Suvudu Universe

We recently asked you, the Suvudu Universe, to send us your questions for Brandon Sanderson, author of the new book Steelheart, which is the first in a brand-new series about a world ruled by Epics, men and women who received superhuman powers in the Calamity. Your responses were fantastic and it was really hard to narrow down the questions to only five. But ... we did. And Brandon answered the questions (we gave him a break from writing and he dictated his answers, which are transcribed below). Thanks to all of you for your thoughtful and smart questions -- and thanks and congratulations to the five winners of a signed, finished copy of Brandon's Steelheart!

Q: It’s been said that writers inject themselves into their work, write about what they know, write about themselves and what they believe. If a reader wanted to learn what makes Brandon Sanderson who he is, what specific works of yours do you suggest they read and what do you feel they will find out about you? --Michael J. Clarke

A: That is a very deep question. As a writer, I feel like this stuff is all there, and yet I’m the last one to notice it. Readers will pick it out and say, “This is very Brandon.” And I’ll say, “Yeah, you’re right! That totally is!” But I’m not putting that in there on purpose. I’m just writing, and if I set out to put something in there, then it wouldn’t end up as the sort of me that you’re getting at with this question. It would be the agenda and not the Brandon. So I’m actually the last person you should ask where to find me in my works. The project that is the project of my heart, that I’ve spent the most time trying to make work and to get published, is The Way of Kings. So you can probably find the most about me in there. I have no idea what you’re going to find, so go for it!

Q: Youth and teens are growing up in a much different world today than most authors did that are writing current YA. With social media and internet at their fingertips, it is like a different universe. How does Steelheart relate to current issues and challenges the youth of today are facing?” --Annie Slasher

A: Wow, you guys have great questions! I think one relevant question in the world today is: Can anyone at all be trusted with power? It seems that everything we find coming out in the news is about how power has been misused and abused. Steelheart is about this. It’s one of the main concepts I wanted to approach in writing this story, and I hope that it’s something that is meaningful to the teens who read the book. The story’s basically about David having to stand up on his own, with no power himself, against the emperor of Chicago. It’s a lot like some of the things I see teens posting and talking about. I think it’s kind of universal. Granted, this is a very different world; you are completely right on that. But at the same time there’s this sense from the next generation of “I’m not ready for this. I don’t have any of the power. I’m a nobody, but I’ve got to do something about this.” That’s what Steelheart is at its core, and I hope that concept will resonate with the youth of today who are going to have to step up and be in charge in the next few years.

Q: If there was one thread or story line you could have changed that you inherited for the WoT books, what would it have been? --James Ammon

A: I didn’t come on to the Wheel of Time to fix the Wheel of Time. I had to be very firm with myself as a fan -- because I am a fan -- that my job was not to change the Wheel of Time in any way. My job was to finish Robert Jordan’s story in the best way that I could in a way that I think he would be proud of. So, I didn’t go into it saying, “What do I want to change?” Anything that I felt belonged in the books, I put in. I had a responsibility to do that. There aren’t any major threads where I said, “I wish I could change this.” It was always, what would Robert Jordan want to do with this and how can I do a good job with it? In some ways I probably ended up approaching those in a different way than he would have, but I hope that I got across the right feel with them. There is one thing that I’ve talked about before that when I read it in the notes, I thought, “Really, I’ve got to do this?” That was the spanking scene with Cadsuane. But that was one thing that he instructed me that I had to put in. In the end, though, I want the Wheel of Time to be Robert Jordan’s story and not my story.

Q. With every new world it becomes increasingly difficult to make sure it appears vastly different than the previous ones. What are the five most important aspects that, when done correctly, ensure that your new world is unique? --Iulian Ionescu

A: It is impossible to be completely unique, and even if it weren’t, I’m not sure that you would want to be so because that would make your story completely unrelatable. Everything we do builds on the discourse that came before. So, the first thing I would say, if you want to have good stories and good world building, is to read a lot. That will allow you to be part of the discussion rather than just stumbling in and saying, “Hey, I came up with this new great thing,” when this new great thing has been done a bunch of times before. So, be aware of what’s been done.

At the same time, tell the story you want to tell. Don’t worry too much about this. Imagine if someone had gone to J.K. Rowling and said, “You know, wizard school books have been done a lot. You really should do something different.” That advice would’ve been useless to her. Wizard school books had been done a lot before J.K. Rowling did hers. She just did a fantastic one. So, write the story that you want to write.

Now, if you really want to be original in a sci-fi/fantasy setting, I would suggest that you can push yourself to explore a little further. Look toward a culture that you’ve been involved in that you don’t see represented very often in sci-fi/fantasy. I think that a lot of cultures and ethnicities get passed over in mainstream fiction. This is an area that I think could be explored a great deal more than it is being explored and will add a lot more to your story if you go that direction.

For a fantasy story, you could also come up with an interesting magic system. You can let your imagination run wild and react against the things that hopefully you’re reading and say, “What view of the world has nobody done?” But at the end of the day, there’s no magical recipe that’s going to make yours original. It’s more a factor of: Do you have great characters? Do you have a great story to tell? And are those characters and that story tied to the setting in an interesting and powerful way? That’s going to be much more useful to you than stressing over how many times a setting has been done before.

Q: How was building the rules for a super hero universe different from fantasy rules you construct for your magic systems? [How] do you feel when some authors sort of mix up the two different genres? --Christopher Robin Negelein

A: Mixing up these genres hasn’t been done a lot. So I’m not sure if there are trends I can speak to in people mixing these two up. Approaching it myself, I looked at the great magic systems done in superhero stories and found them to be very discrete, as I would call them. Meaning, there is a power -- it works in a certain way, and it’s very consistent in the way it works. I wanted to approach Steelheart in the same way. The foundation of the science of why this all works is actually less important, I think, in this book than it is in some of my epic fantasy books. In an epic fantasy, I’m trying for a cohesive sense of immersion, where I’m convincing you that this is a new world, and so the ecology has to work around the magic system. Whereas in a superhero story, it’s more about: Here is this power. What does this one power do, and how does it change our approach to the world in this one, discrete way? Also, I’ve noticed in superheroes that there’s a huge amount of variety to the powers, and that’s something I wanted to get across. In an epic fantasy, I will have a group of powers that all influence one another and work together. In Steelheart, I wanted powers that felt wildly different from one another to add to the bizarre sense of “What is going on with all these strange powers?”

We'll keep all of you Suvudu Universe members in the loop about future Q&A opportunities with authors. Till then ...