“I loved the character reversal that took place with Vivian and Siri…” and actually I’m enjoying that at the moment “…did you come up with that idea- was that an early idea in your planning or did it emerge as a result of the story writing itself?”
That’s a good question, for most of those they were early ideas, my- I had two main themes for myself when writing Warbreaker, one was character reversals I wanted to play with the idea of reversed roles, you see it from the very beginning when the two sisters are forced to reverse roles and also the role reversal between Vasher and Denth.
The other big thing was I wanted to work on my humor and try and approach new ways of being, of having humor in a book and seeing what different types of character humor I could use. It was really me delving into a lot of Shakespeare at the time and seeing the way he pulled reversals and the way he used multiple levels of humor and I wanted to play with that concept in fantasy novels, so a lot of those were planned. Some of them were not, some of them came spontaneously, as you’re writing the book, you always come up with great ideas for books while you’re working on them so you kind of see the evolution of a few of them.
Warbreaker is posted for free on my website, the complete draft of it and I actually posted the first draft all the way through to the last draft and so you can actually take and compare the first draft to the very last draft and even the chapters as I wrote them you can see how some things were evolving and coming to be and I was realizing certain things while I was doing it and other things were, were very well foreshadowed from the beginning.
Many early ideas from Warbreaker came from Mythwalker, an unfinished novel Brandon wrote a few years earlier. The “switched roles” theme was one of them.
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