So you have “what if?” questions and then you build a universe from there?
Usually they’re “what if?” questions, but Sanderson’s zero-th law, you know I’ve got these laws on magic you can look up - they’re named humbly after myself - so Sanderson’s zero-th law is always err on the side of what’s awesome. And usally it’s less even a “what if?” than a “that’s so cool, tazer toads!”. Like if you really want to know the truth of where the stormlight archives started, there’s all this cool stuff, like part of it was like “what if there was this storm like the storm on Jupiter”, and then I eventually changed it to a storm that goes around the planet, something like that, but the real truth was “magical power armor! YEAH! Magical power armor is cool! Magical plate mail power armor! Why would you need plate mail power armor?” Y’know, and it starts with the really cool idea. Mistborn started with me hitting a fog bank at eighty miles per hour in my car and loving how it looked as it drove past and saying “is there a world where I can imitate this feel, where you can look out and it streams by.” It’s theses early visuals or concepts that make me say “Oooh, I wanna do that!”. That is where my books really come from, and then I layer on top of them the “what ifs?” and a realistic ecology based around these ideas.
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.