1. Where do you get your ideas?
2. Do you have any writing tips for me?
3. How can I get a writing career?
4. Will you do my homework?
5. Will you read my story?
6. Fine, how do I get an editor or agent to read my story?
7. How do you feel about fanfiction/ fan art/ wikis/ etc?
8. No, I mean is it cool if I write fanfic with your setting/characters?
9. Do you answer emails or are you too good for that now, Mr. Snotty Author?
10. Are you going to go back to Midcyru and write more about Kylar?
11.I’d like to get a signed book…
12. No, seriously, I’m a collector and stuff. Can I send my fifteen copies to your house? I tracked down your real address through the internet.
13.Will you come visit me in Karumba, Australia?
14.Cover art: Was that you? Did you design the covers of the Night Angel Trilogy? How much control did you have?
15. Weren’t there two different covers of The Black Prism?
16. Are your characters based on real people?
17.Is the Night Angel Trilogy going to be made into a movie?
18.What age were you when you first started writing?
19.When did you first start thinking about Night Angel Trilogy? *small spoilers* If you haven’t finished Night Angel, stop!
20. When did you first start thinking about the Lightbringer Series?
1. Where do you get your ideas?
Everywhere. Nowhere. If there’s one part of writing that’s truly mysterious, it’s this. Plus, I get thousands of ideas. I get ideas from history–say when I read about the Medicis and their messed up family or when I read about Constantine, or…whatever. The trick is to sift out the good ideas: the ones that I will stay excited about for years, and that I can write well with my present experience, passion, wisdom, and knowhow. (Or that I can research within an acceptable amount of time.)
For example, I’d love to write a novel about the Thuggee of India who (probably) assassinated tens or hundreds of thousands of travelers over three hundred years as a form of religious devotion–and as their job. Sweet, I’m interested in assassins. I can write dialogue. I can write good action sequences, conflicted characters, different systems of morality. I can envision some characters on different sides, a great love story, a framing story from before the British internment and at the trial of the strangler who confessed (in real life) to murdering something like 962 people. But… I’ve never even visited India. There’s a bunch of conflicting scholarship about the Thuggee, with newer scholars alleging that the British exaggerated the threat to justify their own presence in India, and basically ethnically cleansed an entire people who were probably innocent because they were racists. Eww-kay, can I become an authority on India and the Thuggee enough to pick out fact from fiction? Oh, and preferably, if I could do that before I run out of money and starve, that would be awesome. Hmm. Nope.
So, good idea, but not a good idea for me. This happens All The Time. It’s part of the job. Writers have ideas. Lots of them. Too many to capture in a single lifetime.
2. Do you have any writing tips for me?
Yes. I keep them in my back pocket so they squish every time I sit down.
Um, yuck… seriously, dude.
Write what you’re passionate about. I wouldn’t model your hero on yourself, though some people do that–but I would give her some traits that hook into your own deepest fears: Am I ever going to find someone special? If you really knew me, would you like me? Am I ever going to amount to anything? Am I ever going to get out of this town/this relationship? What if there is something under the bed/in the closet/in the dark? What if I never achieve my dream? What if my boyfriend dies? What if my girlfriend found out about X?
If you put one of those big questions at the core of your character, if your plot starts to wander, you can go back to that central thing–hit it from another direction, make it worse–and you’ll find your book is practically writing itself. Well, not really. It’s still work, but it will help focus you.
There’s a thousand other great writing tips, but generally, do what works for you. Try different things and keep doing whatever it is that helps you get words on the page.
3. How can I get a writing career?
I recommend Walmart. Nah, seriously, every writer you talk to is an exception to the rule. I did some things that were dumb in my own career, and a thing or two that was dumb that turned out to be brilliant. So should I counsel you to do things the (dumb) way that I did them so your odds can be even lower? My advice isn’t groundbreaking: read, then count the cost, then write what you love, and write as honestly and passionately as you can, study writers that you love–as in, take out a pen and circle things that they do that worked for you and figure out why–and then hang on. If you can hone your craft, and throw away novels that won’t sell (sorry, the selling part matters), and you can handle disappointment for five to ten years (or, sadly, forever), then this is the job for you. Of course, if you just HAVE TO WRITE and you can’t be discouraged or dissuaded, then it’s simple: write.
Sorry, I was a teacher, so I don’t actually believe that Mr.
Hornswobble wanted ME to analyze my book and present it to class. Points for trying, though.
5. Will you read my story? (It’s only 1200 pages!)
Due mostly to time restrictions and partly due to lawyers, I can’t read your book or story. In my opinion, writers aren’t even the best people to HAVE read your story. First, we tend to like our own way of doing things in stories, and secondly, writers tend to make decisions in our own writing intuitively rather than analytically. Editors and agents make better analysts, in my experience.
6. Fine, how do I get an editor or agent to read my story?
It’s very difficult. It generally takes a long time, and there’s a lot of disappointment. First, write a great book. Then rewrite it until it’s absolutely stunning. Then rewrite the beginning until the first five pages suck every single reader in. If you write mind-shattering endings or brilliant middles but your beginning is rough, no one will ever see them. Believe me, the beginning is the hardest part for me. Do the work.
Next, what helped me was reading a number of books like Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass. Disclosure: he’s now my agent, but I thought the book was excellent long before I met him. Do the stuff in those books, even if it hurts, even if it means you have a lot more work to do.
Then, I recommend saving up and going to a writer’s conference. Yes, this is hard if you’re poor. I almost DIDN’T go to the conference where I met my now-agent because it cost $350 and it was a big stretch for me. Go. But go prepared.
Prepare a two-sentence pitch. Q: “What’s your book about?” A: “A planet-killing asteroid is hurtling toward Earth, and only a rowdy bunch of misfit deep-core oil drillers can fly into space to place the nuke to destroy it.” Your pitch has to be fairly accurate, and totally interesting. Sure, YOUR book has nuances that won’t be captured in a two sentence pitch. Deal. Then have a two minute pitch, in case the agent says, “Wow, sounds interesting, tell me more.” You’ll be super nervous when you give your pitch. That’s okay. Agents and editors are used to people being super nervous when they give their pitch.
They’ll probably say, “Sounds interesting. Send me a few pages.” Send them a few pages with a cover letter that says, “Hey, I met you at X, and you said my novel sounded interesting.” Other folks on the internet can tell you about the rest of the cover letter.
You’ve already polished your first few pages like I told you, right? So send it to them. Then get ready to wait. It took me nine months from when I met my agent and he said, “Send me a few pages,” to when he signed me. Then it took two years to sell The Way of Shadows…which went on to become a NY Times Best-Seller. Go figure.
Google this, though, and find out other people’s advice on pitching and querying, though. I did it unsuccessfully many times, and only successfully once. 
7.How do you feel about fanfiction/ fan art/ wikis/ etc?
I could never read fanfiction because there’s really only two possibilities: you write my characters and my world worse than I do, in which case it pains me, or you write it better than I do, in which case I give up writing and go live in a hermitage. Fan art is great. I love to see it. Wikis are awesome, too. At some point, my brain is going to explode with all the characters running around in it, and I’m going to need some reminders of who everyone is, who’s their cousin, and what their eye color and hair style is.
8. No, I mean is it cool if I write fanfic with your setting/characters?
Oooh, well why didn’t you just ask?
I allow fan fiction licensed as derivative, noncommercial fiction under the Creative Commons. What does that mean?
1) You can’t make money from fanfic based on my work.
2) You need to post a disclaimer on your fic, like so: “The Black Prism/The Night Angel [whichever] is copyright Brent Weeks. This story is licensed under the Creative Commons as derivative, noncommercial fiction.” (See CC website to learn more about what that means: For MY purposes, it means you can’t sue ME if someday I happen to write something similar. (Unlikely, and I would never do that on purpose, but I have to cover myself.)
3) I’m still not going to read your story. I’m too busy writing the next book, which is what you want, right?
4) You can post your fanfic on my forum www.brentweeks.ning.com, where you’ll have a built-in audience rather than having to go somewhere else. We’re creating a handy-dandy new place for it (Fan Creations).
(And a nod to the fantastic Jim Butcher, whose approach I’m mimicking here. Thanks for doing the legwork, Jim. Love those Dresden Files.)
9. Do you answer emails or are you too good for that now, Mr. Snotty Author?
My email address is brent@brentweeks.com
For a few months, back when I was first published, I answered every single email. Pretty quickly, it put a serious squeeze on my writing time. And then it became a huge burden. I love getting emails. I love that my work makes people want to respond directly to me. And believe me, I get it. I remember the feeling of emailing an author and not hearing anything back. It sucked.
I make a concerted effort to connect with fans, and spend a lot of time doing so. You can find me on Twitter, on Facebook, I’ll update the news page here on the first of every month, and I visit my forum regularly and do live chats and video interviews from fans’ questions and the like. I also make personal appearances and go to a couple of conventions and do book tours. What I can’t do is answer even a fifth of my emails. I love getting them, and I do read them all. But I reply to very few.
Because I’m a jerk.
10. Are you going to go back to Midcyru and write more about Kylar?
Yes and no. As I’ve detailed elsewhere, I do plan to write more books set in Midcyru. Kylar will probably be a side character. I may change my mind some day, but right now, I think he’s done the most interesting internal growth that he’s going to do. And externally, he’s so tough now, he’d have to kill continents to have a challenge. There ARE ways to get around that, but so far all the ones I can imagine are lame. I won’t write a lame book (well, not on purpose), not even if it means I get to spend time with characters I love.
11.I’d like to get a signed book…
That’s not a question.
Oh, man. No, please don’t send your books to me. First, I’d probably lose your book in my piles of stuff, and you’d never get it back, and then you’d be mad at me. Second, your book would probably get beat up in transit. If you want a signed hardcover of The Black Prism, go HERE. Shaun sells them for a small markup and will ship internationally. From time to time, I will also offer bookplates, through my forum in limited quantities, first-come, first-serve, but always free.
13.Will you come visit me in Karumba, Australia?
Aye, Karumba. Travel. I love to travel, but I love to write more. Every year, I’ve got only 52 weeks to write. Take a vacation, I’m down to 50. Do a book tour, I’m down to 48. Travel to a professional conference or two, 46. Research, more weeks. I get to factor in a couple of weeks of being stuck, too. Always happens. And then I have to decide how many conventions to go to. I tend to work on the research and the reading and the business that goes into writing even while I travel, but I can’t write while I travel, it requires too much concentration and dedicated time. All this to say, the life of a professional writer can very quickly crowd out his time to write. Once I let that happen, I’m really shooting myself in the foot. So I have to choose what I can NOT do. Most of the above are non-negotiable. (I’d love to trade in those weeks of being stuck, believe me.) And that’s even if cost were no object, haha. So, more weeks on the road equals less pages. Sometimes I’m willing to make the tradeoff–like when I got invited to Paris–but I try not to stack those big time commitments up in the same year. I love to meet fans; I really do. But my biggest professional commitment is to write books for all of you. Simple as that.
Actually, it was a live model. I saw earlier versions that were straight up photos, and some of the measurements did get played with afterward when they started doing some more intensive photoshopping to make it look more like a painting–and do little things like take the creases out of his hood. (Yep, someone had a real hood that he wore that had obviously been sitting folded in a drawer somewhere.)
I talked with Tim Holman, the head of Orbit, about this in depth, and he was very kind to involve me in cover concepts for my trilogy—which he didn’t have to do. His philosophy, and now mine, is to design a cover that lets the reader know in one glance what kind of book they’re looking at. You don’t like assassins? This isn’t the book for you. Of course, many seasoned fantasy readers love their old narrative covers, and may want to puzzle out the whole scene painted on the front, spine, and back of the book, so you lose points with them. And of course, part of me thinks, “But this series is about so much more than just an assassin!” But the cover’s purpose is merely to point the right people TO the book. Same goes for the back cover copy. Mine is very brief and focuses purely on the characters—because characterization is my great strength. I like to think I have other strengths, too, but if you try to convey that this book is great in every respect, you end up conveying nothing at all.
15. Weren’t there two different covers of The Black Prism?
Yes and no. An early cover got leaked onto the internet. I thought it did some things well, but I didn’t love it. Basically, if you looked at that cover, you knew that this new book had been written by me. So if you were a casual reader who enjoyed the Night Angel books, but didn’t remember my name, if you saw that book, you’d be visually reminded. There were a couple of negatives: it looked like it was the same series, which it’s not. And because the Night Angel books have done so well, and because their covers were so different when they came out, other publishers have started doing covers that are very similar. So where the Night Books were so strikingly different in 2009, now they’re not. I also didn’t like the fact that the cover wasn’t accurate to the way magic works in this new world–which no one at Orbit could have known, because none of them had seen the book yet.
Orbit chewed it over, and knew by the time that cover was leaked that they wanted to do something new. And I have to say, I really appreciate that willingness they have to take risks and try things that are new. A lot of places would just say, “It worked before, we aren’t changing it.”
16. Are your characters based on real people?
Nope. Of course, I can’t help but use things that I learn from real people, but I never just pick up Uncle Bob and see what he’d do if faced with murderous hordes from the north.
17.Is the Night Angel Trilogy going to be made into a movie?
I have sold the movie rights, but dozens of things have to fall into place to go from here to there. To put it bluntly, there’s about a 2% chance now of it happening. If there is movement, I’ll let you know.
18.What age were you when you first started writing?
I started my first novel at 13. I wrote another novel in college (and the year after I graduated).
The novel I wrote in college had structural problems that will keep it from ever seeing the light of day. But the story wasn’t flawed–just the way I told it. There was a character in that story who showed up just for a couple of scenes and was totally scary. Inscrutable. Powerful. Operating by his own moral code, which he didn’t reveal to anyone.
When I realized I needed to abandon that book, I decided that instead of throwing away all of the work I did, I would use some of it. So I decided to figure out who that scary guy was. I moved to a new country (Cenaria), wound the clock backward by about 18 years, and examined that scary dude as a kid. That’s Azoth.
This was cool for me because I knew where Azoth was headed. But I also knew where the world was headed. So I could play around with some prophecies. I already knew the people who weren’t even born yet whom these prophecies would foretell. At the same time, by moving to another part of the world, I could invent new stuff.
20. When did you first start thinking about the Lightbringer Series?
Maybe October of 2008, right when The Way of Shadows was first published. I had to decide whether I would write more books set in the Night Angel world or if I was going to do something entirely new. Two things tipped me toward doing something new: I didn’t want to get trapped writing books in one world for my whole career, and I wanted to try to stretch myself creatively.
The Night Angel world is, at first blush, fairly standard European medieval. The benefit of that was that I could throw readers into the story at high speed. You’ve been to worlds like this before, so it’s not confusing. We can focus on story and character, without the boring stuff. Then as I moved into Shadow’s Edge and Beyond the Shadows, I introduced lots of other cultures and revealed more of the complexity of the world.
With Lightbringer, I thought I was up for the challenge of introducing an entirely new world, new rules, new characters, new magic–all while keeping the story moving fast. I also wanted to do something that you’d never seen before. Making up everything new was a significant challenge, though. It was harder than I thought it would be, but I’m really happy that I did it.
