When I first emailed you, Brandon, I indicated to you that my sons are readers. One out of three is not so much an avid reader, but they were captivated by the book that probably gave you a national name, and that was Elantris . And in there, there were themes of a Utopia, and then the opposite. What happens when Utopia crashes, or there’s the fault line, there’s a crack in it? And then we go to Mistborn, and with your permission to sum up kind of shortly, it was, some said, “A revolution of a new generation against someone in power, and yet they don’t even understand the consequences of what they are beginning.” So there are underlying themes that you are hitting as you move forward in your writing. Are these themes that you set out, you think, “This is something that is important to me as an author and I want to explore it?” Or does it evolve through the characters that you develop?
It’s much more an evolution, the second one you mentioned. I’m not one of those who sits down and says, “I want to write a book about X.” I don’t go and inject any sort of philosophies or theories into my book. I sit down and say, “I want to write a book about this character. Well what’s going to be important to this character? What’s going to make them tick?” What makes them tick actually tends to be things that I am worried about, or I am concerned about, or I like to think about and so, the two do cross. You’ll end up… In my fiction you will often find me exploring concepts and ideas that I am interested in, but that will be because my characters are interested in them.
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.