Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

OK, so there isn't a very close movie connection here, but we happen to like fantasy author Brandon Sanderson's work, so when he came into London to promote his new book, The Way Of Kings, we met up for a chat. For those of you who aren't fantasy geeks, we asked some general questions about the appeal of the genre and the role that film and TV play in popularising it. For those of you who are fantasy heads, we asked about his Mistborn series (the new installment of which, The Alloy Of Law, comes out later this year) and his crucial task of finishing off Robert Jordan's epic Wheel Of Time series...

So, since we usually only interview filmmakers, is there any big-screen news to share?

I wish I had more film news. The Mistborn trilogy's been optioned, and I really like the producers and they have a screenplay, but that's the big step, you know, going from producers with a screenplay to getting a studio. Wheel Of Time has also been bought, not optioned, by Universal Pictures, so they're in the screenwriting stage right now.

Wheel of Time for me feels like an example of something that absolutely shouldn't be made into a film, it's so sprawling.

I think it's do-able, but boy it's going to be tough! I do envy George RR Martin with HBO. I think that's a perfect medium for the story that he told.

Helen O'Hara

The response to that has been fantastic; do you see that helping to make fantasy a bit more mainstream? In the same way that the Lord of the Rings films or even Harry Potter books were a sort of gateway drug to the genre, do you think A Game Of Thrones will have the same effect?

Brandon Sanderson

As an outsider to the film industry, I find it very interesting that they seem to focus on what's hot right now rather than what's well done. The thing about A Game Of Thrones is that it's an exceptional story, done really well, which is what happened with the Lord Of The Rings films as well. Those came out, and everyone said, "Oh, fantasy is hot". And fantasy, well, it's been opened up, but it's more that really great stories told really well are hot and always will be. It was really disappointing to me to see them snatch up a bunch of fantasy rights and make films out of them that didn't really work, because fantasy was hot.

The Golden Compass film was heartbreaking, because my perspective on that is that they actually got fantastic casting, the visuals were beautiful and they tried really hard to stay close to the story. I think what happened there was that they didn't adapt it enough, they were too faithful and filmed it almost scene-by-scene. They were too attached to the source material. I talked to the Mistborn producers and we all agree that it needs to be more heavily adapted. It's a different medium. If you can keep the soul of the story but change the story that's what you want to do. If I can armchair it, the Harry Potter films where they were forced to adapt more strongly are the best. The third one is beautiful.

Speaking of adaptations, of course, you've taken over Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series and sped up the pace of the story considerably, so as a long-time reader there, thank you for that!

Credit needs to be given to Robert Jordan; he started to speed up in Book 11 [Knife of Dreams]. In fact, I've read interviews where he admits that the focus was a little bit wrong in Book 10 [Crossroads of Twilight], which is the one that the fans complain about being the most slow, and he himself changed that for Book 11 and picked up the pacing. And I like spectacular endings. When I build my books, I start from the end and work forward with my outline. I write from beginning to end, but I outline end to beginning, because I always want to know that I have a powerful, explosive ending that I'm working toward. Endings are my deal: if a book or a film doesn't have a great ending, I find it wanting. It's like the last bite, the last morsel on the plate, so I get very annoyed with the standard Hollywood third act, because they seem to play it most safe in Act Three, and that's where I most want to be surprised and awed. That's where it's got to be spectacular. You've got to give the reader something they're not expecting, something they want but don't know it, in that last section.

Helen O'Hara

Does that go for something like your Mistborn Trilogy; did you start with the end of the trilogy or go book-by-book?

Brandon Sanderson

I plotted all three backwards and then wrote them all forwards. I had a great advantage writing those books, because I sold my first book, Elantris, in 2003. The nature of how books are 'slotted' into release dates is that a new author doesn't get the best slot. They want to give each author a good launch, but they can't give them in the really prime slots. So we had a two-and-a-half year wait, and usually you have a year between books. That meant I had three-and-a-half years before Mistborn would be out, so I pitched the entire trilogy together and wrote all three before the first one came out.

Helen O'Hara

Is that something you have in common with Robert Jordan, because re-reading the prologue to the first book you think, 'This guy knows how it's going to end'.

Brandon Sanderson

He actually wrote the ending that I worked towards. The last pages were written by him before he passed away. He always spoke of knowing the ending, so I think we do share that. He was a bit more of an explorer in his writing than I am. He knew where he was going, but getting there he wove around a lot. You can see that in the notes I've been given; he jumps from scene to scene. So there's a difference there, but he really loved endings. And that ending is really great; I think fans are going to love it.

How long did you have to think about it before taking on Wheel of Time?

I didn't know I was being considered. I got a voicemail, which was nice because I didn't get it cold. It was Robert Jordan's widow asking me to call her. I couldn't get a hold of her for a couple of hours, so I had time to think! I was prepared, so when she asked me, I said yes. I still could barely get the words out. I was so starstruck talking to her and so befuddled that the next day I wrote her an email saying, 'Dear Harriet, I promise I'm not an idiot.' I do remember sitting that night and having... not a panic attack, but the realization that if I mess this up, I am messing up a story beloved by millions. A piece of me started to acknowledge, 'The Wheel of Time is Robert Jordan's, and I cannot do what he would do'. What I am doing shouldn't have to be done; he should be here to write it the way he wants to do it. There's no way to do it right! I'm setting myself up for failure. That almost made me say I shouldn't do this.

A writer friend called me and said I was crazy. 'Whatever you do right, they'll say Robert Jordan did, and whatever goes wrong you'll get the blame. But I started reading Eye of the World when I was 14, in 1990, and those characters became my high-school buddies, and I'm still in touch with them. If someone else took it and did a poor job with it that would be partially my fault for saying no! I realized that if somebody is going to do this who isn't Robert Jordan, I wanted the shot because I am a fan and I won't screw it up too much.

Are there bits in it where you were aware that it felt like your writing rather than him?

Yes, there are some. For example, Robert Jordan was a Vietnam veteran: he'd been in real battle. My battle training has been watching cinema and reading great books. So my perspective on fight scenes is very different from his. I can't get that authenticity 100%, and if I try too hard it's going to feel fake. I have to do the action sequences like I do action sequences. So it'll flow like cinema rather than having the chaos and insanity of real battle.

What can you tell us about this new Mistborn book?

When I originally pitched Mistborn I did it as more than one series. One of the things that fantasy does that I don't necessarily like is that an author will skip, like, 4000 years and come back and you're still in the same world, nothing has really changed. In The Wheel of Time, I like that steam technology is starting to appear; there's progress. I wanted to do a fantasy series where I told a story that had a classic, medieval feel, and then I wanted to jump forward several hundred years and tell an urban fantasy in a world with guns and skyscrapers and the same magic, and the story of the first series had become the mythology of the second. Then I wanted to tell a story in the future of that, a science fiction story where the magic had become a means of inter-stellar propulsion. So this book is along that continuum; it's not quite up to the second series.

It's a story that I wasn't supposed to be writing but I just loved. It's the era of industry in the Mistborn world. Now we have characters living post-gunpowder. Motor cars are beginning to appear, skyscrapers are just being built. I based some of it on 1910 New York. The protagonist is an old lawman from the equivalent of the Old West who moves back to the big city after 20 years outside. It's a whodunit-ish sort of thing. Imagine Sherlock Holmes in a fantasy world, if Clint Eastwood played the role. It's a little bit steampunk, but not true steampunk because I'm not going interesting places with the steam technology.

Who are your favorite writers?

My favorite living writer right now is probably Terry Pratchett. There is no one who can balance humor and plot and character like he does, particularly in his books about Vimes. I really like Guy Gavriel Kay a lot, and I try to read a lot of new writers to see what's going on in the field, so recently I read The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by NK Jemisin, and that was a great book. I read a lot of history books and non-fiction as well. If you opened up my eReader you'd find three or four Terry Pratchetts, all the Wheel of Time, all the current Hugo nominees and a bunch of books right now on psychology. When I do research I cast my net very widely and then snatch what feels right out of that. Occasionally I'll read a specific book for a specific book, but usually I'm trying to increase my general understanding.

Brandon Sanderson will be signing at the Forbidden Planet megastore in London TOMORROW (June 4) from 1pm to 3pm, and at Waterstones in Guildford on June 6 from 12.30pm to 2.30pm.