Theoryland of the Wheel of Time

DragonCon 2016

So, when you were starting to write your books, did you have that... the Cosmere, did you make it first, or did you start with (the stories?).

Oh, excellent question. So, he's asking about Cosmere, where all my epic fantasies are tied together, where did that come from. I can trace a few paths back to my brain where that came from. What I can say is that it was built in from the beginning of the books you have been reading - but you remember, those weren't my first written books. I wrote thirteen novels before I sold one. Elantris was number six. Way of Kings was number thirteen. And so... I love this idea of a big, connected universe. First person I can remember doing it that blew my mind was when Asimov connected Robots and the Foundation books, which I thought was so cool when I was a teenager. Another path that concept also, though- I don't know how many of you guys did this, but when I'd read a book - I still do this, actually - I would insert behind the scenes a kind of character who was my own, who was doing stuff behind the scenes, like I would insert my own story into the story, just kind of take ownership of it in a strange sort of way. I remember doing this with the Pern books, I'm like "oh, they think that person is who they think they are, but nooo! This is this other person!" And so I had this kind of proto-Hoid in my head jumping between other people's works. So when I sat down to write Elantris, I said "Well, I want to do something like this". All the people I've seen doing this before, and they've done it very well - Michael Moorcock did it, and Stephen King did it, things like this, I'm not the first one to connect their works together, not by a long shot. I felt like a lot of them, they kinda fell into it, and as a writer, having seen what they did, I could do it intentionally, if that makes sense. And so I started out with this idea that I was just gonna have this character in-between who is furthering his own goals, and built out a story for him, and then, after I did Elantris, I wrote a book called Dragonsteel, which isn't published, and it was this origin story for this character. And then I wrote some more books, and so, of course, things like this. Eventually Elentris got published and the other ones didn't, and they weren't as good as Elantris was. And so I took them all as kind of "backstory canon", and moved forward as if they were all there and they had happened, but nobody else knew but me, which allowed this cool foundation for you like "wow, that stuff has happened", because I had books and books of material that I could treat as canon in this way, to let me know where thing were going. So it wasn't... it was planned from the beginning, but not the beginning of my writing career, about book six was where it started.

Brandon on worldbuilding,

DragonCon 2016

So you have "what if?" questions and then you build a universe from there?

Usually they're "what if?" questions, but Sanderson's zero-th law, you know I've got these laws on magic you can look up - they're named humbly after myself - so Sanderson's zero-th law is always err on the side of what's awesome. And usally it's less even a "what if?" than a "that's so cool, tazer toads!". Like if you really want to know the truth of where the stormlight archives started, there's all this cool stuff, like part of it was like "what if there was this storm like the storm on Jupiter", and then I eventually changed it to a storm that goes around the planet, something like that, but the real truth was "magical power armor! YEAH! Magical power armor is cool! Magical plate mail power armor! Why would you need plate mail power armor?" Y'know, and it starts with the really cool idea. Mistborn started with me hitting a fog bank at eighty miles per hour in my car and loving how it looked as it drove past and saying "is there a world where I can imitate this feel, where you can look out and it streams by." It's theses early visuals or concepts that make me say "Oooh, I wanna do that!". That is where my books really come from, and then I layer on top of them the "what ifs?" and a realistic ecology based around these ideas.

Brandon on worldbuilding,