You’ve talked a bit about your involvement in the Wheel of Time, and I really didn’t want this show to focus overly much on that, because I was certain that you, as a writer, have been overly inundated about your involvement in that because so many fantasy fans are excited about that. I really didn’t get to ask as many questions as I wanted to—and I’m not going to take you this way—about your system for developing the kind of intricate magic systems in your two series that I’ve read, or the one series and the one standalone— Elantris and the Mistborn trilogy—cause I’m kind of geeking out about those almost in the way that you are with Robert Jordan—maybe not quite to that extent, but maybe to someone that you’ve read more recently—but I’m very excited about the novels, and I highly recommend them to those of you out there listening. Brandon’s got a very good voice, and it’s really nice to find a new fantasy author who isn’t telling you the same story you’ve read fifty times, but is very much within the milieu. But I did want to ask about Alcatraz vs the Evil Librarians , your midgrade series. I have not read them, but I have to say—the only thing I’ve read is the opening sentence which you posted on your website, and I already want to purchase all the books that are available. Your next one comes out in October. Can you tell us briefly what the inspiration was to do them?
Yeah. One of the functions of getting published like I did—taking as long as I did, and working how I did—when I was trying to break in—and even in those early years when I didn’t know about breaking in—one of the things I did was pop frequently from project to project. I didn’t write sequels. In fact, I haven’t brought this up before, but when I sold Elantris , I was actually on my thirteenth novel. That’s how far along I was in the process. Mistborn is my fourteenth, so you can read my sixth and my fourteenth. I felt that if I just sat and wrote sequels in the same world unpublished, number one it would be bad for me professionally because I can’t really send book two to a bunch of editors, and say “Hey, look at this!” I can only send book one, so if I wrote six books and only had the first one as something that I could try and entice editors with, then I think it would have been to my detriment. Instead I wanted to have six different books—standalones, and beginnings of series—that I could be sending out, and if[?] I could immediately send them something else, and say “Hey, if there’s something you liked in that one, maybe you’ll look at this one and see that I’m getting better,” or “Maybe you’ll like this one better,” things like that. That was my philosophy. So I got used to always writing a new setting, a new world, and a new magic each time I wrote a book.
Partially, also, though, as a writer, this wasn’t just market-field, it was because I wanted to develop something that was my own. I mentioned it before—I think that writers should add to the genre, and I myself was a little bit annoyed with the genre in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Maybe I’ve overstated some of the impact that the children’s book had because of that, but I don’t know. I was one of those that was like, “Really? Do I really need to read yet another book that is about a guy who lives out in the rural woods and discovers that he is the lost king and needs to go find this magical artifact so that he can save the world. Do I really need to read that again?” I mean, Tolkien did a great job of that, and you know what, Robert Jordan did a really good job of that, and you’ve got Terry Goodkind with…I mean, with so many people telling this story, do we really need another one? And I think the late 90s, at least for me, is when I finally got tired of it, and I’d read Robert Jordan, and I said, “Look, I don’t think this can be done better. How can you tell me you can do it better than he’s doing it? Why am I going to read your book?” And that influenced me a lot as a writer. When I was trying to break in, I actually tried writing a story like that, cause I felt like that’s what everyone wrote, that’s what got published, and I got a little ways into it and said, “I just…I can’t feel it. What am I doing that’s new? What am I adding?”
And so I was trying a lot of different things. I was trying to explore. Those first six novels of mine, in fact, were—well, the first five in particular—were very different. I wrote several science-fiction novels. I tried a cyberpunk, I tried a social science-fiction, I tried a comedy—I tried lots of different things, trying to find my voice, and at the end, when the dust settled, after doing that, I realized what I wanted to do, and what I wanted to do was kind of the postmodern epic, so to speak. The child of the 80s and 90s who is aware of what happened with the monomyth and all this stuff in science fiction and fantasy, and say “Yeah, what’s next? What happens next? And how can I do something different? How can I do something new? Where can we take this genre?” New magic systems, different styles of plot. That’s partially where Mistborn came from. Mistborn is the [?] which really doesn’t work for books like it does for movies, so realize this isn’t the only thing the book’s about, but one of the big influences in me writing the book was the idea of me telling the story where the monomyth had happened. The monomyth meaning Joseph Campbell is here with the thousand vases, you know—young hero goes on a quest to defeat the great evil, and what if he failed? What if the Dark Lord won? What if Voldemort at the end of Harry Potter had said, “You’re just a stupid kid!” and killed him, and taken over the world? What if Frodo had kept the ring, or Aragorn had kept the ring, or even Sauron had just gotten it back? What happens next? And that’s where that trilogy came from.
Alcatraz is an interesting story because…Mistborn is the first book that I wrote knowing that it was going to get published. It was my fourteenth novel. Always before then, I’d always written just whatever I had felt like next, and it was the first time I had to consider, “Wow. Elantris is getting published. How do I follow it up? What do I do next?” Originally I’d planned to release next a book called The Way of Kings , which was number thirteen—the book I wrote right before Mistborn—and as I was revising Way of Kings , I had this deep-seated feeling that I wasn’t ready for Way of Kings . I’d written the first book, and it didn’t do yet what I wanted it to do. It was a massive war epic, and was very intricate, enormous world, and thirty magic systems…I mean, it was actually beyond my skill level at the time. And I said, “I need practice writing sequels before I start a massive epic like this.” I’d never written a sequel before.
And that’s when I sat down and outlined the Mistborn trilogy, wanting to write an entire trilogy straight through so that I could have beginning, middle and end done by the time the first one came out. And I actually was able to achieve that, as a side note; I had written Hero of Ages by the time The Final Empire , the first book, needed to be in for its final draft, and so I was able to—I think it comes through in the trilogy—I was able to make it completely internally consistent. You don’t have the problems in that where you have…in some series where you get a little ways into it and then realize the author’s just making stuff up, and trying to…and being self-contradictory, and things like that; I didn’t want that to happen, and I think I needed to practice doing that with the training wheels, so to speak, of having them all done before the first one came out—before I tried launching into something where I would just have to trust my outline in order to do that, if that makes any sense at all.
So, I sat down and wrote the first two Mistborn books back-to-back. First draft done of Mistborn 1, sent off; started the first draft of Mistborn 2, and was revising Mistborn 1 as I was finishing Mistborn 2. I got done with Mistborn 2, and it was the hardest book I’ve ever written, partially because of the grueling hours I set for myself—I wanted to get these all done—but mostly because I’d never written a sequel before, and I was so used to doing something new with every book that I wrote, and so I had to train myself into writing sequels. And after I got done with Mistborn 2, and was trying to write Mistborn 3, I realized I need, just for my own creative process—the way I’ve trained myself—I have to do something completely different now. I have to take a break for a little while and just do something off-the-wall in order to reset all of those tumblers in my head, get back, and write the third Mistborn book, because otherwise I felt that I wouldn’t be approaching it fresh enough. I wouldn’t be approaching it having enough passion for it. I felt I would started it burned out, or at least burn out to the middle of it.
And so because of that, I sat down with that 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.” And I wanted to do what—I sat down with this—I wanted to do something very different from the Mistborn books. Number one, I wanted to do something humorous. Number two, I wanted to play off of the very things that were in danger of becoming clichés to myself, if that makes sense, to keep myself fresh, to say “I need to go completely different directions so that I don’t just become a cliché of myself”. And so I wanted to do something very wacky with the magic system that I could never do in an epic fantasy book, because I want those to all feel consistent and scientific. And I wanted to do a first-person narrative instead of a third-person narrative, to do something different again, and I wanted to write for a younger audience. Mostly though, I just wanted to write something off-the-cuff, which was more like a stand-up routine version, or…not a stand-up routine. More like an improv. You know, it’s not just joke after joke, but it’s an improv story, starting with a kid who discovers that librarians secretly rule the world.
Partially, at this time, I’d also been reading The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown, which has some fascinating aspects and some very annoying ones, the annoying aspects being, I don’t like a lot of the cheap tricks he uses narratively to just pull you through the story, cause they get a little old, but beyond that, I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I don’t believe that the Catholic Church, or anyone, has these secret cabals. I mean, they make for great stories, but I don’t think that it’s there, and so I wanted to tell a silly conspiracy theory book, and so I picked librarians ruling the world. And so what Alcatraz became was a short—for me; 50,000 words—novel that talks about fiction in general. There’s a lot of Alcatraz, the narrator, addressing the audience and talking about what literature does, and what authors do. There’s a point where he goes off about how authors are sadists—because we want to put you through all these terrible emotions—and explains and talks about it in what is hopefully a humorous way, but kind of digs at the roots of what makes someone want to tell stories.
And there is a goofy magic system. Everyone in the books who belongs to the Smedry family—he’s Alcatraz Smedry; it’s a—anyway, they’re the Freedom Fighters who resist the Librarians. They all have really dumb magic powers. It’s kind of like a Mystery Man sort of thing, if you’ve seen that movie. Alcatraz’s grandfather, who introduces himself near the beginning of the book, has the super-power…um, his super-magical power is that he can arrive late to appointments. Alcatraz in the book meets someone in the book who is really magically good—his power is that he’s magically good at tripping. Another guy who is magically good at speaking gibberish. Alcatraz himself has the super-power of breaking things—he’s really good at breaking stuff—and I just based these magic powers on silly, goofy things that me or my family do—being late to something is what my Mom always said—and then trying to twist them on their heads. You know, later in the book, Grandpa Smedry will arrive late to a bullet when someone shoots it at him, so it just barely misses him. You know…fun stuff like this, where I take preconceptions and turn them on their heads.
And that’s where Alcatraz came from. I didn’t write it saying “I’m going to publish this.” I wrote it saying “I need [to write] this.” I finished it; I sent it off to my agent, and said, “Surprise, I wrote a different book than you were expecting me to.” And he wrote back, and said, “Wow, this is actually pretty good! You wrote it really fast—I can tell; it needs a lot of revision—but I think I could sell this, if you want to put the time into revising it.” So over the next year or so, I did some revisions and some drafts and some work on it, and we sent it out, and lo and behold, it had nine publishers want it. Four of them got in a bidding war, and it went sky-high and turned out to be this wonderful thing that Dreamworks Animation actually optioned it before it even came out. And so, yeah. It took on this entire life of its own.
I sold to Scholastic four novels in a series. I have just finished the fourth one. There may be subsequent volumes, depending on things—particularly depending on if…um, when things calm down for me; the amount of work I have to do right now prohibitive for me entering into another Alcatraz contract; my attention really needs to be on the Wheel of Time at the moment—but, the third one is coming out in October; sometimes they appear on shelves a little bit early. They’re a little bit tougher to find in hardcover than my other books because—I’ve been told, and maybe…I dunno—it seems that children’s books…Scholastic likes to market directly to the schools and libraries, and that’s their main method of doing it, at least with my books. They’ve sold as many that way as they have in bookstores, and the bookstores are kind of hit-or-miss on having a copy. Only about half of them get copies in, and so Amazon might be your best bet, or going to your local independent and asking them to order you a copy, and the paperbacks are generally easy to find, but the hardcovers are a little bit tough to find, but the first few chapters are on my website. If you’re looking for something that’s lighthearted—that’s not ridiculous, but it’s lighthearted—has some comedy to it, but really has me looking at the novels in the fantasy genre, in specific, from a postmodern view, just trying to break it down and see what it does, and telling a story with it, then you might enjoy the Alcatraz books.
Cool.
Well, thank you for that answer.
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