I actually am having a meeting on Monday with my publisher saying "We need to get more books to India," because that is the number one complaint I get... The number one country that emails me of people saying "We can't get your books" is India. So hopefully we'll do something about that.
The resonance between various powers, specifically about Shallan... The way that she seems to be sort of Soulstamping herself, is that due to a resonance power? Or is that something external—or is it mental?
...It's a combination of the two, but it's not resonance. It's more mental health and her magic kind of interacting.
What is the difference between the Surge of Tension and Cohesion?
...Sorry, that's a RAFO. We're gonna have to wait until we get some Radiants that are doing these things.
Have we seen the new Shardworld yet? ...Obrodai?
RAFO.
Also, does each of the Unmade have a corresponding order of the Knights Radiant?
Eh... Kind of.
Ok. So there are nine Unmade right, so which one is left out?
Bondsmith. But it's not as one to one, there's some fuzziness in there.
Is each Herald only broken once for each Desolation, thus making there nine Desolations, or are they broken multiple times?
There are more than nine Desolations.
Do the riots in Kholinar have to do with the Thrill, and is there an Unmade centered there?
...That's a RAFO.
Is there anything that we don't know about the Expanses right now that you'd be willing to tell us?
I think I've told you about all of them. Is there one I haven't told you about yet?
Um, I don't know, I've checked the words of Brandon before I wrote these questions. I think we know that um one of them is... Scadrial, and one of them is Warbreaker--
So Densities is Sel. We put that one on, right, Expanse of the Densities? So, if we didn't you now know, Densities is Sel.
What are the geometric properties of Shadesmar? Is it curved, or is it a Euclidean Plane?
It's like a single, infinite plane.
So it extends forever.
Well... Kind of. Kind of yes. The problem is, what people don’t think about doesn’t really appear there, in Shadesmar, so the edges are weird.
Is Uli Da Ambition?
Yes... That one's pretty obvious, though, right?
Here's a Dragonsteel question. If I were to wave Leras' knife over a candle, would it light?
...We'll RAFO that.
So, do you have a name, like an in-world name for a large magical construction, like the things that picks Elantrians?
That was why I invented the term "fabrial." It will become widespread eventually, as the term for meaning, kind of, magic-type devices in the cosmere. That's not what you call it right now, but you can start calling them all fabrials.
But what about something that isn't, like-- I always imagined that Aona left, like, a device, a magical device running--
I will have to RAFO that.
Does red in cosmere signify one Shard co-opting or corrupting another Shard's magic?
Yes.
Was Khriss involved in founding the (a) University at Silverlight?
Yup.
Can Nightblood be dismissed like a Rosharan blade?
He thinks you could.
Was the Nightwatcher the spren that powered the Urithiru fabrial?
Nope!
So, in Bands of Mourning there was an advertisement in the broadsheet from "K and N" asking about talking metal. Does that have anything to do with a certain knife that Nazh lent Kelsier?
I'm gonna RAFO that, mostly cause I'm gonna make you ask Isaac and Ben, cause they came to me with pitches for things to put in those and they wrote a lot of the broadsheet stuff themselves.
Okay. But, does Nazh want that knife back?
The knife? Yes, he would like that knife back.
MaiPon and JinDo are based on Korea and China you've said, I thought that Dominion and Devotion have some resonance with Confucianism-
They do, the yin and the yang and things like that, absolutely.
So that was intentional?
That was very intentional. Yeah, I've always been fascinated with, like, the blue and the red, right? The things that are opposite but to some cultures and not to others. Like, that was really, that was the Ruin and Preservation thing, right?
Is there anything you'd be willing to tell us about the third empire Khriss mentioned in Arcanum Unbounded?
Umm, yeah, I have not decided on some canon answers for that yet, I've debated back and forth on what I'm going to do with it so I just won't tell you yet.
Do all the Shards have the same powers just limited by their intents?
No. There are a uniqueness to them, but. There is some uniqueness to each of them. There's a lot of overlap.
I was wondering if you were ever gonna talk about how some of the names are, like, palindromes and what it means?
So, in the Stormlight world, symmetry is holy. And so, palindromic names are how the names of a lot of religious figures, and things are. And even a lot of people, who-- particularly those who are based off of them. It's a religious concept. The keteks, the poems in the back, are symmetrical poems.
Can you write the Fourth Ideal of the Windrunners in that book?
Nope. Because I haven't released it yet... I haven't gotten those yet.
I have a question about the Shin. Are they originally from Roshar? *laughter*
Answers are coming.
Is there significance in the metal thing relating back to... Scadrial?
Yes.
In Words of Radiance, can you give me a worldhopper that you haven't told us about?
Afraid not. The problem, I just get asked that, like, twenty times per signing, and I wouldn't have anything left.... I'm sorry... The one I get asked a lot is, "Can you name a Shard you haven't named before?"
There's, like, three left!
Yeah, I mean... And people already pulled out from me all the worldhoppers that I am comfortable talking about.
Had you planned to write... the whole Cosmere when you initially started?
So, I wrote Elantris, had a bunch of the ideas. I started planning right then, and it has evolved a lot since. A lot of Elantris kind of got retrofitted into the things I came up with over the next four or five years... By the time I did Mistborn, I had most of this in mind, but it changes so much, even while I'm writing it.
So, like, when you had Warbreaker, it was--
Warbreaker, I wrote as a prequel to Stormlight. I had already written Stormlight One by that point, but I didn't like it, so I wrote about Kaladin's swordmaster, who was in the first book in that version.
A sword. Can they, like, feel it when they stab something?
Some of them really don't like it. Watch Wyndle's reaction to this sort of thing.
Is Soulcasting more efficient if the item you're Soulcasting resembles the item you're trying to make?
Good, no one's asked me that yet. RAFO.
Is the Breakaway inspired by Korean outdoor markets?
Yes... Night markets, right?
Everybody talks about steel-steel twinborns. A big topic of discussion. What I'm thinking about, I haven't seen anybody ask, what happens when somebody who's tapping speed, does a steelpush, does the steelpush react in realtime or accelerated time? And the object-- is it like a railgun?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm surprised that no one's asked me that before. This gets really dangerous really fast... It's RAFO territory, but you are thinking along the right lines.
So, you always talk about how you're an outliner. So, what do your outlines look like, and how long are they ranging from your YA books to something like Stormlight?
So, the one for the new book, Skyward, is about five pages long, and it's mostly-- first it's "Here's the worldbuilding paragraph," there's a bunch of headings and paragraphs. Characters, about a paragraph or two about each one. And then five parts, I tend to do a lot of five act things. So, prologue, part one, part two, part three, climax. Just a bunch of bullet points.
And how long would one be for, like, Oathbringer?
Oathbringer one's, like, 30 pages.
Are we ever gonna get to hear the music that is sung within Stormlight?
I hope so.
Will it be chanting?
A lot of chanting. A lot of rhythms. A lot of chants.
In the past, you have said... that we've seen a metal that is from a Shard that we know, on Scadrial. You said Wax has seen the influence of a Shard other than Preservation, Ruin, or Harmony, and that the spike that Bleeder was using was a metal from a Shard we know. It seems like there's another Shard influencing Scadrial. Is Trell an extension of that?
Yes.
And is that Odium?
That's a RAFO.
So, if a person claims a new set of Shardplate, and there's a difference in size between the new wielder and the previous wielder, does it adjust to the size of the new wielder?
It does... And there are things they can do to size it and things like that. But it slowly changes over time, like a Blade sometimes does under certain circumstances.
Is it possible to bond with two swords and dual-wield?
Read And Find Out.
On the eye colors on Roshar, there are some weird ones, like orange and yellow. Are those there for a specific reason, or are they just--
Yeah. The whole eye color thing is kinda based a little bit on the Knights Radiant, the eyes changing is involved there. What's normal eye colors to them, it's just normal to them. It's not weird to see violet eyes and things like that. But it would be weird to us.
Did the eyes have to do with the Orders?
Yes.
I want to know if there is a toxic level for Stormlight? If you're in the storm, can you get to the point where you have too much?
No, it doesn't quite work that way. Good question, though.
You said there was one person, I guess it was the Soulcasters, who were starting to change because of that?
That's more the magic changing their soul over time. It's not necessarily a function of the storms.
Do you imagine anybody when you write, like an actor?
Usually not... They're just usually just who they are in my head.
I was wondering, in Roshar, if any of the women were left-handed, if that interfered with the safehand? Or do they force them to--
They force them. It doesn't work for everybody, but at least--I read into this--there are countries where you're not allowed to be, in our world, left-handed. It's not a thing. They just force people to not be left-handed. It works better for some than others...
Pre-Shattering magic in books?
Let's see. I would count the highstorms as that. Highstorm predates the Shattering. Now, the highstorm has been changed dramatically by certain events, but the highstorm does predate the Shattering.
We have a lot of fan theories about your work, and most of them are wrong by necessity.
...That is true.
Are there things that are sort of directly designed to encourage or dissuade certain theories?
...As a member of Wheel of Time fandom growing up, I have experience on both sides of this now. And I decided after-- and this was partially looking at Robert Jordan's notes, looking at how he approached it, how it worked, being a fan-- I decided that that direction lies madness. Trying to stay ahead of the fans, trying-- if you try to twist so much that the fans can't guess, then that just means your foreshadowing is not going to work. On the other hand, doing too many in-jokes and things like this, it risks just making your book uninteresting, or not long-lasting.
And so while I read a lot of fan theories, and I even take them on occasion-- like Shardfork? That was totally a fan thing. Someone suggested that, I'm like, "Yeah, that would totally happen." But I kinda have to approach it from the frame of mind of "What would the characters do?" And I try not to actively write things that dissuade or encourage certain theories, I try to write what is best for the story. And let the fans then-- if they're going to guess, they're going to guess. If my foreshadowing is good, they probably are going to guess. At the same time, I know how insane they all are, 'cause I'm one of them, and I know they're just gonna go off on weird tangents. And that's just fine too.
So, it's this weird balance where I try to be part of the fandom, but make sure not being overly influenced by the fandom, and Wheel of Time gave me a lot of good practice on this. One of the things I really worried about with Wheel of Time was that the book would become a sequence of in-jokes for people who had read the series before. And yet, at the same time, as a fan, there were certain things I really wanted to see happen. I wanted to see certain characters meet up again after a long time apart, and I had been waiting for that for, like, a decade, and I was gonna make that happen, right? And I had to balance those two things, and that's just what I do with my books, even still.
What's going on with White Sand? The sequel?
...Sequel looks really good. It fixed a few problems I had with the first one, and improves upon it, and it's good. I think they're looking at February. The date that was online earlier was just somebody guessing, and it kinda got perpetuated and Amazon picked it up. But there was no official date. And February is what we're looking at. The art's all done, and it's looking really good. So, February.
How many of the worlds in the cosmere do you eventually plan to talk about that we don't know about?
...From what's been released, you've gotten almost all the important ones. There's, like, two or three ones I would consider relevant to... for instance, the planet that the Aethers, from Aether of Night, which is an unpublished book-- that's still part of the cosmere, I'm gonna do some stuff there. There are a couple of other worlds, one is mentioned in Oathbringer, just very briefly, in one of the epigraphs. There are others that I'll get to. But, when I designed the cosmere: Scadrial (Mistborn), Sel (Elantris), and Roshar were my pillars of the Cosmere story. With Yolen, the planet where it all started, just kind of being behind-the-scenes relevant. Those are the pillars of our story. Other planets will come into it, but those three-- there's nothing more important than the ones you've seen already.
In Elantris, you have this array of people who are essentially gods, immortal, but they appear with absurdly high frequency. How come they basically don't take over the planet?
...There are a couple reasons for this. One is that magic on Sel is very strongly tied to location, and was even back when the Elantrians were at the height of their power. So, this is a big part of it, location-based magic. Meaning, the further you get from Elantris, the less powerful your magic was, and the Elantrians really didn't like going places where they were not super-powerful. And so this is certainly part of it, and I explored this idea in Warbreaker, where the people who happen to be gods are really aggressive and kind of slowly conquering outward and things like that. It felt right for me in Elantris to be doing it that way.
Why can't they just increase their numbers. Because their numbers increase over time?
...The number of Elantrians had certain thresholds and upper limits, that I haven't described in the books yet.
In Way of Kings, all of the philosophers and logic masters are male, and reading and writing is described as a feminine art. It was long ago, so was there...
...This was a shift that happened in Roshar at a certain distinct point, where reading and writing became feminine arts. It was related to a power struggle over Shardblades and Shardplate, where certain people in charge realized, "If we can push the women towards something else, we can have all their weapons!" I know, it's not a good thing. But it happens. That's where safehands came from, and things like this, philosophies written in the past being taken kind of as dogma, and power struggles being involved, and things like this, and there was a shift happening. You'll find there's plenty of female philosophers, but they tend-- that tends to be a dividing point, and you start to see female philosophers appearing in Roshar after that divide, and you tend to see a lot more male philosophers beforehand. Good question.
One of your characters wishes for and is given capacity... That is one of my favorite concepts of all the books that I read of yours. Can you talk about the inspiration for that gift of limited and maximum capacity?
To not give spoilers, there is a character in The Stormlight Archive who has asked the Old Magic, which is a force that kind of has references in things like The Monkey's Paw and what-not, a force that doesn't always give you things exactly the way you want them. And I built, by the way, the Old Magic into The Stormlight Archive because I felt that at a certain point, while I love to do these rule-based magic systems, I wanted there to be a contrast to it... It's kinda like this idea that, yes, modern science and things have explained a lot of stuff, but there's something primal, perhaps, in the past, I don't actually know. But that idea that there's a primal magic that doesn't really adhere to the rules, we can't anticipate it, was really, I felt, vital for me to include so that I didn't overexplain everything in the books.
So, there's a person who asked for capacity. It wanted to be, let's say, strong enough to lift (it's not actually strength, but it's more of an emotional thing) what was coming. That, I feel like, is a very real thing to wish for, right? I have frequently, like... people say "What would you wish for," and I say "The ability to fly," because I would love to be able to fly. But really, if I sit and think about it, capacity, ability, the capacity to hold all of this stuff in my head, would probably be the sort of thing that I would wish for. So this character, in some ways, is giving wish fulfillment for me, because that's what I would maybe ask for if given the opportunity, but even that kind of turns on its head because the Old Magic just doesn't get people in the way that people think they should be gotten.
How many books are gonna be in The Rithmatist?
...I originally plotted it at three. I tried to write the second book a little while ago, and it didn't work. It's called-- The second book is called The Aztlanian, and it takes place in the city of Tenochtitlan. And I just did not have my Aztec culture down well enough, and that was part of why the book was failing. And so, I'm going to give it another try. But that's why you don't have it yet; it's one of those books that's been hard for me to get.
My friend has a theory: The Lord Ruler is the one that Shattered the Shattered Plains. Is that a possibility?
I won't discount it out of hand. Mostly just so that he can keep arguing with you guys.
So the Sleepless kind of have me wondering about what sentience is in the cosmere. Like how would a Sleepless manifest on the Cognitive Realm--
That's a good question, you'll-- that I'll RAFO. But they are a single consciousness, but they would argue that all your cells are independent of you. So they are cells that can move around. They're really fun... they started in a non-cosmere book when I was 22. Obviously a bit inspired by Fire Upon the Deep, one of my favorite science fiction books. And I read that book and I'm like, "Group consciousnesses are cool!" what if you had a species that was made up of-- Not like one of these Ender's Game y'know, one, but each swarm was an individual and they could breed and evolve their own things to do different stuff. So each of these little bits, these hordelings is what I call them-- I might change because we've got cremling now. But each of these little bits is bred for a specific purpose, "Feed the swarm" and stuff like that. So they've got all kinds of cool stuff going on.
Are they slivers?
Oh slivers. Not quite like slivers. Slivers are a little more that whole Ender's Game thing, right? And this is actually an individual that's not a hivemind. This is an individual, single consciousness, and they've got a step between cell and body. We kind of do too, like mitochondria are kind of "What are these? Are these things we ingested somehow and got working for us?" It's all very cool.
So is it like Malazan Book of the Fallen, like the D'ivers?
Ehhh, there's little--
Okay, a little?
Yeah.
Chapter Seven
I've taken some visual art classes. I'm terrible at drawing—as you would expect from someone without a lot of experience—but I felt it would be important to know how visual art works and how artists think. Listening to the professors talk was in many ways more useful than the practice itself, though I did enjoy the drawing as well.
(As a side note, my final project for an art class in 2002—a basic drawing class—was a landscape of Roshar with rockbuds and the like. I took a stab at doing my own concept art, and bad though it was, it did help me start to visualize the world.)
How Shallan thinks here is really a blend of how I think as a writer and how I've heard visual artists think of their process. I'm drawing heavily on my own experience, and because of that blend, I suspect that to many artists her process will sound odd.
Chapter Eight
Shallan Rejected Again
I do wonder at reader reaction to these Shallan sequences. Some in the writing group found these scenes too long. They figured it was inevitable that Shallan would end up as Jasnah's ward, and so spending several chapters with Shallan working overtime to secure the position wasn't interesting to them.
I admit this is a potential problem with the sequence. However, I felt it important to show both Shallan's determination and Jasnah's character with these sequences. I needed to show Shallan working very hard for what she wanted. It also gave me several opportunities to show the contrasting timidity/insolence that makes up how I view Shallan as a character.
