Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

Well, one of the things that bothers me about a lot of fantasy is that the worlds are strangely static, like we invent all sorts of contrived circumstances to keep them from progressing naturally, because we want stories of a certain type. What we do in fantasy, this kind of idealized time period, in literary terms we call it uchronia. Which in some ways is fun, but it's not very realistic.

I envisioned a series in which there was real progress. There are books that have done it; the Wheel of Time did it, for example, with the introduction of steam power [into a medieval/Renaissance setting], but I wanted to do a story where I wrote a trilogy which explored a fantasy world, and then do other books years later where that fantasy world has now progressed, and its technology has progressed, so that it's now almost more of an urban fantasy world. You know, write urban fantasies in a setting where the mythology and history are things you saw take place in the first part of the series.

This really interested me, because I'd just never seen it done quite the way I wanted to do it. And that's often where my books come from—I find a place where the genre maybe hasn't been explored fully, and I get really excited. And so I pitched my editor a series where the first trilogy is an epic fantasy series, and then years later an urban fantasy series, and then years after that a science fiction series, all set in the same world. And the magic exists all through, and it is treated differently in each of these time periods. And that's what Alloy of Law is: looking at the Mistborn world, hundreds of years later, where society has been rebuilt following the events of the third book.

The analogous time period in our world [for Alloy of Law's setting] would be about 1910, but that's not really very accurate, because in the Mistborn world there are certain things they're much better at—metallurgy, for one, obviously—but they're very poor with communication, because everyone's very concentrated in one area, so long-distance communication is just not one of the things that's very important to them. So it's not a one-to-one correlation. But electricity is starting to be installed in homes, and steam power is used quite extensively.

It has one toe dabbling in steampunk, but I don't call it that because while there is magic and technology, it's not quite the same. The steampunk genre has a certain Victorian feel to it; there's an air that makes something steampunk, and this isn't quite that.

So anyway, it's the story of a man who lives in the frontier lands, and comes back to the big city because he's inherited lands and a title. And he has certain things in his past that make him feel it's time to leave his old life and come to a new one. And the goal here was not epic scope; with The Way of Kings on one side I didn't want that. This is more a mystery/adventure, and I think it's really fun.

The Stormlight Archive—you don't grow up reading the books I read, such as the Wheel of Time, without wanting to tell a big epic, and this is kind of what I always wanted to do, to have my own big epic. It's what I love to read and so it's what I want to write. So I've always planned for The Stormlight Archive to be very big, and hopefully meaty and weighty. I started writing about the characters as long as two decades ago, and I finished the first draft of The Way of Kings in 2002, so almost ten years ago now. So it's a series I've been working on for a long time.

I think you'll find that most authors have series like this; for Robert Jordan it was The Wheel of Time. And people have asked me if I want this to be my Wheel of Time, but that's a very difficult comparison for someone to make. What I want is for this to be a great story, hopefully told really well; it's a story I've been wanting to tell for years and years. And time will tell how that turns out.

It will be multi-volume; I pitched it to Tom Doherty [of Tor Books] as ten books, and I envision it as being a project I work on for a very long time, and try to do these audacious things I've wanted to do forever.

It's very art-intensive, and very different from the other books I've done; it incorporates some of the other things I've liked to do from other books, but at the same time it's its own thing. So I view as something awesome that I want to be working on for a long time.

Robert Jordan's magic system is both hard and soft. It's similar to, for instance, the Harry Potter magic system, which I personally think is quite well done. Of course, I do think Jordan's system is overall more consistent and a much better magic system. This is partially because of the strength of its limitations; for instance, that male channelers go mad, and the chance of burning yourself out with channeling, make it for a much more interesting magic system narratively. The "going mad" thing is basically the best limitation that I've ever heard of in a book series.

People like Tolkien, for instance, didn't explain a lot of the magic, and so what the magic could and couldn't do leaves you with a lot of that sense of wonder, so there's something to be gained on that side from not explaining. Jordan, I would say, is about on the seventy-five percent mark toward a more hard, rigid magic system, and it actually tends to work really well, but you'll notice that he liked to introduce new elements to the magic quite haphazardly—you know, suddenly someone is able to do this. It happens actually pretty frequently in the series as new things are being rediscovered.

Balefire, for example, is manifested quite spontaneously by the characters to solve little problems, and then it becomes a tool to solve bigger problems later on. Just like in a lot of storytelling, in the first third of the story, you will often have a dynamic rescue by a character the reader or audience didn't know existed, and this is not a terribly satisfying resolution, but that's okay because in the first third of a story, you're not looking for satisfying resolutions, you're looking for satisfying introductions. That's kind of what the nature of storytelling is. So when the new character rides on screen and saves the heroes in the beginning of a story, and it's the old friend of the hero who they didn't know was in town, it becomes a very nice introduction for that character; we like that character, we're interested in him, and it can work very well.

In the same way, a character manifesting a power in the beginning of the story that kind of comes out of nowhere to solve a minor problem, is a satisfying introduction, but not a satisfying resolution. And then later on when a major character gets brought back to life by balefire, because it's used in a way that the audience could anticipate, suddenly we have a very satisfying resolution of a conflict, using a magic that we're familiar with.

It's the difference between Han Solo saving Luke by getting him off Tattooine by just kind of haphazardly being there in the right place at the right time, and then Solo coming back at the end of the movie to save him. In the first case, he just kind of drops into [Luke's and Obi Wan's] laps, but that's okay because we're introducing him. And then he comes back at the end to save them after great foreshadowing of all the changing he's done as a character, and we love it.

Yeah. One of the big complaints about fantasy as a genre is that "oh, that's the genre where just anything can happen, and so there's no tension." People complain that it doesn't matter what the characters do because they can always be saved by some magical whatnot. And that's actually a very poor way of looking at it, because if you think about it, regardless of what kind of fiction you're writing, you can always save your characters with a handwave.

Even if you're writing in "the real world," a character can win the lottery, and suddenly all their poverty problems are taken care of, or someone can suddenly dramatically change their mind and fall in love with the heroine when they weren't expecting to. Whatever it is, you can always just handwave to fix a problem. It's not a thing that can be relegated only to fantasy. The challenge in fiction is to make all of these things feel satisfying, even though in some ways they are a wave of the hand. And that's how I look at magic systems.

Exactly. And all of the laws I've come up with, which really aren't laws—they're quite arrogantly named, I realize—have more to do with just good storytelling than they have to do with magic, but I framed them in terms of magic because people always ask me how I invent these magic systems. Well, I do that by trying to make them good storytelling devices.

Sanderson's Second Law is that limitations are more interesting than powers. And this extends more deeply than in just magic, but if you look at magic, what magic can't do is going to be more interesting to your readers, and more useful to you as a writer, than what the magic can do. This is why channeling [in the Wheel of Time] tends to be such a great magic system, because the limitations are very well-executed; it's the part of the magic that shines the most.

But this is ultimately all a plot issue, because what a character can't achieve, whatever is holding them back, is generally more interesting than what they can achieve. This is just kind of a general storytelling principle across the board.