Brent Weeks – The Black Prism – Q & A

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to see fantasy author Brent Weeks do a reading and Q&A session in support of his latest release The Black Prism.  The questions covered topics ranging from how he writes to how he plots to comparisons between this new series and his Night Angel trilogy. 

Here is a transcript of the Q&A session.

Audience question: What kind of degree did you get at Hillsdale?

Brent Weeks: I studied English at Hillsdale, had a little bit of classics on the side.

How much longer do I have to suffer [until] the next book?

The next book I plan to have out in like 16 months…ish.  I write as fast as I can.  This kind of goes in with another question, “how many books are there going to be?”   I know the story, and I know what has to happen.   I was laying out the story for what happens in book two, and I know the story, and I know where it ends, and I know what has to happen.   And I was putting on a desk like this, so I have little 3×5 cards and I cut them in half and I write down a scene on each one so I can get a lot.  And book 2 was looking enormous to me, like the story I know, but how you break it up into a book is different.  And so I’m a little scared that book 2 is going to be gigantic. I called up my publisher and was like “could you take ‘Trilogy’ off the title? Can you take it off the book cause I know you’re laying it out today because it might be four books?”   I will only do it as four books if I can figure out four really satisfying ending points.  [To question asker] You’ve obviously read this book, you see that it ends.  There is an ending, obviously not everything is wrapped up, but there’s a story and it has an arc and it has a conclusion and even though you want to keep going at least you’re done.  So if I can come up with four great endings it will be four books.  If I cannot come up with four great endings book two will just be much bigger.  If it’s much bigger, it will take me longer to write.  I promised my publisher this book would be my shortest book yet, and of course it’s my longest book yet.

Do you know how the whole story arc goes or just through Book 2 so far?

I know book 2 really, really well.  I know most of the important things in Book 3.  The way I write is I basically set out the important things that I know have to happen and then I write toward those, making the main conflict worse and worse and worse until you come to a crisis. But I give myself the freedom that if I find things that are more interesting as I go along, you know, like there might be a scene I’m writing that I think of now that I won’t get to write for three years, if in the intervening time I come up with something better I’m not just going to stick with the outline.  Or if I’m writing something and I go “you know I’ve seen this before, that kind of bores me,” then I’ll change it.  I’ll work on it until it’s better.  So I know those major plot points.  I have most of what’s going to happen to all the main characters at the very very end, although I have a couple of different possibilities for a couple of characters.  So I’ve got the plan pretty well in hand for now.

Since you already have a successful trilogy, how much did you have to write on this idea to sell [it] to your publisher?

I was fantastically lucky with that.  I wrote the first trilogy, it came out, it was doing fine, and my publisher said to me “we want your next three books.”  And they didn’t care what I wrote about.  I still had to write a little blurb “this is what the story is going to be about and it will just be one book!”  They laughed at me and said “you’re not capable of just writing one book” and I said “you’re right.”  So, honestly I was a little bit fortunate that the first trilogy sort of found success over six months.  It got more and more popular, because if had been really really popular right away they would have said “we want more of those.”  So this gave me some freedom.  I got to choose what I was going to write next. 

How do you design completely different worlds?

With a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, unfortunately.  Basically I wanted to do something different than the Night Angel world.  I made some decisions with the Night Angel world that it was going to be pretty close, especially at first, to like your typical medieval Northern European kind of thing.  And then after that I sort of introduced more complexity.  Having a world that you’ve seen in other fantasy stories, or like close to that, allows me to hit the ground running and really go, and not have to explain a lot.   You know, you say “medieval fantasy setting” and everyone goes “okay, I get you, let’s go, tell me the story.”  So that was good, that was fun.  I wanted to try something harder.  I want to do world-building that’s really interesting. I want to do magic that’s really interesting.  So, I took all the ideas and all the stuff that I had kind of done before, and I said, let’s do something different.  I think I didn’t realize how big of a task I was biting off, but I really enjoyed it. 

In this book, and also in the Night Angel trilogy, your political system and moral character, they seem to really be based on Rousseau and Machiavelli especially.  Did you study political theory before or did you study it while you were writing the book?

This is a beautiful thing about writing epic fantasy.  I can do whatever I want as long as it’s interesting.  I find Machiavelli just a fascinating guy.  I did read him for one class in college, but he’s a guy who really didn’t live up to his own beliefs, because he was a better man than what he actually talked about and seemed to advocate.  Certainly my own understanding of the human creature comes through in my books.  So I think some of the Machiavellian stuff probably works in real life, so that’s going to find fruit in my books.  But I’m not going to beat you over the head with “hey guys, political theory time, chapter 6.”   So those things come through, and I like to explore to different people’s point of view and different systems of morality at work in the same world. 

You’ve got a brother theme in this book and a brother theme coming up in Night Angel, are you stealing from one for the other?

Actually the Night Angel one is going in a really different direction, and so I see where it looks similar from here, but that’s going to be really, really different.  So it’s not really plundering, and I can’t really explain to you why because I’d be giving spoilers for something I’m not going to be able to write for three or four years.  So you’d probably hold me to it.  But they are very different ideas, and I hope you’ll see I’m that telling you the truth four years from now.

You mentioned the 3×5 note cards.  When you actually start writing do you use a word processing program or a novel writing program?

People look at a novelist and say “that must be the way you do it, so that’s the right way.”  I don’t think there is a right way.  The way I do things is…I do a lot of different ways because I’m always trying to see what works better for me.  Generally I just have a word processing document.  I write down a lot of cool stuff.  Things that fascinate me, or I run across somebody’s view point and I try to understand it.  And I start to come up with a character.  Instead of having your typical plucky youth, let’s have a fat kid be the main character…Okay, well that’s kind of interesting to me, so my mind sticks to that.  Then I just write down tons of stuff.  Fat kid…okay, so he’s mouthy and he’s insecure and blah blah blah.  So I’ll write down a hundred pages of notes, and I’ll just spend time dreaming.  It’s a little bit terrifying, because it feels like you’re not doing anything, but I spend that time…a couple of months.  Then I start seeing if there’s a story there.   Then I’ll start getting out those 3×5 cards, and I write down the cool scenes on them, and I jumble them on my desk.  Then things slowly, through the weird creative process, start to glom together.   Things start to fit.  And I go “is this a different story than I’ve seen before?” or “is this a different twist that I haven’t seen that interests me enough for me to invest the next two years of my life in?”  And then as I go forward, I try all sorts of different things.  Different people, different stuff works, and unfortunately you just have to try until you find what works for you. 

Are there any other authors in this genre you like to read for your own enjoyment?

Of course I grew up on Tolkien, Robert Jordan.  Really enjoy George Martin, he’s a huge influence on my whole generation of writers.  Now I’m not reading as much as I would like to, because I’m fairly easily influenced by other writers and so I try to protect doing my own thing.  I do get manuscripts from people now.  Publishers send me things and say, “hey if you like this will you say something nice about it?”  Every once in awhile I get something fun.  I recently read a book by a guy named Douglas Hublik whose not out yet, it’s going to come out in March.  If you like the assassin goodness and sort of the gritty stuff, you know, it like starts with the main character torturing someone.  It’s a bit rough, but it’s really fun. Dark humor.  The books I read, no one else has read yet.   It’s kind of a downer for me, because it kills the social aspect, but there it is.

How did you sit down and write your first book?

I knew I wanted to be a writer for a long time.  I tended bar for awhile.  I’d write during the day and tend bar at night.  Then I got a job as a school teacher, and I wrote nothing all year.  I really liked teaching and I liked the kids, but I was dying inside, because I love writing more, and I wasn’t able to write and teach at the same time.  When I got married, my wife actually supported me, and she worked the day job and I wrote all day.  So that certainly helped that there was some guilt that my wife was working somewhere that she didn’t enjoy.  Like I better be doing something.  But it’s more the practice, like, if I’m deeply unhappy when I’m not writing, which I am, then I need to do whatever it takes to get the words down.  Faulkner said “I write only when inspiration strikes,” and I make sure it strikes every morning at 9 a.m.  What I call it is butt-in-the-chair time, like this is my writing time, and I’m going to write.  And you protect that time, and you don’t do other stuff.   Turn off the internet or whatever it takes for you to protect it and do it and look forward to it. Then you build stuff up in your head so that when you do sit down, you’ve got ideas.  But it’s discipline, it’s work, it’s a job. 

I mean, inspiration does strike, and I have days where I’m just tearing through it, doing a million things, and I write really, really fast and far, and it’s fun all day long.  And then there’s day where it’s like “okay, I know what needs to happen in this scene,” and it’s usually that first sentence or that first paragraph, and if you can just force yourself to write it, then you can get the ball rolling and you can write more.  You have to be willing to write bad stuff.  It’s like, if this first sentence or paragraph stinks, I can come back and fix it.  But if there is nothing on the page, you can’t fix it.  So you have to be willing to write bad things in order to get the story going.   Whatever that is for you that gets words on the page…it’s really easy to go back and edit because the critical mind can be forced to come out and play whenever you want.  The muse is a little harder, but if you’re putting words down on the page it’s a lot easier to get the Muse to play with you.