Found 128 entries in 0.181 seconds.
So you mentioned that Kaladin gets sad during the Weeping. Is that due to lack of stormlight or maybe seasonal affective disorder?
It is mostly due to seasonal affective disorder. Now, you know, there are other things going on and whatnot, but yes he has strong seasonal affective disorder.
What was your inspiration for Kaladin?
Kaladin was inspired originally by reading about surgeons in the middle ages.
In transitioning from Merin to Kaladin, was there any plot sacrifices that were particularly difficult for [you]?
No. I had been disappointed enough in the way that Merin turned out in the original draft of The Way of Kings, that transitioning to someone more vibrant and more interesting in Kaladin really didn’t feel like a sacrifice to me.
When Kaladin jumps in to help Adolin, and he's fighting and he says he feels like he can fight with his eyes shut. Is that just Kaladin being cocky? Or is that Investiture related? ...It reminded me of atium.
There's a little more going on there, but it's not as far as you think.
Is there any specific relation between Kelsier and Kaladin, and the fact that Kelsier was killed with a spear and Kaladin used a spear. They seem like almost exact opposites.
Not really an intentional one, though I do intend their personalities to be opposed. I like how they are opposing philosophies as protagonists, but the spear thing is completely coincidental. They are very opposite styles of hero, the big pitch for myself was "Kelsier would the villain if he were in the wrong story." This is a guy where you could easily imagine that this guy could be the antagonist. He gets channeled towards good things and becomes the protagonist. There is no way Kaladin would ever be the antagonist, or if he did it would rip him apart, right. It's not in his nature.
If Kaladin and Dalinar were Magic cards, what color do you think they’d be?
Dalinar now is mono-White. He was mono-Red in his youth, inching toward Black-Red, but I would just call him mono-Red in his youth. Kaladin I would probably call Blue-White in Magic terms because they like things that fly and that have to do with the wind. So he would get the elemental Blue and personality White. Maybe a tinge of Red, but probably-- I would make a Blue-White Kaladin.
Was Adolin and Shallan always the endgame, or did you ever shift to Kaladin?
I did shift, back and forth. So, what I do with a lot of my relationships is, I don't usually plan them out. A lot of characterization, I have to leave the characters kind of their own volition. So I write my way into relationships and I write my way into the character elements. I plot my world, my setting, and my plot out ahead of time but I let the characters go where they're going to go. I know some people would rather she made a different decision, but that is the decision that felt right to me going forward.
I've just validated all the Shallarin people on the internet saying, "Aw, he changed his mind!"
Who's Tarah?
*long pause* Why do you want to know? ...Tell me why you want to know.
Because she's important to Kaladin and Kaladin's important to me?
Okay, that's a decent answer. She-- um. Ehhhh. She was someone Kaladin cared for deeply in a romantic way.
How tall is Kaladin?
Kaladin I think is 6' 4"? But I'm not 100% sure how the equivalent-- Like he is 6' 4" to Rosharans, which may actually put him several inches taller to the 6' 4", like the feet on Roshar are not exactly the same as feet here.
I thought Kaladin was dark skinned.
Most of the Alethi are darker skinned, and would not look Caucasian to us. But most cover artists (and readers) miss this fact.
It's not something I've been clear enough about to publishers when they commission art. My bad, not theirs.
Chapter One
This was a controversial chapter for my writing group and my editor, and was wrapped up in the whole learning curve argument. It was suggested several times that if this chapter were from Kaladin's viewpoint, the book wouldn't feel quite so overwhelming at the start. After all, Chapters One and Two would then be from the same viewpoint and would give a stronger clue to readers.
I resisted. I had already accepted that this was going to be a challenging book for readers. That's not an excuse to ignore advice, but at the same time, I decided I was committed to the long-term with this book. That meant doing things at the start that might seem unusual for the purpose of later payoff.
This is an excellent example of that. If I'd done this scene through Kaladin's eyes, I don't think it would have been as powerful. Kaladin is on top of things here, in control. I didn't want the first chapter to feel that in control. I wanted the sense of chaos worry and uncertainty.
Beyond that, I wanted to introduce Kaladin as a contrast to all of that. A solid force for order, a natural leader, and an all-around awesome guy. Doing that from within someone's viewpoint is tough unless they're on the arrogant side, like Kelsier. It can work in that kind of viewpoint, but not in Kaladin's.
Finally, I am always looking to play with the tropes of fantasy where I can. I feel that if I'd been writing this as a youth, I'd have made someone like Cenn the hero. (Indeed, in the original draft of The Way of Kings from 2002, Kaladin was much more like Cenn is now.) Opening with a young man thrust into war, then having him get killed seemed like a good way to sweep the pieces off the table and say, "No, what you expect to happen isn't going to happen in this book."
This also let me set up for a future chapter, where I could flashback to Kaladin's view of these events. As narrative structure was something I wanted to play with in this book, that appealed to me.
Kelsier vs. Kaladin, who wins?
Kelsier is meaner. Kelsier is sneakier. Raw power - I'm not sure, but I'm gonna go with Kelsier. If its on a battlefield, Kelsier doesn't win. If its off the battlefield, Kelsier wins. Kaladin is a soldier. He can fight a war and fight with a team and he can win a battle. Kelsier can sneak into someones house and stab them.
Just a minor request: Kaladin have some semblance of long term happiness? I know he struggles with depression and PTSD, but just a little bit of-- as happy as someone struggling with that can be?
I think you can be very happy when you're struggling with those things. There, obviously, are things you have to learn and things you have to work with, but it is, I think, totally possible that he could. Whether or not I'll do it-- I'll take that as a request.
Is Kaladin's name influenced by Dune?
I've read Dune many times, so maybe? It's more looking at-- A lot of Dune names are Arabic inspired, and I went to that region for a lot of the names. But I think the word "Paladin" was probably more in the back of my head. I didn't even think of it until I started writing it, and I'm like, "Oh I bet that's where I got it." But it's often kind of based off of like, Khalid, or things like that? Like a lot of the Arabic names go Khalid.
I was actually just thinking that the other day how the Knights are a lot like paladins.
It wasn't like, "I'll come up with the word." But after I started writing I'm like, "Oh I bet that's why the name felt right to me". But you can't separate an author from their influences, and I've read Dune like 5 times.
Is Kaladin ever going to get like a wife or a girlfriend?
Here's your RAFO card. There's your RAFO card.
What was that plot point you were talking about where you had to change it?
Kaladin kept the blade and plate in the original version of The Way of Kings.
What's Kaladin's last name?
Kaladin doesn't have a last name because, in Alethkar, your last name is your House name. He is vacillating on what his House name would be, everyone just calls him Kaladin Stormblessed. There's a realistic expectation that if he wanted to be a Kholin, he could be a Kholin, if he wanted to adopt that as his own House name instead of having a different one.
But right now he's just called Kaladin Stormblessed.
When Kaladin dreams about riding the highstorm, is that something only he can do, only Windrunners, all Radiants?
RAFO.
Will the flute come back?
A lot of people are curious about the flute. I have been non-committal, so far.
Is Kaladin related to Aesudan?
Yes, but it's not a close relation. A very complex system of things, but yes.
I was just wondering why he knew her...the melody she was humming.
Oh, he did. That is not because they're related.
So it's something else?
It's something else. I thought that was a sideways question about Kaladin's mom.
It kinda was, I thought maybe she hummed that and so that's why he recognized it.
No, good question.
What was your inspiration for Kaladin? What made you want to make him?
Kaladin's origin was in me reading about the interesting lives of surgeons in pre-industrial eras. Surgeons who were at times treated no different from a butcher, and at other times straddled this line between superstition and science in a really interesting way. And I wanted to write a surgeon who straddled that line. Where the superstition was against them, but in some ways the science that they knew also worked against them because the people didn't trust it. That's a really fascinating character. He started more as his dad, and as I worked the books he became Kaladin the son of a surgeon instead of the surgeon himself.
As a lady who enjoys romances, is a Kaladin romance coming soon?
Three (kind of three and a half) failures so far. Maybe fourth time is a charm? Let's just say it's not off the table.
Speaking of Rosharan calendar-- So seventeen year old Kaladin, is he the equivalent of a seventeen year old Earthling?
It's 1.1, I think is what is it. Right, they're 10% older than their accounting system. So no.
So Adolin is 27, true?
Yeah.
So then a year is obviously a lot more than 1.1 but--
Well no. The years are 500 days, but they're 20 hour days. Keep that in mind. So when you run the calculations kinda together, you end up with around 1.1.
If Kaladin wasn't in the arena in Words of Radiance, would Zahel have intervened to help Adolin?
I will RAFO that, but a different kind of RAFO—in that I don't think Zahel himself knows what he would do in that situation. The better part of him would want to have, but he is not living his best life right now, shall we say. He is not living up to his potential, and he knows it. And so would he have? He should have. But would be have? Good question. Even he doesn't... I don't think that he could answer.
You said you would talk about the tone issue after the book comes out. What was that issue, and for which character?
So the tone issue for Rhythm of War is just how dark things get in some of the Kaladin viewpoints. We've had some rough times for Kaladin through this series, and I wouldn't say that this is necessarily darker than book one, for instance, or even some parts of book two. But one thing we were noticing with the beta readers is: stacking what was happening to Kaladin on top of a worldwide pandemic that was causing general anxiety in a lot of the population was making some beta readers overreact to Kaladin, the darkness in his thing. At the same time, I thought... "Overreaction's" the wrong term, right? It was the right reaction for them, it's not that they overreacted. But they reacted stronger than I think people would have in another year
And this left me with the difficult choice of: is this an actual tone problem with the book, or is this the function of the fact that everybody's really stressed right now? And I decided to walk a middle ground between this. I decided that even if it was a stronger reaction, there are things I could do that would just generally improve the book, that wouldn't make it worse, but would also help with this issue. The main thing that I looked to do was make sure that Shallan and Adolin's sequences were lightened up through most of their sequence. Even though some tough stuff was happening with Shallan and her viewpoints, particularly at the beginning, I wanted to back off on...
What I mostly did was: I added a few more scenes with Shallan and Adolin that were more "let's investigate a mystery, let's problem solve" but not "oh my goodness everything is wrong with Shallan, this is really stressful." This doesn't include the starspren scene, that was already there. But this does include... I think it's the second Shallan viewpoint in that part where they're crossing the ocean. That second Shallan viewpoint or maybe the third, there's one in there I added specifically to be like: let's show some healthy relationship stuff going on, just to balance out the fact that stuff's really dark over with Kaladin.
This might be a slight spoiler for the next book, but I can tell you Kaladin has now turned the corner, I would say. You should be expecting from now on: Kaladin's still gonna have dark days, Kaladin has depression. But he turned a major corner in this book, and I'm very proud of him.
Considering Brandon likes MTG, this is probably something he has thought out haha.
Kaladin strikes me as someone with a very White personality and Blue powers.
Shallan's Blue.
Dalinar's White, but I feel like he was Red before.
Adolin has some Red, some White, and recently some Black I guess.
Lift is Red in personality and I guess Green at powers.
What else can you guys come up with?
Hmm... These are not bad, and it's always hard to figure out how to define by this system--honestly, I wouldn't trust my definitions, I'd have to go to MaRo or something.
I'd suspect that Shallan is red/blue instead of mono blue.
Lift is very green, not just in powers, but in personality. She's all about instinct, and doing what occurs to her in the moment.
As OP said, Kaladin is very white/blue. And Dalinar is red who became white. Navani is mono-blue. Szeth is black/white, and Taravangian probably mono-black. Eshonai is probably green.
Moving on to Words of Radiance, as we were entering typo fixes for the paperback of this book, I made changes to a few lines near the end. This isn't anywhere near as extensive as the changes in Elantris, but once again I figure I should be up-front about what I did and why I did it.
This part is going to have some spoilers for the book, so if you haven't read it, please stop right here. I'll put a number of blank lines here to prevent accidental spoilers. Scroll down if you've finished the book.
So, in Words of Radiance, I think the scene I worked on the longest both in my head and on the page was the final confrontation between Kaladin and Szeth.
There was something I wanted to do, and took a stab at it in the text, then backed off because I couldn't make it work. It was important to me that Kaladin refuse to kill Szeth at the end. Kaladin is about protection, not vengeance, and once he realized that Szeth really just wanted to be killed, I wanted Kaladin to hesitate.
It didn't end up working, and I moved on to a new version and submitted it. But this itched at me, and by the time the book was released, I felt I'd made the wrong choice for that scene. So I've taken this chance to roll it back to the previous idea, and written it in a new way, which I like much better.
The events are the same, except for that moment. Szeth is now killed by the storm instead of by Kaladin, which I think is more thematically appropriate.
The question this raises is about Szeth being stabbed by a Shardblade, then being resuscitated. I'm sad to lose this sequence, as it's an important plot point for the series that dead Shardblades cannot heal the soul, while living ones can. I'm going to have to work this into a later book, though I think it's something we can sacrifice here for the stronger scene of character for Kaladin and Szeth.
Kaladin is a lot younger than his knowledge and training levels are... *inaudible*
It just depends, he's led-- you have to keep two things in mind, he's led a very hard life, which aged him experience-wise differently, and also Roshar years are longer than ours, so when they say in this book [that] he's 19, he's not actually 19, he's more like-- I can't remember the exact equation, but he's actually 23, or something like that. So do keep that in mind.
