going to finish the story. And I don’t think a book really lives until it’s been experienced by a reader. And so it doesn’t bother me, the idea of going through translators or getting different interpretations by the audiobook narrators, because I feel like my text is going to be interpreted by whoever experiences it, in different ways. And in some ways, as soon as it gets experienced by a reader, it becomes their story. They finish it, and it doesn’t really ‘come alive’ until they’ve done so. So, it’s not finished anyway. I think it’s just really cool. I like seeing fan art, even though each drawing of a character looks different from another one. It lets me see a little bit how that book was finished in that reader’s mind.

Questioner

Could you Forge an entire human? What if a kandra eats that human?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, you could Forge an entire human, and the kandra can eat that human as long as the Forgery takes. The problem is, once you break the seal, they're going to change back. So that kandra would have to find a way to eat that person without breaking the Forgery. In that case it would just remain.

Vaelith

I would like to echo a question that someone beat me to. The way you ended it seemed to leave the door wide open for other books with characters such as Spook and Breeze playing much larger roles. My question is, was the ending planned as just an open-ended ending to make people wonder about what might happen, or was that with the intent of writing more books in mind?

Brandon Sanderson

I like it when my characters live on in people's minds. I have no plans right now to write any more books about Spook or Breeze, though what they do in the next period of time will create the history for the next series. However, there's a chance I'll change my mind on this. However, this ending was not set up for another book specifically. I just wanted to tell the best ending I could, and this is how it turned out.

Peter Ahlstrom

Brandon does want to write more Mistborn books, but not with the same characters. There would be two more trilogies. The second trilogy would be set a few hundred years later, in a modern day–type setting, when the events of the first trilogy have passed into legend. The third trilogy would be set a few more hundred years later, in a future, outer space–type setting.

It's such an audacious idea I wish he would write it right now because I want to read it, especially the third trilogy. But Brandon has announced his next project (pending Tor approval) will be Way of Kings, a 10-volume epic fantasy. He'll sprinkle in a book from another project here and there, so the next Mistborn trilogy might start before Way of Kings is ended, but it will be years yet before there is any more Mistborn.

Kaimipono

But Ookla, he already wrote that one!

Peter Ahlstrom

I know. :)

The real story is that Brandon was writing (or revising?) Way of Kings when Tor offered to buy Elantris. Brandon signed a two-book contract for Elantris and Way of Kings. Then Brandon realized he wasn't in the point in his career yet where he could write Way of Kings the way he wanted to, so while he was supposed to be revising Way of Kings he secretly wrote the first Mistborn book instead, which he then sold to Tor as a trilogy, replacing Way of Kings in the original contract.

But for some reason Amazon already had a listing for Way of Kings, with a release date. Thence the fake reviews.

I've read an early draft of the first book, and it aims to be very epic. (No, Elvis is not involved.) I do wonder, though, whether when it actually comes out, the fake reviews will get attached to its Amazon listing. :)

Brandon Sanderson

This is all true. Note that the book would not be named The Way of Kings. Most likely, I'm going to make that the series name. So I guess the book "The Way of Kings" must be some kind of parallel novel or prequel or something... ;)

Peter Ahlstrom

Oathshards is out, eh?

You're such a tease, Brandon. All these details about the next series will make everyone hungry for it, and then we'll all have to wait.

Of course, any other book you put out in the meantime will still be awesome, so we should be content, right?

Brandon Sanderson

I don't think Oathshards is as strong a name as "The Way of Kings." Plus, that's really what the series is about. 

Questioner

How much did the alpha, beta, and gamma readers in your opinion influence the end product [of Oathbringer] here today?

Brandon Sanderson

...I find them invaluable. Let me define them for you first.

Alpha readers are a very select group. My editor, my agent, my wife, and, like, my assistant-- like Peter. These are alpha readers, people who are reading it in a very raw form.

Beta readers are more like a test audience. The difference between alpha reader and beta reader is that the alpha is somebody who's an industry professional, for me, who can say-- can look at the structure and say "here's some advice on structure" and things like this. A beta reader is just a person who likes books, whose job is just to say "I like this, I don't like this, this is why." Right?

Gamma readers are proofreaders. So, usually, Peter handles all the gamma readers. I don't even see what they say, because that's all to fix proofreading.

I am a very big believer in test audience. I know some writers don't use them at all, but I find it really, really helpful to see how people are responding to the text and the fiction, and then looking and saying, "What is it that is making them feel this way? Do I want that? Do I not want that?" It is just a huge piece of the toolbox for me, a huge tool in the toolbox. (That metaphor doesn't work, because a larger tool in your toolbox is not necessarily more useful, but go with me on it.) I would say, they had all kinds of effects. And we might have Peter do some blog posts on things that I changed because of the beta readers while I'm online. And once you've read the book, you can ask me, we'll try to post about some of this stuff. Usually, they're not making suggestions, they're just giving their feelings, and I'm looking for the places where I've misfired. Where I'm like, "I thought this scene would be super dramatic," but everyone is confused. That's the sort of scene you want to find, and then ask yourself, "How can I make it work instead."

Questioner

You had 70, right?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, I had 70 beta readers on this. They wrote around 600,000 or 700,000 words. So, more than was in the book, about the book. Yeah. It's crazy.

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Lightsong Awakes from More Bad Dreams

This is the scene in the book where I originally started to turn Lightsong's dreams a tad darker. As you can see from the final version, I've now been doing that from the beginning. All to keep tension up.

Anyway, these dreams he saw—a prison, Scoot, Blushweaver—were there in the original draft. As I've said, I'm a planner, and so I had my ending well in mind by this point in the original version of the book. That ending changed in many ways during revision, but it's kind of surprising how much stayed the same. Sometimes, things just work and you do get them right on the first try.

Shallan's Ward

While Sazed holds Preservation and Ruin, could his intent change from Harmony to Discord?

Brandon Sanderson

It is possible.

Questioner

I assume I'm going to learn a lot more about this in Stormlight 3 but Nightblood, is he more dangerous or less dangerous now that he-- obviously he needs Investiture that is why *audio obscured* any Investiture?

Brandon Sanderson

I'd say more dangerous, a little bit easier to get the Stormlight.

Questioner

I assumed I'd learn a lot more about him...

Brandon Sanderson

You will, and he's pretty dangerous, but he is also less dangerous because other people have Shardblades, if that makes sense.

Jared_A

Brandon, how do you feel your identity and upbringing as a Mormon has affected your work?

Elantris, for instance, centers around a magic system that has essentially been broken because something in the world has changed—a "new revelation" if you will. And then Mistborn has at its core a set of holy writings that have been altered by an evil force.

These things seem decidely Mormon to me, or at least informed from a Mormon perspective. Do you feel that is the case?

Brandon Sanderson

I don't set out to put anything specifically Mormon into my books, but who I am definitely influences what I write and how I write it. I'm always curious at the things people dig out of my writing—neither of the two points you mention above are things that I was conscious of, though they certainly do make interesting points now that you look at them.

My goal in storytelling is first and foremost to be true to the characters—their passions, beliefs, and goals. No matter what those are. I'm not trying to make a point consciously ever in my writing—though I do think that good stories should raise questions and make readers think.

Who I am as a person heavily influences what I write, and I draw from everything I can find—whether it be LDS, Buddhist, Islamic, or Atheist. It's all jumbled up there in that head of mine, and comes out in different characters who are seeking different things.

In other words, I'm not setting out to be like C.S. Lewis and write parables of belief. I'm trying more what Tolkien did (not, of course, meaning to compare myself favorably with the master) in that I tell story and setting first, and let theme and meaning take care of itself.

Fiction doesn't really exist—certainly doesn't have power—until it is read. You create the story in your head when you read it, and so your interpretations (and your pronunciations on the names) are completely valid in your telling of the story. The things you come up with may be things I noticed and did intentionally, they may be subconscious additions on my part, or they may simply be a result of your interaction with the text. But all three are valid.

Jared_A

On a different but related note, I really love that you honestly look at religious convictions in your books and that you don't portray such convictions in a shallow way.

Brandon Sanderson

Regardless of a person's beliefs, I think they would have to admit that religion and spirituality has played a large part in our development as a people. It's a very important thing to so many of us—and I also think that for most of us, our beliefs are nowhere near as simple as they seem when viewed from the outside. I appreciate your praise here, though I think I still have a lot to learn. There's a real line to walk in expressing a character's religious views without letting them sound preachy—the goal is to make the character real, but not bore the reader.

Argent

In English, "N" is articulated the same way "T" and "D" are - on the alveolar ridge (as all three are nasal alveolar). It seems like in the women's script "N" belongs to a different family from "T" and "D". The former is a "left facing arrow" while the latter two are "right facing arrows", to use some very basic description of the symbol shapes. Why is that?

Isaac Stewart

Peter might have a better explanation for this, but because of the three sizes, we had to group things in ways that didn't always make sense. The N was a fourth letter in a set (TDL), so looking back, maybe we should've grouped N with TD instead of the L, but then that has a cascading effect, so this was the best we could do in the time we had. But we don't know exactly how the Alethi speak. There's always a chance that the Alethi Z sounds more like "dz," and the Alethi "S" sounds more like "ts" (like the German Z), in which case the SZN grouping makes a lot more sense. But that's just conjecture.

Peter Ahlstrom

The symbol sets are all based on historical place of articulation (and articulating tongue part), and there have been some sound changes over the centuries so they don't currently all line up exactly. The t/d/r/th/l group (historically alveolar) is articulated with the tip of the tongue, and the s/z/n/sh/h group (historically postalveolar) is/was articulated with the blade of the tongue.

The modern h sound (like h in English) used to appear only in the palindromic locations, and was written only with the diacritic. This diacritic is mirrored on the top and bottom of the character. Some writers may use only the top or bottom because lazy. Also, sometimes the diacritic can be left out entirely and people just know to pronounce it as h because it's a very common word or name.

The h character used to stand for a weakly-voiced postalveolar non-sibilant fricative. This later shifted backward to a velar fricative (first weakly-voiced, later voiceless) as in Kholin. In modern times the h character is usually for the same h sound that we have in English. Sometimes kh is written using a combination of the k and h characters, and sometimes it's written just as h for historical reasons. Different regional dialects also shift the pronunciation one way or another.

The L sound has also shifted. It used to be a voiced alveolar lateral fricative, and this is still seen in names like Lhan. It's now a regular L sound.

The final group, k/g/y/ch/j, used to have dual articulation, similar to velarized postalveolar. Now the articulation has separated, with some velar and some postalveolar.

Currently y and j are pronounced the same or differently based on class and regional dialect. So, a darkeyes name like Jost or Jest will be pronounced with a regular j sound, while with the upper class it has merged with y so that Jasnah and Jezerezeh are pronounced with a y sound. Historically they were always separate sounds.

Questioner

[Us discussing savantism off to the side and Brandon overhears us]

Brandon Sanderson

What am I going to change?

BeskarKomrk

Something about savantism and how it works.

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, savantism I’m tweaking. It’s not going to mean anything to most people, but if you are studying savantism, watch how it evolves in future books. There is an interlude from a savant viewpoint in Oathbringer, though.

yulerule

A Radiant savant?

Brandon Sanderson

A soulcasting savant.

Questioner

How many of the Stormlight Archive, how many are you planning?

Brandon Sanderson

There are two sets of five. The first five will come to a climax, and the second five are going to take place ten years later. Some of the cast will be the same. It's the same series but some of the cast will change. For instance, Lift is being seeded as a main character for that series. She'll be grown up, so she won't be quite-- She'll still be Lift, but she may not be quite as teenagery. She's a very special individual.

Renarin will be one of the main character in that series. Jasnah will be. And Taln and Ash, who are both Heralds that we barely see on screen in the current ones, they'll be main characters.

Cyrus the Not Too Bad

You are known for being extremely meticulous in planning out the structure and details of your stories before writing. That being said, are there any times you have come up with a new idea or plot point as you are writing and just went with it?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, it happens all the time. I am, as I've come to learn, relatively detailed in my outlines compared to a lot of my contemporaries. (I am not the most detailed; I think that prize probably goes to Kevin J. Anderson. His outlines tend to be just basically the book, but shorter.) If you've seen me talk about my outlines, there are a lot of bullet points in there and goals; I don't know exactly what's gonna happen in each chapter, I'll know what I want to achieve in each chapter, which is a little bit different. I'll know, "these two characters need to interact, this information needs to come out, and this event happens to end the chapter." I'll know things like that. However, as I'm writing, as you're putting the book together, as you're getting in the zone and really getting to understand how the book is feeling and flowing, you start to change things, just from the first chapter. Not even it comes out exactly like planned most of the time. And this is just a part of the process.

Now, I am an outliner, which means that when one of these things happens, I will often go with it, but I'll also be revising my outline. I'll take a little bit of time to just go with it and see how it goes, often. But a lot of times, I'm already working on my outline. I'm already saying "oh, this is a much better idea, this is working way better." Trying to remember... from a first book, a time where that happened. Famously, Adolin wasn't a viewpoint character in the original draft of The Way of Kings, but that didn't happen during the drafting, that was during the revision process, so it's not quite what you're asking.

The personality that Doomslug ended up having in Skyward was not something I had planned out. I just kind of went with it as it came along as I was writing. A lot of the personalities of the side characters in Skyward are a good example of this. Like, even Jorgen's personality is quite different from what I had imagined in the outline. This happens a lot with characters for me that I'm writing, and who they are becoming is a much different person than who I maybe imagined them. Until I write through their eyes, I'm not 100% sure who they are. And this is the big thing that throws my outlines off. I know that my characters are going to grow to become different people than I imagined when I started, and the outline just has to adapt to that.

Unless it goes too far. Some of my fans who were watching back in the time, I added a character to Warbreaker just kind of on-the-fly as I was working on the beginning. And I really liked this character, they were great. So I'm like, "Wow, I want to bring this character on the adventure." And I wrote them into a couple of chapters, because they were just fun to write, and it just ruined the other chapters. The chapters no longer worked in the structure I was making, and it was a worse structure, and this character being along was taking away from the sense of isolation, which was a major theme for Siri in that book. And I was posting these chapters online as I wrote them for Warbreaker. I just eventually said, "This character is no longer coming on the adventure" and pretended they hadn't been there in the next chapter I posted. That happens sometimes, too, where you just decide to edit something down.

Brandon Sanderson

I've already talked about how much I love the maps in this book. Isaac is amazing. He also did the chapter symbols, which are interesting in that they are based off of the symbols in the first book. If you compare, you can see that they're the same symbols, only changed. The idea is that these symbols in this book are earlier versions of the same alphabet in the previous book, used here since this book will be partially about the characters looking into what happened in the world a thousand years back. You can imagine the epigraphs (the italicized things at the beginnings of the chapters) written in this alphabet. Modern people in the book, then, write in the version of the alphabet that is used in book one.

We had planned some pretty dramatic artwork to use in the book along with these–some large-scale symbol glyphs using the alphabet–but eventually decided not to go with them. Not only was Isaac swamped, but Tor was giving us grief about the length of the book (I'll talk about that later.) In the end, I'm glad we went with only these–they are elegant, and I like how they work with the previous symbols.

Brandon Sanderson

Hrathen

So, Hrathen wasn't really dead. (Ironically, while many of you are probably saying "yeah, yeah. That was obvious," I actually didn't have him appear here in the first eight drafts of the book. I'll explain later.)

I think this is my favorite scene of this chapter. Not only is it written a little better than the rest of the book (I added it quite late–just this last summer) but it gives final closure to the Hrathen-Dilaf relationship. It uses Hrathen's time in Dakhor as an ironic twist against Dilaf. In short, it is a pretty good scene. Fulfills character, plot, and theme at the same time–while giving us a nice image to boot. (Though I do hate to do the "Hey look, a guy we thought was dead is really alive" twist.)

The story behind this scene is pretty recent. One of the original rewrites Moshe asked for was a fix of the ending, which he thought was too Deus Ex Machina. (Which, indeed, it was.) I don't think I'll go into the entire original version here–it was quite different. You can read the alternate ending in the deleted scenes section, when I throw it up next month. The short of it, however, is that Ien (Raoden's seon) showed up to save Raoden and Sarene from Dilaf. I used a mechanic of the magic system that I have since pretty much cut from the novel (since it was only in the book to facilitate this scene) that allowed Ien to complete his Aon, "healing" Dilaf. Except, since Ien's Aon was broken, it turned Dilaf into an Elantrian instead. (A non-glowing Elantrian. One like Raoden the group used to be–like Dilaf's own wife became after she was improperly healed in Elantris.)

I know that's probably confusing to you. The scene, over all, was just kind of weak. It relied on a barely-explained mechanic mixed with a tangential character showing up at just the right moment. When Moshe asked for the change, I immediately saw that I needed to bring Hrathen back to life for a few more moments. Letting him die on the street just wasn't dignified enough (though originally I wanted him to die this way because it felt more realistic.) I wanted a final confrontation between Hrathen and Dilaf, since it would give most people's favorite character a heroic send-off, and would also let me tie in the aforementioned Dakhor irony.

In the end, I was very pleased with the rewrite. It's good to have an editor.

Brandon Sanderson

In the comments, I saw that one of you was asking about my prewriting process [for Wax and Wayne Four]. In short, for this one, what I did is: there were three big steps. The beginning was, I wrote down Character, Setting, Plot together in a document, and I then did a subheading for each of the main characters. For this book, it'll be Wax, Wayne, Steris, and Marasi. And I said, "All right; what are their character arcs? How do they change? What do they want in this book? What's going on with them?" And that was the first pillar I wanted to hit; I wanted to make sure that everybody was working and that I knew where they were all going and where they would end. Because this is the last book of that sequence, and I want the ending to be spectacular.

Next part was setting. In this, mostly it was developing the magic system, making sure that the things that I'm doing with it, the new ideas that are coming in and developments, are in line with the general goals for the Cosmere and for Scadrial, and that everything that I wanted to do worked within the bounds of the magic, and bouncing that off of my team and making sure that I was explaining things well, why things worked like they did.

And then the last part was to construct the actual plot. This is: what is happening, what are people wanting to do? How am I weaving in character arcs to this large construct that is the plot of the book?

Questioner

For a writer like yourself and Robert Jordan who both have very expansive and articulate universes, how much of the planning process do you do up front and how much do you let it develop organically as you write?

Brandon Sanderson

I am more naturally a planner, but both methods are valid. Robert Jordan was a little bit more of what we call a pantser. But every book changes as you're writing it. Like, I don't know if you've read Stormlight, but one of the main characters in Stormlight wasn't meant to be a main character until I finished the book and there was something wrong and I went through revisions, and added a character's viewpoint in to fix those problems, and then that sends a ripple through my whole outline, and you know, so stuff like that.

Brandon Sanderson

Alcatraz The Leader

This chapter is important because of how it gives rounding to Alcatraz’s character arc. We see him acting decisively here–making decisions, leading the group even though his grandfather is there. He is a natural leader, when he can get over his hangups.

However, one short experience isn’t enough to change him completely. He’s still got a lot to learn. As a nod to this, he breaks the sword by accident when leaving. It’s a metaphoric indication that he has only taken the first step in his journey.

Fejicus (paraphrased)

(something along the lines of how exactly is what you see when you burn gold determined)

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

He said that each time you burn gold, you see a different image, so it changes depending on your current situation.

Rebecca Lovatt

What would you say your proudest moment has been along this journey of 10 years so far?

Brandon Sanderson

There have been several of them, the same type of moment. It's when people come up to me, and they say to me, "Brandon I was not a reader, and your books turned me into one." Because my story, which people can find because I've told it a thousand times, was that I was a reluctant reader. I didn't like books until fantasy novels changed me. I got into this because I thought, "I have to learn to make people feel like Anne McCaffrey made me feel." So in those moments when they say that, that's when I know I'm doing what I set out to do.

A close second is when they tell me I kept them up late at night. I feel nice and evil when I've done that.

Rebecca Lovatt

You have caused me many many sleepless nights. Like the moment I got Words of Radiance--I think I finished that in two or three sittings. Coincidentally, I did not finish my assignment that was due the next day.

Brandon Sanderson

Excellent. Corrupting the youth again. That is the theme of what I do in my life.

Phantine

So you said how stuff is stuffed into the soul changes what a bond can give. Is that like the difference between a Spren bonding a Person and and maybe Hemalurgy forcing a bond or is it more like the difference with how Parshendi form bonds with Spren?

I guess a better way to say that is would the bond be different if a human created the bond with a Spren not a Spren Bonding with a human?

Brandon Sanderson

These things are all important parts of the system, and I'm curious to see where fans go in exploring the possibilities and theories related to it.

...

RAFO

TimAnEnchanter

How is homosexuality regarded across the cosmere?

I know one member of Bridge 4, though I forget who, is gay, but I'm asking more in the sense of legality, societal view, etc.

Barleyjuicer

It would probably depend on the planet and culture involved. Roshar has many varied cultures and probably has multiple different acceptance levels. Scadrial is much more progressive and really only has two cultures so it's more likely that most if not all of the world accepts it. Maybe this is something you could ask [Brandon] at a signing or during an AMA.

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, this varies widely based on the planet, and even culture, TimAnEnchanter.

Roshar, for instance, has a lot of different perspectives on homosexuality. In Iri, the more religious segment (who believe that life is about new experiences) would approve, while the more rigid modern, secular society has outlawed it.

In Azir, you'd find something like existed in middle-ages India. (Some societies there had this curious system where a gay man would be given "social reassignment" so that he was treated like a woman, dressed like one, and had relations with men--even if he wasn't actually transsexual.)

Vorin culture is concerned with oaths. Extra-marital sexuality is strictly forbidden, but homosexuality is regarded the same by most as heterosexual relationships. If the proper oaths are spoken, then the Almighty approves. (This usually means marriage, but there are certain official forms of other relationships that would allow it also.)

There are actually a couple of scenes in Book Three talking about it, for those who are interested, as the family and romantic relationships of the bridgemen are becoming a larger part of the story. (Still a small part, I should note, for space limitations.)

On Scadrial, it's going to fall between Pathian lines (each individual decides for themselves) and Survivorist lines (you follow church hierarchy, which forbids it.)

Don't even get me started on Bavadin's religions.

fbstj

What reasons do Survivorists use to rationalize heterosexuality? Thank you so much for these tidbits it's really interesting to hear more about this stuff from you. It would be great to see some of this canonized, maybe in an interlude, or random background discussion somewhere. Thank you again for your books! Also very interested in hearing why secular Iriali have decided to 'regress' on that.

Brandon Sanderson

Survivorism calls it unnatural, and not conducive to the survival of the species. More than that, though, Survivorism has become very conservative and slow to change. What early thinkers had to say is regarded very strictly in the religion. Back during the early days of the new era, repopulating the basin was of prime concern, and this became a big part of what led to moral codes in Survivorism.

Brandon Sanderson

And yes, he dreams this while Siri and the God King have sex for the first time. That's not a coincidence.

Why does Siri having sex with the God King make Lightsong's dreams turn more violent? Well, it means that the impending disaster is far more dangerous. If she is with child, then the tragedy of her death is that much greater. Beyond that, her having a child (or being thought to be going to have one) is part of what makes Bluefingers do what he feels he needs to in executing her.

He might have done that anyway, but the actual event of the consummation of the marriage is a powerful turning point in the karma of the city and the future of the world. And Lightsong, who is extra sensitive to these things because of being a Returned, is affected by that change in what is coming in the future.

Brandon Sanderson

Duladen, Jindoeese, Svordish

Duladen is a language purely of tonal convenience. My only rule for this language was to use that which ‘sounded right.’ It seemed wrong, in a way, to force any firm linguistic constructions on the Dulas. In addition, Galladon’s use of Dula slang was to become a major mood element of the book. I didn’t have enough time in the book to develop the language in detail, but I needed its sounds to give atmosphere.

Duladen implies a laid-back, loose culture. Its words flow smoothly, and even have a hint of ridiculousness to our English-accustomed ears. Even the Dula word for Hell, ‘Doloken,’ has a kind of rhythmic nonchalance about it. Ironically, the part of the Dula language I was most unsatisfied with was its lead character’s name. I eventually changed it from “Galerion” to “Galladon” to make it fit better.

JinDo is probably the least original of the languages in the book. It is an unabashed rip-off of Chinese, as can easily be distinguished. I did this with some hesitance. I worried that I had too much of a ‘learning curve’ in the setting of the book already, especially with the strange circumstances Raoden was going to be forced to endure. When it came to the JinDo language and culture, I feared that stuffing too much development into such a minor part of the book would make it unwieldy.

JinDo is most important for the philosophers it spawned, three men who eventually became the religious foundations of the continent. I chose an Oriental culture to mimic in this case because of the mystical way in which most western cultures regard Asian-sounding names. Simply by calling something “JinDo” gave it an instant sense of foreign-ness.

I went, perhaps, too far by making the adjectival reference for the nation ‘Jindoeese.’ I probably should have gone with simply “JinDo” as both noun and adjective. Other than that, I am satisfied with the culture, despite its lack of original sounds.

The final language, Svordish, was almost an afterthought. I wanted to make it a dialect of Fjordell, something I could point out to show that all of the nations beyond the mountains weren’t just one big stereotype. By giving Svorden a minor identity of its own—with a side character and the ‘sv’ pattern of sounds—I hoped to give a bit of roundness to the unseen Fjordell empire.

Autarchk

If I can ask a question, I just read the Mistborn trilogy and, were Preservation and Ruin two different shards or a single one with their power split somehow? If they were two shards, does that mean a single person can hold more than one, since Harmony apparently holds both now?

Brandon Sanderson

They were two shards.

Yes, one entity can hold more than one. Remember that holding a shard changes you, over time. Rayse knows this, and prefers to leave behind destroyed rivals as opposed to taking their power and potentially being overwhelmed by it.

Nepene

I have a question, if you are willing. Would Ruin be more compatible with Rayse, would he pick up that shard had he visited Scadrial and shattered him? All the shards we have seen that he has shattered seem rather different in intent than him- Honor, Cultivation, Love, Dominion. But Ruin seems more in line with Odium. Rayse has ruined the days of quite a few people.

Brandon Sanderson

Technically, Ruin would be most compatible with Cultivation. Ruin's 'theme' so to speak is that all things must age and pass. An embodiment of entropy. That power, separated from the whole and being held by a person who did not have the willpower to resist its transformation of him, led to something very dangerous. But it was not evil. None of the sixteen technically are, though you may have read that Hoid has specific beef with Rayse. Whether you think of Odium as evil depends upon how much you agree with Hoid's particular view.

That said, Ruin would have been one of the 'safer' of the sixteen for Rayse to take, if he'd been about that. Odium is by its nature selfish, however, and the combination of it and Rayse makes for an entity that fears an additional power would destroy it and make it into something else.

Fantasy Faction

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)?

Brandon Sanderson

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.

Questioner

Have you ever thought about making your writing class open?

Brandon Sanderson

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.

Brandon Sanderson

Part Four: Updates on Secondary Projects Dark One

We’re moving ahead with the graphic novel on this, and giving you some glimpses of that is one of the big things I’m happy to announce for this State of the Sanderson. We’ve included some gorgeous pages below. The graphic novel is turning out to be something really special. We don’t have an exact release date for this yet, but it shouldn’t be too much longer before we can announce one.

In addition, many of you may have heard the news that J. Michael Straczynski (creator of Babylon Five, among many other cool projects) is attached to this project to make a television show. The same outline I came up with for the graphic novel drew serious Hollywood attention, which is how this happened. That said, JMS has other projects he’s working on as well, and Dark One needs to wait for the right time for him to work on it.

STATUS: Real motion here. Exciting developments in the process!

Songs of the Dead (Was Death by Pizza)

This perpetual entry in the State of the Sanderson is creeping ever closer to being a reality. My co-author, Peter Orullian, has suggested the title Songs of the Dead—which is a really great title, considering it’s about a heavy metal singer necromancer.

We’ve got a second draft done, but it needs a third one. Unfortunately, the hangup is me, as Stormlight has taken basically all my time this year. Peter sent me his latest draft in June or so, and I’m only halfway through my revision of it at this point. So I’m sorry it’s taking so long; I’m excited for you all to read the book, but as it’s my first true book collaboration, there are some growing pains as we figure out how to make the process work right for us.

Hopefully I can finish my next revision early next year, send it back to Peter for one final draft, then begin showing it to editors.

STATUS: Waiting on my next revision.

The Original

This novella that I wrote with the fantastic Mary Robinette Kowal is finished and being recorded as an audio original. It should come out very soon, and I’m quite proud of it.

I’m a little annoyed as the Will Smith movie that came out earlier this year has a similar premise. But that movie bombed and apparently wasn’t very good. So maybe people will appreciate a similar idea done right? We’ll see. I had hoped to get this out before Mr. Smith’s movie came out, but Mary Robinette was busy winning all of the awards for her excellent Lady Astronaut series, and I was busy getting rained on in Roshar.

STATUS: Out soon.

Alcatraz Six

This one is mostly done, just needing a few little tweaks. Again, I haven’t had a ton of time last year, but this one is looking really good. It’s basically all complete, only needing one last pass. We should be doing the interior artwork and editorial work next year.

STATUS: Basically done.

Elantris, Warbreaker, The Rithmatist

No updates from last year, I’m afraid. There was no intention to make progress on these this year. Once Alcatraz is wrapped up, I’ll turn my attention back to The Rithmatist as the last looming series that needs a wrapup that hasn’t gotten one. Elantris and Warbreaker sequels aren’t to be expected until Stormlight Five and Wax and Wayne Four are done.

I know a lot of you keep waiting on Rithmatist news, and I feel bad having to give you the same news every year. (Yes, that paragraph above is the same one I put in the State of the Sanderson last year.) But the truth is, I really can’t work on this until at the very least Alcatraz is finished.

A glimmer of light for you Rithmatist fans is this: my son just read the book, and he’s joined the crowd calling for me to do a sequel. So you have an in-house representative.

STATUS: Keep Waiting. (Sorry again, again.)

White Sand

Graphic novel three is out now! So if you haven’t picked it up, please check it out!

We’ve learned a lot doing our first graphic novel series. Again, there were some growing pains. (We aren’t thrilled, for example, by how often we ended up needing to change artists.) The good news is that we really enjoy doing these, and so we are planning to do another graphic novel series set on Taldain, visiting darkside and dealing with Khriss and her adventures there. So if you are one of those people who read the prose version years ago, and have been waiting for some resolution, Isaac and I are outlining a sequel series right now.

STATUS: Trilogy complete, likely to do a collection of all three in coming years. Sequel series being outlined.

Brandon Sanderson

Siri Is Locked Up, and Her Guards Change

Just a quick reminder here of what's going on with Siri. I worry about her next few sequences looking too "damsel in distress." I tried to counteract this in several places, which I'll mention. Still, I had a problem here. Once things turn to combat and fighting, there is very little that Siri can do. She's not Vin—she can't approach things the same way.

However, since Elend got to play damsel in distress fairly often in the Mistborn books, I think I've earned the right to put a female protagonist into that role here. It's appropriate to the plot, and I don't think it could have worked any other way.

Questioner

So the difference between the White Sand novel and the White Sand graphic novels, what was the thought behind changing Ais's gender?

Brandon Sanderson

There were a couple thoughts. The main one was, I just thought the character was more interesting. A lot of my early books, you'll notice I did a thing where I'm like "I want to make sure that I'm doing the female character really well." And you can see the problem in that sentence, and that is really how I approached it, I'd say "Well I want to make sure I do the female character really well." And I think I did do the female character pretty well in some of those early books. But you'll see a consistency to them, and this is just coming aware of your biases.

Now, there is nothing wrong with writing a book intentionally and saying, "You know what? Because of the way I want to write this book in this world, I'm going to make the cast almost all one gender or the other. It's when you're doing it consistently on accident, that there's a problem. And I had to kind of sit down and say, "Did I do this because I thought it was best for the character, or did I do this because I love Inspector Javert and I just wanna have to have Inspector Javert in my book?" And that's where the character came from, quite obviously.

And I sat down and said, "If I were going to build this character from the ground up to be my own character and I were trying to throw away all biases, what would be the best for the character?" And Ais being female was not a "I need more women in the book," it was more of, "If I'm throwing away these biases and building the characters, what works the best?" and I just really liked how that character came out when I was rebuilding. Yeah, anyway, we'll go with that.

Questioner (paraphrased)

In Elantris it talks about how the wood and stone in the city is rotten and crumbling. Why does this happen?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

This is because when objects become Invested for long periods of time their Spiritweb changes to accommodate the Investiture. When the Investiture was pulled up off the stuff in Elantris, its Spiritweb was severely damaged so it showed that in the Physical Realm. This happened with the Lord Ruler when the Bands of Mourning were ripped out of him.

Brandon Sanderson

This is my third and final essay tying in with the release of my new book, Legion: The Many Lives of Stephen Leeds. The book has been released for about a week now, and I hope you've all had a chance to check it out. This story is something special to me, particularly the third part—which might be the most personal story I've ever written.

But how did it start? The Legion stories seem, at first glance, very self-referential. They are about a man who hallucinates a wide variety of characters—but unlike many protagonists of his ilk, Stephen knows that his hallucinations aren't real, and doesn't (for most of the stories) resist the fact that he is like this. Instead, he uses this ability to help him, acting like a one-man team of experts.

The parallels are obvious. Stephen is very much like me, in that he imagines a large cast of people who accompany him. It's quite the metaphor for being a writer, though when I was working on the first story, I didn't really see this connection. I just wanted to see if I could change something that is often portrayed in film as a huge liability into (instead) a huge advantage.

The original cast of hallucinations—specifically JC, Ivy, and Tobias—were based on actors. This is rare for me, as I don't often "cast" my characters in stories. But to me, it felt like Stephen would have used people he'd seen in film as a jumping-off point to create these personas, much as many of my characters have their roots in the pop culture I consumed when young. Ivy, then, looks roughly like Gwyneth Paltrow, Tobias like Morgan Freeman, and J.C. like Adam Baldwin—with the name J.C. being a reference to the fact that he's played multiple characters with those initials.

But, like any characters I create, these were just jumping-off points, used to spin me into unique characterizations. JC went into this fun mix of self-aware, playing up his quirks, while Ivy became a representation of the fight within Stephen between cynicism and sincerity.

The more I wrote, the more this became a metaphor for the complex relationship between a writer and the characters in their head. The voices that they know aren't real—but still depend on convincing readers to buy as real people. The stories deal with mental illness, yes, but the further I wrote, the more Stephen became a stand-in for the way our perceptions—and our hopes—shape the world we perceive. And maybe for the crisis that can be caused when we realize there's a misalignment between the two.

Going back to the points I made in the first essay, however, it isn't that I was trying to express anything specific by writing these stories. And yet, by the end of the third one, I had indeed expressed something that was deeply personal—and real in ways that it is still strange to me that a piece of fiction can reach.

But that's the point of stories, or at least one of them. A medium through which we can all connect in ways that we never could solely by explaining ourselves. Because art reaches inside us, and expresses aspects of ourselves that aren't deliberate, there's a truth and genuineness to it. A raw sincerity that isn't always about which part of the three-act structure you're crossing right now, or which part of a character arc this event is fulfilling. Those are important to give us a framework. But it is not itself the art.

The structure is the skeleton, but the art is the eyes. The part you can see into and feel it looking back at you. The part that somehow—despite my best attempts to quantify it—is a soul that lives on its own, and defies explanation.

Brandon Sanderson

Boy, I have a lot to say on this chapter. Let's talk about Sarene's engagement to Roial.

Some moments, when you're writing, things just click together. The moment when I came up with this plotting element was one such moment. I hadn't actually planned this into my outline. Suddenly, as I was writing, I realized just how much sense it made, and how wonderful it would be to force the characters to have to go through this. Even still, this is one of my very favorite twists in the book.

The scene in the carriage has been there from the beginning, but I did change it slightly in the last draft, adding the section where Roial talks to Sarene about herself. His line "You're an excellent judge of character, except for your own" is something I think needed to be said to Sarene at some point in the book. The actual suggestion that it happen came from my Master's Thesis committee. They–correctly–saw Sarene as someone who had an unrealistic image of herself.

She really isn't as unmarriagble, or as unwantable, as she thinks she is. Even back in Teod, she wasn't regarded quite as harshly as she assumes. However, she's very hard on herself. Someone needed to sit her down and tell her–at the same time acknowledging to the reader–that she isn't half as bad as she seems to think.

EruSmikalov

Do you regret setting the precedent that Stormlight books are as big as they are?

Brandon Sanderson

Nope. They are the length I want them to be, and I have always said to people these will be at the length that I want them to be. I view them as thousand-page epics: that's how I plot them, that's how I pace them, that's how I want them to be. If I changed my mind, I would let you all know, but I have never felt constrained by that. I have more felt constrained by the realities of publishing and how long I can get before the presses break.

And I'm much more comfortable with that now that I know I can do hundred-thousand word novels that are tight and things like Skyward or Bands of Mourning (instead of the new one, because the new one's 150), but the fact that I can do that and I can do novellas that are tight means that I can with confidence say that I'm writing the Stormlight books at the length they deserve to be, not at an artificially inflated length, if that makes sense.

Adam Horne

Correct me if I'm wrong; I might be conflating stories. At one point, you had considered making each of the books three different books, right? Or breaking them up?

Brandon Sanderson

No. I plot them, in order to be able to put this all together, I plot them as three. Not as three different books, but as a trilogy intended to be read together without breaks between it. But that helps me conceptualize how to build it. The fifth one will not be built that way, though, as I was alluding to earlier. It will be built someway else, and I will tell you about that when we get closer to it and after I make sure that this structure is working.

Questioner

Do you plan on writing Stormlight Archive where you have to be Cosmere aware?

Brandon Sanderson

I intend Stormlight to always be its own story. The Cosmere will start influencing a little more here and there, but I never intend you to have to know anything about the Cosmere. Who knows how I'll be at the later books if I'll change my mind, but I intend it to be no more than it's really been now.

Questioner

Do you know the value of a heliodor and a smokestone and all that, the relative values?

Brandon Sanderson

Peter does. I wrote it out once and now I have him just fact-check it for me when I write the books. So I will often say, "Worth about this much, give me the right money and change". So I made the original guide that they follow, but nowadays I don't have to use that; I can just bracket and say, "Something worth about this much".

Tempestuous

What's the process of making a map? How much info does Brandon give, and how much do you adapt it to yourself?

Isaac Stewart

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.

Brandon Sanderson

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.

Isaac Stewart

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.

Brandon Sanderson

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.

/u/ph4mp573r

[Hoid] was beheaded in Dragonsteel Prime and the Dawnshard is what regrew his head. He makes a crack about always thinking his head would have grown a new body, not vice versa, as he stares at his own severed head.

/u/sambadaemon

Slightly related: If the Dawnshard let Hoid regrow his entire head, will it eventually give Rysn back the use of her legs?

Peter Ahlstrom

The different dawnshards have different powers.

Information subject to change when it appears in canon.

Brandon Sanderson

The Number Sixteen

I worry that having Vin make this connection is one of the more forced events in the book. She'd just finished telling everyone that she wasn't a scholar, and now she discovers a pattern of numbers hidden in the statistics of how people fall sick? My original intention for this was to have her be in a mind-set where she was looking for natural rules—because of her earlier discussion of Ruin and his rules—which then allowed her to see this pattern.

Rereading it, I'm not 100% pleased with it, but it's too late to make a change. I'd probably rewrite it so that Noorden or Elend make the connection, then let Vin connect that to what she's been thinking about. That would have been a much more natural progression.

Note that here, Vin misunderstands what these numbers mean. She's looking for rules that bind Ruin. What she finds is not that, but instead a clue left by Preservation. Numbers are understandable to people regardless of language, and so Preservation decided to leave some clues for people to discover that would hopefully lead them to follow the plans he'd set in motion. In my prewriting, I'd intended there to be more hard facts to be discovered in the workings of the universe—numbers hidden in mathematical statistics that said rational things, like the boiling point of water or the like. All as a means of Preservation hinting to humankind that there was a plan for them.

In the end, this didn't work out. I decided it would be overly complicated and that it would just be too technical to work in this particular novel. The only remnant of that plot arc became the number sixteen that Preservation embedded into the way the mistsickness works, intending it to give a clue about what the mists are doing to people. "You now are Allomancers!" is what this was supposed to scream. Unfortunately, the Lord Ruler's obfuscation of Allomancy—and the number of metals in it—left this clue to fall flat.

asmodeus

We now know that Glys and Tumi were Enlightened, and that has⁠—to some extent⁠—affected Renarin's Oaths and Surges. Could this Enlightenment have only happened one way? In the sense that is every Enlightened mistspren going to be displaying the same changes, or is there room for exploration here?

Brandon Sanderson

Good question and RAFO. I'm glad you're asking that, but I am going to RAFO it.

Questioner

So what would Wayne do with a Shardblade?

Brandon Sanderson

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

Questioner

My question is about Vin's earring. We see later on in the books that hemalurgic spikes lose their charge very rapidly. But Vin leaves her earring in a box. So how does it contain enough charge to still have enough of an effect for her to...?

Brandon Sanderson

I have this on a logarithmic scale. At the beginning, you lose some power pretty quick. And then it evens out. And my answer there is just there was enough left, and it could have, at that point, gone decades without getting to the point that it's a hemalurgic spike in name only. The reason they want to keep... they want to maintain as much power in those as they can. Which is why they talk about this thing. The first day you leave that spike without a host, or without taking certain precautions, you lose the most power that you're ever gonna lose. So those who were aware of this tried very hard not to let that happen. But once it does happen, you end up with something like Vin's earring, which still has a hemalurgic charge, a significant one, enough of one to have a change on the person wearing it. If we didn't do this then, like, koloss spikes, would be meaningless very quickly. I built it into this. It's one of those, like, steep drop off, and then not bad.

Adam Horne

A few people have wondered if we're ever going to see time travel in the cosmere.

Brandon Sanderson

Time travel into the past is something that I decided very early in the life of the cosmere that I was not going to deal with. So people can time travel into the future, but we can do that right now - not very much, but if you go fast, you are time traveling into the future by laws of relativity, and it's easier to do that in the cosmere. There are a couple things for storytelling that really throw a lot of wrenches into your worldbuilding. One of them's time travel; as soon as you introduce time travel, it changes everything.

Another one is bringing characters back from the dead, and since my very first cosmere book starts with someone being resurrected in chapter one, I knew that people coming back from the dead was not something I could have a hard fast rule against in the cosmere. Multiple books are based on the idea of people being resurrected; that's where Warbreaker and Elantris both come from, is that kind of idea.

Since I knew I was going to be doing that one, the other two that I think that really mess with things in strange ways are alternate dimensions and time travel. And that's when I just said I'm going to put those both off-limits in the cosmere. You saw me doing alternate dimension stuff in Steelheart, in part because I won't let myself do it in the cosmere. I'm already playing with fire with the way that people can become cognitive shadows in the cosmere, and I don't want to have the other two messing up narratives and storylines and things on the level that they would. So no time travel into the past ever in the cosmere.