A lot happens before this book opens—how did you pick an opening for Wax’s story, leaving so much of the backstory with Wayne (and others) to be picked up and absorbed on the fly?
I usually like to start my books in medias res to an extent. It brings across the sense that I want to portray, which is that the characters all existed before the book started, and the characters continue—those who survive—to exist after the book ends. That helps with the sense of immersion. Granted, each book tells about a very important chapter of the characters’ lives, and there’s a distinct beginning, middle, and end to that chapter, but if the beginning or end are too hard and fast, it feels contrived to me. So I do this with all of my books.
It’s usually harder to figure out a starting point than you might think. I often have to revise my beginnings very heavily. This is no different from my other works; in the Mistborn books I’ve had to do this often. The prologue for [ The Alloy of Law ] was actually written to be the prologue to a sequel, and after I wrote it, I thought, “No, that needs to go in this book.” We did a lot of shuffling around at the beginning of this book to find the right starting point.
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