I don’t know if you know the history of The Rithmatist .
No, I don’t.
In 2007, before Harriet [McDougal] called me about the Wheel of Time, I was writing a book that wasn’t working. It was called Liar of Partinel . You’ve never seen it. No one’s ever seen it. It just happens to writers: once in a while you write a book and you know something deep is wrong with it, like it’s fundamentally broken in some way. I was bored while writing it. This wasn’t writer’s block—that’s something different. Across two months, every chapter I would go through the motions, but I wouldn’t feel any passion to the chapters. Eventually, halfway through, I said, “I just can’t do this anymore. I need something I’m excited about.”
I sat down and started sketching. I don’t do a lot of drawing. The last time I did some sketching that started a book was Elantris , where I did all the symbols for the Aons. I just started sketching, and I started imagining this story where people would duel with these chalk circles. You draw this chalk circle around yourself, and then you draw little beasties, little creatures that would crawl across the ground and attack your opponent’s circle, and when your circle got breached that was the end of the thing. It’s like a magical version of a tower defense game or something like StarCraft. I imagined these kids playing this game and thought, “Where do I go from this?”
It was one of these purely creative experiences where I was just drawing and making notes at the side and coming up with things in order to not have to do this other book, which I found so boring. Over the course of a month, instead of doing what I was supposed to be doing, I wrote The Rithmatist . It’s one of those books that just flowed out of me. It just came out like it is, basically, right now. We’ve done revisions and so on, of course, but the revisions are all minor.
It’s hard to even explain why it happened, but it came from those sketches. I just started drawing.
When I finished The Rithmatist , Harriet called me [to ask Sanderson to complete the Wheel of Time series]. I was really relieved that I didn’t have to go back to that book that I didn’t like anymore. I turned my attention toward the Wheel of Time.
I love The Rithmatist . Great system of magic. You do these unique systems of magic, and yet you say all your worlds are related.
Yes, they are all related, but I didn’t connect The Rithmatist to that.
Oh, okay.
Because The Rithmatist has connections to Earth, and I don’t want the Earth books—anything on Earth—to be related to the big system of everything else, because it adds too much. Does that make sense? It adds too much baggage.
So The Rithmatist is its own contained world. I wanted to play with Earth history. I just wanted to do wacky things. The JoSeun Empire, which is the old name of one of the Korean dynasties, has conquered Europe at various points, and so European food is very Asian influenced. You’ll eat spaghetti with chop sticks, and things like that.
I’m not trying to do true alternate history. True alternate history is when people say, “What if this arrow had hit this guy in this battle and instead . . . ?” That’s not what I’m doing. What I’m doing is alternate world, where we’re reimagining everything and just letting it be fun.
I’ve shrunk the planet. It’s much smaller. You can take a train to Europe. The United States are a bunch of islands instead, and people duel with chalk, and my hometown in Nebraska is the source of all evil in the world, with a magical tower the monsters come out of.
By the way, all the Rithmatic defenses are named after friends of mine from Nebraska, or people I knew, or things from Nebraska history. There’s something called the Osborne Defense. Well, if you’re from Nebraska, you know that Tom Osborne was the great coach of the Nebraska Cornhuskers for many years. All the defenses are named after things like that, just for fun.
How about your parrot?
My parents?
Parrot. Didn’t you have a parrot in there?
I did. Well, it’s a cockatiel. He’s called Beaker, because he sounds like the Muppet. All sorts of random things from my life. Like Professor Layton, the math teacher, is a good friend of mine who was the best man at my wedding and who is a math teacher in real life. You know, you can do fun stuff like that in a book set in our world that’s not our world, things that you just can’t do in something like The Way of Kings where you want it to be a little more serious and epic. It has to take itself seriously. You’ve got to maintain continuity. Oftentimes, when I’m escaping from something like that, I write something like The Rithmatist , which I don’t need to be quite as serious with. In some ways, it’s a release valve from writing the big epics. They’re my true love, but there are things you can do in a book like The Rithmatist that you just can’t do in The Way of Kings .
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