You’ve said that when you design a character or other part of the world for a novel, you put it into the book and see if it works. Are there any characters that you keep on a backlog and try to mix and see if they fit?
Totally. What I have is this notes file, literally called “Cool stuff that I need to use sometime.” And it’s like when I see something in the news or I meet a person and say, “I need to use that someday.” It can be years before I end up sticking them in. The Shattered Plains for instance came from an entirely different world than Roshar that just didn’t work.