Hi Brandon.
Hi.
I’ve read a bit online about how you have an overall storyline covering all of your novels, but I really don’t know much about it. I was wondering if you could expand and explain.
Okay. The overarching story of all of my novels. This warrants some backstory. If you weren’t familiar, I wrote thirteen novels before I sold one. I spent a lot of time practicing and learning, and I love big epic grand series. However, you know, you can’t grow up reading the Wheel of Time without loving big series, but advice I heard early on was, selling a big series is actually pretty hard from a new author and if you, for instance, spend your life and you write like six books in the same series, and you send off the first book to someone and they don’t buy it, you can’t really send them the second book because, you know, they’ve already rejected that, and so it’s really putting all of your eggs into one basket, and that doesn’t end up working out for some people. I didn’t want to do that; I wanted to expand my chances, and so I wrote thirteen novels in different worlds, all with their own different magic systems and own characters. But secretly I loved the grand epic, and so I started connecting all these worlds during my unpublished era, and telling a hidden epic behind them all that I was setting up for.
Well, eventually I sold book number six, and embedded in book number six was a bunch of this stuff for the hidden epic, of course, and six is actually one of the ones where I first started doing this. My first five were kind of throwaway novels. It was six, seven, eight, and nine that were really involved in this. Six was Elantris ; seven was a book called Dragonsteel ; eight was a book called White Sand ; and nine was a book called Mythwalker , which eventually became Warbreaker , which I eventually rewrote and released as Warbreaker . So that four-book sequence was very ingrained in this kind of hidden story behind the stories. When I started publishing these books, I just kept it going, the hidden story, the hidden epic.
Now one aspect of this was that I didn’t want people to have to know all the books that came before to understand what was happening in any one of them. So, for instance, if you read these you don’t need to know anything about the hidden epic. It is back there behind the scenes for some day when I actually write a series dedicated to it, that there will be all this foreshadowing, but it will never directly and in really important ways influence a given series. For instance, you don’t have to have read Elantris to understand Mistborn even though technically they’re sequels; Mistborn is technically a sequel to Elantris , just set on a different planet.
There is one character who has appeared in all of my novels, and several other characters who have jumped between novels. For instance there’s a character from Elantris who is in The Way of Kings —one of the main characters from Elantris shows up in Way of Kings under hidden auspices, but it’s pretty obvious; the fans found it really fast, those who were watching out for it—but that sort of thing. So, there is a story going on behind all of this that I will eventually tell, but what do you need to know about it right now? That all of these things are basically Easter eggs right now. None of them are dominating the storyline at all; it’s just a bunch of cool Easter eggs that eventually will mean something to you. So the character to watch out for is called Hoid; it’s a pseudonym he usually uses—pseudonym is I guess the wrong term; the alias he normally uses—and he’s all over in the books, so if you watch out for him you’ll see him.
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