Questioner

Does it feel like your own work when you hear [a translation]? Is it recognizable in any way? What do the translations do with your work? I suppose you get a lot of questions by your translators about the magic, about invented words. How does this reflect on your writing?

Brandon Sanderson

You know, I'm not sure if it changes the way I approach my writing at all. But I do find it fascinating. Hearing a reading, in particular, is in some ways, it's a double interpretation. Because first, you have the translation to German. And then you have the narrator... will give an interpretation, as well. But one of the things about writing that I believe is that I'm not completing the story. What I do is, I write a script. And every person who reads that book is going to finish the story in their head. I give descriptions of the characters, but even with those descriptions, every person who reads the book is going to imagine those characters [in a] slightly different way. So I've always viewed myself, as a writer, as kind of like the screenwriter. Where the reader is the director, who's going to finish the story. And I don't think a book really lives until it's been experienced by a reader. And so it doesn't bother me, the idea of going through translators or getting different interpretations by the audiobook narrators, because I feel like my text is going to be interpreted by whoever experiences it, in different ways. And in some ways, as soon as it gets experienced by a reader, it becomes their story. They finish it, and it doesn't really "come alive" until they've done so. So, it's not finished anyway. I think it's just really cool. I like seeing fan art, even though each drawing of a character looks different from another one. It lets me see a little bit how that book was finished in that reader's mind.

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Questioner

You were mentioning outlines before. I was just wondering, when you start your outlining and you're done, is it usually a very clear process of outline and writing, or do you go back and forth and back and forth?

Brandon Sanderson

The question is, "Is it a clear cut process of finishing an outline and then writing, or do I go back and forth," and it's the "go back and forth."

Usually what I can do is I can get an outline about three fourths of the way there before I need to start writing. The issue is, I share a little bit with the discovery writers in that I tend to discovery write my characters. I don't usually outline my characters nearly as much as I do my world and my plot. But the problem is, characters then can evolve to being people that would't do the things the plot calls for them to do, and in that case I have to rebuild my outline to fit who the character is becoming. I find if I don't give myself that flexibility, the characters start to feel wooden, and start to feel like they're cardboard instead of real people. So this requires jumping back and forth with that outline, and changing things and knocking out walls so to speak.

So an outline is not a rigid structure I have to follow. It's a guide map to where I want to go, but sometimes I might change the destination or I might want to take a deviation. And at that point I put down the book, and I go back to the outline, and I rebuild the outline, and then I go back to the book.

I also have something I call the floating outline, which is-- It's a separate document that's the next three chapters in detail, outlined out. The main outline may just say, "Bullet point: characters go here and accomplish this." But then the floating outline has, "Well I need to work in this character relationship, and this scene, and this little part of the worldbuilding. And this part over here is an info dump and boring, so let's do that in an interesting way. And let's have Shallan stab herself in the leg while she's doing it,"; or things like that in order to build an actual scene rather than just a lot of info dump.

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Questioner

While you're writing and focusing on one book, what do you do when you get distracted by other cool ideas?

Brandon Sanderson

...This is one of the hardest things about being a writer, for me, is that there's always some cool new thing you want to do. And in fact, as a new writer, back when I was first trying to write, it was even more dangerous, because I would be looking at my flawed current book, and I would have in my head this perfect other book. And once I start writing that one, that one would be perfect. This one is, like, ugly. And that one will be beautiful. And one of my big hangups, as a new writer, is, I would finish the book, but instead of doing revisions, I would go off and write the new one. And then, as I was writing that one, another one would start to become the perfect thing. And for those who don't know, I wrote thirteen novels before I sold one. Part of the reason that that happened was because I didn't learn how to revise until fairly late in my unpublished career. Learning how to take a good book and make it great was what kept me from getting published for years. So it's about discipline, unfortunately. It's about writing down that idea, saving it for later, knowing you can come back to it, but your job right now is to make the one you're working on the best book it can be. And that can be hard. For me, I just had to learn that this book wasn't going to ever be perfect unless I put it through several drafts and learned how to make it look good, rather than imagining a perfect other story that I might write.

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Questioner

If a non-Radiant brought Shardplate to Shadesmar, could he easily bring it back?

Brandon Sanderson

They would not have too many problems with this. There might be some weird things. But bringing it back and forth is not going to be the problem.

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Questioner

I wondered if an Inquisitor had children, if they would inherit stronger Inquisitor abilities, or if they would just inherit the lesser lines from being a Seeker, for example?

Brandon Sanderson

Excellent question. I don't think I've ever been asked this before... The way Hemalurgy works, if you're not aware, you are taking someone else's soul, and you are basically nailing it to your soul... That won't affect the children. So you will have the weaker lines.

They have tried that. Unfortunately.

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Questioner

We know that Hoid is able to do some kind of travel forward in time. Is this ability something to do with Connection with time?

Brandon Sanderson

No, not in so many words.

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Questioner

What happens in cosmere terms with Parshendi? Like, they Connect to a spren. And then, by it do they change their Identity, or what?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes. Basically what's happening is, that symbiosis has a similar effect to Hemalurgy, but not so nasty. And it's being reflected there in the Physical Realm.

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Questioner

In The Way of Kings Drehy says, "By the Brightcaller's rays."

Brandon Sanderson

Uh-huh. Oh, you want to know what that is? RAFO.

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Questioner

I would like to know the process of working with other artists, like Isaac. And I saw there was a very big list of credits in the start of Oathbringer. Does the artist also affect your writing? Or you write first, and then the artists do their artwork?

Isaac Stewart

For each Stormlight book, we have twenty or thirty pieces of art, and I can't do them all myself. We've had a bunch of people waiting in the wings, a bunch of artists that we send the art to. I read the book, I make notes, Brandon gives me notes of what he would like to see in the book. We combine it into a big list. I assign out to different artists. And then we have art reviews, where I get art from the different artists, and Brandon and I go over it and say what they got right, what maybe they could change. And then we go back and forth with the artist until it's just exactly what we want it to be for the book. The same thing happens when Brandon and I are working on maps or symbols. That's basically the process.

Questioner

So it never affects your writing?

Brandon Sanderson

It does affect my writing. I can give a couple little examples of this. The American cover for Elantris, I love. It's done by Stephan Martinière. It's this gorgeous cover, it’s a very distinctive, different sort of style. But the actual scene he painted wasn't in the book. And I liked it so much... And that doesn't matter that much. The cover of the book, think of it more like a movie poster for the book. The actual scene doesn't have to occur, that doesn't bother me. But I realized I could change one little part, and have Sarene and Hrathen on the wall, looking like they did on the cover. So I rewrote the passage to match the cover. So that has happened before.

For instance, Isaac has inserted a character named Nazh into the books, who is kind of one of the people in-world-- It's important to me, particularly in Stormlight, that all the art you're seeing is something from in-world. I don't want it to be-- The covers are different. The covers are one thing. But the other stuff that we wanna have in there, we want it to be what we call ephemera. It's a map that actually existed in Roshar. It's sketches done by a character from the books. This is to not break the immersion. You're not going into the book and getting it illustrated for you. You are getting the scraps of drawings and things that were in-world. Because I feel like-- Tolkien started this. The map that you got in The Hobbit was the map they carried. It's not like someone came along and drew a map. And I liked that way better. So Nazh is one of the characters gathering these maps, and bringing them together. So I wrote him into the books.

Other things that Isaac has done like that, or an artist has sent us something and I'm like, "This is really cool. Let's work this in somehow." It does happen, certainly. And we do get the art early enough, in a lot of the cases, where I'm still doing revisions, and I'll add tweaks and things like that.

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Questioner

I was wondering if there will be any follow-up books to Elantris?

Brandon Sanderson

Follow-ups to Elantris. Yes, I would like to do some sequels. They are probably the sequels to the world rather than sequels to the characters. One of the reasons I didn't do them, or haven't done them yet, is when I first published, Elantris was my sixth book. It was the first published of those thirteen I wrote. It's the only one of those thirteen that got published. It was the only one that was worth being published. And when I wrote it I was really excited by Mistborn--or when I published it, because it was years later. I thought I could do a really good job with a trilogy. When they said, "Do you want to do a sequel to Elantris?" I thought, "I really like that there are sometimes really great standalone books to try an author out on, and I would rather people be able to have a standalone to try me out." Because back then I remember looking at new authors coming out and saying, "Brand new author. Book one of twenty," and thinking, "I don't know if this author can pull it off," right? I would rather try them out on a single book, or maybe a trilogy, and see if they can really tell a good story before I commit to something huge. So I figured doing a couple of standalones--I did two standalones and one trilogy before I launched into anything big of my own, because I wanted people to be able to try me out. And I really like how Elantris has stood on its own as a single book.

I do have plans for some follow-ups. Elantris, that world, is pretty important to the cosmere. I need to bring it up to speed with the other things. So there will be sequels, but like I said they're going to be world sequels. Like Sarene and Roaden may get mentioned and you may see them, but they won't be the main characters.

Questioner

So if there *inaudible*.

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah, yeah. Maybe a little closer to like-- For years I wanted to do the sequel about Kiin's children (that's Sarene's uncle). Like after they're grown up have them be the main characters, and I was kind of seeding that. We'll see if that's still the way I go, but that's the plan right now.

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Questioner

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Are there plans for some more books for The Rithmatist?

Brandon Sanderson

...Rithmatist was the book I was writing when the Wheel of Time call came. And I was required, by my kind of own determination, if I was gonna do this, I had to drop everything and do it. So I finished The Rithmatist, I gave it to my publisher, and I said, "You can't publish this yet. Because I don't know when I'll be able to do sequels." And then I went to work on The Wheel of Time. Eventually the publisher just couldn't hold-- help themselves. They're like, "We have a Brandon Sanderson book. They sell really well. He says we can't publish it." And then they begged and they begged and they begged, and I said, "All right. You can publish it." But I had no idea when I'd be able to do the sequels. And I still don't quite know that. I did sit down a couple years ago and try to write one, and it just didn't work at all. There are just multiple problems with getting that sequel to work right. I still think I will be able to do it. And think I owe it to you, because the ending implies sequels. But I have no idea when.

I'm kind of trying to clear my plate of all the things I was working on before The Wheel of Time, which is now almost ten years ago that that started. I was working on Legion, I was working on Alcatraz, I was working on The Rithmatist. Legion, I managed to finish up. Alcatraz book six... the rough draft is done. So those two will be done. Then I just have to find a way to fix Rithmatist. But I don't know. Wax and Wayne four has to be written before that. Skyward probably has to be written before that. So then we'll see where I sit. I apologize. That's the one that I have to be really vague on.

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Questioner

I think [my class] enjoy [Skyward] because you have space fights for boys, and for the girls you have a female protagonist. We wondered if this was your intention for choosing a female protagonist?

Brandon Sanderson

No, it really wasn't. My intention for choosing a female protagonist was, she was the character I was most interested about writing in this world. I do try to make sure I have a balance, kind of in vague terms. But mostly I'm like, "Who is the character that this story matches best?" And Spensa, she was raised on Conan books, and she wants to be a warrior like that. And she's very different, she's very weird, in the sort of weird way I like to write people. And she's just somebody that I was kind of bursting at the seams to tell her story and to get her into a book.

The original idea for Skyward came from my love of stories about boys and dragons. There's this classic story that gets told. Kid finds a dragon egg, and then they hatch the dragon egg in secret and become this dragon rider. It's the story of How to Train Your Dragon. (Not a dragon egg, but he finds a dragon.) It's the story of Eragon. It's the story of one of my favorite books of all time, Dragon's Blood by Jane Yolen. There's just a ton of this type of story. And one of the things I like to do is isolate a story's archetype, kind of try to break it down to "Why do I love it? What makes it work?" And then try to build it up in a new and different way.

Stormlight, the Bridge Four sequence, I built off of an underdog sports story. Like, if you've seen Hoosiers or Miracle or any of these stories about an underdog sports team who takes on the world. That sort of archetype became the Bridge Four sequence. And Skyward came from the kid and his dragon stories. And that was the seed of it. But Spensa was always going to be the protagonist of that. She was just a character I knew I needed to write.

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Questioner

Would you ever consider doing another Writing Excuses anthology?

Brandon Sanderson

Ooh, you're into the obscure stuff. For those who don't know, my friends and I run a podcast called Writing Excuses. We did something weird where we all brainstormed a story and recorded the brainstorming session, and then went and wrote the story. And did workshops of it on the podcast live, also. The collection has the brainstorm session, the workshop session, the first rough draft, and the last draft of the story. It's an interesting thing for writers to pick up.

Probably not. It was a whole lot of work, and everybody complained about it a ton when I was making them doing it. And they all did it, and they're all wonderful people and excellent writers, but man, it was a big headache. So I don't know if I'll put myself or them through that again.

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Questioner

Do the names of the Unmade correlate to the fragmentation of their spirits?

Brandon Sanderson

No. Good question.

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Questioner

Can a full Radiant summon his Shardhelmet even if there is already one physical manifestation?

Brandon Sanderson

RAFO.

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Questioner

I don't know if you knew all the Mistborn metals at the beginning when you designed them or if you really have to think about a new one if Brandon says, "Yeah, well there's going to be another metal."

Isaac Stewart

Right now we have twenty-four symbols because we added the symbol for lerasium, which is also the symbol for-- No, that's not the symbol for lerasium, that's the symbol for Scadrial. So we have twenty-four symbols. Twenty-three of them correspond to the Scadrian alphabet--or at least in the Elendel region. Right now we have sixteen metals and then we had two more that got shifted off the chart. So we have four or five symbols that when Brandon comes up with a new metal we'll just assign that. Assign one of those symbols probably. But when we run out of that we'll find other ways to make the symbols look right.

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Questioner

Do you already have a design for the Krell? Anything physical about them?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes, the Krell actually are a species from an earlier story I wrote in the universe, Defending Elysium. Second book, I'll delve into that. You will have met them if you've read that earlier story. But I go into a bunch of different races from where the Krell are from, and we deal with a lot of that. So, you're gonna meet some aliens in the next book. Quite a number of them.

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Questioner

When you're writing maps for grand scale things like atlas style maps, they're presumably fairly straightforward because you rarely would say, "This character is moving north." You would say, "This character is moving toward the town." When you're writing (or rather when Isaac is drawing) town maps, you often presumably would say, "This character is going to dart left, down an alley." Do you wind up having to path out where a character would go in order to make the map at least somewhat accurate?

Isaac Stewart

I do keep this in mind when I'm reading the books, and I'll write it down. If something doesn't quite work I'll tell Brandon about it. There's a bit of what we call handwavium on that, with the city blocks. I'll put enough city blocks in there that-- Sometimes it doesn't matter because it will work out, if that makes any sense. But we did, on this map right here, the map of Kholinar-- Down at the bottom we have a map of one of the levels of the palace in Kholinar and we did have to do a lot of reading and going back to-- Our continuity editor, Karen, went back and found every instance of where people were at in the palace in the previous two books and then we used that to draw out this map. So we did have to make sure that left was left and right was right on this particular one.

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Questioner

I reread Words of Radiance, and I was wondering about the timing of the bond breaking. It started to weaken after he had that incompatible oath. And it really broke after he tried to protect someone, so that made no sense for me, because that's what h's doing, and he would have been able to protect even more people if he could have used his powers. We had some theories about that. If it's just the time, because he didn't find the words, or if the Stormfather took it actively from him. Or if he just tried to use too much power, and that broke the bond.

Brandon Sanderson

So it's a little spoilery, so I don't want to dig into it too much, in case people haven't read the book. So... imagine there's a hose with a kink in it. You've caused the kink, and now you're trying to force water through the hose. And then you break something, because you're still holding the kink down. Basically, you want the power, but to not have to go through the proper channels to get it. That's was what was dangerous there.

The way the Stormlight magic works is, there are certain restrictions placed on you. And you can't access the power without those restrictions. And there is also the will of another individual involved, which is important to it, as well. So imagine the kinked hose, if that helps.

Questioner

To what extent would you say Oathbringer picks up on political discussions and debates that are leading today.

Brandon Sanderson

Excellent question. I would say that it certainly picks up on them. It can't help but do so, right? Now Tolkien and CS Lewis had a big argument about how much stories should teach. And Tolkien abhorred metaphor. He said, "I'm just trying to write the story that I'm writing. You can interpret it how you want, but I'm not trying to put things into it." And I felt more like him. I do't generally look at books as a method of trying to advocate for anything. But what I'm thinking about, what I'm concerned about, will definitely reflect in the novels.

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Questioner

Since you have basically established that spren are at least to some extent alive, how is it possible for a Shardblade to not cut right through a living weapon, like Syl for example.

Brandon Sanderson

What you are seeing is: when they are pulling through into the Physical Realm they are creating something that is not 100% physical, not 100% metal, it's like an amalgamation of the two. And that is doing something very special that then prevents other things from cutting through it. It's specifically the way that it's happening. You could make this happen with other things too.

Another big part of it is the amount of Investiture. If something is highly Invested it's going to stop a Shardblade too, because the Investiture is gonna kinda bounce off of each other. It's theoretical, for instance, you could make a Hemalurgic spike that would stop a Shardblade...

So, invest something highly and it will stop a Shardblade almost always. But, you can cut souls; they are highly invested also. So you need something in the Physical Realm that is pulling power through from the other Realms.

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Questioner

Did you do the annotation process while you were writing? Or do you do it after?

Brandon Sanderson

When I did the annotations and things. That was back when I had to do my own copyedits. Copyedits are so boring. You've read the book six times at that point. You give it to a copyeditor. They give it back to you, and you're, like, making notes, telling them, "No, I did want this comma here." It's all of that stuff. Now, my assistant Peter handles that. And I was so bored during those, I needed a break to stop and write something, and I did the annotations. That's where those came from. That's why you don't see as much of them anymore, now that I have Peter to do the really boring stuff. And he loves it. He loves it! It's what he lives for. He's an editor, they're weird.

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Questioner

There is also a thing with Alcatraz. The first time you wrote the book in third person, he was fourteen years old. And the published version, he is thirteen. And you don't explain that on the website. Why?

Brandon Sanderson

The publisher asked me to age him down. Generally, when you're writing a kid's book, the book is usually-- You make the age of the protagonist, minus two years, is about the age that you're writing the book for, when it's for teens. And they felt that about eleven-year-old was about where that book should be. So they asked me to age him down.

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Questioner

Would the works you have not yet published ever be published?

Brandon Sanderson

Probably not, because they're bad. I found ways to fix some of them and release them in some form. White Sand was the best of them and we did graphic novels of those. Because the bad parts of White Sand was I went too long on the same ideas over and over. So we were able to trim those out and make graphic novels out of them and it worked really well. It's not impossible that the other good one, which is Aether of Night, could work that way. The problem with Aether of Night is, and you can find this online. We let the forum, the 17th Shard send it out to people. So if you go there and ask, you can get it.

It feels like two books that are woven together. There's a romantic comedy, and an End of the World Apocalypse. And they just don't mix real well. And that's the big problem with that book. You can read White Sand by signing up for my mailing list. Most of them just aren't that good is the problem. Maybe Ill release them for free on my website or something.

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Questioner

I teach at university, and I had to grade a paper about Way of Kings. It dealt with Colonial and post-colonial structures, religion, fashion, and language. Did you do that consciously or subconsciously, especially the colonization part?

Brandon Sanderson

It's very conscious, that part. The Alethi are in part, based on the Mongols, particularly when the Mongols invaded China, then became Chinese culture, which I find a very fascinating period in history, where the Mongols became a Chinese Dynasty, they actually also became an Arab dynasty over in the Near East. It was just this really interesting thing. So you've got colonialism before colonialism happening there. And I was very aware with the subtext of the Parshendi being a major theme of a people that didn't just enslaved a people, they enslaved them and took away their minds, that I couldn't shy away from dealing with these topics and these concepts. You see as the series progresses, it becomes-- You've got people like Kaladin who are essentially good people, but not understanding at all even their own biases, which is how we all are. These are things I want to deal with, because I find them interesting. They're important now, but it's, I think, important to how humans work and interact and see the world. Because I think this has been happening since the beginning of our history as human beings. And so it's something that is fascinating to me, and something that I think a lot of us wrestle with, and I wanted my characters to deal with that.

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Questioner

If you could co-author with any author dead or alive, who would it be?.

Brandon Sanderson

Wow. Well I already got to do that on my favorite author, right? So if I were going to pick another one-- Oh, I'd write a book with Oscar Wilde. That would be real interesting. That would be a lot of fun.

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Questioner

I recently learned that Roshar is modeled off of the Julia set. This magical fractal concept. I would like to know who of you pulled that off, and are there more things that you are inspired by stuff like that?

Isaac Stewart

We both pulled that off. The Julia set, when we first did a map-- we almost didn't do a map for The Way of Kings. It was the last thing that we did. And Brandon said, "I think we need a map". And so we put that in and he gave me a picture of the Julia set and he said, "I want you to make this into a map". So we made it into a map, did all the coastlines and things. And then what was the--

Brandon Sanderson

The reason being, I had in the back of my head this whole idea with patterns and math and the idea that Roshar is a constructed world, built and grown. And I liked the idea of fractals and the idea of mathematical formulas and these things being the basis for where Roshar came from. Which, you know we've got a base ten world in a universe that's base sixteen. Well, base two, but whatever.

It's this weird thing where Roshar I specifically wanted to have some of these mathematical underpinnings. So when I saw this computation of the Julia set running, it looked like a map to me. But of course, that happens a lot. Mathematical formulas, fractals, these things look like maps because maps are fractals. This is why we see-- Maybe you've seen it when paint peels on the wall, you might look at it and be like, "Wow that looks like a fantasy map". Or when rust forms, you'd be like, "That looks like a fantasy world!" I know that happens to Isaac all the time.

Isaac Stewart

The Mistbornworld came about that way. It was from a rust-thing that looked a lot like what Brandon had drawn.

Brandon Sanderson

So when I saw that, I thought, "This is a world". And I filed that in the back of my head. Roshar, in the very first incarnation, had a different shape. That was the 2002 version I wrote. When I wrote it in 2009, I wanted a different shape. The map that I had drawn didn't work.

Isaac Stewart

You did ask if there are other things like that. I would just say pay attention to the Shattered Plains and pay attention to the shape of Kholinar. Among other things.

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Excelcius

What's the biological reaction of a limb cut by a Shardblade, because they don't start to rot after being cut?

Brandon Sanderson

Yeah they don't start to rot, so the bloodflow is still happening. The limb is still attached, it's not going to rot off, but the soul is dead. This is a thing that can happen in the cosmere that can't happen here. Because you have Spiritual, [Cognitive], and Physical DNA. Your soul's been severed in that part, and it just flops around. You can't feel it, you can't control it. It's something that, again, couldn't happen here.