Shadows of Self Houston signing

Event details
Name
Name Shadows of Self Houston signing
Date
Date Oct. 7, 2015
Location
Location Houston, TX
Tour
Tour Shadows of Self
Bookstore
Bookstore Murder by the Book
Entries
Entries 19
Upload sources
#1 Copy

Questioner

When writing, how do you work out space versus time?

Brandon Sanderson

Space versus time, what do you mean?

Questioner

So I guess distance versus time. So like, you have your math and you're writing, is it more just kind of feel how the story goes, or is it "I know this amount of space is going to take the characters four months--"

Brandon Sanderson

Oh I see what you're saying. Ok, so how do you work with, when you've got traveling characters, working out how much time things are going to take, traveling and things like this in the book, it actually really depends on the plot archetype of the book. If the book is what we call a travelogue, which is about traveling places, exploring new locations, it's kind of got that adventuresome, exploration feel to it, then the destinations you go to are the main part of the plot. For most of the books I'm writing, I don't do travelogues very often. I've done a few but not very often. So for me, that stuff in the middle is the boring stuff, and I skip it. You'll see in my books, they start in one chapter and they're like "well, we've gotta get here", and the next chapter they're like "wow, that was a ride" and then were there, and that's because the plot archetype I'm working on is usually different than that. So you've gotta kind of understand what you're writing.

One of the big things to figure out about your story, either discovering it as you write or planning it, however you do it, is why are people turning the pages, what are the promises I'm fulfilling, what is the thing that they're going to read that book to get. It can be multiple things, but if that exploration's part of it, they don't want to miss that journey. I remember reading a book once, and this is kind of an example of why this is so important, and I'm not going to name who it is because he's a very good writer. But there's one of his books where he stops, takes a break, comes back to the characters a few years later, like in the middle of the story, and you've missed the main character falling in love and getting married and this stuff. And I was like "No!", because the book is a coming-of-age book, and so the coming-of-age book skipping falling in love really felt like a betrayal of my trust as the reader. There are other books I've read where you can skip that, and it's okay, does that makes sense? Because the book is not about that, it can be about something else. So make sure you're not skipping the stuff that people want to read. Make sure you skip the other stuff though.

#2 Copy

Questioner

I've got a question about Hoid. Now that he is a [worldhopper], he's been in quite a few books, do you have any plans or is it possible that he may windup jumping realities into a universe that, as you write more books that are outside the cosmere, or do you just kind of plan of having him--

Brandon Sanderson

Good question. So the question is am I going to have Hoid, who has appeared in many of my books, jump between universes as I write more outside the cosmere. The answer is actually no. I have a distinct story that I'm telling in the cosmere and it's less about the fun of connecting all my works, which is fun, but it's less about that and more about the actual story. Part of the reason I'm actually doing this thing with Hoid is I like the idea-- playing with the idea, of what is an epic. An epic that spans many many years is really cool to me, so I have hidden that amongst my books, and it'll eventually come out in a much more direct way. I actually had to make this choice pretty early in my career, when I was writing The Rithmatist was the first one. You know, the Alcatraz books are just goofy and zany, so I didn't have to think about it as much with those, but with The Rithmatist I was like "what am I going to do with this?". Because it had originally been planned as a cosmere book, and then I decided I wanted to set it on Earth and I didn't want to do a lot of these sort of political things on Earth in the cosmere, I wanted it to be a far-off and distant place. And that's when I made the break, I said "no I'm not going to put him in this". And that made it easy when people were like "hey, you going to sneak him into The Wheel of Time?". Nah nah let's move along there. A lot of people were expecting me to sneak him in.

#3 Copy

Questioner

Do you find yourself impatient having to wait to reveal some of these things?

Brandon Sanderson

Do I find myself impatient having to wait to reveal some of these things? Yeah, yeah yeah, it's--

Questioner

Start changing your mind and working on that idea more--

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah I do. There are ideas that I'm like "this book is gonna be so cool, I'm going to work on that", and then I have to be like "alright, you can work on that while you're excited about it, but do you realize it's like ten years away?" So these outlines, I'm very excited-- But you know what, I'm used to it. I started writing Dalinar's story when I was fifteen and people didn't get to read Dalinar's story til I was like 35-- 37-- something like that. It was 35 I think. So I waited 20 years for Dalinar. So I can wait a little bit longer on some of these other things.

#4 Copy

Questioner

You were saying that you had, somewhere in the Middle East, was it  English or were they reading it in...

Brandon Sanderson

Oh good question, were they reading it in English or Arabic? They were reading in English, they were reading the UK editions. So I don't know that I have-- Well, I know I have my books in Turkish but I don't think there are any actually in Arabic. There's some sister languages, but not Arabic.

#5 Copy

Questioner

When you're writing a book, and you're writing a character that's better at something than you are, like Shallan is very good at drawing, or Wayne is very good at imitating voices, how do you write that?

Brandon Sanderson

This is a good question. You get this old adage in writing classes where people are like "write what you know". And you're like, buuuuuut...writing about English professors gets a little old, unless you're writing literary fiction and that's like half of it. What do you do when you want to write someone that's better at something than you are? Excellent question. A couple of things. You can construct the perfect situation to show off what you want to show off, which is not how life normally goes. So I'm not nearly as clever as some of my characters, but I can construct the situation and then take like two hours thinking "Alright, what's the perfect comeback" Go get a burger and it's like "Ahh the perfect comeback". Like you might do when you're like "Ahh if only I'd thought of that. You can make that happen.

The other thing you can do is good research, and for a lot of things where it's a skill I don't have, what I try and do is I try to do enough research to get myself like seventy percent of the way there as an expert. And you can do that pretty fast, you take a couple of months, read a couple of books, and you can get yourself to the point that you don't sound embarrassing. Then you write the scenes and you find someone that is an expert, because that last thirty percent is what takes like nine years extra. And you give it to them and you say "Where am I wrong?". And since you've kind of done enough work that you're not just like completely out of left field, they can fix it usually, and they're like "Oh yeah, this is not something that a doctor would say", "This is not something you do, you fix it right here, but you got these parts all right, the context is correct". And that's what you want to do, if you can. Forums are very useful, in the internet age you can go and hang out, learn around people talking about all kinds of things. You can be like "How do these people think? How do people who think this way think?", and you can go there and get from their own mouths and their own voices, a lot of how they're talking and thinking, what their passionate about and things like that. And then you try to represent that the way they would represent it if they were writing the book.

#6 Copy

Questioner

Do you ever plan on writing something akin to Silmarillion for the cosmere?

Brandon Sanderson

Do I every plan to write something like the Silmarillion for the cosmere? Hehe. No I have no specific plans right now. I've read the Silmarillion-- Wow, he was a genius, but that's where you get to the mad genius stuff, right. Yeah, I have no plans right now to do that. Maybe you'll get me when I'm 70 and I'm like "Ennnhhhh... I must write my own Isaiah, I will do it". 

#7 Copy

Questioner

How many scripts did you write and submit before you got Elantris picked up?

Brandon Sanderson

How many scripts did I write and send out before I got Elantris picked up? So novel-length things, Elantris was my sixth. It sold while I was writing my thirteenth, which was The Way of Kings. You shouldn't have to do that, I was really bad when I started. The other thing is I was not good at revising, and I sometimes wouldn't even send books out, because I was like "I can learn do that better, I'll just write another book", which was the wrong attitude to have but it ended up working out for me so I don't know that I'd change anything! I did collect rejections but really-- My first five books were very experimental. Someone told me your first five books are usually terrible, which is not necessarily true but it was the right advice for me. I sat down and I wrote five.

My first one was an epic fantasy, because I was pretty sure that's what I love. My second one was a space opera. My third one was a sequel to that epic fantasy. Then my fourth one was a comedy, like a Bob Asprin-style fantasy farce. And then there was a cyberpunk. And then there was Elantris. I wrote those five, and after I sat down and wrote those five and said, "ok, epic fantasy's what I love, I'm gonna go with that." That's when the idea of the Cosmere started going for me, and I sat down and I wrote Elantris, a book called Dragonsteel which is kind of Hoid's origin story, and a book called White Sand which we're currently making into a graphic novel. Those three books I got the best feedback on when I was submitting them and that's when I really started to push it, in getting it published. So you can imagine that what I did is I practiced for a while, I wrote a book that I thought was pretty good and during the three years it took to sell that, I ended up writing some more, because I do that. 

#8 Copy

Questioner

After reading your entire bookology--

Brandon Sanderson

Bookology, I like that.

Questioner

It got to the point where I was running out of books so I went on your website and found your recommended reads and after talking to some other authors I found some other connections to you, David Farland, Brian McClellan. Is there anyone else you would recommend down the same track?

Brandon Sanderson

Ok, authors I would recommend-- I'm going to go in a couple of different directions because not everyone might like the same sorts of things. I'm going to tell you what I've been reading lately. Brian McClellan's very good, and Brian McClellan was one of my students but I can't really take credit for Brian because he was really good when he came to class in the first place. Brian's books, if you haven't read them, Promise of Blood is the start. They are flintlock fantasies and they kind of combine a little bit of hard fantasy magic, like I do, and a little bit of the kind of grimdark grittiness and kind of combine them together into this cool mix. So the magic isn't quite as hard as the magic I do, meaning quite as rule-based, but the grimdark isn't quite as grim as the grimdark tends to go. The mix works really well.

I read Naomi Novik's new book, Uprooted, which is really good if you haven't read it. It's kind of like a dark fairytale YA but really twisted, so it's not intended for a teen audience because it is pretty twisted, but it's like how the fairytales really were, it's that sort of thing, it's really cool, it's very well written. Let's see-- I'm currently reading Dan's new book, that's not out yet. But I Am Not a Serial Killer. If you haven't read Dan's books they are great and they are creepy. It's about a teenage sociopath who hunts demons, to get that whole "I'm a sociopath and kind of want to kill people". Not that all sociopaths want to, but he does. And getting it out of his system is going and killing demons. 

Let's see, what else have I really loved. I like Robin Hobb's books a lot, if you haven't read Robin Hobb. Brent Weeks, a very similar writer to me. Brent Weeks, The Black Prism. It seems like Brent and I must have read the same books, a lot of the, growing up, and have the same-- because we both kind of independently started doing this kind of epic fantasy rule-based wacky magic kind of thing right about the same time. I really really like NK Jemisin, Nora Jemisin, her books are very literary so if you're not on the literary side of fantasy-- but the new one is fantasic, it's written in the second person, at least one of the viewpoints is. It's like the only book I've ever read in second person that works. And some of my classic favorites are A Fire Upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge, it's very Dune-like, in that it's a science fiction that blends the best parts of epic fantasy together with it, and if you haven't read that and you like Dune, you'll probably like A Fire Upon the Deep. There we go.

#9 Copy

Questioner

Any more information on like the efforts to go to the movies--

Brandon Sanderson

Oh the movies stuff--

Questioner

--or television or even maybe animated?

Brandon Sanderson

Television or things like this. So for those who don't know, what we do with Hollywood is they come and they option our books. This is where they give us some money not to sell the books to anyone else while they try to get things together to make a film, and most of the time it doesn't pan out. Sometimes it does, but making a film takes a lot of effort, takes a lot of time, so they want to make sure that they've got the rights looked-up while they do that. So it's basically like renting the rights, but it's a rent-to-own, because eventually they have a buy-out price they have to pay, but all the rental payments kind of apply to that. And I have had things for option since 2006 I think, and nothing's ever gotten made, and right now I have under option Mistborn, I have Emperor's Soul, I have Stormlight, I have Steelheart, and Legion just lapsed, so if somebody wants that, let me know. And all of those are in various stages of production, I've chosen production companies that I feel good about, and so I feel good about all of them, but I don't know what the chances are, right.

The most recent one was Steelheart, with Shawn Levy's company, he did Real Steel, that's what convinced me, it's a Richard Matheson story that he adapted. He also did the Night at the Museum films. And they've been really cool, they invited me in, I got to tour Fox Studios, and they're working on a screenplay, I'm hoping that will turn out well but I have really no power to make Hollywood do stuff. Nobody really does, even the people there, I think they're all kind of confused by how it sometimes works out. So I would do animated if the right project came along, and someone offered me, and I thought it looked good. I'm not opposed to that. I'm not opposed to TV. We just have to see who comes to me.

#10 Copy

Questioner

So there's a popular theory on the internet--

Brandon Sanderson

Oh no--

Questioner

--that Brandon Sanderson is actually a robot, or a collection of robots. So they've never actually heard you dispute this. 

Brandon Sanderson

Right right right, well, the thing is-- the way we were programmed doesn't let us lie. So this is a problem for disputing it. So I'll just say "No comment".

#11 Copy

Questioner

The fight scenes in the Mistborn novels are incredibly visual. How do you write that, do you have to diagram it out?

Brandon Sanderson

Right, how do I write the visual fight scenes from something like Mistborn? Actually, you do a lot of research by watching Jackie Chan films, *laughter* but really what you're doing is actually, at least the way I approach it, you can do whatever works for you, but the way I do it is I actually approach what I want the emotional and mental beats to be in the scene and I build the scene around that. What is someone going to realize? What is someone going to feel? What is someone going to connect? How are they going to bring these things together? And then I use those to construct the scene so that even if someone is not following it, or is not as interested in the action, they'll get the emotional parts, and have these focuses for themselves. And I just construct the action around that. And often in the first draft, it's actually pretty rough. One of the biggest things I have to do in second drafts and third drafts is fix blocking for these battle sequences, which is where everyone's moving, because I'm working on the emotional beats first. And I feel like that's the way to go for me. I can construct a really awesome looking fight scene but the problem is you can't do a Jackie Chan thing in a book, like he punched him, he punched him really fast, this other person punched her twice as fast but then she kicked him twice. It's just boring right, and even the blow by blows, when they get exciting, kind of feel boring sometimes. But if you've got those emotional and mental things connecting, and pulling the reader through the story, then it's going to work better.

#12 Copy

Questioner

Why did it take you so long to write the fifth Alcatraz book?

Brandon Sanderson

Why did it take me so long to write the fifth Alcatraz book... So, the Alcatraz books, the problem was I had this weird relationship with Scholastic, who was publishing them, where they didn't want to keep publishing them, but they didn't want to sell them back to me either. And it was really weird, because I was like "If you don't want to keep publishing them, why not like let us take them back and sell them to someone else?", and they were like "ehhh", so we had to convince them to sell them back to me, and I actually had to pay them a bunch of money to get the rights back, to bring them to another publisher, and that deal required that we couldn't sell any Alcatraz books until January of this upcoming year [2016]. And so the reason I couldn't do that fifth book is because of that contract. I let them sell off the remaining books that they had so that we're rereleasing them starting in January, the first four again, and then the fifth one. We didn't want to do the fifth one until the first four could come out, so people could buy them. So that's the reason!

#13 Copy

Questioner

In The Stormlight Archive, Damnation is a physical planet, or place, to my understanding. The Tranquiline Halls seems a little less tangible, is it a physical place and will we see it?

Brandon Sanderson

So, Damnation and the Tranquiline Halls, are they physical places? In Rosharan mythology they are places, much like heaven and hell are places. Tranquiline Halls is-- and so they believe that they do exist, but they're not sure if they exist on this plane or the next plane, or things like that. And that's all I'm going to say about it.

#14 Copy

Questioner

I have a question on when you use terminology because you use a lot of regular terms. If you've read Warbreaker, Breath specifically. So as a working writer, before ever reading Brandon Sanderson's novel, I might have come up with the Breath myself. So the question being, have you ever had that, where you work working on something and then read another book and found out they were using either a similar term or something--

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah it's happened a bunch. Have I been writing a book when someone came up with a similar term? Janny Wurts wrote a book about someone called the mistwraith. There is a book called, like, The Curse of the Darkeyes, or something like that. It's hard to do something where someone hasn't used any of the terms before. Like trying to do the Steelheart books, which use superhero mythology, try and find a name for any superhero that DC or Marvel haven't had, it's like basically impossible. So I had to be like alright, ones that no one has heard of, that only appeared in one issue, if I come up with a cool name and they've used it once in like one issue, I can still use it. You just have to not let that get to you. Make the story your own through good writing and good storytelling, and no one's going to look at it and be like "Ohh this is a rip-off". And if your beta readers all say "Oh this is a rip-off", then maybe you change it, but they probably won't. That's my advice to you. Don't stress that one too much. Work on making your story great and don't worry too much if it is what someone else has done. 

#15 Copy

Questioner

Are there any actors that you would love to see in an adaptation of your work?

Brandon Sanderson

Wow, excellent. Are there any actors I would love to see in an adaptation of my work? Wow, you know, you toy with this in your head, but I usually only do it after I've written the book because-- and then it's kind of hard because I'm like this character is the person in my head, not a specific actor. But we've had to start doing it, where people come when they're making the films and they're like "Who do you see in this role", or something like this. And so I have come up with some of these things. For instance, the guys who have Mistborn keep talking about Sazed, and they kind of want to go Asian with Sazed, which I think would work just fine for the Terris, and they keep using Chow Yun Fat as someone they would look at. Which would be pretty cool. 

Legion I wrote with a few actors in mind, one of the few books I've done that, so if you've read that I actually cast Ivy, JC, and Tobias as three actors I like. You should read it and see if you can figure out who those three are, because I've said online and you can read that and say "I wonder", and then you just google it and they'll all be there. One of them is from Firefly, so-- I'll give you a hint, this character's initials have been the same in like five or six different movies, and they're the same initials I use for the character and the fact that he's playing a character with the same initials, and so I use those initials. But for the most part I don't really think on this too much, because you spend a lot of time thinking about it, like when someone first bought Mistborn I was like "Ooh who do we get to play Vin"? And now all those actors, they're all like ten years older than being able to play Vin now, so it's like what was the point in doing all that. So I'm just going to let something actually get to casting, and then hopefully they'll invite me in and I can give my feedback.

#16 Copy

Cadmium (paraphrased)

We've seen someone with a Hemalurgic spike communicate or under the control of Ruin or Harmony... Can other Shards communicate or control those individuals?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Yes. Good Question. Yes...  They can certainly communicate...

Cadmium (paraphrased)

To what extent?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

Not to the extent that Ruin did. The others could communicate but it'd be vague or faint, not as direct as Ruin was. He connects to us, well, them through the little bit of Preservation that he had or could touch. Because the spike pierces the soul.

Cadmium (paraphrased)

What about on other planets than Scadrial?

Brandon Sanderson (paraphrased)

It'd work the same way. but again probably vaguer or fainter. Might go unnoticed.

Event details
Name
Name Shadows of Self Houston signing
Date
Date Oct. 7, 2015
Location
Location Houston, TX
Tour
Tour Shadows of Self
Bookstore
Bookstore Murder by the Book
Entries
Entries 19
Upload sources