I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your creative process for designing magic systems. Do you have an idea for a story and then make the magic based around that? Do you have an idea for a system and then try and build stories that work around the system? How does designing the story world play into the process? When you’re designing the system itself do you start off by figuring out what you want the end result to be and then work towards it, or is it the other way around?
I’ve done it all of these ways.
Most commonly, I develop the magic, plot, characters, and some setting ideas separately. I combine them in my head, looking for good synergy. (Allomancy and Feruchemy were designed separately, then put into the same book.) Sometimes, I design to fit a story. (Hemalurgy was designed to fit a hole in the three-fold magic system I wanted to tell.) Other times, the magic comes first, then I build everything out of that. (This happened for my YA book Scribbler —also known as The Rithmatist —which isn’t out yet.)
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.