In this week’s new Writing Excuses episode, What Makes a Good Monster, with Courtney Alameda, Howard, Mary, Dan, with guest host Susan Chang talk Monsters with Courtney Alameda at LTUE 2017. What makes the best ones so good? We discuss some of our favorites, and how the criteria we apply to them can be applied in the creation of monsters of our own.

Last week, Vasher and Lightsong each suffered their own form of torture. This week, in chapters 54 and 55, Vivenna and Nightblood seek Vasher, Lightsong learns more of his history, while Siri and Susebron are the rope in a tug-of-war between the real priests and the fake ones.

The Twitter post archive for July and August are up to date.

FAQ Friday

Do you ever have crazy ideas that are too crazy?

This happens all the time.

Greatness is often born of brashness. Of a reckless, bull-headed intent to do something everyone tells you is stupid. Sometimes, the best ideas are the ones you can’t articulate in brief, because distillation ruins the very performance. Reduce a symphony to three notes, and it will seem pedestrian. Some ideas take to summary with ease. For others, explaining them is like trying to help someone climb Mount Everest after they say, “I’d like to take the quick route, please.”

As a writer, you grow accustomed to saying, “It will work when I write it.” You get use to saying, “I can do this, even if everyone tells me I can’t.” Becoming a writer in the first place is often done in defiance of rational good sense.

And sometimes, you’re wrong. You try to prove that the idea works, you OWN it…and it’s just not working. You’re convinced it’s your skill, and not the idea. If you could just figure it out…

This happened several times on the Wheel of Time. River of Souls, the famous deleted sequence from Demandred’s viewpoint, is one of these. Perrin’s excursion into the Ways in book 14 (also cut) is another. Early on, I pitched Perrin deciding to follow the Way of the Leaf to the team–but I wasn’t actually serious on that one. More, I was in a brainstorming session with Team Jordan, and throwing out things that could possibly fullfill Perrin’s arc in an unexpected way.

The 10th anniversary of Elatnris has some deleted scenes, and the annotations talk about how in that book, I originally decided to have Hrathen turn out to be of a different nationality (secretly) as a twist at the end. The man who was doing all these terrible things was from Arelon all along!

That was stupid. It undermined much of his arc. It was a twist to just have another twist–in a book that already had plenty. Early reactions from Alpha readers helped me see this.

Lately, I’ve been trying to do some things with backstory and “cosmology” for the Stephen Leeds (aka Legion) stories, and Peter’s not sold. We’ll see if this turns into a “it will work when I write it” or a “That’s a twist you don’t need, Brandon.”

“I’m making a mess with papers.”

It has become a tradition for Lizbeth, Peter’s daughter, to make a mess be casually throwing the finished Stormlight Archive manuscript down the stairs. You can see all three of the videos on Brandon’s Youtube channel, or below for you convenience.

Vol. 1 – The Way of Kings

Vol. 2 – Words of Radiance

Vol. 3 – Oathbringer

In this week’s new Writing Excuses episode, Retrofitting Structure into a First Draft, Brandon, Mary, Mary Anne, and Wesley speak, at least in part, to discovery writers. In this case, talking about how to take a non-outlined work and apply a structure to it in revisions.

Last week, in Tor.com’s continuing reread posts for Warbreaker, Vivenna learned some very difficult recent history, while Siri learned unexpected ancient history. This week, in chapter 33, Vivenna confronts hard truths, badly.

The Twitter post archive for May is up to date.

Today’s poll, to be answered Friday, May 19th, will focus on the cosmere. As always, if you have a question you’d like to get answered by Brandon, please leave a comment in whichever location (Facebook, Twitter, Google +, or Instagram) and I will add it to the list of potential questions.

Full questions:

• • If a bullet is made out of an appropriate metal and shoots through someone and gets lodged in someone else can it function as a hemalurgic spike? If it can, would the spike kill someone if it was lodged in an incorrect spot for a spike?
  • How were the glyphs and glyph-pairs in the Stormlight universe created?
  • Why didn’t Dalinar get the powers of a Stoneward, when he bonded Taln’s honorblade?
  • Is Hoid aware that he’s a character in a book?
  • Can a Mistborn burn the metal used to make shard plate? (Say they got a fragment of shattered shard plate)

Thank you for voting! Here are the results:

Why didn’t Dalinar get the powers of a Stoneward, when he bonded Taln’s honorblade?

Some readers have already figured this out, so I don’t think I’m engaging in to large a spoiler to dig into this one here.

There are several oddities going on here. The most important one relevant to this question is the Blade in question. If you compare the descriptions of the sword described in the epilogue of The Way of Kings to the one that traveled with the madman (allegedly Taln, the Herald) to the Shattered Plains, you’ll find they are different.

The one that characters obtained in Words of Radiance is NOT and Honorblade. It’s an ordinary shardblade (as ordinary as one of those can be called.) I’m not going to say specifically what happened to the Blade Taln arrived with at Kholinar, but I will say that it IS a different weapon from the one in Words of Radiance.

The other issue here is the somewhat lesser question of whether this character is actually Taln, the Herald, or not. Some characters in world don’t believe that it is, though his viewpoint in Words of Radiance strongly implies otherwise. This isn’t specifically relevant to the conversation for reasons I’ll talk about below–but it is tangentially related. Because in the Cosmere, intent is important to many of the types of magic. It’s theoretically possible to hold an Honorblade and not realize what its powers are, and therefore be unable to access them.

As an aside, this character was actually the primary protagonist of the version of The Way of Kings I wrote in 2002. A man who woke up, with lingering memories of madness, and claimed to be a Herald when nobody believed him–as he couldn’t manifest any powers, seemed to have lost his sword, and lore said the Heralds weren’t coming back anyway.

When I wrote the new version of The Way of Kings in 2009 or so, one goal was to focus the storyline. I’d included so many characters in the 2002 version that none of them progressed very far in their arcs, creating a strong setting and interesting characters–but a bad book. During the new version, I decided that this character would be moved to the later books, and I’d explore him there.

In the 2002 version, the text was very dodgy on whether or not Taln was a Herald. Confronting the fact that he just might be crazy was a major arc and theme of the book–however, as I’ve worked on the new version, I’ve realized that it would be dangerous to be too vague on this. Stringing people along with the question for a book or two is one thing–waiting until book six or eight to do a character’s arc, and leaving the question of whether they’re a herald or not all that time, seemed unfair.

So the text is going to be making manifest fairly quickly who this person is. You’ll have confirmations long before we dig into his viewpoint in the later books.

So, a recap:
1) The swords WERE swapped somehow.
2) Someone could hold an Honorblade and not realize they had access to powers.
3) This character may or may not actually be a herald–but the text is going to make the answer clear, and I’m not trying to trick you.

Brandon