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Did anything help inspire Navani’s character in tWoK?
Numerous things. Partially, the fact that there’s a distinct lack of mothers in fantasy fiction. Everybody seems to be an orphan.
Partially, the need for a strong, well-rounded woman of an older, wiser nature to balance out Shallan’s impulsive nature.
And, in part, she was designed because I wanted a Fabrial engineer among the cast, and extrapolated personality from there.
Is Lopen, is he going to be one of the secondary [main characters for the back half of the Stormlight Archive]?
He is not. Good question.
Information. That's the real power in this world
Everyone is an academic. (Or, well, nearly everyone.) This is intentional. Grandpa Smedry gives us a speech here about information, and if I had to pick one theme for this book, his comments would be it.
Isaac Asimov once complained that fantasy was all about dumb barbarians killing smart wizards–thereby making the genre anti-intelligence. I’ve always found this a shortsighted way of looking at the genre. To me, it’s all about being clever. I wanted heroes who were academics. People who were what we would call nerds. And I wanted to show them using information–rather than weapons–to save the day.
I do worry, however, that Grandpa Smedry droned on a bit long in this chapter. It’s the last place where I think we have this problem in the book, but this chapter itself is essentially one big conversation while preparing to go into the library. Not a lot happens.
We get those sometimes in my books. Hopefully, they set us up for the drama and climaxes later on. We need to know the characters, and have a groundwork, for the quick pacing that happens from chapter seven onward.
How do you pronounce the Mistborn Planet? [Scadrial]
Sca (as in Scab) dri (as in drink) al (sounds like ul).
Okay. I always said Sca (as in Skate) dri (as in drink) al (as in Albert)
That’s perfectly fine. This can launch me into my little thing on pronunciation. As readers, you get the say, you’re the director. I wrote the script. The director can always change things. If you want a character to look differently in your head, that’s okay. If you want to pronounce things however you want, that’s okay too. Because a book does not exist until it has a reader. It really doesn’t live. It exists, but it doesn’t live until you read it and give it life. So however you feel like doing it, go ahead. And remember, I’ve said this numerous times before, I don’t pronounce all the names right. I’m American, so I pronounce things with an American accent. The best example I give is Kelsier, because I do say Kel (as in bell) si (as in see) er (as in air), but they say Kel (as in bell) si (as in see) er (as in hey) in-world (it sounds very French). I say E (as in the letter e) lan (as in lawn) tris (as in hiss), they say E (as in the letter e) Lan (as in lane) tris (as in hiss) in-world. So there are linguistic fundamentals of these because I do have some linguistic background, but I don’t always say them right. I like saying Sa (like suh) rene (like Reen), instead of Sa (like suh) rene (like meany), which is how they say it. Which Suh-reany sounds kind of dumb in English. And in their language, it’s a beautiful woman’s name, but here you wouldn’t call someone Suh-reany, you’d call them Suh-rean.
Strategies for the Sagging Middle.
Middles are tough. My experience has been that the writer thinks the middle sags more than it does, because you're not at the exciting beginning wherever everything's fresh and not at the end with the climax. Stagger the climaxes. For instance, Words of Radiance, I built it and plotted it like three books with multiple climaxes from major characters at the end of part 1, at the end of part 3, and at the end of the whole thing. It'll make your novel read like a trilogy.
You got it wrong. I'm not busy because I'm writing other books, I'm working on the licensing deals! Cardboard shardplate! Official Bridge Four loincloths! "There's spren in my poop" toilet paper!
Serious question: are there poopspren, and how would they fare in indoor plumbing situations?
Well, it depends on how you're defining spren. In the books, they don't make a distinction, but there are several varieties. At the basic level, everything has an identity--a soul, you might say, but more than that. This is based on how it is viewed, and how long it has been viewed that way. Feces would have this, but wouldn't have a very strong cognitive identity because of its transitional nature.
Other types of spren, the type that characters see and interact with, are cognitive ideals or concepts which have taken on literal personification over time. These are usually related to forces or emotions, and don't relate to this particular topic.
And that's far more than I ever expected to say on this...
Which character in your books so far have you had the most fun bringing to life?
Probably Wayne. He's just fun to write. When I get in his viewpoint, the weirdness takes over and it's great.
In a similarly amusing cameo (I must have been in a cameo mood) we have Slowswift—who is based on Grandpa Tolkien. (See this picture.) The name itself comes from his love of wordplay and of names that are inherently self-contradictory.
I'm no Tolkien scholar—I don't know the man's personality or how he would have reacted to this situation. I'm just a layman and a fan—who for some reason felt like sticking in a tiny side character in imitation of the master. We authors do strange things like that occasionally.
On one of your older Writing Excuses you guys talked about doing retellings or reimagining stories. I was curious if any of your--even your short stories-- are either in full or in part retellings?
I use the bits-- You ever read the Alcatraz books?
Actually those are the only ones of yours I haven't.
Okay, so those I actually--don't get weirded out-- but I used the Oedipus myth. A little bit. Not the weirdest parts. But the y'know--
Fate...
Fate, and being blind but not blind, and prophecy, and things like like that because the character tells you the end of the last book in the first paragraph of the first book and then it's all like it's almost fated to be. And so there is metaphorical blindness, and there's-- things like that. So that's the only one I used any-- and even that's really loosely structured. I wouldn't say I used any specifics, yet, for any of my books.
Unless you count archetypes. Like I like taking certain archetypes and mixing them in. Like Bridge Four is an underdogs sports story. So I use the archetype of something like losers but I made it being killed on a field of battle instead, and things like that. But those are more general, it's a more different sort of thing.
What are the other books in The Stormlight Archive going to be about?
Well each one is going to cover a flashback sequence for one of the characters and each one will focus on a different order of the Knights Radiant. And that's not always the same, like the flashbacks for the first one were Kaladin and it was also Windrunners, but we won't always have them be the exact same.
So, I heard you talk about cameos, are there any other cameos besides Hoid and Nightblood in the books?
So, Galladon from Elantris, Baon from White Sand, and Captain Demoux all show up in Way of Kings. They're the Purelake scene. Let's see... the character of Felt is a worldhopper, you see him in a couple of books. Watch out for him. Khriss is in a couple of the books, she's the one who writes the Ars Arcanums. Nazh is in a couple of the books, Khriss's assistant. Vasher is in the book. They're all over the place.
How long have you had the idea for Skyward?
The first ideas - about Spensa's character - started around 2012. It wasn't until I decided to put her in this setting that it came together.
In the original draft, I wasn't sure what kind of person I was going to make Allmother. I hadn't planned for her and Lightsong to have any kind of history together; these are just connections I worked into it as I wrote. (Along with his relationship with Calmseer.) He needed something to intertwine him better with the court, and so as I was drafting, these things kind of just fit together. Sometimes readers ask me what I plan and what I don't. Well, the honest truth is that it's hard to look at a book and give clear guidelines on what was planned and what was developed during the process of writing. In this case, Allmother as a character was done completely on the fly.
Of course, once she was developed, I went back in the next draft and built in some references to her in the Lightsong sections so that I could hint at previous interaction.
Twentieth - are there any characters you dislike writing about and would like to kill off?
Joking answer: Cadsuane from WoT, someone else from WoT - Masema.
I would like to know what makes Brandon's books so well-suited to visual adaptation.
Thanks!
He describes dramatic events and characters with clarity while including creative action, which makes it easy to visualize but also stimulating to imagine. He's also gotten quite good at giving you enough information to draw conclusions, without giving you so much that you don't need to bother drawing anything... that took some time, his early books are a lot less descriptive, but even with the first Mistborn novel he had some very strong visual concepts.
In addition, he's often combining something familiar with something fantastic (literally). The familiar elements give an artist a basis upon which to map the fantastic. So we have something like Shardplate, which is plate armor (familiar) but it's made *only * of plates, no cloth or chain (fantastic), and that's where it gets interesting to design. Or we have the Chasmfiends, which were described by Brandon to me as "crayfish-dragons" (familiar/fantastic). Or we have the Inquisitors, tall scary men (familiar) with shiny steel spikes through their eyes that emerge from their skulls like horns (WTF).
Thanks to his descriptive clarity and the familiar/fantastic mix, a properly-trained illustrator has the right elements to produce content with enough basis to set a firm foundation, but enough freedom to add their own creativity to the mix.
Plus, his stuff is just fun. Fun goes a long way. :)
Chapter Twenty-Five
Fadrex
Fadrex was originally named Fadex. However, nobody—not my editor, my agent, or my writing group—liked that name. I added one letter, and suddenly it was okay. Go figure.
This city, as I mentioned earlier, was very tough for me to figure out how to describe. I can picture it quite distinctly in my head. Of course, I've spent a lot of time in southern Utah, where rock formations like this are plentiful. If you Google "Cathedral Valley" you can get an idea of what this area might look like—except that the formations in Cathedral Valley are a little bit higher and more spread out than what I imagine for Fadrex.
Sometimes I wish I could crawl inside the heads of my readers while they experience these stories and see what they imagine the places to look like. I've said before that I like how fiction is participatory—that each person who reads my books imagines slightly different things; each person gets different images for places and characters. I'd like to know what they see, just for curiosity's sake. There's no wrong way to imagine these people, just like there isn't a right or a wrong way to pronounce the names. It's all up to you.
Phenax, which Shard do you think he is most like?
God of Deception. I don't know. I'd have to think about that. I'm not 100% sure. It might be one I haven't revealed yet which...
Obviously that's the whole RAFO deal.
Yeah. Phenax is an interesting character in the lore. I like all of their gods of the underworld that they do.
Sarene's extended internal narrative about Graeo remains in the book despite a slight dissatisfaction on my part with the section. It feels a little expository, and we've gotten implications regarding these things before. I'm not sure that we really learn anything new about Sarene's character here, we just get a few specifics about her past.
However, one of the nice things about a book like this–or, even, books in general, as opposed to movies –is that you don't have to worry TOO much about every scene and moment. I don't have to shave seconds quite as intensely as a film-maker might, or even shave words as much as an author of a shorter work might. I can afford a few diversions like this one, even if they ramble just a bit.
Spook's Delusions of Grandeur
Spook thinks a line here that my editor, and several writing group members, tried to cut. It's the line where, just in narrative, it implies that Spook had been the one to overthrow the Lord Ruler. It says something like, "It was much like that night, the night when he had overthrown the Lord Ruler" with the narrative making it clear that the "he" was Spook.
You have to remember that I use a limited narrator, not an omniscient one. When I'm writing a scene from a character's viewpoint, the text is colored by what they think and their view of the world. This line is deliberate, as by this point Ruin has his claws deep into Spook and is making him begin to think things that just aren't true. It's getting difficult for Spook to distinguish Ruin's fantasies from the reality, and for a moment he inflated his own part in the overthrow of the Lord Ruler.
Vivenna Agrees to Learn Awakening
This has been a long time coming. Sorry to make you wait; in some of my books, I like to use a lot of magic from the start. In others, I like to build out the setting first, letting the characters learn and explore more slowly.
I've long wanted to call a magic system "Awakening," by the way. I tried it out originally in The Way of Kings as the name for the transformation-based magic system in that book. But it never worked. You didn't really "awaken" things. I was just using the term because it sounded good.
So I put it back in the file to be recycled someday. As I began to plan this book, I developed a magic system that could be called Awakening. Bringing objects to life seems to fit that just perfectly. So yes, the word came first—though I'm not sure how much I grew the magic system around that one word, or if I was feeling I wanted to do a "bring objects to life" magic system and realized I could use that great name I'd come up with earlier.
Is there going to be a Hoid book? Just Hoid?
There will be several Hoid books eventually. [...] It will be about his backstory, the main one, and then we'll have some in the present as well.
Will it show up in scenes where he interacts with these characters?
I'm not planning those right now. I know they would be interesting, but I'm not sure if they'd make good enough books.
How much control do you have over the Words of Radiance cover?
Some. By dint of being fairly well-known in the industry. But I'm really fond of Whelan's work and more likely to pick a direction from concept sketches than push Whelan somewhere entirely new.
Could you, for instance, hold firm for epicanthic folds on Rosharan characters?
Probably yes, but most of Whelan's cover work has been figures in the distance for now so that isn't likely to be an issue.
Camon was originally far less competent than he ended up in the final draft. Originally, Vin was constantly (in this chapter and the next) thinking about how he was making mistakes when talking to the obligator and the crew. I thought this would establish Vin as an intelligent, insightful character–one who is even better than the guy in charge of her crew.
However, I eventually realized that this didn't work. Camon was too incompetent–the version of him in the first draft would never have been able to keep control of his crew. In addition, by making him so weak, it weakened the threat to Vin. It's always better to have antagonists be strong, if only to make the heroes look stronger by comparison. Though Camon is only a minor villain in this book, strengthening him made the story seem much more logical, and I really don't think I lost anything.
Chapter Eighteen
As I said before, the Zane chapters originally started earlier in the book. I pushed them back in order to keep the mystery a little longer and to streamline the beginning.
Now I can finally get into his story. Zane is important for several reasons, many of which I can't really explain without spoiling not only this book, but the next one. One of his most basic functions is to provide a foil for Elend. An opposite. Elend is safety, and Zane is danger. They share many similar features, but in Zane, most of those features are twisted.
He also represents a throwback to Kelsier. He is more like the Survivor than he'll probably ever understand.
Making him insane like this was a gamble on my part. I worry that, at first, it seems cliche. There's a whole lot more going on with Zane than you might assume, but your introduction to him is that of a schizophrenic villain who likes to cut himself. This might just seem like a grab-bag of psychosis, but I ask you to stick with me on this one. Zane has been many of my alpha-readers favorite character.
When is The Emperor's Soul set relative to Elantris specifically and the other cosmere books?
The Emperor's Soul is set after Elantris but not so far that the characters from Elantris would not still be around.
I think Navani is a bad person.
Why do you think that?
Because Wit didn't like her at the beginning, and her daughter warned against her. And any romance with the main character can really <rush out>. I wanna know, is she a bad guy?
Well, that's definitely RAFO territory.
So obviously Twitter... Brandon's a huge Twitter user, and most of you will know that and probably follow him. If you don't: BrandSanderson—that's his Twitter account. We have a great question from one of the forum users that I think deserves some time. What's the oddest, harshest, and most uplifting thing that someone has said to you over Twitter?
Man, that's rough. I do...you know, I see more than I can respond to. And I do apologize to people who tweet me on Twitter. I try to respond when I can, but I can't always respond. There's just too much happening. But I try to do batches where I respond for a little while to people. The most interesting things I see...oh, boy. The Internet is a weird, weird place, and you see... The most interesting would probably be some of the fanfiction ideas that I've seen passed around involving my characters in very strange situations. Uh, I won't go any further than that. The most uplifting is when a book of mine helps someone who is having just a hard time. I would say that, or even the book's... You know, I became a writer in part because of how much I loved what the great books that I read when I was younger did to me, what they did to me inside. I'm not naturally an emotional person, and stories are one of the few things that can evoke strong emotions in me. And so when my books do that for someone else, it's very humbling and gratifying. The harshest things that people say...it's really harsh when I let people down. When, you know, when someone has built up my books so much, loved them so much and give them to someone else who reads them and they just don't work for them. You know, not every story is going to work for everyone, and I understand that, and I know that logically, but it still hurts to know that I've let down readers who were expecting something wonderful and for them isn't
How do you do time dilation and character time? Like how do you keep the stories straight?
Just practice. And good beta readers really help with that a lot because in my first drafts I will often mess these things up and then my beta readers will help me.
I was surprised to find out Skyward trilogy is not a trilogy anymore, but four books. How did this happen? You have more stories in this world or book 3 is growing too big, so you decided to split it in two smaller books?
My normal mode for a series is to write the first book, make sure it works and that I have a good feel for the characters, then sit down and really hammer out the outline for the series.
When I did that for this book (sometime in early July) the outline that worked best was four books instead of three because of where the breaks and climactic moments were.
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.
Do you have, for Starsight and Skyward, aesthetic touchstones that you bring to these different books? Or does it just all sort of emerge from the storytelling as you get into your characters?
I do, and it depends. Sometimes, as I'm working on the book, I develop those. Sometimes it's ahead of time.
My cultural touchstone for Skyward was me saying, "All right. These people are in just this terrible situation. And they are constantly being fought by this unknown enemy. What kind of society would grow out of this?" And I pushed it towards a little bit of an authoritarian, martial dictatorship. Using, actually, North Korea as one of the touchstones, and some of the Axis powers as touchstones. And a little bit, in places, of communist propaganda, and things like that. Some of the visual touchstones was Italian futurism, and things like this, just to kind of give this same sort of feel that I was looking for. If you read the book, there's just little hints of it here and there. You're gonna see cubist designs in the architecture, and you're gonna see the paintings and things they describe have this sort of Italian futurist feel to it. There's a little post-Art Nouveau. You've probably seen the art style. It's, like, ships flying into the air leaving lines of red and yellow light in the sky, and very very almost Art Deco-ish feel. These were my visual touchstones for myself. Just because the society, I thought, this might be the closest thing that we have on our planet to how I feel this would really arise with the military being completely in control and lots of people being lost in battle but them needing to keep morale up, and things like this.
So this whole aesthetic of speed and force and martial unity and finding themes of, there is a particular beauty to those kinds of things. There's art that reflects it.
There's also this kind of, "Desperate times call for desperate measures." And one of the things Spensa butts up against in the books is, "Have we gone too far on this? Have we become so focused on this that we're losing track of what it means to be human? But, at the same time, is this what kept us alive? Maybe the fact that we can even think about being human exists because of how extreme our society had to become." And these are really interesting questions that are fun for writers to deal with. Part of the reason that I write sci-fi and fantasy is it allows me to pluck some of these things from our world, separate them from some of the cultural baggage, and try and approach them and talk about them in story form. So I can just explore what it might feel like and how some of these questions might be explored, potentially, by us in the future.
When Jasnah picks up the bead for the palace, is that the same bead that Shallan picks up in Oathbringer?
Yeah.
Is that a coincidence or is there something else...?
So, whenever things like that happen you can assume there's little bits of Connection going on that's changing the probability a little bit. You're not meant to read much into it, but the probability is increased because of thing like that.
And you'll find, if you look really closely, there are connections between the characters that are really subtle that I'm doing, that anyone who's touching the Spiritual Realm or thing like that. For instance, in the second book, Syl turns into Shallan while Shallan is washed up on the beach while Syl is talking to Kaladin somewhere else. There's enough Connection going on that you see Syl change shapes, and Kal's like, "It looks like she's walking on a beach!"
It's just Syl... because through all of that, is turning into... You'll find things like that <happening> all through the books, really subtle, really small. There's just meant to be, one of the things in the Cosmere is Connection. Your Connection to people, Connection to things, places, influences probability a little bit.
Vin As the Lord Ruler's Heir
In this chapter, Vin says the same thing that TenSoon did—that she's the heir of the Lord Ruler. To her, it's a bad thing.
I worry that too many people in this series spend their time comparing themselves to either Kelsier or the Lord Ruler. However, I felt it was very natural for them to do so. This scene isn't a character climax for Vin—this explanation that she's the Lord Ruler's heir doesn't strike me as a deep and meaningful resolution of problems in her psyche. It's just an interesting tidbit that came out under some duress.
Does/is Jasnah gay?
Jasnah prefers to keep her sexuality a subject of non-discussion. That is how Jasnah would answer. She would rather not discuss her sexuality.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
So, here we get the payoff for several hundred pages worth of hinting at Iadon's insecuirty and paranoia. Plotting is all about payoffs, in my estimation. You have to earn your plot. You do that by putting the pieces together in the right places, so when you finally get to a climax (even a smaller one) your readers accept what is happening.
The build-up doesn't have to always be subtle–and it doesn't even have to be done through traditional foreshadowing. For instance, if you want a character to be able to defeat a small group of bandits, you have to have earned the payoff that says that he/she is competent with a weapon. It's like a chemical equation–you balance all of your pieces on the one side, and they should equal what comes out on the other end.
In order for Sarene's speech in this chapter to work, I needed to do several things. I needed to build up that she'd be both capable enough to make it and brash enough to go through with it. I also needed to build up that Iadon would crack beneath this kind of external pressure, which I hope I did.
Are any of the characters in your books strongly influenced by people you know in real life? Would you be able to share a few if so?
Sure! Most are cameos. Many people in Bridge Four are based on friends/family members. Skar, Peet, Drehy, Bisig, Yake, and a few others are friends or family.
Sarene was loosely based on a friend of mine from college.
That's interesting that you had this DID direction planned for Shallan since the beginning (pre-Way of Kings I presume). I had just assumed it was something that you developed in between WoR and Oathbringer. I know you've commented on subjects related to this before - but in light of what you're saying about leaning away from the fantastical, I'm curious to know if you think that if Shallan had become, say, an Edgedancer instead (or just never continued in her truths), that she would have developed DID and those aspects regardless? Or would she just have had her trauma manifest in other ways (such as other dissociative disorders like depersonalization/derealization/amnesia)?
I would say that she would have gone the same way she has, but the manifestations of her disassociation would have been different. But this is something I could perhaps waver on.
I've seen quotes from you before that you didn't intend her to actually have DID, is that just about it originally being more fantastical, and now you're trying to make it actually be realistic more?
Yes, that's what is happening here. I originally shied away from it, as I didn't want to open that can of worms--but then, I realized I was opening it anyway, and the only way to be honest was to admit what I was doing and get some people who have DID themselves to advise me.
I think, in hindsight, I was trying to take too much of an easy path--and the path that didn't require me to do the work like I needed to
Aha! So that's what you did. I immediately noted in the first chapters that Shallan's illness seemed to have gotten worse. I thought that it was you alludIng to a downward spiral of the characters in conjunction with the world of Roshar - which made sense because, if you place a mentally ill person in a world with no access to mental healthcare and then make their situation worse, what would happen? Their mental illness would get worse.
I'm surprised that it was just a change in the way you write her.
If you had the option to go back and revise all of her chapters that way, would you?
Because as it is, the real-ness and definition of her other egos reads like a downward spiral.
What you're noticing is not just me changing the way I'm writing her. More, I realized that her downward spiral was going to require me to actively deal with her mental illness in a responsible way, if that makes sense.
I wouldn't change much about the past books. It was more that I realized that the place she was going in this one required a more delicate touch than I could manage without some expert help.
Chapter Sixteen
Obscure References
Chapter Sixteen is the chapter for random obscure references and jokes. Perhaps I did this unconsciously, rather than having more full-blown asides (though my editor did cut one about soy sauce and ninjas from the next chapter–I’m serious) because I wanted things to move quickly.
Anyway, here’s a list of the references, if you didn’t get them all. First off, we have the Heisenberg joke–he’s the guy who is famous for his teachings and discoveries about the uncertain location of electrons. The wordplay with him is so twisted that I have trouble working it out, but it still makes me chuckle. This is probably the one that remained in the book that my editor likes the least–she tried to cut it three times.
The “British people are all well-mannered dinosaurs” crack also almost got cut, but I decided to keep it. It breaks the fourth wall a bit–essentially, it’s me admitting that I made dinosaurs act like proper, stereotypical Brits just for the heck of it. It’s a self-aware parody of the stereotype, which means that sentence could undermine the cohesion of the worldbuilding. But, well, the worldbuilding is all there to let us have fun anyway.
Let’s see…others. The dinosaur talking about the “C” section of the library is a reference to Michael Crichton, who wrote Jurassic Park (and Jurassic Park Two, which starred a character who had died in the first book, but who was so popular in the movie that they resurrected him in book two by simply saying, “Oh, you were mistaken. His wounds weren’t as bad as they looked”).
Grandpa Smedry saying “I’ll go for a walk” is a reference to Monty Python, of course, and Quentin’s “Wasing not of wasing is” is a reference to Spook from my own Mistborn series.
Did I get them all?
Chapter Nine
TenSoon and Chronology
I probably should have found a way to stagger these kandra chapters a little bit better. We get a lot of them up front in the book, and then they dribble away through the late middle. The problem is that I didn't have very many pages to devote to TenSoon's story. I decided that rather than having one or two long chapters, I'd split it up and have five or six short chapters.
However, I generally follow a straight chronology in my books—meaning that page 22 is almost always later in time than page 21, no matter which characters happen to be on the different pages.
That means when I split TenSoon's trial into three chapters, I had to keep them all very close together, since they were covering a single day. I didn't want to—say—stick in a TenSoon chapter, jump a week forward to Vin's section, then jump back to TenSoon's trial.
Didn't you do the RoosterTeeth logo and work on RvB animated ?
Can you talk a little about those two ?
I did!
The RT logo came about back in 2003, I think? I was a fan of the first season of RvB and I hung out in their forums. When they sent out the call to redesign their old clip-art logo, I was there. When other artists were offering mascot-style cartoons, I saw there wasn't anything wrong with the icons in their existing logo, they just needed a fully original representation. It's been one of the longest-reaching and most enduring illustrations of my career, and paid off quite well for what amounted to an afternoon's doodle of a rooster silhouette and some cartoon chatterteeth. I wish I'd drawn the key better, it's all asymmetrical and it never stops driving me nuts.
RvB Animated came around in 2008. By that time I was a Lead Animator at Humoring the Fates, a studio down in Florida. Burnieb asked if we could take on some original RvB animated content, and we gave it our best shot. I did the character designs, boarded it, keyed out the animation and put in most of the gunfire/blaster VFX, but the team at Studio Fates did the lion's share of the real work. We produced the whole thing in-house, and with a core team of less than a dozen.
This was before Monty and his team really revolutionized what Rooster Teeth could do with a blend of machinema and original 3D animation, which ultimately was the perfect solution for what they wanted to do. But it was a good early experiment and a rare opportunity that I'm proud to have taken part in.
I'm pretty sure we were the first production to adapt Halo for 2D traditional, we were certainly a year ahead of the overseas work on Legends. If you dig around in the archives of the studio's production blog, you can find all sorts of early design docs and pencil tests.
Are there any cool powers or mechanics that you really liked but had to cut out of your work?
I went through a lot of cool powers for Allomancy that I thought were nifty that I didn't end up using. So, yes, there's some there. You would ask me to list a few, and I would just have to get out the notes to remind myself, because it's been fifteen years. So, I'm not sure what they are. But I know I went through a whole list of abilities before I settled on the ones I was gonna use.
I cut a really fun character from Elantris; you can read deleted scenes on my website. There's a really fun antagonist who showed up in the story at the wrong place. It was a big distraction. I cut that out.
Every book has some things that get trimmed or cut out. Usually, they're not really big elements. Book Three of Stormlight was supposed to have a Syl viewpoint. It didn't get in there, but we'll get it in in another book, don't worry. It just didn't fit. We had even a little symbol drawn up for her, so hopefully we'll be able to use it in the next book.
There's just things that happen that just don't end up working, and they end up on the cutting room floor. You're like, "Don't cut any of it, Brandon! Just leave it!" Trust me; it's better. The first draft of Oathbringer was 540,000 words long, and the final cut was 460,000 words. So, we cut 80,000 words, which is an entire novel, out of that book. But the book is way stronger for having done that. And you wouldn't enjoy it as much.
It's like, I try to get it down so the soda tastes right. And if it's watered down too much, you're like, "I get two cups of Coke instead of one!" But both of them taste half as good. I would rather give you one really good cup of Coke.
Main Book Projects
Mistborn
And speaking of Mistborn, how is Scadrial doing? My current plan is still to have the Mistborn books stretch throughout my career, establishing stories in different eras of time with different sets of characters.
The original pitch was for three trilogies. The Wax and Wayne books expanded this to four series. (You can imagine Wax and Wayne as series 1.5, if you want.) This means there will still be a contemporary trilogy, and a science fiction trilogy, in the future.
I have one more book to do in the Wax and Wayne series, and I'm planning to write it sometime between Stormlight books three and four. Until then, Wax and Wayne three—The Bands of Mourning—comes out in January!
Status: Era 1.5 book three done; book four coming soonish
And, Elend. He's one of my other favorite characters in the series. You'll see more of him–don't worry. I really wanted him to walk the line between being clever and just plain dense (in the way that men can sometimes be.) Some people accuse me of writing Elend too much like myself. In truth, I could see myself sitting at a party reading a book, rather than paying attention to the pretty girl trying to talk to me. Or, at least, that's the way I would have been when I was growing up.
I'll talk more about Elend later. Though, I do want to note something important. It's a law of storytelling that the girl is going to end up talking to the one boy at the party that she's not supposed to. So, don't pretend you didn’t see it coming.
So, you always talk about how you're an outliner. So, what do your outlines look like, and how long are they ranging from your YA books to something like Stormlight?
So, the one for the new book, Skyward, is about five pages long, and it's mostly-- first it's "Here's the worldbuilding paragraph," there's a bunch of headings and paragraphs. Characters, about a paragraph or two about each one. And then five parts, I tend to do a lot of five act things. So, prologue, part one, part two, part three, climax. Just a bunch of bullet points.
And how long would one be for, like, Oathbringer?
Oathbringer one's, like, 30 pages.
One of my favorite characters is Kaladin. This is a bit of a *inaudible* question. I just want to know if he will ever be able to make peace with Szeth, at some point?
You know, you get one of these. Here's you card, you can come up and get it. This is your RAFO card.
How much does your wife influence your work?
Quite a bit. She's usually the first person who ever reads my books. And we tend to talk a lot together about books and movies and things like that, so I'd say she's a pretty big influence. She won't let me base a character on her, though. I asked her if I could, she said no. She can't be in the books.
This introductory scene, where Dox and Kell meet on the city wall, has just the right feel for me. I wanted this book–particularly at the beginning–to have the feel of a heist movie. Something like Ocean's Eleven, Sneakers, or Mission: Impossible. I thought a couple of senior thieves getting together on the wall and talking about the team they are gathering would fit in just perfectly.
That was, by the way, one of the major inspirations for this book. I've mentioned that I stole the concepts for Allomancy and Vin's character from other books I wrote. The plot came from a desire to write something that had the feel of a heist movie. I haven't ever seen that done in a fantasy novel–a plot where a team of specialists get together and then try to pull off a very difficult task.
Will Book 3 [of The Stormlight Archive] be Szeth's book?
He used to think so. Now it might be Dalinar's. He is going to do the flashbacks for both (and Eshonai) and then decide.
[The Stormlight Archive] 3 pov character? Some say Szeth others say it's up in the air?
He said he's not going to canonize it or anything, he's also looking at Dalinar and Eshonai and going to see who's backstory fits the flow of the book best
The koloss army was another thing that got shuffled about in this book. Originally, the Luthadel folks discovered its advance pretty early on. All of their discussions, then, talked about the fact that they had three armies bearing down on them.
I pushed back knowledge of the koloss for a couple of reasons. First off, koloss are scary–and I think they deserve to be treated differently from the other two armies. Their appearance can throw a real wrench into things later on, once Elend and company hear about them. It allows for the reader to know something that most of the characters do not, and leads to anticipation and tension.
In addition, it gives Sazed another good reason to exist in the plot. Now he knows about the koloss and nobody else inside the city does. His mission, therefore, is even more vital. He has to bring information back to his friends.
The natural sarcasm in Wit, is that just purely natural? Or do you have inspiration for all of those sarcastic comments?
I often, if I have to write a lot of the character, will look for a similar humor style, and see if I can channel it. If I'm writing Wit, for instance, I'll go to somebody more biting. Some modern comedians, or occasionally Oscar Wilde. If I'm writing Shallan, I'll try to look for something softer and more wordplay-ish, like Jane Austen. And just kind of read a bunch of it, and try to get the feel. It just depends. If I'm writing Lopen, I will try to look for the kind of uplifting humor, self-effacing style. Like, I just kind of have a different style for each type, and I try to find a person or writing in the real world that has that type of humor and try to use it.
