Back when I was trying to break in, I spent many years writing books and not getting published. I was under the impression (it’s just one of my beliefs) that it would be easier for me to break in doing a lot of different standalone novels, or first books in…
Regarding your laws on magic, your first law states that the ability to solve problems using magic is directly proportional to the reader’s knowledge of said magic. My question comes kind of as the opposite. What is your opinion on the ability of the author to create problems using magic? Does the reader need…
Introduction To Sanderson’s Laws I like magic systems. That’s probably evident to those of you who have read my work. A solid, interesting and innovative system of magic in a book is something that really appeals to me. True, characters are what make a story narratively powerful—but magic is a…
This is a hard question for me to answer because I’m not sure that I look at it this way. I don’t look at characters as evil or good; I just look at them as who they are and what their motivations are. I personally don’t feel that I generally…
One of the aspects of writing characters like them is that if we’re not going to get viewpoints from them, their personality has to be strong enough to manifest externally. Which tends to have an effect, if it’s not done well–or sometimes even if it is done well–of making them…
Have you noticed the lack of prominent gay characters within the epic fantasy as a genre and do you ever include (or will ever include) gay or lesbian characters in your own work? That’s an issue that I feel I should speak about delicately, because it’s one of those charged…
It can be hard. I often have to rewrite my first chapters after the book is finished. Practice by having four very different character ride through the same town, but see very different things. You can also try an exercise like I did in my story I Hate Dragons, where…
A mixture of helpful women friends and a lot of early failures. I’ve found the biggest problem with writing the opposite gender comes when you add them simply be a love interest. Nobody is just a love interest in their own minds. Make them a character first, a plot device…
The audiobooks are good places to start when looking for name pronunciations since they often request a recording of a list of names from the book. Sometimes they’re not accurate to they way I say them myself though. Some names are tricky, Kelsier “should” be pronounced the french way, something…
It depends on the series. For Mistborn, I build a feel for certain regions and develop names using the linguistic rules of that region. The Central Dominance (and Elendel in this book) had a slightly French feel to the linguistics, and many of the names came from that paradigm. However,…