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You've mentioned that The Stormlight Archive is broken down into two sets of five books. Is the story arc of the second set of books going to be completely different than the story in the first 5 books?
It will focus mostly on different characters, with some appearances by characters from the first five. I wouldn't call it a different story, more a sequel.
What the heck is [Feruchemical] Investiture?
I’m not going to say that because it would be a spoiler for those who haven’t read the Ars Arcanum yet.
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?
Which character had an easy concept, but was harder to translate onto paper?
Sazed was harder to translate to paper. I often go back to him, because his arc in the third Mistborn book is one of the hardest that I've ever writen. It took a lot of revision. And on paper, it was pretty easy. "Character gets depression, because everything he's believed in turns out to potentially be a sham." That is really hard to write. Turns out that a mental affliction that encourages you to not get out of bed, not do anything, and tries to push you to be inactive meshes really poorly with trying to write characters in a novel. Getting depression right can often be soul-crushing for the reader and really boring, which is quite a challenge, because we do want to get it right if we're going to include characters with depression. But, at the same time, a person who has trouble getting out of bed every day can wear on you to read. And it's one of those things where being realistic adds a whole host of challenges.
And my advice, if you are doing this, is to make sure that there is either some external force forcing them to keep going, or some sort of sense of progression, even if it's downward progression, that the reader can watch and feel a sense of motion to the character's arc.
Katarotam was an evil guy who owned Kaladin as a slave. He beat his slaves + killed friends of Kaladin's.
*on the receipt it goes on to elaborate* Katarotam cheated Kaladin of both food and clothing…
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Marsh Finds Goradel
And, Goradel dies. I hope Rich appreciates the time and effort I put into this death scene. I mean, if you've gotta go, then facing down an Inquisitor in the night, surrounded by ash, and actually giving him some trouble is a pretty good way.
Spook's message is now gone, destroyed. Sorry about that. Not sure what else to say about this short chapter. I like the poetry of the discarded tools imagery, and it reminds me of things Zane said in book two—that he felt like he was always someone else's knife. Spiked through the chest, he was one of Ruin's more useful pawns.
With a huge interconnected work like the Cosmere, do you ever worry when introducing a new concept in a book? How it may affect past and future novels?
I do. This is the biggest challenge of having a large, interconnected universe like this. And the farther you write, the more difficult and dangerous this becomes. And this is why I need to have a large team, and some really solid beta readers. Because every writer, when writing a book, can get a little myopically focused on that book only. Which can be a good thing; most writers, it doesn't matter, because that book is going to be that book. But because the interconnectedness and the continuity of the Cosmere is so important to me, it's really handy to have a lot of people looking over my shoulder saying, "Are you sure you want to do that? Because it has this ramification here." We're not gonna catch all of them. But I do like that protection, and it is something that I think about quite a bit.
It is one of the reasons why I tried to build the underpinnings of the cosmere to be adaptable to a lot of different of the types of magic systems I type to write. This is why these fundamentals of Fortune and Identity and Connection are really what kind of drive creating the magic systems. You're often going to see me wanting to create magic systems that do similar things. And having these sort of magic system underpinnings that both drive me to ask "what new could I do with this?" but also have an intended connectivity between them is really helpful in a lot of different ways.
But it is dangerous, yes. And if I were going to give advice on that, it would be that make sure your fundamentals 1) naturally fit the type of systems that you would want to build, and 2) have enough versatility that they can be adapted to a variety of different styles of system. And stay away from some of the big problems, like time travel. Very early on, I'm like, "Cosmere can time travel into the future. You can speed things up for yourself, you can slow things down, your movement through space. But you cannot go backward." And having a few rules like that... there are not alternate dimensions in the cosmere. There are different planes of existence. But there are not alternate realities. We are not going to have the sort of things. (That I played with in Steelheart, because I knew I didn't have it in the cosmere. The Wheel of Time loves to play with alternate continuities as one of its themes of magic, and I love it. But it was built in and baked in from the beginning and used very well well. I didn't want to go down that rabbit hole.)
Make a few rules like that, and I think that's helpful from writing yourself out of problems with solutions that break everything. And let's just say that it is very hard to not do that, as evidenced by many film series which have a lot of different people working on them who can make their films work, but often will break the rest of the continuity in order to do so. And we can't afford to do that in the Cosmere. That's not something that I want to do.
The background to my question is this:
It was once stated by Mr Sanderson that "Magic in the cosmere needs a guiding force. If it doesn't have one, the magic itself will gain sentience." We also have that things like Nightblood that gained sentience because of crazy amounts of investiture.
My question then is:
"Is the reason that investiture has this tendency to lead to sentience caused by the fact that pre-Shattering Adonalsium had a goal/purpose/intent of bringing sentience to his universe."
(I guess this is in a way a 2 part question, because it assumes that Adonalsium actually HAD the intent of bringing sentience to his cosmere)
Yes, this is part of the reason. Good question!
I think you are really active on the subreddit for The Stormlight Archive?
I am fairly active, the problem is every time I post I get like 300 hundred responses and I'm like "I can't respond to all of that I have to write books".
Does having multiple people burn copper make it harder to pierce them?
Yes.
With your awesome art people, have you thought about doing kids' books, like 2nd, 3rd, 4th grade level?
I've considered it, but I haven't practiced that very much, and it is a different skill. I'm not confident in being able to do that myself. But it's on my radar, since I have kids that age.
What about The Lost Metal?
Should be soon. It and Skyward 3 will be my next projects, to be done before I start Stormlight 5.
Would you ever want to write an episode for Doctor Who?
I would consider it. But I don’t have enough screenplay writing background right now, I'd have to work with someone else. Does that make sense? If they had a good screenwriter who could work with me, then yeah.
Chapter Five
Vin and Elend's Plans and Progress
This is my personal favorite of the opening chapters. I love how it establishes what Vin and Elend are trying to accomplish, but at the same time shows how stretched thin they are. Both bounce around from one emotion to another, and the argument near the end of the chapter is a good example of just how exhausted they both are.
Elend is more forceful now. He's become a wartime leader, a much different man than he was in book one, when he went to parties and read books. He's fighting to find a balance between being the man he thinks he should be and the man he knows he has to be. It all works very soundly for me.
Glad to hear you'll be back in the short game. Can you take us through a normal writing day? Do you have a word count goal?
Yes. It depends on the day and the book, but generally 2,000 words is my goal. 3,000 to 4,000, probably around 3,500 is a really solid day for me. A basic writing day: I get up at noon or 1:00, depending on when I went to bed. I play with my son for about an hour, giving my wife a break. Then I go downstairs for four or five hours, check my email, write for a while, go up and have dinner, play with my son some more, then go back down and go back to work until I’m done for the night. The last couple of years have been pretty much a lot of me with my laptop on my couch or in my beanbag chair writing books.
Will Moash worldhop?
RAFO
Authorial Interruptions
The style of these interruptions–we’ve got one at the beginning of each chapter–is intentional. I’m not shooting for brilliant humor, most of the time. I am the type of person who likes dumb humor. Groaners, you might say. That’s why I post Amphigory comics on my site. Bad puns, jokes that deserve rimshots, that kind of thing.
So, what I tried to do with a lot of these inserts was have a final “pow” of a line that creates a jarring gap between the last bit of the humor and the reintroduction of the story. Instead of a smooth transition, in other words, I wanted a harsh one.
I can’t quite explain why I like this so much in mixture with the humor. For one thing, I think it lets the reader keep the commentary and the story straight from one another. Also, I think it gives a stronger emphasis to the jokes–which, like the aforementioned rimshot, gives an unconscious clue to the reader that yes indeed, that was a joke. A lot of the humor in this book has to do with non sequiturs and the like, so making them stand out more seemed like a good instinct.
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.
What happens to seons during the Reod is that the Reod messes with the seon's spirit.
Did you have an inspiration for the Talents, in Alcatraz?
Stupid things that myself or my family do.
Chapter Thirty-Seven - Part One
Whew! Getting tense now. I love endings–they're my favorite parts of books to write. Once, I wrote 16,000 words in one day to finish up a book. (That was my record until I finished Scribbler a few weeks back. I think I did 23k on that book in one day to finish it off.)
There are a couple of important foreshadowings in this chapter as well. One is the seon sense of direction, which plays a very small-yet-important part in the climax of the book. The other is Sarene's insight into Ahan's character here at the party. If you've been following him, you realize that he is like she explains–a little too quick to act, not quite as politically shrewd as he'd like others to think. It's this scene, however, where I really wanted to lay the seeds of understanding in my readers, preparing them for his eventual betrayal.
Quellion Pleads with "Kelsier"
By the way, Quellion can in fact see Ruin here. When Ruin manifests himself in form, not just in voice, anyone who he's corrupted with a spike can see him with their natural eyes. (Or at least, in the case of Inquisitors, with their Allomancy.) I tried to get this across as best I could, but some readers still had trouble with it.
Can Shardblades be pulled and pushed?
It would take a LOT of power to do so. Conventionally, no.
Chapter Sixty - Part One
Form
From here on out, the chapters get longer. It's interesting to try and work with pacing. I think the shifting viewpoints achieve the sense of drama I want, and coupling that with lots of new chapters would be repetitive, I think. So, I waited for the most dramatic moments possible to end chapters. I think this ending counts.
The triad system breaks down completely here. Everything is falling apart, and we're getting wild viewpoints from all over the place. (Well, not exactly–we only add Galladon and Lukel. However, I think that after fifty-nine chapters with only three viewpoints, suddenly adding two more will be disorienting enough to have the effect I want.)
Part of the reason I add the viewpoints is so that I can show the breakdown of the form of the book. However, another–perhaps more important–reason is so that I can show what is happening in places that don't involve one of the three viewpoints. Raoden is off in his own little world of pain, and Sarene and Hrathen have gone to Teod. If I want to show what’s happening in Arelon, I need some new viewpoints.
Question about some encyclopedia of about cosmere, so like Silmarillion, something like that.
Yes, yeah. Someday maybe. I don't promise it. We will see.
Chapter Forty
The Creation of New Inquisitors
It was very convenient for the system I built into Hemalurgy that the Inquisitors were designed and commanded to hunt down skaa Mistings. There were always enough of those that they could create new Inquisitors to replace the ones who eventually died of old age.
The Inquisitors were always so determined to catch the skaa. So passionate. With good reason, for that was the only means by which their race—and Inquisitors are a separate race, just like the koloss and the kandra—could perpetuate itself.
Are the Heralds Rosharan?
Well, you will have to Read And Find Out on that one. Good question.
I was interested if, the Wax character, if he was inspired a little by Sams Vimes by Terry Pratchett.
Yeah, absolutely. Vimes had a deep effect on me as a writer so any time I'm writing a copper you'll end up with some Vimes but I'd say Wax has a little extra Vimes, so does Dalinar, Dalinar's got a bit of Vimes in him to.
My friend and I always argue. He's like, "Amaram and Jasnah are the same age." Are they really?
Amaram is a little older, I believe, but they are around the same age.
Like 24ish?
Oh, no. Jasnah's like in her mid to late thirties. Mid thirties. I get it mixed up which one's Earth age and which one's Rosharan age. Whatever I say in there, it's about 10 percent more for our age. But yeah, Jasnah's not...
She's not a spring chicken.
She's not a spring chicken.
But Amaram's older?
Yeah. I think Amaram's like a year or two older, but they're around the same age.
Do you prefer one of your books to be adapted into a live-action series or an animated series?
I would take either, fairly equally balanced depending on how much of a push I thought it was going to get and how comfortable I was with the creative team that would be joining me and making it. So there is a big push toward animation right now that I think there'll be some opportunities for, but we have also some very nice things happening in the film department, like I am most of the way through my own take on a Mistborn film treatment and I'm going to be looking for partners on that. And over the last couple of years I've made some really nice friends in Hollywood that I'm hoping will be interested in helping me make that happen. Of course, the hardest part of making a film, which is why despite fifteen years of selling options and things, never getting one made is, is somebody's gotta put up $200 million to make the thing, and that's a lot of money. So if you feel like paying $200 million for my film, go ahead and let me know.
Can glyphs be attached to anything besides a chalkling?
*pause* Not that THEY know of. Let's go with that.
Will the Stormlight Leatherbounds look like the Mistborn ones, or something totally different ?
They'll be split into two volumes each, so they'll be different in that regard. There's a chance they'll come in slipcases, but we'll see if there are any other differences. We're still a few years off of the first one of those.
Is Steris autistic?
She is definitely on the spectrum, but more toward where Asperger’s used to be. Not nearly as far along in the spectrum as Renarin.
Is the world of Perfect State a culmination of the technology we saw in the final Legion story?
I'll leave this to interpretation.
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.
If you had a bendalloy Hemalurgic spike...
That will be in the Hemalurgic table, which we will be releasing, hopefully, next year.
You mentioned one time that there were guards hiding under the bed and in a secret room when Siri first goes to the God King?
Yes, I at least imagined it that way.
Do you always add details like that in your imagination?
It's very frequently I do. Just cause I want to be a few steps ahead. And I want to be making sure that my motives for the characters—particularly the side characters, we're not seeing through their eyes, make sense. Motives are really important to me.
It was a person I had known for my entire life: Ms. Fletcher
The Ms. Fletcher scene has some interesting things to note. First off, if you figured out before Alcatraz that the person whose footprints he was following had to be Ms. Fletcher, you’re not alone. I realize this isn’t the biggest twist ever. However, there’s more going on here than you might suspect.
Particularly with the fact that she lost her keys. That’s important. You’ll find out in book two why. Also, there’s more about her footprints that will be answered later in this book.
In that regard, you've been called like a million times a prolific writer, and you are, but many people tend to believe that you have some sort of superpower. You don't, you just said many times that your secret is persistent and consistent writing, and I was wondering if this ever lets you disconnect from your worlds, or even put them on standby, if it's easier having that sort of structure and saying, "Okay, now I'm going to write, and now I'm going to not write"?
This is a very astute question, because one thing that is very hard for writers is to write when we're supposed to. And this goes both ways, meaning, sometimes, for writers, when it's time to sit down and write, writing doesn't happen, but sometimes when we are supposed to be spending out time with our family then our brain is not there and we are somewhere else, and I would say that's the main source of conflict, often, in writers' interpersonal lives.
Though if I do have a superpower, I owe it to my mother. My mother is an accountant, and she is very, very logical, one of the most logical people that I know, and she trained me from childhood to do the things that I'm supposed to do--to do my homework, to do my chores, all of these things. I had a paper route, as a kid, delivering newspapers from age twelve, and I always remember whenever my money came in, my mother would sit me down, and she would hold the money, and say, "Okay, now how much do you put in this savings account?" And I would have to guess numbers until I got to what she thought was right, and she would put that in, and then the next savings account, and then the next savings account, and then I would get handed a dollar. But I was the one of my friends who had a Super Nintendo because of those savings accounts. She trained me very well, and I often say my biggest advantage, as a writer, is that I am an artist with the training of an accountant. And so, when it's time to do my writing, I'm very good, practiced. It took time, many years, but I am practiced, and I am able to be very productive on most days. It's art, so some days, it still doesn't work, but most days I am productive, and equally important, when it is time to spend time with my family, I can turn that off, go be a dad and a husband, and then turn it back on after they go to bed.
[Can’t hear the actual question]
Elantris’s magic is location based because the primary source of the magic is located in the Cognitive Realm. Most of the worlds, the primary source of the magic is the Spiritual Realm, where all places are one. So for instance, Mistborn, you can go anywhere in the Cosmere and use the magic. Elantris, you can’t, because Devotion and Dominion were killed and their bodies were stuffed into the Cognitive Realm and the magic is being powered that way.
Chapter Twenty
What TenSoon Doesn't Know
Remember that TenSoon doesn't know what happened at the end of the second book. This was kind of hard for me to keep in mind, as I kept wanting him to mention the day mists and the troubles up above. However, he left before the Siege of Luthadel ended—he doesn't even know that Vin survived the assault on the city, let alone that she found her way to the Well of Ascension.
I considered having TenSoon overhear some kandra guards discussing these events so that he could use the information in his speeches, but I decided that would seem too contrived. He had to get along with what he knew, not what I wanted him to know.
When you write short stories, do you write them separately, or do they just come along - when you are writing longer books that you come along them?
Usually I’m working on a book and I have a great idea for a short story and I force myself to put it off until book is done. I tried writing a short story on plane right here and it’s awful, it's so bad I don’t think I will let anyone ever see it.
It's pronounced SAY zed. And his nickname Saze is pronounced SAYZ. Or in IPA it's ['sei̯.zɛd] and [sei̯z].
Do Vasher and Vivenna hook up? *laughing*
Uh, that's a definite RAFO.
Did you purposely make the Church of the Survivor sort of like Christianity or not?
Kelsier intentionally made it like Christianity. In kind of a false way, meaning he read about and had Sazed tell him about religions that were similar and then he built that his own way.
Oh so did Sazed tell him about...
Sazed told him about religions that were similar. I wouldn't say Christianity specifically, but their version and things. So there is a yes and a no.
Also, is there a common reality/universe throughout all of you works (WoT excluded)? The gods and magic system of your books you have mentioned as pieces of a larger source. I know I am mistaking the language a bit; it was a while ago that I read this. But Preservation and Ruin were linked and you referenced possible deities in Elantris, not to mention Austre. I know your magic systems are all well thought out and the rules have practical founding. With this in mind, I assume your deities and beings of power would have universally applied links and rules as well. I figure they all exist in the same multi-verse.
I am remaining mostly closed-lipped on this topic, as I don't want to spoil the story and discovery. There is a lot of discussion about it on my website. I can confirm what I've said earlier, that there is a common character appearing in the books, and that there is a single cosmology to all of the Shardworlds and their books (Elantris, Mistborn, Warbreaker, White Sand, Dragonsteel, The Silence Divine, etc. Those last three are unpublished, by the way.) There is also a connection between how the magic works in each book, as well as the fundamental metaphysics of the worlds.
Why did Rashek create mistwraiths the way that he did?
He wasn't sure what you meant by this, but he was sure that the annotations would cover what you wanted to know.
Where did Terris prophesy about Hero of Ages come from?
RAFO.
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.
