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Questioner

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?

Brandon Sanderson

I use the bits-- You ever read the Alcatraz books?

Questioner

Actually those are the only ones of yours I haven't.

Brandon Sanderson

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--

Questioner

Fate...

Brandon Sanderson

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.

Ian M Mackay, PhD

Was much of the Shattered Plains inspired by the beach?

Peter Ahlstrom

A lot of the life on Roshar is inspired by tide pools.

Questioner

I was wondering, how often are [???] life imitating art or intentionally put into place?

Brandon Sanderson

It's rare that it's intentional. Once in a while it is, for instance Nohadon is based off of King Benjamin.

Questioner

Nohadon?

Brandon Sanderson

The author of The Way of Kings, the original author. But more often it's just unintended

Questioner (paraphrased)

Was Hemalurgy inspired by your time in Asia, and more specifically - acupuncture?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Yes. A lot of the stuff in my books that looks like it came from Asia really did come from my time there.

Brandon Sanderson

Huio is based, partially, on someone I met while touring. I had a driver who was from Pakistan, originally. (It's not uncommon for the publisher or convention to assign me a driver to get me to all the places I needed to get.) We had a good time chatting, and I discovered he had a Ph.d. in mechanical engineering. However, for various reasons, his life in his home country was really difficult--so he took the chance to start over in a new country with a new life. (More, he wanted to get his children out of a bad situation. I believe he was Sikh--though he might have been Jain--and his family was suffering some persecution for it.)

He couldn't get work as an academic, despite being a professor, as his mastery of languages was really bad--and couldn't teach in his new country. He couldn't get a job in his field either, since both the language barrier was a problem, and also he had trouble getting businesses to accept his credentials since they didn't think highly of the programs in his country. (At least, not the ones he'd attended.)

So here was this man who was obviously WAY smarter than I was, doing an entry-level job. And he considered it an upgrade for certain personal reasons, but I could tell he was really frustrated by the language holding him back. I've always remembered the experience, and the lesson it taught me about assumptions I sometimes make.

Brandon Sanderson

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.

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Sixteen - Part One

The epigrams in this section of the book should look familiar. Not because you've read them before, but because–assuming you have any familiarity with fantasy–you've read this kind of story before. The young peasant hero who rises up to fight the dark evil. I suspect that the jacket flap, if you've read it, gives away much of this storyline. This is one of the foundational concepts for the book, however. I've read too many stories about young peasant boys who save the world. I wanted to tell one about a world where the prophesied here came, then failed!

This concept, of course, evolved. The original idea was for the Dark Lord to defeat the peasant boy. Instead, however, I found the concept of the peasant boy becoming the dark lord more interesting.

Questioner

How did you come up with the idea of windspren?  

Brandon Sanderson

Windspren in specific? I was thinking about the way the wind is often anthropomorphized, right? It's treated as if it's something alive. And that, for years, just stuck in my head. For a while there were only four windspren, one for each of the quadrants: the north spren, the south spren, the east spren, the west spren, or the west wind and things. But eventually I split them into many more, because I was working with the honorspren and things like that.

Brandon Sanderson

Origin of Awakening as a Magic System

I never did write out in annotation form an explanation of where Awakening came from. I believe I talked about the origin of the term Awakening, but never the actual powers of the magic.

As I've said, I wanted to do something that had a very "vulgar magic" feel to it. Something gritty, dealing with the forms of people, like voodoo or hedge magics. I wanted to have something that reached back into our cultural unconscious, and something that dealt with necromancy in a new way.

Those are all pieces of the puzzle. Another piece, however, was the desire to do an animation magic—a magic focused around bringing inanimate objects to life on order to serve you. As I've said, it's very tough to come up with completely new powers nobody has written about or used (though I think I've got a few in store for The Way of Kings). However, a good magic system can be crafted from the interpretation of old powers used in new ways with interesting limitations and cultural connections.

I've seen people bring objects to life in books or movies, but I've never seen a formal magic system designed completely around it.

One of the other things I'm always looking for is new ways for people to gain their magical powers. As much as I like Mistborn, the "It's genetic and you're born with it" method of gaining magical abilities is just about the oldest and most commonly used way. It's used so much because it makes sense, and because it's easy to explain. Breath, and its transference, came from my desire to come up with something different—something that had an economic component, something that allowed anyone to become a magic user, but which still had limited resources so that not everyone could be one.

I'm still trying to innovate in this area, but I think my favorite part about Awakening is the concept of Breath and how it's transferred. It turns people into resources for the magic, but in a way I hadn't seen done before.

Questioner

What was your inspiration for Waxillium?

Brandon Sanderson

My original pitch for myself for Wax was Clint Eastwood finds out that he's inherited a noble house, and has to move to New York City and take over the family finances.

Questioner

One of my favorite moments in The Way of Kings is when Dalinar is having the vision of the Knights Radiant and they're descending from the sky and going into battle. I'd like to know the origin of that scene in your head.

Brandon Sanderson

I wanted to provide a contrast. This scene is one I came up with in outlining, it's not one of those scenes that I hang everything on. Most of what you do as a writer, you discover as you do, even if you're an outliner like me. And this was a scene where I'm like, I need something to show the contrast between the world that Dalinar is seeing and the world he is living. And that scene was kind of the metaphorical starfall, that felt like it would express the drama of the contrast, the dark night with the monsters and the bright Radiants from the sky.

Gadmond

Were the Whisperers inspired by the card Permeating Mass? Their green color and the way they turn everyone they touch into more of themselves seems too similar to be coincidental.

Brandon Sanderson

The Whisperers were actually more inspired by the card Strangleroot Geist. (Though I can't discount the fact that other cards, like Permeating Mass, might have been unconscious influences.)

I knew going into the story that I want green-aligned villains, and so was trying to ask myself what would inspire a group of green geists--and what would motivate them. We've seen green villains in MTG before (the Kami and the Phyrexians both did a good job of this.) I wanted to see if I could approach the color from another direction, and was trying to think of what green would want. It seemed to me that completion, the pieces being gathered to the whole, could be very green--as could the idea of survival of the fittest. (In the form of the Entity putting itself into two souls, and figuring the stronger of the two would eventually consume the other and become its host.)

Jofwu

I'm really hooked by the "girl and her dragon" idea. Were there any fun or interesting things you were able to explore by virtue of replacing the dragon with a spaceship? That is, it's easy to imagine the fun similarities, but I'm curious if there were any notable differences introduced by that swap.

Brandon Sanderson

Hm... Well, normally in the dragon egg story, a trope is that the dragon needs to learn how to fly/fight and the trainer needs to learn with them.

Here, the ship knows how to fly--but is busted up. So there's a lot of fun in the story relating to how exactly to get parts for the ship--which leads to a completely different style of storytelling.

Questioner

What gave you the idea to write the Alcatraz books?

Brandon Sanderson

You know what, it was the first line. I was just doodling in a notebook one day, and I wrote down, "So there I was, tied to an altar made of outdated encyclopedias, about to be sacrificed to the dark powers by a cult of evil librarians." And I had to write that book. So I just kind of took that line, and I ran with it.

Questioner

Did Navi from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time have any influence on your coming up with Syl?

Brandon Sanderson

I get this a lot. Here's my dirty secret: I never played Ocarina of Time. I really am embarrassed by that, because I have played a lot of Zelda games, and they're all great. A lot of people are shocked by that, because they list that as their favorite, and I never played that.

Questioner

Why’d you pick Nebraska?

Brandon Sanderson

I’m from Nebraska. I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska and I thought, if I’m going to put in a place that’s a weird, crazy dangerous place, why not make it Nebraska? A lot of the defenses are named for people I knew in Nebraska. There’s an Osbourne defense. Anyone from Nebraska will be able to pick out where I got that. A lot of my friends, my parent’s friends growing up, I just named defenses after them. That’s where that came from, it’s got all this Nebraska stuff.

Brandon Sanderson

You might be curious to know that I based Elend, in part, on my editor Moshe. I don't know that it was conscious–in fact, I just noticed the connection while writing right now. However, the speech patterns and the way he thinks are very similar to Moshe, and I kind of see him in my mind as looking like a younger version of my editor. I guess I see Moshe as a sort of heroic guy.

He wouldn't make a very good dictator either. But, then, I think that's a good thing, since I have to work with him. 

Brandon Sanderson

Demoux's History from Book One

This might be a good place to give you a little bit of Demoux's history, by way of reminder. He was one of the first recruits to Kelsier's army, and Ham promoted him to captain almost as soon as he (Ham) took control of the troops who were hiding in the caves back in book one. When Kelsier came to inspect those caves, Demoux led him around a bit. Then, Kelsier used Demoux in a display where he humiliated a dissenter.

Eventually, Yeden took the army and decided to attack a fortified position. Some of the troops thought this was against what Kelsier had told them to do, and these stayed back in the caves. Demoux was their leader.

He's also named after my good friend and former roommate, Micah DeMoux, who also did the jacket photo of me in the backs of all of my books. Captain Demoux actually looks just like Micah, in my mind, though with the fitness of a soldier.

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

What's the concept of the safehand?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. There's a writerly answer and an in-world answer. Which do you want to know?

Questioner

Let's do the writer answer.

Brandon Sanderson

Writer answer, so. I am fascinated by taboo. I am fascinated by the fact that in Asia you don't show your, the bottom of your foot to people. It's terribly offensive. I am fascinated that in some cultures some parts of the body are shown and others aren't. Things that we would consider vulgar, to other people are not, and vice versa. It just fascinates me as a writer and when I approached the books I was looking for a ways that I could give a feel for a human culture but not one that we have seen before and the safehand grew out of that.

Questioner

For Jerkface... Was he supposed to stay a jerk, or did you want him to...

Brandon Sanderson

I planned out his arc. I tried very hard to evoke Malfoy, Crabbe, and... Goyle. I tried very hard to evoke that, and then try to pull the rug out from underneath that. Whether I was successful or not, depends on your interpretation, but he was always supposed to be.

And the real fun and twist to this book is, Spensa's kind of the bully, but she presents him as the bully. And hopefully, as you read, you're like, "Wait a minute..."

Questioner

If you were a Smedry, what would your talent be?

Brandon Sanderson

I base most of the talents of the people in the Alcatraz Books off dumb things that I do. So I am famously bad at dancing. Famously. So I would definitely have that one. I am always late; that came from me. (Though really, secretly, it came from my mom; 'cause she is even more late that I am.) Most everything thing in there is me. But I would say probably "bad at dancing", that would probably be my best, because I am just really bad at dancing. It's not even in a funny way, it's just in a boring way.

Questioner

A lot of authors say that a lot of their writing comes from personal experiences. For Warbreaker, do you have any personal experiences that led to...?

Brandon Sanderson

I did write it on my <honeymoon>, so that may play into the whole marriage, all that stuff. I'll go with that one. There's a weird one. As I was working on Mistborn, my editor said, "Wow, Elantris and Mistborn both take place in pretty dark and grimy worlds. Do something more colorful next time." And so I'm like, "All right, I can do colorful."

Calderis

The light lines/lances are a very fun concept. Is there anything in particular that inspired the idea of grappling combat in space?

Brandon Sanderson

Probably watching too many cartoons or B movies where someone turns a corner in a vehicle by throwing out an anchor or something. (Didn't the batmobile do this once in the old Adam West batman?)

Glorious_Infidel

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?

Brandon Sanderson

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.

Slowswift

Is Slowswift an Allomancer?

Brandon Sanderson

No. Slowswift is a cameo for Grandpa Tolkien.

Questioner

Where did the idea of pooping in Shardplate come from?

Brandon Sanderson

Because I wondered how it happened with knights on the battlefield and thought, "This is the sort of thing that just doesn't show up very often in fantasy books."

Adam Horne

Or in history books, probably.

Brandon Sanderson

It's there in history books. The historians are very interested in this sort of thing.

One of the ways that I wanted to ground some of the conversations in Stormlight was to talk about some of these things. And it turns out that Shallan and Adolin's conversations tend to be very good places to talk about this sort of thing.

Questioner

What was your inspiration for Jasnah?

Brandon Sanderson

I had done several times, when I was designing characters in the cosmere, someone who kind of thought they were an awesome scholar but really wasn't. That's the kind of thing with Sarene and a little bit of the thing with Shallan. They're young people who haven't quite made it there yet, whose opinion of themselves is kind of beyond their actual skill level. Who would be, like, the scholar? Like, the ideal Rosharan societal scholar? And I built Jasnah out of that, and then took her in a way that would allow her to also be in conflict with that at the same time. Always a good source of writing a character.

Questioner

Do you have any specific inspirations for spanreeds?

Brandon Sanderson

Like most things in my books, you can ask me what my writerly inspiration is, and what my worldbuilding explanation is. And let me explain that.

Writerly inspiration for spanreeds is me acknowledging that I wanted to have a society that acted more like a post-Industrial Revolution society (or very close to it) than a Medieval society. And there’s lots of ways to do this. Fantasy worlds do not have to progress socially the same way that we progressed. A lot of people want to tie technology to social progression, which you don’t have to do. You don’t necessarily have to say “people from the Industrial Revolution in our world acted this way; therefore people in this world…” You just don’t have to do that.

But there are certain technological revolutions that happened that do form a technological basis for some of these things. For instance, trade was very essential to the expanding political entity that was a world economy. We needed people to at least be travelling consistently to Asia before that could happen. And I really think a lot of what makes people act the way we do, perhaps, in some of our societies is this kind of mass communication.

And I didn’t want to be there yet, but I wanted to give a way that news and ideas could travel around the world in a consistent way on Roshar, to make the continent feel like a single entity. Because otherwise, I would probably have to tell the story as not a worldwide story. You just can’t travel, and ideas can’t move fast enough. Even if you look back at Roman times; Roman times took place in a fairly small geographical area, and even that, it was really hard for them to know what was happening. And you would have to spend months and months getting information that was then months and months out of date. And there’s a lot of sitting around and waiting in those cultures for things to happen, even with having the Mediterranean to sail around and bring this information. I just wanted information to move fast, both culturally and narratively. And so I said, “I’ve gotta find a way to do this. I did it with Seons in Elantris; I need find a way to do something similar to that on Roshar.”

Real-world inspiration, if there is one, is an auto-pen. Where authors can have a little machine sign books for them; it moves on its own. I’ve never used one, but politicians use them quite a bit. When you get that hand-signed letter when you’ve donated whatever to whatever political party. That hand-signed letter was probably machine-signed with a real pen, rather than hand-signed by the individual.

Brandon Sanderson

Chapter Three

Shallan

I chose to use Shallan as my other main character in Part One, rather than Dalinar, because I felt her sequence better offset Kaladin's. He was going to some very dark places, and her sequence is a little lighter.

She is the only "new" main character in this book. Kaladin (under a different name) was in Way of Kings Prime, and Dalinar was there virtually unchanged from how he is now. The character in Shallan's place, however, never panned out. That left me with work to do in order to replace Jasnah's ward.

Shallan grew out of my desire to have an artist character to do the sketches in the book. Those were things I'd wanted to do forever, but hadn't had the means to accomplish when writing the first version of the book. I now had the contacts and resources to do these drawings, like from the sketchbook of a natural historian such as Darwin.

One of the things that interests me about scientists in earlier eras is how broad their knowledge base was. You really could just be a "scientist" and that would mean that you had studied everything. Now, we need to specialize more, and our foundations seem to be less and less generalized. A physicist may not pay attention to sociology at all.

Classical scholars were different. You were expected to know languages, natural science, physical science, and theology all as if they were really one study. Shallan is my stab at writing someone like this.

Elise

I really loved the character Lightsong, he was my favorite and probably one of the most interesting characters I've ever read about. Did you have anyone in particular in mind when you came up with him? How did go about developing him as a character?

Brandon Sanderson

Rupert Everett was sitting in the back of my mind.

Actually, in order to develop Lightsong's character well, I didn't want to imitate any one voice. That's something we always stay away from. But I had been wanting to work on writing humor in a different way from what I'd previously used. I spent a lot of time watching and analyzing the movie THE THIN MAN, the old comedy/mystery/crime film with an emphasis on very witty characters making wisecracks as they investigate a murder. If you haven't seen it, it's delightful. Along with AN IDEAL HUSBAND and THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST, those were my three sources of inspiration. I was trying for a blend of those two styles—and then of course added my own sense of humor.

Questioner

What were the Allomantic metals based on?

Brandon Sanderson

The Allomantic metals were based on two main concepts, magic that feels one step science one step superstition so I was reading things like alchemy and I wanted something that was one half chemistry, one half alchemy. The idea of eating the metals and metabolizing them was really interesting to me because it's kind of almost scientific but not really. That mixed with me wanting to have a thieving crew have different powers that would help different members of a crew and I built the powers to match people like Ham and Breeze.

Questioner

Did you have an inspiration for the Talents, in Alcatraz?

Brandon Sanderson

Stupid things that myself or my family do.

Questioner

So, your Legion series, where the guy has multiple hallucinations and everything like that-- Where did you come up with your idea? Was it just hanging out--

Brandon Sanderson

Where was the idea for Legion, which if you are not familiar with it Legion is this weird  thing where I have a guy who's a genius, he can study any topic and learn that topic and become an expert in it very quickly but the information appears as a hallucination who can coach him in that information. So it's like he's a schizophrenic but instead of the voices telling him to kill people they tell him how to hack computers or things like that.

The idea came because I was actually working in a writing group with my friend Dan who was working on a book called The Hollow City which is about a real schizophrenic, not a super-powered schizophrenic in a weird Brandon-world. And I'm like "Oooh this would be so cool, what if his hallucinations helped him? What if--" and he's like "That's not my book, I don't want to write that book" and I'm like "But it's so cool!" and he's like "Then you write it!" So I did. And that's where it came from. A lot of time being a writer is realizing "Oh I wish someone would do this, HEY! I know someone who can do that, ME!" and then I write the books.

Questioner (paraphrased)

Was Shallan's ability to draw intentional, just so you could have her draw all the maps?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Yes, basically that was the seed for her. I was inspired by people from history like Darwin who was a scientist and did drawings. That was part of the concept that made me put Shallan into the books. All those drawings are intended to give you a sense of immersion.