Your Mistborn trilogy is over 2800 pages total. Where did the idea for such a complex story come from? Did something specifically inspire you? How did you manage to hang in there for so long? Were there times when you thought, “I’m exhausted, I just can’t go on”?
There was no one specific inspiration; it was a combination of different ideas bouncing around in my head for years and other ideas that I tried in earlier books that didn’t work out. One idea does not make a book or a series, but ideas in interesting combinations makes a book. With Mistborn, one idea came while I was driving one day and entered a heavy fog bank: this started me thinking about a world shrouded in mist. Later I started thinking that a heist plot such as in movies like Ocean’s Eleven would make a good fantasy story. I started thinking about different kinds of metal being used as magical batteries for different types of power. And I had a cinematic image of someone leaping through the air in a mistcloak. All these things combined to make a book.
I wrote all three Mistborn books before the first one was released, so I was able to go back and alter things in the first book to keep everything consistent with the last book. And it was indeed exhausting. I’ve found that from time to time in order to recharge my mental batteries, I need to take a break and write something else instead. So after writing The Well of Ascension and before starting to write The Hero of Ages , I took some time off from the series and wrote a fun experimental project instead. I didn’t really know where it was going or what I would ever do with it, but it turned into the first Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians book, which was completely different from the Mistborn books that had been occupying my life for months. I found that when I was finished writing that side project, my mind was refreshed and I was ready to tackle the Mistborn world again. So ever since then I’ve made it a habit to take breaks to write experimental short projects that don’t necessarily have to go anywhere. Sometimes they work out, and sometimes they don’t and I shelve them. But it keeps me fresh.
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