wotwiki

Interview #1101: Mistborn: The Well of Ascension Annotations, Entry #20

Brandon Sanderson

I worry just a tad about the light-hearted feel of the end of the chapter here. Originally, this scene was in the book BEFORE the army showed up to attack. In the original draft I showed Elend and company living (and fighting off assassins) without knowing that an army was bearing down on them. Moving the army so that it began the book on the horizon was the major pacing change I made that sped up the book, and increased the tension.

However, we missed a few of the more light scenes—like the upcoming sparring—and I didn’t want to cut them because they were so indicative of character. I decided to leave them in. Kelsier’s crew is accustomed to dealing with stress and remaining jovial. The only change I really had to make was in the Elend viewpoints, which you will see in the next chapter. Still, I hope the tone isn’t off—that’s a real worry when you transplant scenes from a previous draft, as opposed to writing them new when you change as much as I did at the beginning here.

Contributing

If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.