This interview contains FULL SPOILERS for Brandon Sanderson's Cosmere.
Last month, we had the privilege and honor of interviewing fantasy author Brandon Sanderson. All week we've been previewing excerpts from that conversation as part of our "Week of Sanderson" celebration...but here at last, we've reached our destination. It's time to unveil the full interview!
For many fans of genre fiction, Sanderson is an author who needs no introduction; but today is a special day, so of course we're going to give him one. Sanderson published his first novel, Elantris, in 2005 at the age of 29, but by then he was already wildly prolific. Elantris was the sixth book Sanderson wrote; by the time it went through the publication process and hit shelves, he'd written 14 book total. The following year he launched his Mistborn series, which has become a staple of the Cosmere, a vast interconnected universe of stories where all of Sanderson's epic fantasy books take place.
Around that time, he was tapped to complete The Wheel of Time books following the death of original author Robert Jordan in 2007. Over the next four years, Sanderson put his nose to the grindstone and released not only the final three Wheel of Time books, but also The Way of Kings, the gargantuan first novel of his own magnum opus, The Stormlight Archive. This period of time launched Sanderson's career into the stratosphere.
But Sanderson has never been content to rest on his laurels. He's written dozens of books in the years since, including the middle-grade fantasy series Alcatraz vs the Evil Librarians, the YA sci-fi series The Reckoners and Skyward, standalone fantasies like The Rithmatist, and numerous novels set in the Cosmere. Sanderson releases books with clockwork efficiency, and his fans have embraced him for it. To date, he's hit the New York Times bestseller list eight times and has sold more than 40 millions copies of his books around the world.
In 2022, Sanderson's career took another massive leap forward when he announced he had written five novels in secret during the pandemic, and was self-publishing four of them through Kickstarter. That Secret Project Kickstarter shattered the record for the highest-funded Kickstarter of all time, raising over $41.7 million and gaining the attention of national mainstream media outlets. Over the course of the following year (dubbed "The Year of Sanderson"), the author released those four books to fans, many of whom opted to back the Kickstarter without so much as knowing the titles of the books they would receive until they arrived on their doorstep. It was an incredible show of fandom trust.
That brings us to December 6, 2024 and the release of Wind and Truth, the fifth novel in The Stormlight Archive. Sanderson's landmark series is projected to span 10 mainline novels, split into two distinct arcs. Wind and Truth marks the end of the first arc of the series, culminating many of its long-running plotlines as it lays the groundwork for the next chapter of the saga. It also featured mind-blowing connections to the wider Cosmere as a whole. For fans who've followed Sanderson's work for years, its release was a special moment. Tickets for the author's Dragonsteel Nexus convention in Salt Lake City, Utah, where the book was debuted, sold out in one hour.
Now that Wind and Truth has been out in the world for several months, we sat down with Sanderson for his first full-spoiler interview about the Cosmere since its release, digging into the reception to the book and its biggest secrets. We also discussed Ghostbloods, the third era of his Mistborn series which he's currently hard at work writing; and Tailored Realities, the non-Cosmere short fiction collection he's releasing later this year. As the Cosmere has grown, it has inched ever farther from its epic fantasy roots as worlds like Scadrial in Mistborn and Roshar in The Stormlight Archive go through technological revolutions. What does the future hold for the Cosmere as it heads into its space age?
From all of us here at Winter Is Coming, it is our great pleasure to present our interview with Brandon Sanderson. You can watch below, or read on for a transcription replete with references that provide extra context for many of the fascinating details Sanderson shared. (Edited for clarity and length.)
Wind and Truth
DANIEL ROMAN for WINTER IS COMING: Wind and Truth has been out a few months now. I've been following your work for years, and it's been amazing to see you release this culmination of the first arc of The Stormlight Archive. It's obviously something you've been working toward for quite a while. How are you feeling about the reception to it, now that it's out in the world and people have read it?
BRANDON SANDERSON: Largely, I feel very good about it. Because I do such extensive beta reads, I know what people are going to say, and I'm usually targeting those emotions. Wind and Truth, when I was working on my original outlines, was the one that I knew would probably be the most divisive. And looking at the responses, [they] have been divisive in the ways that I expected and wanted, and so we're good.
It's interesting, each book of The Stormlight Archive I feel needs to reinvent itself. They are so long. I write them as if I were plotting a trilogy, each volume a trilogy, and I feel they would get stale really quickly if they didn't reinvent themselves periodically, with each volume. And so there's things I did in Wind and Truth very specifically to make people uncomfortable. And maybe that's not a wise choice, but it definitely was the artistic choice. I can talk you through one of these.
I'd love that.
Kaladin is kind of our throughline through the first five books, in a lot of ways. Book one is, Kaladin rises up and saves the day. Book two...Kaladin has to question his fundamental beliefs, and then book three is Kaladin breaks, right? That's kind of our trilogy. And you have this idea where [in] books one and two, Kaladin steps up at the end; in book three, he fails to do so. Book four is breaking Kaladin further to that breaking point, and book five is Kaladin steps back. You've had Kaladin as your main emotional throughline through the series so far, and he's not in book five, which is instantly going to make people feel like something's off, something's weird about this book. Kaladin's taking a backseat suddenly, and actually Adolin is doing the kind of plot structure that is typically a Kaladin plot structure, in book five.
There's a lot more that are kind of like that, that I hope, you know, readers who don't even see structure are going to be like, "Something's weird about this book." Because I want the book to be the one when people get done, that they're just not quite sure what's going on and where the series is going anymore, because I knew the series needed that book 5 sort of change of the status quo if I was going to do 10 books. And so I've been watching, and I've been seeing that.
The one piece of Wind and Truth feedback that surprised Brandon Sanderson
BRANDON SANDERSON: Now, there is one piece of feedback I've gotten that has surprised me, and it's very rare that I'm surprised. And that's the prose in book 5 feeling a little more modern.
WiC: That surprised me as well. I wrote about this in my review for Wind and Truth, that you've been including modern language in Cosmere books for a while at this point, and I did not think the prose in Wind and Truth felt noticeably different on that count. So that took you aback?
It took me by surprise. The betas didn't spot it...that's the one that I've been looking at and saying, "Alright, do I need to re-evaluate?" I like listening to the fandom and things like this, and I do think I've been inching more and more modern, because in my head, the Cosmere is going more and more modern. But that discounts kind of one of the reasons people come to fantasy, and that is as a contrast to a lot of contemporary fiction.
People will say, "It feels more YA," which is very interesting because what actually is happening, I think, is that there's this kind of contemporary voice to prose that you'll find in YA, romance, thrillers, mystery...but a lot of the readers are going to experience it mostly through YA, coming out of YA and things like that. And it's interesting to me that that's happening.
The Marvel problem
BRANDON SANDERSON: I also think people are reacting against some of the humor styles that were very popular in when I was growing up. We call it "Whedon-esque" or, you know, things like this. I blame Marvel and Star Wars...I feel like there are some misfires with some of that humor. Like, you look at [Thor: Love and Thunder]...
That's a good example.
Right? Because the one before that, Ragnarok was just really...it's fantastic, might be the best MCU standalone film, non-Avengers film. It might be like that or [Captain America: Civil War], depending on how you count these things, but it's really a really strong film. And the only kind of flaw that it has is now and then, they undercut emotional moments with humor just a tich too much. And then Love and Thunder goes a little bit further. And when you go that step further, I think people are responding against [it], they're like, we do want to have an emotional connection to our characters. We do want to not have every scene...it's almost like films are afraid to have drama, because they're afraid the kids will call it cringe, so they have to cringe it before the kids can call it cringe and be like, "We knew it was cringe, see!" And I think people are responding against that, which makes them hypersensitive.
And so there's something to watch for in that as well, because Wind and Truth has some of its humor scenes up front, where normally they're in the middle, because I kind of do the relaxing, getting ready for the big explosion [at the beginning]. So part one of Wind and Truth is the, "Alright, let's spend some peaceful time with the characters before things go crazy." Normally that's in the middle of a book.
Anyway, I've been looking at those things, with the prose and whatnot, and if something's off, it's only off by five or 10%. But you know, I do listen. I do. And as kind of a student of how prose and storytelling works, it's interesting to try and dig back to, "Alright, what's going on here? Can I interpret what people are saying?"
People are allowed to not like my books! Totally fine. All I would ask is that they assume I'm doing what I'm doing intentionally, because I usually am. As long as people are like, "Sanderson did this and I don't like it," rather than, "Sanderson doesn't know what he's doing." I've been doing this a long time, I usually know what I'm doing, I just might make choices that you don't like. Which, you might be right!
I've said this before, the big thing when I turned in Wind and Truth to Peter [Ahlstrom, and my] editorial department in June before it came out, I said, "Alright, this is the book that has the biggest danger of breaking my career. Beware, be warned, this is the one. Doing this and then making them wait eight years...this is the thing that could end it all." I think it's the right artistic choice. I think when the series is done, people will be like, "Wow, I'm so glad we had book 5." But I also think it's going to be a book that's going to make some people uncomfortable.
That is a very daring decision, the hiatus. I've been a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire for a long time and people love to gripe about The Winds of Winter, but I remember A Dance with Dragons, which was around a six-year gap from A Feast for Crows. I think it's such a credit to how well you've communicated with your fanbase that they weren't like, "Oh my god, six years?!" Because that's around the same amount of time.
But what you said about the prose, and kind of moving into that almost more modern speak, the therapist joke was the thing that came to mind, which I didn't mind, because you set it up.
I love the therapist joke, but that might be the one that's a step too far. I knew when I was writing it, this could be a step too far for people. Sometimes you just have to do the things that make you smile.
The Space Age of the Cosmere
I watched an interview a while back that you did with Daniel Greene where you talked about how you felt like you weren't "equipped" to write true hard science fiction, like Kim Stanley Robinson-type stuff. But the longer the Cosmere has gone on, it almost feels like it is moving towards science fiction, but where obviously the "science" is the science of the Cosmere. I'm thinking of books like The Sunlit Man, Wind and Truth, and The Lost Metal. To some extent, those linguistic choices are going to be part of that. Can you talk about how you're navigating that transition? Do you still expect to be able to write epic fantasy in the Cosmere, or are we fully in the sci-fi era?
What an excellent question. There's a whole lot that I've thought about on this for many years. I don't want to leave behind epic fantasy completely, though I do think that as I move forward, you're going to see two types of epic fantasy in the Cosmere. One...takes place outside the current timeline. When I jump back and I do Hoid's backstory, we're back to epic fantasy, though it'll be Bronze Age. And [the other is] things like, not necessarily the voice of, but things like Tress of the Emerald Sea, where you see touches of the rest of the universe has hit the science fiction era, and there are science fiction things here, but you know, this planet is not there yet and what not. I think you'll see mostly those two types of things.
You'll see a lot more Dune style where it is. Dune is such a strange beast and I love it for it, right? A Fire Upon the Deep has a bit of this same feel where it's like, is this fantasy or is this science fiction? Well, Dune is science fiction, but man, it feels like an epic fantasy. Dune is what proved to me that you can put guns in something and still have the feel of that epic fantasy that I love. Because Dune feels more like Game of Thrones and Wheel of Time then some other fantasy books that are strictly fantasy do, because of some of the tone. So you'll see me doing some things like that as well.
I still don't think I'm equipped to write true hard science fiction. I respect it greatly. But as I've always said, kind of the difference between what I do and what hard science fiction does, is hard science fiction takes what we have and extrapolates realistically to a future, and I take a future and then justify it with the mechanics in-world. And that's a very different thing.
The biggest challenge I will have is I don't want my books to read like technical manuals. There are some people who love that. I let myself do some of that with Navani in [Rhythm of War], and I love it. But I have to be careful that every book doesn't read like a hard science fiction where you have to have a PhD in the Cosmere to understand what's going on.
That's actually a challenge for the Ghostbloods. I want people who read the original Mistborn trilogy, who maybe weren't into Wax & Wayne, to be able to jump to this. And I want it to not read like a technical manual. But at the same time, you can read Tom Clancy and not have to understand the technology in specific that he's referencing, that are causing some of the problems in the Cold War thrillers and things. And so there's a line to walk there, right? How much do I explain? How much do I leave to the hardcore Cosmere fans? How much do I put in an appendix for them? You know, Star Trek gets away with a ton of technobabble, but you don't have to understand any of it. Where is that balance? So that's the biggest challenge for this book other than, you know, writing a fantastic book.
Ghostbloods
So, Ghostbloods. You're into writing that series right now. How much is all that something you're thinking about as you're working on it? And just generally, how's the writing treating you on this series?
It's going really well. So if you don't know the history of Mistborn, I pitched Ghostbloods in 2006.
Wow. Which would have been the year that the first Mistborn book, The Final Empire came out.
Yeah. So I called my editors before the first one came out and I said, "Just so you know, here's kind of my outline for the series." And it was original trilogy, Ghostbloods, and science fiction trilogy. And I walked him through all three of those and said, "Here's what I'm doing: epic fantasy becomes kind of the foundation of mythology and religion for an urban fantasy, and then we jump into a space age science fiction." Back then I was referencing Fifth Element as kind of a fantasy/sci-fi mix that I was shooting for, and saying this is what we're looking at for kind of a trilogy of trilogies. And he's like, "Wow, you're ambitious." He kind of sounded like, "Eh, this will never happen." But it did, it is finally happening.
And so it's been 20 years that I've had like what I wanted to do with Ghostbloods. And I did borrow a little of that for Wax & Wayne. There's things I took and said, "No, this will fit better in the Wax & Wayne series." But it's very cool. It feels awesome to finally...you know, you plan something for 20 years and you get to sit down and finally write it. It feels really nice to get this out of my head.
There's a few of those. Like when I finally get to write the Hoid backstory, that's another one...I know exactly what it's gonna be, I just gotta find the hole in my schedule to write it. And that one's not planned until after Stormlight 10, so people don't have to panic too much. But you know, I've wanted to do this forever, and so being able to sit down and finally do it feels extremely gratifying, and the writing's going great. You know, these are characters that I've known for 20 years that I finally get to introduce to people.
"I felt like George Lucas..."
You mentioned Wax & Wayne. That was the unplanned era of Mistborn. Often when fans on forums talk about this stuff, they refer to the Ghostbloods era as the "80s sci-fi tech thriller" era of Mistborn. Has that tone or anything about it changed at all because of Wax & Wayne? Or just in general, because now as you said, it's been 20 years, you've written more than 20 books in the Cosmere.
A decent amount has changed, like you evolve over time. The core characters and the goals that I'm having have stayed the same. But you know...I have an art department now. I put them for six months doing concept art on Mistborn modern era, and they just kind of were churning [things] out. I felt like George Lucas saying, "Okay, I'm gonna do this one, go further on this. Give me more on this. This is the wrong direction, give me something else for this.'' And I have all this big folder of concept art they did for me. And they're all off on the other things now, but I have this. That's real different, right?
And Ben McSweeney, who's just awesome. He did the concept art for Way of Kings back when I did my original pitch, and now he's on staff. He just loves Mistborn. I found him through Mistborn fan art, that's how I hired him in like 2008 or 2009, whenever it was. And he came up with all these ideas that are really cool for melding some science and fantasy and, you know...how does this feel different from other urban fantasies? We don't just want to do our world, but there's Mistborn. We want it to feel like Scadrial. So that's been a lot of fun. That's changed how I play and interact with that.
Doing Wax & Wayne...I always told people that, one of the key plot points was a Mistborn serial killer. I kind of did that already, and I borrowed that whole plot sequence and put it in Shadows of Self. And so I'm not going in that direction, I'm taking the other kind of parts of it and things. So there's things that slipped into the Wax & Wayne books and felt like a good match.
I also moved the timeframe up about 20 years in-world, so that the Wax & Wayne books aren't quite as distant a memory. Like people that you met during those could theoretically still be alive, the younger ones, right? We're doing like a 50-year jump instead of a 70-year jump, and that 20 years is relevant for some of these things. And I've already set up the Cold War, so I don't have to set that up. It's already in existence, so...you know, stuff like that.
So this is a much more tightly tied series to Wax & Wayne than Wax & Wayne was to the original trilogy, in a way?
Yes, in a way...like I do intend for people to be able to just pick it up, even if they haven't read the original trilogy, or if they haven't read Wax & Wayne. But you know, Wax & Wayne will be lots of good backstory.
Recapturing early career magic
You mentioned your art department. That's a new thing that you didn't have when you conceptualized Ghostbloods, which is obviously a pretty big marker of where you are in your career, which is about as established as it's humanly possible to get for an author. But something I think is really interesting is that in your announcement video for the Secret Projects, you talked about how writing those books in secret and then being able to surprise people with them "reminded you of the early days of your career." You're almost doing something similar with Ghostbloods in that you're writing all three books before you release them, which is the same thing you did with the original Mistborn trilogy. What made you decide to approach it that way, and can you talk at all about like the importance of reclaiming that early career spark for you when you're at this monumental level?
That's also [an] excellent question. So what made me decide, we'll start there. I think every series would be better if it were done this way. But realistically we can't, right? I can take three years and write three books, but Stormlight, like writing one Stormlight book alone takes me three years. Even if only 18 months of that is like hardcore writing, I can't just pick up and go. Like, there's so much work that goes on kind of brainspace-wise to writing one of those that, you know, I just cant. And so because of that it's unrealistic to assume [I could write them all at once]...but it's how Tolkien did it, right? And I like what it did for the Mistborn original trilogy. Being able to write that straight through...there are things I could do, I could get the exact wording in the first book for the foreshadowing of the very last scene — well, not the very last, but you know, the climactic scene. You can get those things in, whereas with Stormlight, I have to do my best at guessing.
Like, I didn't know until a later [Stormlight] book that I was going to age up Gav. And so in the first book, the foreshadowing...it's just the suckling babe. I get later on and I'm like, "Oh, this kid's gonna have to be older than that. He'll have to be at least six." That's not a suckling babe. And then I'm like, "No, he needs to be even older than that, I'm gonna have to time dilate him." The metaphor still works, but the language that I wrote in 2009, that I have to pick up in 2024 when I'm polishing [Wind and Truth] for release...there are things you just have to accept that it's going to have to be a little more metaphoric, when if you can write them all through, you can just make sure the language is exactly as you want it and things like that. So I like being able to do that.
Reclaiming my spark is an interesting question to ask. I've never lost my spark for writing. I absolutely love this. The Secret Projects though taught me that once in a while I need to blow off steam. I need to be able to write something that I don't have a deadline for, and that's the big difference between my career now and my career before I got published. In those early days...it was an awesome time. It was also nerve-wracking, because I didn't know if I'd have a career. But I had a group of friends and expanding acquaintances and their friends who were all reading my books. You know, I had hundreds of people reading my books when I was unpublished, waiting for the next one. But when I finished a book, they never knew what they were going to get, because I didn't write sequels back then. I was trying to break in and I knew I could only break in with the first book. And so all of this growing fan base would just get something random from me. They'd have no idea what was coming next. And I liked that flexibility and freedom.
And so that's why I was able to take these six months — well, they ended in January — but I finished Wind and Truth and I took six months and I said, "I can work on whatever I want during this time." And a big chunk of that became the novella for Tailored Realities, 50,000 words, so it's...you know, it's a novella for me. It's technically a novel, but it's a very short novel. And part of that became going back to White Sand and fiddling on that, part of it became a screenplay for The Emperor's Soul that I'm very proud of.
I need more screenplay practice. Like, I envy [George R.R. Martin] so much, him having worked in television for so many years, and then coming to it and suddenly being able to have a great influence on the first seasons of Game of Thrones because he had been, you know, working in television. I envy him that experience. And so this is like my fifth or so screenplay. So I'm getting to where I feel comfortable writing them and offering feedback on them, but I still need more experience. So I decided, "Hey, I'm gonna write a screenplay on Emperor's Soul," and stuff like that.
I've now blown off that steam, and I was itching to get back to something like...you know, my true love is this deep continuity across many worlds, that's why I keep coming back to it. But I just need a break from it now and then.
Tailored Realities
I wanted to ask about Tailored Realities, which is your non-Cosmere short fiction collection coming out later this year. Was there anything you had to do differently when approaching it than when you put out your Cosmere-specific collection, Arcanum Unbounded?
I knew I wanted a cornerstone story for Tailored Realities. The Cosmere collection...it didn't have anything exclusive to it. When we released it, I believe one of the Stormlight novellas had not been published widely, but then it immediately got released on its own later, and there were already plans for that. Like I did write Edgedancer kind of for it, but I also knew Tor was gonna [publish it on its own]. And so I knew for Tailored Realities that having a cornerstone story was in some ways more important.
I release these collections because I feel that they're fan friendly, not because they make money. Collections don't make money. In fact, Edgedancer selling on its own has made more money than [Arcanum Unbounded]. So has Dawnshard, like easily, handily, just tons more. And so the collections are there because I feel fans need a place to be just like, "I can't keep track of all the stuff he's doing. Here's a book that has all of it." If you have this, you're up to date, at least counting all the years leading up to its release. They're just a fan-friendly thing to have, to get it all together.
I don't anticipate [Tailored Realities] breaking any sales records. It's there to be a fan-friendly way to get everything collected that you would want to have for your collection, so that you don't have to hunt it all down. And maybe someday we will do a "Moment Zero" on its own...probably will, because I mean, if the other things are an example, they do sell better on their own. But I like having it here just as a statement to the fans. I'm gonna do this. We'll eventually someday have an Arcanum Unbounded 2.
I relate to that fan-friendliness, because I have Arcanum Unbounded, and I remember being excited about its release because I didn't know where I could go to read something like Sixth of the Dusk before that book came out. Are there any other stories aside from "Moment Zero" in Tailored Realities that you are especially excited to make more broadly available?
Well, it's got my only flash fiction piece. Under 500 words. I'm not convinced it's very good, but it only takes one page in the collection, so people will forbear. I think it's pretty cool, but, you know, flash fiction is not my strong suit. It's good for me to practice it, right? I want to practice all the things that are uncomfortable...I wanted to make sure that I do practice that now and then, and so I slip that in.
But you know, the showpieces are going to be "Moment Zero" they're going to be the "Perfect State," which was nominated for the Hugo, and they're gonna be "Snapshot." You know, those are going to be my strongest stories in the collection, almost assuredly. There's some other fun things in there. We didn't put any of my old fiction in, so this doesn't include any Sanderson Curiosity, none of the stuff that I did before I got published. But it does have "Defending Elysium" in it and some of the stuff that I wrote pretty early in my career. Technically, I wrote before I got published, but then I sold right around the time that I got published. So basically this is everything non-Cosmere that's not Legion. Legion is its own collection. You'll have it all there.
And then it's got, like three exclusive short stories. One is the flash fiction piece. One is another story that I wrote just kind of for fun and never sent anywhere. It's too short to to really do anything. And I don't generally send the short fiction to the magazines, because I wouldn't be able to tell if they were buying it because it's from me or not...having Brandon Sanderson on the cover. And so I just saved it for this. And then "Moment Zero," which I'm interested to [see] the reaction to...
"Moment Zero" and the challenge of writing a modern cop story
One thing [about "Moment Zero"], it is a cop story. And writing about police officers in today's environment is something where you gotta be like...you know, I love the classic cop story, I love me John McClain, things like this...but we do interface differently with police officers in 2025 than we did in the 90s when Die Hard was written. I actually kind of put some talking about social issues in it in the first draft, and my beta readers exclusively are like, "There's not place for this Brandon, even touching on it is a bad idea. You can't do a good job with it, this is an explosive action story." And I actually pulled back on a lot of that.
You know, like I have a pair of heroic police officers, I think there are heroic police officers out there. Does not mean that we shouldn't be having difficult conversations about how policing is handled in the United States. And so I'm curious...how's the response to just a classic cop story in today's environment?
That's really intriguing. That makes me more excited to read this story.
Well, like I said, I pulled back on talking about this. Both from the non-cops and the cops I had read it, just [were] like, "This isn't the place for it." I do think I talked about that enough in Wax & Wayne, where you kind of had Wax versus Marasi where she's like, "Hey, you know, we need to police differently than you policed when you were out in the Roughs." So I did dig into it. But you know, it is an interesting thing to think about when you approach writing a cop drama these days.
The secrets of Wind and Truth
Let's bring things back around to Wind and Truth here at the end. This book was a big deal because it's the culmination of the first arc of The Stormlight Archive. A lot of people have been waiting a very long time for it. You dropped what I thought was a pretty mind-blowing revelation near the end of the book, when it's confirmed that Odium was the one who caused the deaths of the Shards on Sel, which is the planet of Elantris. Elantris came out all the way back in 2005. How long have you known and planned that secret, and were there any other bombshells like that in Wind and Truth that you were especially excited to finally reveal?
I forget what I've told fans and when I haven't. Like, I believe I had mentioned just in signings and things — not that everyone should know, it's not been in the books until now — but I believe I mentioned that Odium was responsible for this back in the early [2010s]. When I sold Elantris and was working on Mistborn, that's when I sketched out the broad strokes of the Cosmere with Sel (Elantris) Roshar, and Scadrial forming kind of my backbones. And so I knew about the interactions between the Shards on those planets in pretty intricate detail.
Let's see, what other things were people waiting for? I mentioned that I think all the Shards have been named now. And so people who were waiting for that, Wind and Truth got that across. What other big bombshells did I release?
Shallan...
Yeah, let's talk about Shallan's parentage. One of things you have to do when you're writing a book across 20 years, is you have to make a decision. And the decision is how well are you going to foreshadow your bombshells? I was able to kind of watch Robert Jordan and read his notes, and he never said, but I got the sense he got very annoyed that fans were guessing his bombshell revelations very early on. And you get this sense of annoyance from him. And I have no evidence for this, but for Wheel of Time fans, I really think that he changed who Demandred was because fans guessed it. I think. I'm in that camp. The notes don't indicate either way, but I'm in that camp. You know, George has even talked about this I believe, where he's talked about fans and theories and how you interface with them.
One of the things I decided very early on, was I was not going to change things because fans guessed them. it's important to me for multiple reasons, one being that I think the books will stand the test of time better if I don't. Because people who don't have 12 years to guess things and just read the books straight through...they're not going to pick up that Gav is the champion, right? I really don't think anyone's going to guess that if they sit and read the books. But the foreshadowing's all there so strongly that if you're the type that is used to my tricks and has 15 years from the first book until book book 5 is out, that the theories can all be there.
Shallan's mother can be guessed, and I kind of like that. Part of it annoys me as an author because you're like, "I can't fool these people anymore." Part of me is like, well, a twist is all about the execution and not the actual twist, right? You don't twist just to have a twist. You twist because it makes the story and the characters more meaningful, and the narrative more meaningful in some way. Shallan's mother, I think is a very meaningful twist for lots of reasons. It was baked into the series, and fans found all the clues, and they brought them together and presented arguments and, you know, they were right. I do like that fans can be right.
I do like that that's how my books are, that you can do this...but fans do have to understand that expectation of having your mind blown by twists...I can still pull one out now and then, like what happened with Taravangian at the end of book 4. They have to be a different kind of twist. And I have more of these planned, but some things just kind of happen organically to the characters, some things I make sure are built up over time so you can go back and find all the clues.
So I'm pleased with how the twist like that happened and whatnot, but I do recognize, like for some fans...I watched this in Wheel of Time, being part of the fandom. People get so invested in the theories and reading the theories that when it just is one of the theories — like when Asmodean's killer was just one of the theories — a lot of people are like, "That's it?" Well, it's like it can't not be that because you've now discussed every option ad nauseam, and to blow your minds, it would require undermining the actual narrative of the story.
So I do hope to be able to blow people's minds now and then. I do hope that, you know, the decision Dalinar made at the end of Wind and Truth was unexpected and leaves lots of question marks in a good way. But a lot of things like, you know what? I'm totally fine if you figure it out. That's why the foreshadowing's there, so that you can. If you couldn't, then those styles of twists are not good twists, in my opinion.
Surprising yet inevitable is the great phrase. And I shoot for twists like that. Doing it across books...if people read closely — which I love that they do — they're gonna guess them. That's okay. Hopefully they'll enjoy how I performed the twist.
With Wind and Truth, it seems like people did respond really well to a lot of those twists, you know, Dalinar's choice...and the Kaladin one at the end. I get a little emotional even thinking about that one, it was so well done.
I did see people guessing that one. The foreshadowing's there, but I saw a lot fewer. I think people thought it was a harebrained theory when people were posting them on Reddit, but it's one of the ones I was most excited to be able to show off. Because again...we needed this book to make you ask questions about where are we going, what's even happening. And now people can understand why two of the Heralds are main characters in the back five, right? Taln and Ash are both main characters, and you kind of will see us dealing with who they are a little bit more. And now you know how our inroads to that might happen.
An immense thank you to Brandon Sanderson for taking the time for this interview, and to the folks at Tor Books and Dragonsteel for arranging it.
As of this writing, Sanderson is hard at work on Ghostbloods, and nearly a quarter of the way through his first draft of book one in the series. He has two books coming out this year: the short fiction collection Tailored Realities on December 9 (currently available for preorder); and the Dragonsteel premium edition of Isles of the Emberdark sometime this fall, his fifth Secret Project novel which is set in the space age of the Cosmere. A wider release of Isles of the Emberdark from Tor Books is slated to follow on February 3, 2026.
To stay up to date on the latest from Brandon Sanderson, check out his website along with the website for his company Dragonsteel, or follow him across social media on YouTube, Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and TikTok.
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