I sat down to write Alcatraz with a writing prompt: a one-sentence line that had come to me one time, just when I was hanging out with some friends, and I hurriedly typed into my phone, and said, “Huh, I should write that story one day.” And the line was: “So, there I was, tied to an altar made from out-dated encyclopedias, about to get sacrificed to the dark powers by a cult of evil Librarians.”
I wanted to do something very different from the Mistborn books I had been working on. Number one, I wanted to do something humorous. Number two, I wanted to go in a different direction than my other books. Number three, I wanted to do something very wacky with the magic system that I could never do in an epic fantasy. Then, I wanted to do a first-person narrative instead of a third-person narrative. I wanted to write for a younger audience. I just wanted to write an improv story, starting with a kid who discovers that librarians secretly rule the world.
I started with a brainstorming session, trying to pull together the best—but most screwy—ideas that I could. Things that I thought were very fun, but which would never work in a more traditional fantasy novel.
What I did in brainstorming reminds me a lot of how an improv comedy troupe comes up with jokes—toss a bunch of props in a bag, shake them up, and then start pulling them out and see what you can do with them. The first novel was a pure joy of discovery writing, with me juggling multiple elements in an attempt to hit all the points I’d set up for myself. It was so much fun, I did another one between the next two epic fantasy books I wrote.
Because of this, these books are very different from my other books. They’re comedies, for one thing, with a sarcastic narrator who makes fun of the writing process. You get a lot of (hopefully entertaining) commentary from the narrator on what makes books work, along with a lot of the hallmarks of my writing—done in a new way.