YouTube Livestream 9

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Name YouTube Livestream 9
Date
Date May 28, 2020
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Entries 16
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#1 Copy

Questioner

Can Skybreakers vow to follow a code of rules some might consider outlaw-ish, like the Pirate Code. Are they obliged to adhere to changes in the law after their vow?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes and yes.

What you're running into with what's happening right now, the Skybreakers are under the thumb of someone who has a much more rigid interpretation of what they should do than is necessary for the Order. And so you could totally be a Skybreaker who is not of this group, and this group would not look kindly on something like the Pirate Code necessarily. (Though the Pirate Code kind of works for them, because it's in international waters, so even with the current crop of Skybreakers you could probably argue the Pirate Code, and they'd probably be okay with it.)

But you could have even less, codes that's like, "I'm going to follow the code of the criminal underground. I'm going to follow the Mafia code." Current crop of Skybreakers, that would not fly with them. But in the Order in general, and the way that highspren work, and things like that, you would totally be okay.

Which is kind of dangerous, yes. But you would have to follow the code as the code changes. So that could get you into trouble, also. Skybreakers, they've got an interesting way of going about all this. Hopefully, all the Orders do; that's one of my goals with them.

#2 Copy

Questioner

Will the tenth book of the Stormlight Archive be the last book in the cosmere universe, or there a plans to continue with other stories in the cosmere universe indefinitely?

Brandon Sanderson

So, the last chronological book of the cosmere sequence is the final Mistborn book. So the way that the structure works right now. Elantris, Mistborn era 1, Stormlight Archive first five, Mistborn era 2, Elantris 2 and 3, Stormlight Archive 6 through 10, the the final Mistborn era, is how I'm going. 

Right? Did I miss one? I missed an era. So, I'm going to do the Wax and Wayne era and the 1980s era kind of together, and mash those together. 

So, era 1, era 2/3, Stormlight 1-5, Stormlight 6-10, era 4 of Mistborn, is how it is right now. Era 4 of Mistborn will the the last chronological. We will have the flashbacks to Dragonsteel after Stormlight 10 but before era 4 of Mistborn

I do not intend it to go indefinitely. If I manage to get all of that done before I die, which I hope I will - I move pretty quickly, then there's a decent chance I will write other cosmere books that happen in the cosmere, probably during this time frame at some point, unconnected or only tangentially related and things like that. But I do intend that to be the final book of the cosmere sequence, and I have no plans for anything chronologically after that. 

Questioner

Did you mention Warbreaker in there?

Brandon Sanderson

Warbreaker is a side project. I do count Warbreaker, there will be a sequel to Warbreaker. But Warbreaker, Emperor's Soul, Silence Divine, all of these things I might write, the unnamed Threnody novel, these are not what I consider the core, essential cosmere books that I need to write. I need to do Dragonsteel, Mistborn, Elantris, and Stormlight, and that's like your core sequence of stories, and if I can get Aether of Night in there - I sure hope that I can - if I can get the Threnody novel in there - I sure hope I can - and some stuff like that.

The requirement I placed on myself is no more than three years between Stormlight books, with a slightly larger break between 5 and 6, cause the first five are an arc. But I'm hoping no more than five years there, but we will see. And gotta just keep moving, keep going, keep writing, so that my own mortality does become a factor in the cosmere sequence.

#4 Copy

Questioner

Is there a particular subgenre of fantasy or sci-fi that you would like to tackle in the future?

Brandon Sanderson

Well, I do know what I am going to be tackling in the future, and it's this sort of... I don't know if there's a good name for it. A lot of people call it magepunk. I don't know that I like that as much. It's this fusion of fantasy elements and science fiction elements. As I move the cosmere more towards science fiction, it's moving more toward space opera science fiction. I love The Fifth Element. One of the things I love about The Fifth Element is this idea of this space religion. That kind of throwback fantasy religion mashed up with far future science fiction is so much fun to me. This is what we love about Star Wars, right? It's the everything-but-right-now. All the past stuff that's cool, all the future stuff that's cool. Now, do this poorly and it can feel like it's a story that's just throwing everything and the kitchen sink at you. What I'm hoping I'll be able to do is have realistic extrapolations, where things that aren't present in our world are natural to be present in the future of the cosmere. But I do like that idea, I do like when magic becomes the foundation for science fiction. Other than that, subgenres of fantasy that I would like to tackle, what haven't I tackled that I would like to try some time... I don't know. I haven't really done a true Weird West. Wax and Wayne kind of touches on that, but I haven't done what I would consider a real authentic Weird West story. That I could totally see as being something that I do in the future. Maybe if anyone thinks of cool ones, they can put them in the chat and we can throw those out.

#6 Copy

Brandon Sanderson

For the Shards of Adonalsium, which are basically the deities of the cosmere, I have picked things like Odium, Ruin, and Preservation, to be words that are really easy to... they mean something, you understand exactly what they are, there's going to be sixteen of them, so trying to remember all sixteen different names if they weren't something like that is going to be really hard. It makes it easier to keep which is which, it has an ominous feel to them, and they regionalize, translate into other languages really easily. So that's what I've done.

#7 Copy

Questioner

Do the Purelakers get pruney feet because of the water? If not, is it because they have special feet or does it have to do with the magic fish?

Brandon Sanderson

They have adapted over time and they do not have magic feet. They have special feet, but they have adapted over time to the situation. Now, let's make the note that most natural selection does not work on the timescale of the cosmere and so there probably have to be some magical foundations for this. The fact that everyone on Roshar is Invested with a bit of Investiture more than average is going to push people over time in a way. Kind of the rationale I give myself on this is because Intent and these sorts of things are so important cosmerelogically that we get evolution on a faster scale in most of the cosmere. And so you can see this just by adaptations that have happened since the history of Roshar itself and the arrival of humans on Roshar and things like that.

#8 Copy

Questioner

Who would win: Dalinar with his Shards, or Szeth in Stormlight?

Brandon Sanderson

Young Dalinar with his Shards, Dalinar in his prime versus Szeth? I think, long run, Szeth wins. The reason for this being, Stormlight is just an unfair advantage. You take away the Honorblade from Szeth and Dalinar does win. Szeth is good. But Szeth doesn't have experience with Plate nearly as much. He has been trained almost exclusively on Honorblades and Surges. His fighting styles are all built around them. He is an expert at using Surges, but if he doesn't have those, he's got nothing. Dalinar is good at a lot of different fighting styles, has been in war a ton, and even if he didn't have Plate and you put the two of them without powers against each other, Dalinar's probably going to win. But if Szeth has an Honorblade... being able to heal and being able to fly, these are two almost insurmountable advantages in a one-on-one combat.

#9 Copy

Questioner

You said earlier that Rhythm of War includes a key sequence that you have envisioned for years. How does it feel to have captured the sequence? And are you personally happy with the result?

Brandon Sanderson

Feels great to finally write that sequence. And now that the beta reads are in, I can say the sequence works. Really, really pleased. Really happy that it came together. There were other things that needed to change, but that one worked. There almost have been no edits or revisions to that whole sequence through all the drafts. I've been planning it for so long. It's one of those things that I wrote, and it was as I imagined it, and it came together. And you will be able to read it in Part Five of Rhythm of War.

#10 Copy

Questioner

How is the Mistborn screenplay going? What's it like adapting your own work from over a decade ago?

Brandon Sanderson

I've been running the screenplay through my writing group, and they've got some great feedback. The biggest challenge right now with the screenplay is actually with Vin's character. This is because a lot of what you get to know about Vin in the course of Mistborn is really internally motivated. She's actually pretty quiet, rather shy for someone who does what she does. And keeps a lot of her emotions and thoughts close to her heart. That is hard to show in a screenplay. And really difficult to pull off in an action/adventure screenplay, where you need people to be moving and things like this. And the danger is having Vin come across as just an Artful Dodger. As this confident street thief. Which was the first version of Vin that I wrote, trying to pull of in the books and then failed. This is just one chapter, before I wrote the book. She was kind of your more generic street thief, your Aladdin, your Artful Dodger. And Vin didn't work that way. It, partially, was too generic. Not that those characters are generic; they've just been genericized, they've been done so much. So I tried this other version, this non-self-confident version of Vin that had this really interesting dynamic going on inside of her about wanting to trust, but not being sure if she could. And that really made the book work. Getting that across in the screenplay: super hard. So that's been the challenge.

Fitting it into screenplay format has actually not been hard. I haven't written the screenplay yet; this is all in the treatment stage.

How is it adapting something that I wrote over ten years ago now? It's actually been, in some ways, liberating. Because I have enough distance from it, I can see structurally the things that I can change, I think, easier than if I'd been closer to it. But also a little bit hard, because it is something so long ago, I have to keep going back to the book and reading sections of the book and reminding myself of things that I wrote in the book. Like, the scene where Vin and Elend meet is one of my favorite scenes in the book, but I still had to go back and reread that scene to get it into the treatment, because I had forgotten the actual dialogue cues, and things like that.

So, yeah, it's a challenge, but it's also liberating.

#11 Copy

Questioner

How much do you have to show about the past of your characters in a flashback?

Brandon Sanderson

There are no rules. There's nothing you have to do. Flashbacks, though, they can be great, they can be a minefield. Let me talk about some of the minefield aspects of a flashback.

First is, you're gonna have to decide how you're gonna do your flashbacks, because there are a lot of different ways. I do my flashbacks in The Stormlight Archive as a separate narrative line and basically we have multiple timelines in the books, where you're getting a character's timeline catching them up to the start of The Way of Kings. This works very well in an epic fantasy because I have lots of space and I can separate these chapters off that are flashback chapters completely on their own and they can be isolated. More common, the type of flashbacks you'll see from a lot of people is the "stop and think about it" flashback, and then cut to a new scene and you are seeing actively what the character's remembering at that time. This is the Lost method, the TV show Lost, a lot of television shows and movies use this, and they actively show the character thinking about it. I rarely do this. Once in a while, in The Stormlight Archive, you'll see a character start to tell a story about their past, and I'll make it a line with the next flashback chapter that you're going to get, but really what's happening is a character's telling another person a really shortened version of events, because when you're getting the flashbacks, it's actually not a flashback, the characters thinking about it, that's a separate timeline.

Another way to do it is the kind of, in the middle of a chapter, you're not doing a scene break, you're just flashing back to what happened, and there it gets tricky with tense. Tense can be really a challenge with this. The "I had done this" or whatnot, or if you're not gonna use the tense, it can get really confusing if you're not gonna do a tense change, you're just gonna put that past tense too, both of which are viable, I've seen them done very well. But those in-scene flashbacks can get really "tell-y" and really hard for readers to track and kind of uninteresting for them to read. The danger with any flashback -- this is the one that has the most trouble -- is that the reader will feel like the story is not progressing and instead they're wasting time doing something else and that they're not interested in attaching to this. And this is a challenge even with The Stormlight Archive ones. There are people who just do not attach to the flashback sequences, because they are, by nature of their story, prequels. And that's a challenge of writing them.

What do you gain? Why would you do this? Well, it's a really cool way to build motivation for your character, depth for your character, and to show a different place and time in your story so that you can show how much has changed. We talk about show versus tell, and you can use a flashback to show a character's changes quite dramatically in this manner. You can also get information to the reader in ways that would've been really "tell-y" otherwise. Sometimes, flashbacks are really "tell-y". And when I say "tell-y", they're boring, because they're infodumps and they're just giving you a whole bunch of information. A lot of times, if you do a flashback right, it feels more active and more interesting way to get the same information across to the reader, rather than having the character sit and explain about their lives to people, you just get to experience and see it. But that's just one tool, right, and like all of them, gauge for your own story if this tool is going to enhance the story you're trying to tell or if it's something that you should save for a different story.

#12 Copy

Questioner

What makes fantasy creatures good and how do you go about creating them?

Brandon Sanderson

I try to build mine from the ecology of the world of the world I'm building. I try to extrapolate from that and this is just because I have this sort of "one foot in fantasy, one foot in science" approach to writing the cosmere in particular. And because of that, I want the flora and the fauna to feel integrated with the world that they're on and to be interesting in that aspect. Obviously, I have not done this in most books to the extent that I did in Stormlight. But one of the fun things for me to do is to ask, "What have I changed about this world? What would that do to the ecology?". What do I look for other than that? I want something that's visually interesting. I want something that'll draw well. I want something that'll not just be what I've seen before and that will be a nice take on what I've seen before. That's the thing, I mentioned before: human creativity is about recombining things in interesting ways. That's how we seem to work. We don't come up something we've never seen before, we put a horn on something we've seen before and call it something new, which is cool. We're remixers, is what we're really good at doing. And I ask myself, "What can I remix that I haven't seen remixed before?"

#13 Copy

Questioner

In Warbreaker, you dealt delicately with sex and sexuality, especially in the first half. How did you find that line of what was appropriate and what wasn't, especially given the culture of sex in the region in which you live?

Brandon Sanderson

With Warbreaker, with all of my books, basically I'm thinking less about the culture in which I live and more with my own personal lines on these sorts of things. And I've constantly said, and I still believe, that one can write mature fiction without graphic content. That is what I like to try to do. And Warbreaker is, in part, an attempt to explore where I would want to go with these themes and ideas, and a book where I was expressly not being explicit, but also going further across lines than I normally went, to see... "across lines" is probably the wrong term. Going further along a path. Because I don't think, really, that I have lines. I have paths I go on, and at some point, I'm like "This is as far as I want to go on this path." And it's not like I draw some line in the sand, it's just my own gut instinct. With Warbreaker, I just wrote what I was comfortable writing, and maybe even pushed myself a little further and said, "Am I comfortable with this or not?" as I was writing and I thought, "No, this is dealing with the topic in a mature way that I like" and it worked for me. It was an experiment and kind of a give-and-take, but every book that I write is that to one extent or another. This is just one of the areas that I was focusing on when I wrote Warbreaker.

#14 Copy

Questioner

Can you talk a little bit about Dark One? Anything else that's going on here?

Brandon Sanderson

We are working on the audio version. We're doing it as an audio original, the actual prose version. I don't know when that will happen. Probably with that one, I'm gonna do it with Dan Wells, is most likely what's gonna happen. He and I together.

Television show, there's been no movement that I really know about. Joe Straczynski did email me a little while ago, talking about when he thought he was gonna have the pilot script ready, and things like that. There's still some progress there. Actually, he did send us the pilot, didn't he? He sent us the first draft of the pilot. That I did read, so I do know he sent it. But, basically, it's TV. Things are working along; it's coming along slowly. Who knows. If they start filming, I'll go out and and enjoy. Joe Michael Straczynski is a blast; he is quite the character, and I have loved chatting with him and going out to dinner with him. He knows his stuff. The show will be his thing. I will be involved, but gotta let the showrunner make the show that they want to do.

#15 Copy

Questioner

In a Google video you once made, you talked about how you never knew Robert Jordan. You knew his family, friends, world, and characters; but not him. You wrote the end of his life's work. That juggernaut that is and was The Wheel of Time.

In The Emperor's Soul, Shai had to build up something new from journal entries from the Emperor as well as pieces from her to make what she thought was a better man. Long question short, is this analogy baseless? Or do you in some way see The Wheel of Time as your Emperor's Soul?

Brandon Sanderson

You know, there's an interesting connection there that I'd never thought about before, reconstructing the person from the lore of their life, rather than themselves. Where that falls apart is, I still maintain (and I doubt there's much contention on this point) that Robert Jordan could have done a better job of his ending than I did. This is in the definition, right? I couldn't reconstruct...

The whole goal of The Emperor's Soul is that she's creating a work of art that replaces the original, but in many ways is superior to the original. I don't think I did that. But I did have that experience of trying to recreate, in some ways, Robert Jordan from all the pieces, all the lore, all the ephemera.

So I love that you've made that connection, and I certainly think there's something there. But I don't know that the metaphor sticks in the large scale.

#16 Copy

Questioner

Who bullies whom: Jasnah or Cadsuane?

Brandon Sanderson

I would like to think that Jasnah and Cadsuane would very quickly determine that they should have mutual respect for one another and keep to their own spheres. They would meet, they would turn around, and they would walk the other way from each other and go on bullying other people.

Event details
Name
Name YouTube Livestream 9
Date
Date May 28, 2020
Entries
Entries 16
Upload sources