Brandon Sanderson's Blog, page 38

Lucca Comics & Games Festival + Updates

For my European readers (or those of you interested in going to Italy this fall!) I will be in Italy at the end of October as the guest of honor at the Lucca Comics & Games Festival. I will announce my exact festival schedule once it is finalized. For more details check out my upcoming events page.

The sixth installment of the 2016 Sanderson Lectures, “The Business of Writing,” is now live! If you missed last week’s episode, “The Box,” you can catch up on all the videos here. Enjoy!

In this week’s new Writing Excuses episode, Elemental Thriller Q&A, we fielded the following questions about the “Thriller” elemental genre from listeners on Facebook and Twitter:

How do I build tension consistently through my story?
How do you maintain tension during dialog?
When do you not use a cliffhanger?
Do you ever picture your scenes as if they were in a movie?
How much elemental thriller is too much for a book that isn’t a thriller? What’s the tipping point where you’ve switched genres?
What do you do when the tension in your story peaks too early?

My assistant Adam has updated the Twitter post archive for July.

Limited edition of new novella now up for preorder

It’s time to talk novellas. I commonly do one or two of these a year (this year, I did Mistborn:Secret History and the Stormlight novella Edgedancer, coming out in November in Arcanum Unbounded: The Cosmere Collection). These shorts are ways for me to explore cool or intriguing ideas in a briefer form, so that my attention isn’t drawn too far away from my main projects.

For next year, I only have one novella scheduled right now: a science fiction detective thriller called Snapshot. I wrote it during my trip to Dubai this year, and I’m quite pleased with it. I think you’ll all enjoy it quite a bit.

Normally when it comes to one of my novellas, I just release it and then start promotion. With this one, however, some of my professional colleagues (including the bookseller who long ago organized my first real signing) are starting a specialty press, and so we wanted to announce this one early to give a little momentum to their company. Therefore, Snapshot is up for preorder at Vault Books right now. (Exciting!) It releases February 2017.

I do want to warn you, however, that their edition is the expensive, leatherbound collector’s edition we sometimes do for these books. If the price tag makes your eyes bulge, realize that there will be a simultaneous cheap ebook (which will also be included for everyone who buys the limited edition), and then later in 2017 we will have a non-limited-edition hardcover on my webstore along the lines of the Shadows for Silence/Perfect State double. (We might publish Snapshot alongside Dreamer, the horror story I did for a Charlaine Harris anthology.)

As always, thanks for reading!

Brandon

Tweets July 2016

BrandSanderson Fri Jul 01
Finished the next big chunk of Stormlight 3, formally completing Part Two (of five, though part five will be short.) Looking good so far!

King_of_Whirl Tue Jul 05
@PatrickRothfuss @LordGrimdark @BrentWeeks @BrandSanderson Thinking of moving away from Microsoft word, is Scrivener any good?

BrandSanderson Tue Jul 05
@King_of_Whirl Afraid I use Word. But I have friends that love it.

BrandSanderson Tue Jul 05
Lecture #3 from my writing class this year is up! #2 went up last week, if you missed it. link

darci_cole Tue Jul 05
@BrandSanderson Would you say the “Sense of Progress” you teach here is basically a different way to talk about/explain pacing?

BrandSanderson Tue Jul 05
@darci_cole Kind of. You can have a slow pace and good sense of progress at the same time, though.

VeesBooks Tue Jul 05
Just finished #Mistbornbook1 by @BrandSanderson …. I think I’m in a daze of shock. Wow. What a way to… Wow. #Amreading #reading

BrandSanderson Tue Jul 05
@VeesBooks

LuckDragn Wed Jul 06
@BrandSanderson I only know two other writers near me. Who else would be good for a writer’s workshop?

BrandSanderson Wed Jul 06
@LuckDragn You can sometimes find very good readers, with an editorial mindset, who don’t write themselves who are good members.

BrandSanderson Wed Jul 06
@LuckDragn I’d suggest going to a convention someplace close, though, and seeing if you can meet other writers there.

BrandSanderson Wed Jul 06
This week’s Writing Excuses episode discusses the difference between thrillers, horror stories, and mysteries. link

BrandSanderson Wed Jul 06
The Mistborn: House War board game Kickstarter is now 530% funded and working on the 12th stretch goal. link

BrandSanderson Fri Jul 08
#TheShatteredLens from my middle grade series, Alcatraz,was chosen as one of @iBooks’ #BestBooksofJuly:

link

BrandSanderson Sun Jul 10
Three year old quote of the day: “Dad! I have a new game called get the duck and throw it in the air. Guess how to play it!”

BrandSanderson Tue Jul 12
Lecture #4 from my writing class this year is up! #3 went up last week, if you missed it. link

BrandSanderson Wed Jul 13
This week’s Writing Excuses episode discusses Impostor Syndrome with guest, Alyssa Wong.

link

leo_dabrowskej Fri Jul 15
@BrandSanderson Ever thought about a comic of the “Reckoners” world? I would freaking love it!

BrandSanderson Fri Jul 15
@leo_dabrowskej We have considered it! If the White Sand graphic novel does well, I might do others.

BrandSanderson Tue Jul 19
Lecture #5 from my writing class this year is up! #4 went up last week, if you missed it. link

BrandSanderson Tue Jul 19
Tomorrow (Wednesday) is the final day to back the Mistborn: House War board game Kickstarter campaign.

link

BrandSanderson Tue Jul 19
This week’s Writing Excuses episode discusses thrillers as a subgenre.

link

Mistborn board game Kickstarter ending + Updates

Tomorrow (Wednesday) is the final day to back the Mistborn: House War board game Kickstarter campaign. All stretch goals have been unlocked, including an expansion covering the time period of The Well of Ascension called Mistborn: The Siege of Luthadel, which is now available as a $30 add-on.

The fifth installment of the 2016 Sanderson Lectures, “The Box,” is now live! If you missed last week’s episode, “July.

New Worldbuilding Lecture + Updates

The fourth installment of the 2016 Sanderson Lectures, “World Building,” is now live! If you missed last week’s episode, “The Illusionist Writer,” you can catch up on all the videos here. Enjoy!

In this week’s new Writing Excuses episode, Impostor Syndrome, with Alyssa Wong, the Campbell Award nominee and Nebula Award winner joins us. Impostor Syndrome is the frame of mind that many successful writers suffer from, in which they worry that they’re not really good enough at writing to be enjoying their success. Worse, this mindset can prevent us from continuing to create. Many of us suffer from this, and we have some strategies to cope with it.

Update on the Mistborn: House War board game Kickstarter campaign: It’s now at 632% funded, and is working on the final listed stretch goal. Though I hear they have something up their sleeve for another stretch goal after that.

New Writing Lecture + Updates

The third installment of the 2016 Sanderson Lectures, “The Illusionist Writer,” is now live! If you missed last week’s episode, “Cook vs. Chef,” you can catch up on all the videos here. Enjoy!

In this week’s new Writing Excuses episode, The Elemental Thriller, we discuss the difference between the drivers in thrillers, horror stories, and mysteries, and use the elemental genre tools to assist in the differentiation. We also cover the tools we use to develop and maintain the tension that is so critical in a thriller.

Update on the Mistborn: House War board game Kickstarter campaign: It’s now at 530% funded, and is working on the 12th stretch goal.

Last week, in Tor.com’s continuing reread posts for Words of Radiance, Shallan evacuated the armies while Kaladin battled. This week, in Chapter 87, in the aftermath, they face rearrangement of the world as they knew it.

My assistant Adam has updated the Twitter post archive for June.

White Sand Release & Signings Starting Tonight!

Many of you have been asking for details about the release of White Sand. For those who don’t know, this is a book I wrote around the same time as Elantris—but which I didn’t ever sell. It needed a solid revision before I could send it out, and there were so many things I had to work on that the revision kept getting delayed. When the comic book company Dynamite Entertainment came along a few years ago asking if I had anything that would make a good graphic novel, it seemed the perfect opportunity to make use of White Sand.

Dynamite has been excellent to work with. Rik Hoskin, the person hired to do the adaptation, is a fantastic writer—and he really managed to preserve the core of my story, using my own dialogue and descriptions, while cutting out all the unnecessary stuff. The artist Julius Gopez, the colorist Ross Campbell, the letterer Marshall Dillon, and the editor, Rich Young, have all done a wonderful job.

The novel is big (no surprise), so it’s going to be released in three volumes. The first of these comes out today!

I’ll be doing two release events for volume 1 of White Sand. See below, or the upcoming events page on my website. All copies of White Sand will be signed and numbered at both of these events.

White Sand Release and Signings
Tuesday, June 28th

Time: 7:00-9:00 p.m.

Address: Barnes & Noble Jordan Landing

7157 Plaza Center Drive

West Jordan, UT 84084

Phone: (801) 282.1324

Wednesday, June 29th

Time: 5:00-8:00 p.m.

Address: Dragon’s Keep

48 West 300 North

Orem, UT 84606

Phone: (801) 225.7623

Perfect State Annotation Two: Consequences of the Cut

Cutting the last scene was not without costs to the story. For the longest time, after removing this scene, something about what remained bothered me. I had trouble placing what was wrong.

The story went through editorial revisions and beta reads, none of which revealed what was bothering me. This process did convince me to add two scenes. The first was scene with the “paintball” fight in the noir city, which was intended to mix some action and worldbuilding in while revealing more of Kai’s personality. The second was the flashback scene where Kai and Melhi meet on the “neutral zone” battlefield, intended to introduce Melhi as more of a present threat in the story.

Something was still bothering me, even after these additions. It took me time to figure out exactly what it was, and I was able to pinpoint it in the weeks leading up to the story’s publication. (Which was good, as it allowed me to make some last-minute changes. I’m still not sure if they fixed the problem, but we were satisfied with them.)

The problem is this: removing the final scene hugely undermined Sophie as a character. 

The deleted scene provides for us two complete characters. We have Kai, who wants to retreat into his fantasy world and live there without ever being forced to think about the falsehood he’s living. He wants just enough artificial challenge to sate him, but doesn’t want to explore life outside of the perfect world prepared for him.

As a contrast, we have Sophie, who refuses to live in the perfect world provided for her—and is so upset by it that she insists on trying to open the eyes of others in a violently destructive way. She tries to ruin their States, forcing them to confront the flaws in the system. 

Neither is an ideal character. Sophie is bold, but reckless. Determined, but cruel. Kai is heroic, but hides deep insecurities. He is kindly, but also willfully ignorant. Even obstinately so. Each of their admirable attributes brings out the flaws in the other.

This works until the ending, with its reversal, which yanks the rug out from underneath the reader. Sophie’s death and the revelation that Kai has been played works narratively because it accomplishes what I like to term the “two-fold heist.” These are scenes that not only trick the character, but also trick the reader into feeling exactly what the character does. Not just through sympathy, but through personal experience.

Let’s see if I can explain it directly. The goal of this scene is to show Kai acting heroically, then undermine that by showing that his heroism was manipulated. Hopefully (and not every scene works on every reader) at the same time, the reader feels cheated in having enjoyed a thrilling action sequence, only to find out that it was without merit or consequences. 

Usually, by the way, making readers feel things like this is kind of a bad idea. I feel it works in this sequence, however, and am actually rather proud of how it all plays out—character emotions, action, and theme all working together to reinforce a central concept. 

Unfortunately, this twist also does something troubling. With the twist, instead of being a self-motivated person bent on changing the mind of someone trapped by the establishment, Sophie becomes a pawn without agency, a robot used only to further Kai’s development.

Realizing this left me with a difficult conundrum in the story. If we have an inkling that Sophie is Melhi too early, then the entire second half of the plot doesn’t work. But if we never know her as Melhi, then we’re left with an empty shell of a character, a direct contradiction to the person I’d planned for her to be.

Now, superficially, I suppose it didn’t matter if Melhi/Sophi was a real character. As I said in the first annotation, the core of the story is about Kai being manipulated by forces outside his control.

However, when a twist undermines character, I feel I’m in dangerous territory—straying into gimmicks instead of doing what I think makes lasting, powerful stories. The ultimate goal of this story is not in the twist, but in leading the reader on a more complex emotional journey. One of showing Kai being willing to accept change and look outward. His transformation is earned by his interaction with someone wildly different from himself, but also complex and fascinating. Making her shallow undermines the story deeply, as it then undermines his final journey.

There’s also the sexism problem. Now, talking about sexism in storytelling opens a huge can of worms, but I think we have to dig into it here. You see, a certain sexism dominates Kai’s world. Sophie herself points it out on several occasions. Life has taught him that everyone, particularly women, only exist to further his own goals. He’s a kind man, don’t get me wrong. But he’s also deeply rooted in a system that has taught him to think about things in a very sexist way. If the story reinforces this by leaving Sophie as a robot—with less inherent will than even the Machineborn programs that surround Kai—then we’ve got a story that is not only insulting, it fails even as it seems to be successful.

Maybe I’m overthinking this. I do have a tendency to do that. Either way, hopefully you now understand what I viewed as the problem with the story—and I probably described this at too great a length. As it stands, the annotation is probably going to be two-thirds talking about the problem, with only a fraction of that spent on the fix.

I will say that I debated long on what that fix should be. Did I put the epilogue back in, despite having determined that it broke the narrative flow? Was there another way to hint to the reader that there was more going on with Melhi than they assumed? 

I dove into trying to give foreshadowing that “Melhi” was hiding something. I reworked the dialogue in the scene where Kai and Melhi meet in person, and I overemphasized that Melhi was hiding her true nature from him by meeting via a puppet. (Also foreshadowing that future puppets we meet might actually be Melhi herself.) I dropped several hints that Melhi was female, then changed the ending to have Wode outright say it.

In the end, I was forced to confront the challenge that this story might not be able to go both ways. I could choose one of two things. I could either have the ending be telegraphed and ruined, while Sophie was left as a visibly strong character. Or I could have the ending work, while leaving Sophie as more of a mystery, hopefully picked up on by readers as they finished or thought about the story. 

The version we went with has Sophie being hinted as deeper, while preserving the ending. Even still, I’m not sure if Perfect State works better with or without the deleted scene. To be perfectly honest, I think the best way for it to work is actually for people to read the story first, think about it, then discover the deleted scene after they want to know more about what was going on. 

Even as I was releasing the story, I became confident that this was the proper “fix.” To offer the story, then to give the coda in the form of Sophie’s viewpoint later on. It’s the sort of thing that is much more viable in the era of ebooks and the internet. 

Either way, feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think. Does it work better with or without the deleted scene? Do you like having read the story, then discovered this later? Am I way overthinking what is (to most of you) just a lighthearted post-cyberpunk story with giant robots?

Regardless, as always, thanks for reading.

Perfect State Annotation One: Why I Cut the Deleted Scene

This story began with the idea of taking some common tropes in science fiction—the brain in a jar, the Matrix-like virtual existence—and trying to flip them upside down. In every story I’ve seen with these tropes, they’re presented as terrible signs of a dystopian existence. I asked myself: What if putting people into a virtual existence turned out to be the right thing instead? What if this weren’t a dystopia, but a valid and workable system, with huge benefits for humankind?

Kai’s and Sophie’s stories grew out of this. I loved the idea that putting people into simulated worlds might actually be the rational solution, instead of the terrifying one. An extreme, but possibly logical, extrapolation of expanding populations and limited resources. There are certain branches of philosophy that ask us to judge what is best for all of humankind. I think an argument could be made for this case. 

This is the first reason why I cut the deleted scene. It shifted the focus too much toward “Let’s escape the Matrix” instead of the theme of technology doing great things at the price of distancing us from human interaction. 

All that said, Sophie’s arguments in the story do have validity. One of my thematic goals for the story was to reinforce how the fakeness in Kai’s and Sophie’s lives undermines the very things they’ve built their personalities upon. 

For Kai, this is his heroism. The fact that there was never any actual danger for him meant that he was playing a video game on easy mode—all the while assuming he was on the most hardcore setting. This asks a question, however: if his heroism felt real to him, does it matter if he was never in danger? I’m not sure, but I found it one of the more intriguing elements of the story to contemplate.

Sophie has a similar built-in conflict. Just like Kai’s heroism is undermined by his safety net, her revolutions and quests for human rights are undermined by the fact that she was fighting wars that had already been won in the real world. Her state was intentionally built without these things, just so she could earn them. 

And yet, does the fact that the conflict has been won before make her own struggle any less important and personal to her?

She thinks it does. She thinks that the conscious decision of the Wode to put her into a world with fake problems and suffering is an unconscionable act. One that undermines any and all progress she could have made. 

I like that the deleted scene helps raise the stakes for questions like this. However, there’s a more important reason why I felt I needed to cut it. And that has to do with a problem I have noticed with my writing sometimes: The desire to have awesome twists just because they are unexpected.

In early books, such as Elantris, this was a much more pervasive a problem for me. I was eventually persuaded by my editor and agent that I should cut some of the twists from that book. (There were several more twists in the ending; you can see the deleted scenes for Elantris elsewhere on my website.) I was piling on too many surprises, and each was losing its impact while at the same time diluting the story’s theme and message.

I felt like this ending was one “Gotcha!” too many. I see this problem in other stories—often long, serialized works. The desire to keep things fresh by doing what the reader or viewer absolutely would never expect. Some of these twists completely undermine character growth and audience investment, all in the name of a sudden bang. Sometimes I worry that with twists, we writers need to be a little less preoccupied with whether or not we can do something, and a little more focused on whether it’s good for the story. (With apologies to Ian Malcolm.) 

A twist should be a natural outgrowth of the story and its goals. In Perfect State, I decided that my story was about Kai getting duped: duped by the Wode, then duped by Melhi. The twists in the published version contributed to this goal, giving in-story proof that his heroism could be manipulated, and that his existence had grown too comfortable.

I worried that the extra epilogue would divert the story away from these ideas. And so, in the end, I cut it. (Though I’ll talk in the next annotation about some ramifications of this that still trouble me.)

2016 Sanderson Lectures

All,

Several years back, grad student Scott Ashton asked me if he could record my BYU lectures and post them for an online curriculum as part of a project he was doing. I said yes, and it was never supposed to be “a thing,” not really. It was a student doing a project, and using my lectures as a way to explore online education.

Well, since that time, those lectures (which are collected at Scott’s site, which he called Write About Dragons) have been viewed tens of thousands of times, and become one of the big hallmarks of my web presence, at least as far as writing education goes. I’ve been blown away by the reception to them. At the same time, I’ve been keenly aware that the recording was subpar. This isn’t Scott’s fault—he actually did an excellent job, considering his background. But the lectures are at times difficult to hear, and the filming was handled on a single amateur camera.

For years, I’ve been wanting to do something better. And this year I had my chance. My good friend Earl is a semiprofessional filmmaker, and was looking for a new project. I pitched a better-recorded set of lectures, filmed this year in my class, and he jumped at the idea.

I’m extremely pleased with how these turned out. I think the lectures have evolved over time in ways you’ll find useful, and the filming is top-notch. (No promises about the jokes though.) We’ll be releasing these at a pace of around one a week, and it is my hope for them to replace the previous series as the “canonical” version of my writing lectures online.

So, it is with great pleasure that I give you the 2016 Sanderson Lectures, with thanks to Earl Cahill and his assistants for their camera work and editing. (Earl’s company, Camera Panda, gets a shout-out as well.)

I hope you find them useful!

Brandon