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Interview #748: Interview with Isaac Stewart, the man behind the maps of Mistborn and The Way of Kings, Entry #6
Trevor Green
I know some of us have heard the story of how you came up with the symbols for Mistborn, but tell those of us who haven’t how they came about.
Isaac Stewart
I’d drawn about a half dozen pages of symbols inspired by my first reading of the book. Pages with dozens and dozens of tiny, intricate symbols—maybe someday I’ll write a post about the process: Failed Allomantic Symbol Designs. But nothing was really working for me or Brandon.
I’d collected a lot of reference material for the steel inquisitors—nails, railroad spikes, those sorts of things—and one day when I was looking at a picture of a rusty pile of bent up nails, I saw the symbol for Iron. It was a Beautiful Mind experience. The symbol just jumped out at me. Glowing and everything.
After that initial experience with the symbol for Iron, it was easy to come up with the others. The bent nail part eventually became the crescent shapes used in the final book.
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