Christopher Paolini — Eragon author talks worldbuilding, fantasy/sci-fi, how to plot, and themes

welcome everybody to a particularly unique episode uh on the channel because i am talking with the author who got a million kids to read fantasy and another million to read full stop christopher paolini author of the inheritance cycle and his new book to sleep in a sea of stars welcome thanks for having me here i've actually been a big fan of your channel and watched quite a few of the videos over the past uh it's a year year and a half so it's really fun to be talking with you today oh that's a very kind of you it's always you know really cool when you learn someone who is so fundamental to the community that you're in uh knows about your work uh so you're coming out with a new sci-fi novel and people kind of known you for fantasy for a long time so this is really expanding kind of your resume and what you kind of want to be known for and what what your work is would you mind telling me a little bit about your book and when it comes out sure well the book uh comes out on september 15 2020 that is this year and actually i can show you sorry i had this here earlier i'll just grab this this is the advanced reading copy of the book and as you can see it's a big boy it is a it is a large 900 pages i believe give or take exactly so with um seven interior illustrations actually eight if you count the end papers which are gorgeous uh with some art done by my assistant emmanuella and we have logos in here maps all sorts of cool stuff so yeah so this is the book to sleep in a sea of stars it is science fiction it is an epic adventure it is the story of a of a woman named kira navares who's a xenobiologist and she's on the survey team that's examining a moon preparing it for a human colony and as always tends to happen in these sorts of stories she discovers something that is not supposed to be there which is this basically an alien artifact and the consequences of that discovery lead her and other characters on this giant journey across the galaxy and it's you know there are spaceships lasers aliens explosions and of course tentacles as i'm sure you've heard me say so i've heard that yet yeah and and i like i said i grew up reading as much science fiction as fantasy so this was my attempt to take the things i loved about this genre sort of throw them in a blender put my own twist on it and say a few things that i wanted to say about the relationship of individuals versus our responsibility to society also some questions of bodily autonomy and and of course some of the large existential questions that have always driven my writing in general so so that's the new book and actually i'm not going to put on the floor again because i have worked on this book for so long i mean my last big book came out in 2011 so i've worked on this for so long i just i can't have this out of my sight at the moment in my office so whenever i'm working i just kind of have it on the shelf or i have it right here on my desk and i can just glance over and see that gigantic paulini on the spine yeah yeah it's uh beautifully designed i i really want to say that cover really stunning it's it's it's so it really stands out how did you did you did you like contribute to that or is massively well i'm at the state of my career where i mean i have been writing professionally for 22 years at this point and i you know the publisher is very very open to having a dialogue with me about the design of the book the look of the book so we had a lot of conversations about the cover we looked at a lot of possibilities and what made this cover so difficult is that i was incredibly fortunate with the inheritance cycle to have some pretty striking and pretty iconic covers within the fantasy genre you know there aren't really any books in y.a or fantasy that really look like the covers of the inheritance cycle and i mean you see aragon you recognize it everyone knows it so yeah it was kind of like well what could we do that could hold its own and also show that this is a adult novel a little more sophisticated maybe science fiction uh but i will say blue does tend to be seem to be my color so i'm happy with that yeah yeah it's kind of nice that you know you're returning to that though those blue hues that you started with in aragon uh yeah and you say the word sorry i know i was just going to say we have a little bit of a lag here for our audience watching but um in germany and a couple of european countries the book is actually so large that just like with brandon sanderson's books and some other authors they're splitting it into two volumes so the first volume is going to be blue like this and then the second volume is going to be a wonderful emerald green which once you've read the story will seem very fitting oh that that catches my attention just like the idea of uh green being thematically relevant you've mentioned the term fractal verse before in relation to this book where does that come in i'm so glad you asked i can even show you uh so i don't know how well this will show up on camera but right near the beginning of the book we have this which says underneath that logo it says a fractal verse novel and that is the logo for the fractal verse so the fractal verse is something that i and my sister have been working on for a number of years and the idea was to create a setting that we could tell pretty much any type of story that we wanted to so something that encompasses the real world the far future the distant past and embodies a number of thematic and philosophical approaches to technology and the universe in the world is at large so this is the first book the first work set within the fractal verse and there are hopefully going to be many more in the future we're both i'm hard at work we're both hard at work at those things and they'll all tie together in one way or another it might be very subtle but there will be some connections so yeah that's that's the cool thing and then and then you know on the fantasy side of thing i have alagasia which is the world of aragon and i can do all sorts of cool stuff with that and between the two of them i think i pretty much have a playground to write whatever i want and so if i want to write romance i can do it in the fractal verse or i could do it in allegations you know or historical fiction or whatever it's it's it's really exciting yeah yeah i mean the fantasy and science fiction genres are really that kind of broad or at least i feel like they're definitely broadening now in the cultural mindset of like how we perceive fantasy authors have been pushing at those boundaries for years and years to get away from that kind of very restrictive uh tolkienesque uh refined version of fantasy that a lot of people have envisioned it as so you've got kind of a big wide way to uh place to play in now well they're the two best genres to be pigeonholed in because fantasy if you really dig down into it fantasy is an incredibly broad genre you know it's not it's not really limited to one subject material you know you can write in romance novel and if you want to make it fantasy stick a dragon in it or have a little bit of magic you know i mean technically almost not all but a lot of horror is actually fantasy because it breaks the laws of physics you know it's got some supernatural element but it's not considered fantasy so i don't know the the the boundaries between the genres are incredibly blurry as you know and if you have to be pigeonholed fantasy sci-fi is the one to be pigeonholed in yeah yeah absolutely absolutely uh also i want to say to sleep in the sea of stars beautiful title how long did it uh i want to kind of talk with you a bit about method and uh kind of like how you actually write in your process because you know like i'm sure you've discussed fantasy and sci-fi and inheritance cycle a lot i want to kind of learn about your process and of world building of writing for example how do you know a good title well first of all i want to step back for a second and say that as a professional author and as someone who's done this for a very long time and talked with a lot of professional authors about world building and writing and everything else your channel and the way you talk about story and the way you dissect this stuff is damn good and that's the first time i think i've ever sworn in an interview so you're welcome but thank you very much but it's but it's true and and anyone who's watching you know your channel or comes to your videos who's an aspiring writer you know your i think your videos are a really good source for starting to think about these things um and i so i just want to put that out there and and i wish i had had videos like yours to watch when i was starting back in the day that's that's that's very kind i i basically just want to make this sort of process accessible and free to everyone as best as i can so um that's very that's very kind thank you so to answer your question how do you know a good title i think a good title should somehow be the essence of the story now what you consider the essence of the story is incredibly and deeply personal but it really should embody the book you know i had a couple of working titles for aragon back in the day none of which are worth repeating but they didn't stick because they weren't the essence of the story and aragon is that story without aragon there is no story and his journey is the story for and and usually titles for me come about very early in the process i often have the title before i start writing the book so my my feeling my experience has usually been that the title is either incredibly easy or you're fighting to get it right up until the very end um but that's a minority of cases for me uh the worst one i had was my third book brissinger because that was an unplanned book in the series yeah it was meant to be it was meant to be a trilogy i i recall and then it became the cycle because you you as with as with tad williams it's a trilogy in four parts um with as with memory and sorrow and thorn so so that one was difficult but in with to sleep in a sea of stars i had honestly i had the phrase right from the very beginning it's i i joke that it's half the reason i wrote the book and then it's also a line that appears in a poem within the book and so it felt very fitting that it should be the title and i specifically wanted to do something that was longer after having a series of books where every title was a one-word title so this this was a way of stepping away from that and also saying you know hey guys i can do something different and fit this to the story because it does fit the story yeah no that's really good and also just flows off the tongue it's got that alliteration sss which i'm sure was intentional on some subliminal level oh no it was very conscious oh very conscious okay that's good you know that's that it's a really good uh it's a very thematic title like it it it's poetic uh and i think it kind of like it goes back to those epic for sci-fi's of the past which have you know i feel a lot a lot of poetic titles thrown in there i actually think that a lot of authors should um spend a little more time studying poetic techniques because if you primarily write in prose you know poetic techniques are sometimes oftentimes how you get that lyrical quality that you might associate say with you know ursula le guin or patrick rothfuss or you know whomever it might be and that doesn't happen by accident that usually is a very conscious control of the language on their part so there's a wonderful book i always recommend to people called shakespeare's metrical art because so many books on writing poetry just don't get into it on a level that's helpful to a working writer you know it's all very high level stuff that just doesn't answer the really nitty gritty questions and that book does on a complete nuts and bolts level i mean it's you know it's a little dry going when you read it but in terms of giving you useful tools as a writer can't recommend it highly enough right okay that's really cool i'll get a an image of that up on the screen uh so in talking about process there's a really interesting question uh kind of at the foundation of uh kind of writing a book one that i talk about a lot of people talk about a lot with people and that is how do you know when you've got a good book idea and there's a difference here between uh what a lot of people think and what i think in this because i i really struggle for book concepts i will be lucky to get one once every two years like a thing that i go i could write that and a lot of people say i get them all the time how do you know the difference between that's a cool concept that's a cool thing it'd be cool to do or that's a premise that would be fun versus that's a book that needs to be told how that's a book that i can get invested in and and really want to do that needs to be needs to be written how do you personally see that how do you personally approach that that's a really difficult question and i think that there are two possible answers to that one is like a generic answer so like the generic answer is that any idea can work for anyone right execution is everything you can give the same idea to 100 different authors and if they really put the time in and find what's personal about the story for them they can make it work the more specific less general answer the answer that works for me is i have to find something that i emotionally i react to emotionally in the idea and i'm like you i mean i get i get a lot of ideas but the ideas that are enough to make me say i'm going to commit years of my life to writing this don't happen all the time like as with you they're they're precious i mean and it's that weird thing where on one hand ideas are cheap right ideas are cheap you can find a thousand of them a day and you could probably you know brainstorm with someone and come up with a thousand more but execution and then finding the ones that you respond to personally so for me that's how i judge it when i when i feel something and when i feel it deeply that's when i know i have something and it may not and it's not that i know i have a story that everyone's going to respond to it's simply that i know i respond to it and that's all i can judge by and i you know there are so many people in the world i know that if it means something to me if this idea means something to me it'll probably mean something to a large number of other people and then my job is simply to try to execute it as well as possible right right now that's i think that's a really good way to kind of embody it is there any connection for you to themes to uh you know in terms of getting emotionally invested in a story concept is there any relationship to uh what the story is about on a thematic level yes but that usually is the second step which is interesting because okay something like the inheritance cycle is it's a coming-of-age story so it's a story of adolescence so that adolescence immediately provides the theme in a lot of ways i mean not all the themes of the story but the the point is the characters growing up and when that growing up when that maturation is complete the story itself is essentially complete when when the subject matter doesn't provide you with that easy answer then you have to go digging so in the case of to sleep i had two images two emotions in my head that made me want to write the story the first was the very last scene of the book the very last image and the other one was the inciting incident where my character's life changes dramatically near the beginning of the book the themes then were step two for me where i developed what sort of an architecture do i need to justify these two scenes and to make the audience feel what i feel when i imagine those scenes and you know what themes are gonna play into that what is the story about uh and actually i because i had to rewrite this book twice and i have become a big big believer in not attempting to write anything unless you really know what the story is about and i don't mean you know oh the characters run from point a to point b and they do x y z i mean what is the story actually about on a deep deep level because i because the thing is is on one hand it's cliche to say it oh it's a coming-of-age story or oh it's a mystery or oh it's a romance or oh it's a journey of self-discovery but you know what knowing that is actually really helpful that's why i felt like the the newest star wars films got kind of muddled because if you try to think of rey's story it's very hard to articulate what her story actually was versus luke's story or or even anakin's story right yeah yeah i i absolutely agree and i i am really there on uh kind of like knowing what the story is about on on a core level and i think that's for me the real difference between cool story concepts and like a book idea is do i know what this story would be about on that deeper level like you say yeah so and my experience too is that the best writers really do think about that you know this this doesn't happen by accident yeah yeah absolutely absolutely uh it's really cool to see you thinking about that in your own work you mentioned when you're talking about sleep in sea of stars it's ideas of individual responsibility versus collective responsibility or your responsibility to society what kind of is the i mean if you can share for you personally what's kind of that thesis or core ideas that you want to explore or questions you want to explore in the story that you might that make you care about it well it seems to me that technology is integrating us subsuming us ever more into society you know and that's not necessarily a bad thing that has been the prog the the sort of the arc of human civilization human society over thousands of years as we become more interconnected we become more enmeshed in the larger organism that is humanity you know we formed this super organism and whenever you see a technology that increases communication like the internet like the printing press you always see a concurrent jump in technological innovation artistic creation artistic innovation things like that so my thought was that in the future as privacy continues to disappear as technology becomes actually integrated into our our physical bodies via implants and other things that it's going to be harder and harder to sort of separate yourself as an individual from society and then you know when the society asks or needs help from you and doesn't necessarily care about you what is your responsibility is it just to the people you love or the people you care about or is it to humanity as a whole and i think those are questions people have wrestled with you know for hundreds of years whether you're a soldier or a diplomat or a scientist or just an everyday citizen but i do think those questions will become more relevant and more difficult as time goes on that's a really fascinating viewpoint it's actually a question i haven't considered before and i i'm really i'm really interested in that point that you said about how as we get technology kind of emission to our actual physical bodies there's kind of that and we lose privacy that distinction between kind of us and the collective really blurs quite a bit cyberpunk and transhumanism are two of my favorite kind of concepts to explore so if there's that in the book then i'm certainly kind of like you know interested to see where you take it well as i've often said our greatest um prophet of the future was not heinlein asimov or clarke it was philip k dick yep yeah yeah he's he's a fantastic author i i adore his stories yeah i mean we just the future we live in is so weird uh and he's the one who he's really the only one that really embraced that weirdness up until like william gibson and and a couple others but i don't want people to think that you know what what i'm talking about here is the bulk of the story either these are themes that are layered into the background uh you know i've touched on them in a few places um the rest of the time the characters are dealing with what's important to them the larger journey they're on uh and of course bad puns because you have to have bad puns yes yes i you yeah i know that you like uh bad puns do you have any examples of your beautiful bad puns from the story i do but are they all contextual that they're all in jokes for the story no no they i do but there's absolutely no way that i want to ruin them for readers so you have to encounter them along the way my my agent was actually dead set on having me rip out every single one of them uh during the editing and then my editor was very happy to leave the the puns so the puns have actually stayed that is fantastic you know sometimes you've got to take charge of your own work right that's what's real that's what's really at the core of the story the puns that's right that's right you know actually it but it's it's actually because of a philosophical argument that i had or disagreement i had with the writing in battlestar galactica the reboot the new series right yeah because i i thoroughly enjoyed it i'm not going to discuss the ending but i thoroughly enjoyed you know the general approach and what they were doing but that story the series was so darn grim now that was justified by the subject material but if you're ever around you know guys in the military or gals in the military or er room nurses or paramedics or something they have some of the blackest filthiest humor of anyone on the planet and you know the apocalypse happens and you know only a small fraction of humanity survives you better believe people are going to be cracking some black jokes at times and that's that's the thing i felt was missing was just a touch of that every once in a while yeah yeah yeah yeah i i think i think that's a reasonable criticism of it you sort of expect that i i'm only passingly familiar with battlestar galactica i've only i've only seen like the first season it is something i've been wanting to get into because apparently it's fantastic apart from the ending but you know the ending didn't bother me as much as it did some people i i wasn't necessarily a huge huge fan of the ending but i could see why the writers went the direction they did and there were a coup there were some interesting things in the ending so i think it really depends on how you view the story and how you react to it emotionally that determines whether or not you enjoy that right right okay that's fair so in the inheritance cycle you added some doctor who easter eggs occasionally now it's actually been a while since i've read the indirect cycle and i have read all of it by the way uh you can actually see it in the background down there but uh i can't remember all of them there was something to do with angela at one point and i think there were some references in the dwarves but uh are there going to be any and to sleep in a sea of stars uh no comment no comments no okay okay that's fine there there i'll just say there are some cool references into sleep and i think readers will enjoy it by the way i do i do have to say we we have to talk about dragons here for a second sure fear that's fair because i i did watch your video talking about dragons oh no oh no no no no no okay no wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait and you know what i think your points were absolutely valid no but they weren't because uh i well are you i was gonna go in to defend myself but okay i i uh somewhat i think overlooked a part of the law that i did know was there uh unfairly which is that obviously uh safire's uh language is reflective and influenced by eragon yeah um so i i i apologize for misrepresenting your law on that front no but it's interesting you brought that up because it was something i actually wrestled with during the writing of the series which was that i had this very alien creature who you know if you think about it from a biological standpoint it's going to be completely different from humans and the way they think and behave is going to be completely different from humans and that ought to be reflected and i think what what sort of tipped the balance for me was writing all of these scenes where aragon and sapphira were basically sharing their minds sharing their thoughts sharing their sharing aragon's language with sephirah and that led me down the road of thinking well that would probably influence the way she views and behave things pretty significantly i mean safira if she were real would hate me for making this comparison but it's almost like when you get a duckling that imprints on a dog and thinks that that's their parent but on the flip side if i were to write the series now one of the things i would do differently would be to show it also in reverse because the reverse would also be true that aragon would pick up some dragon habits if you will or modes of thinking or something from safira and that actually could be really cool with dragon riders that if they're really paired with a dragon for a long time they get a little more draconic if you will that's actually a fascinating concept and i think that would have been really cool to explore and also i do know that in the later books there is a moment where uh sofia sort of has to confront that she's not like the other wild dragons who are a bit more alien and and strange and they they sort of i think it's an i think it's an eldest that um that that that she sort of realizes that she's not she's been a bit domesticated in a way uh am i am i am i remembering that correctly yeah i was eldest and then there might have been some of that later also uh i was actually talking i was talking with daniel green the other day and he said that that you hadn't seen the things where he talked about you and uh and i was like oh no i've got one video which has which has sofia on the front i so hope he hasn't seen that video no i thought you i thought you were very fair in your video i really did and the way you talk about things like i said the way you're analyzing things is very much how a writer an author analyzes this stuff and it's strange for me because i'm i mean i'm like you i'm a sci-fi fantasy fan i'm a sci-fi fantasy nerd i mean i was home-schooled i grew up reading all this stuff and when i go to the conventions back when there were conventions you know i'm always going up to the other authors and saying oh man i read your books growing up and it you know had a huge influence on me but now i've been in the business long enough that the revere you know now it's and now the next generation of authors is coming up to me and saying oh i read your book growing up and um and and it's just it's it's it's a wonderful thing but it's also very strange because i'm still a huge fan and i'm always trying to learn and grow and read uh more yeah yeah that's that's uh really fantastic and so speaking of uh like how you grow and read as you write uh how do you sort of maintain the writing headspace like for some people they'll you know make sure they read kind of the stuff that they're writing you know similar sort of genre so sort of keep it chewing who's who am i sort of writing against and sort of trying to channel right other people will not read it at all they'll be like i need to be in my own space psych you know psychologically where do you sit on that kind of spectrum it's changed with you with time when i started out i would actively avoid reading things that were similar to what i was writing because i found it very easy to just pick up styles of what i'm i'm a very good mimic when it comes to writing styles but as i've gotten more experience i've become basically i've solved the same problems thousands of times in my writing you know those problems are you know pacing plotting getting characters in and out of rooms that sort of thing and i've developed my own style as a result so i don't find myself mimicking what i'm reading i do tend to avoid things that are too similar in subject material just because it can be a mental overload you know if i'm writing about dragons i don't necessarily want to read dragons at the same time i had that experience when i was editing inheritance i tried to read um uh his majesty's dragon by naomi novik and i got two pages in i was like nope nope this is too much too many dragons i gotta stop um but which i've i've gone on and read uh her her novel um was it uprooted which i thought was fantastic so really really enjoyed her work um but that's that's the only thing i try to balance right right no that's that's totally fear uh so i have a couple of questions here which the first one is was there a pressure or what kind of pressure was there as an author moving forward to other work considering the commercial success and somewhat young stardom that you had that is relatively unique in the author community um that you received so early on in your life what sort of pressure did that create for you uh trying to move on well the pressure what pressure there was was primarily during the writing of the inheritance cycle it was a it was a pressure cooker if you will because the deadlines were somewhat unrelenting and the promotional activities were just ongoing and once the film that was never made was made um that that kind of drove everything to a level that i had never experienced before and that stayed like that pretty much to the end of the series once the series was over everyone i worked with at random house my agent i mean everyone knew i needed time off i mean there was no question there was i wasn't under contract anymore so no no one was pressuring me to do anything and i needed time off i needed to just live my life in a way i hadn't been able to um in the in the years before that so in some ways it was almost like training for us training for the olympics or something where every day is devoted to it you finally get to go to the olympics you perform and then maybe you get a chance to go to the olympics four years later and you do that a couple of times and then you just you need to you need a normal life after that so again i could have stayed within the ya genre i could have stayed with fantasy i could have stayed with inheritance cycle in that world and i know that my publisher is very excited for anything i produce in that realm in the future but i have never set out to be one type of author i have a lot of stories i want to tell and you know the publishers were willing to give me a shot with something very different um and so far the early response to sleep has been absolutely fantastic so if that continues with commensurate commercial success aka lots of readers read the darn thing uh then then that really has sort of solidified this next step of my career and is going to really let me do what i want moving forward if it if it doesn't then you know that limits certain options but either way i told the story i wanted to tell and that i'm very happy with it that's really good and it's it's really good that i i know that you can sort of step back from that and and say i've told the story i want to tell because you know with the pressure of deadlines i'm sure there's a lot of like fear that maybe it's going to go out as the story i didn't quite want to tell yeah only 99 there well i've never i've never allowed myself to compromise i mean that's not to say that i couldn't have done a better job at times because i'm human of course i could have done a better job at certain points in my writing career but i've always done the best job i was capable of in that moment and i have never ever allowed something to go out the door unless i had reached that level of quality that i felt i could reach so if that sometimes that meant pushing deadlines sometimes that meant pulling you know all-nighters or just insane editing schedules but as a result as hard as that is as a result i don't have any regrets when i look back and that is no small thing that's really good and uh you know i i believe that this this philosophy of never never actually a compromising and and always making sure it's your best work is manifested in the incredibly manly incredible beard that you've got now just grown out with that determination you know i think i think it's just something you have to grow when you write sci-fi fantasy for long enough the truth of it is that i because i got published so young part of my image was you know the young writer and i'll tell you i hate yeah and and i hate shaving so when i was on book tour and doing the publicity having to shave every single day with just pure torture my skin does not like it like i can shave every once every three four days and i'm okay but every day it just wrecks my skin so as soon as inheritance was finished i said that's it i'm done i'm gonna grow a beard um which i did and uh i shaved it off about two three years ago and hated how i looked and immediately grew and going so that that's fair you know i've never had a beard actually i've watched your a couple of your interviews with with murphy and daniel and i went to my girlfriend and i said you know what i think one day i'm going to grow up and she's like no no you're not like well here's here's the thing here's the thing if you give it about three months it goes from the the itchy and looking horrible stage and then it actually gets soft and then then everything's okay but until you get to the soft point it's just it's sandpaper all right so i just got three months of my girlfriend just being really unhappy with me before it gets good okay that's good to know the problem is if she ends up liking it you'll never be able to shave it right yeah that's true that that's also true so uh returning to kind of your method um about uh how you plot where do you start do you do you do you figure out the ending first do you figure out the start do you figure out core moments you want to tell how do you plot a story uh as kind of as a process well i'm a little weird i think among the authors i know because i usually already have the ending of a story when i sit down to plot like that's often the idea that i get that gets me to figure out the rest of the story so that's extremely helpful if you have the ending to a story that doesn't always solve problem plotting problems i actually have a screenplay i tried writing one time where i have a wonderful ending for it and i have not been able to figure out how to justify the ending so whatever i have whether it's a beginning or an ending then the main question the main process is simply asking myself a heck of a lot of questions that's what plotting is it's asking questions and trying to answer them so that would be you know how does a dragon egg end up in the middle of a forest somewhere who finds it who else is looking for it what other what sort of a world does a dragon live in uh you know and that applies for science fiction as well as fantasy yeah and then and then just doing a lot more work than you think is necessary i think that as readers we often have the impression that books just magically happen you know the author sits down and just writes it and gets sent to the publisher and it gets published but it's really like you know a magician who practices and practices and practices to make a trick look effortless you know the amount of work i put in behind the scenes with you know character bios character motivation world building biology science all this other stuff is there to make the final product look effortless and you know that all that work is paying off when you sit down to write and things don't necessarily feel easy but you always feel like you're on solid footing and that's the difference between doing the world building and not doing the world building and doing the plotting and not doing the plotting absolutely so you've mentioned we're building there does war building come first in the middle or like between story and world building a lot of people begin very distinctly with one yeah and then come with the the other after where do you sit um i'm probably a little bit more on the story side than the world building and i do a lot of the world building as i'm plotting and it just sort of happens during that same time process but to me the world building i love world building i would happily do it for the rest of my life and that's the that's the danger of it you know because the world building disease yeah and i'm sure you've seen this too you know i've met a number of people who've built wonderful worlds and they have no story to tell in it so i i would rather have a wonderful story with crappy world building than the other way around another thing is in an ideal world the two feed back and forth into each other you know you think of a cool thing in the world and then you figure out how that influences the story and vice versa but if you don't actually have a story and character that people care about you know what's what's the point you're just creating this this fantasy sandbox and then what's gonna happen with it you know maybe that's okay for an rpg or a tabletop game or something like that but otherwise i don't know yeah no i i actually personally quite agree with you you quite a lot there i'm quite more towards the story than the word building side despite the look of my channel uh uh and i know that a significant part of my audience are like a really core they're really into word building but um i i always do come up with with story first yeah and i mean i assume sorry after you the fractal verse i assume has a lot of world building to it like you've got a lot of stuff down for the future a ton i mean i've got in the back of to sleep i have literally a fake scientific paper on how faster than light travel works um which i and how does it work oh man how long do you have um so here's a this is a perfect world building example you know in a lot of science fiction franchises like battlestar galactica star wars star trek we have faster than light travel because otherwise traveling from star system to star system is just completely impractical in any reasonable amount of time okay great so we have a faster than light system the problem with that is according to pretty much any of physics as we know it that means you now can travel through time and do not travel through time right right and the thing is it's almost never addressed in those franchises or like in the case of star trek they'll happily travel through time and it's like oh we're just going to go back and do this and do that which can be fun from a storytelling standpoint but from a world building standpoint causes you some really really big problems so in my case i wanted to come up with this faster than light system that did not contradict physics as we know it that did not allow for time travel that did not um use wormholes and that because wormholes have problems of their own and that had not been used by any other franchise that i was aware of that took me literally a solid year of research and thinking and i really mean i was working on it for almost that entire year to figure that out that's incredible so it might is it a big part of the story or no it's just like a passion corner of the book well i mean it isn't it isn't it is it drives the technology of how all how how characters travel from star system to star system so on one hand it's incredibly important because it's the travel system uh technology that everyone uses in the story but on the other hand i do not bog the reader down with that and but as the story goes on and as these books will go on we'll learn a little bit more about the the little sort of interesting wrinkles of the technology so that's i mean info dumping and how you divulge information is a huge huge part of writing any sort of speculative fiction and learning to balance that is incredibly important um brandon sanderson has been i know i don't know if he's finished it but he was reading to sleep in a sea of stars and he actually said one of the best things i've heard about the book uh which was he said that i it's a huge book but that it's paced like a smaller book like a short book that's that's that's a really high praise so yeah and um uh yeah i know that especially to hear that from brandon sanderson so on that note do you have any advice for uh exposition sharing exposition in a palatable well-paced way any tools or techniques that you feel work for you well the the genres have evolved i think that's something to keep in mind if you go back to the 80s or earlier you'll see stuff being done that we would consider pretty clunky these days um you know like david eddings starts the bulgarian with literally something that's like you know ten thousand years ago when the gods created the world and gives you a history of the world up to the modern day something like that you really can't get away with that these days uh so but but a good good example is actually dune dune reveals its world slowly and it doesn't pause to explain what all the little things that are being mentioned are you know you're just told this is here and it this is what it is generally but we don't get any technical technical explanation it's just presented as a feta complete basically so no yeah so very much dropped into the world as it kind of yes yeah the downside of that is you can go too far with that i think i discussed this uh with daniel which is there's a there's an author um or murph uh there's an author named cj cherry who's a famous science fiction writer and she writes an extreme limited third person to to to such a limit to such a degree that you will often get confused as the reader trying to figure out what's going on it's better on a reread and she does it masterfully this is not a criticism it's a very specific you know technical choice on her part but that can be confusing for the reader because if you're only shown what your main character sees or thinks about then there will be vast chunks of the world around the character that just never come up in natural day-to-day activities yeah so balancing all that boy um experience helps with this um i i think i try to balance it by saying if the character really has no reason to think about stuff i'm not going to dwell on it i might mention it briefly but i'm not going to dwell on it and you can even think about in the real world if a character is walking by a mcdonald's you say you know so-and-so walked by a mcdonald's you're not going to tell the reader what a mcdonald's is so why would you do the same with a future or fantasy equivalent of a mcdonald's maybe you should maybe you shouldn't you know but yeah that's fair i actually aired too far on the other side um i'm not giving enough information when i wrote to sleep based off my experience with clotted fantasy pros and one of some of the feedback i got on the first or second draft was you know pacing's great we could actually use uh just a little bit more explanation on a few things so that we have a better sense of the world and i was like oh more explanation oh i can do that that's the easy part that's right so you know it's probably better to err on the side of you know being a little sparser with it rather than overdoing it you know you can always put a little more in taking stuff out is tough yeah yeah i suppose uh i mean i mean to some to some people would be a harsher criticism to say that you get bored of the book than it is to say it's a little bit confusing you know uh yeah boredom yeah boredom's deadly confusing is just interesting okay so we were talking about battlestar galactica when my family and i were watching that show it has a weird structure and i'm probably miss miss remembering it but it has the it has like an opening teaser or recap of the previous episode and then it's got a small bit of actual episode and then it has the credit sequence and then it goes into the rest of the episode and i seem to remember that in the first few shows in the first season we didn't realize there was actually a little bit after the recap and so we were jumping straight to skipping the opening and jumping straight to after the credits and you know the weird thing is it resulted in a really interesting viewing experience because it felt like the writers were leaving it consciously leaving out crucial bits of information and just dropping you in the middle of the story with every new episode it was it was a wonderful experience actually and i kind of wish they'd kept it up but then we realized what was going on it was like oh okay we get it right that's that's really interesting i wonder how that would affect your experience and i think there's there's definitely something to be said for uh leaving gaps and letting the uh reader kind of figure out what goes in between them just figuring out which gaps to leave is really hard it only works if you really know what is actually going on humans humans are really good at pattern recognition that's kind of like our super skill so you know it's kind of why like writers of television shows and long long form fiction basically can't surprise their audiences anymore these days because the hive mind of the internet will guess everything so so in that case as long as you do know what the overall structure is you can leave a heck of a lot out and still keep people interested absolutely and uh you know we don't want to run into the game of thrones problem where they change the ending for you know sort of subverting expectations on you know on purpose which is just not a good idea there's something to be said for letting people guess things you know yeah and you know as as entertainers we are in the business of uh fulfilling expectations to a degree hopefully we do it in a way that is unexpected so it's it's it's expected but the actual means by which it happens is perhaps not immediately obvious but that when that happens i think that's where you get the most satisfying of stories so just a few questions before we wrap up uh you mentioned that you've re-written to sleep in see the stars two times now when you say that is that two drafts or is that two entire rewrites how many drafts have you done or do you do of a book like do you have a standard like i must do three drafts before i move on to editing or to beta reading or whatever uh depends how you define draft i would say with there are two major versions of this book there's the first draft i wrote which did not work in the slightest and then there were maybe two drafts of that first version following the the first draft where i was essentially rearranging the deck chairs on the sinking titanic and trying to make that version work but it didn't work i then did a major rewrite where the first section of the book and part of the second section essentially remained the same and then pretty much everything after that was written from scratch and this is an over three hundred thousand word book so that was a lot of writing three hundred thousand yeah that's that's a lot yeah and i did i did most of that rewriting last year so um yeah as far as drafts it's just you do it until the book is as good as you can make it and you stop editing when you start changing stuff back to what it used to be right right absolutely uh that's that's that's really cool um so you went through like as a total probably like four drafts or something for four to five drafts like including two massive rewrites oh god i mean then once i rewrote it i probably went through two three major drafts on on the second version um let's just say let's just say i'm thoroughly sick of looking at this book at this point i love i love looking at the outside i don't want to look at the inside yes that's that's totally fair you know and especially because we were talking about story ideas i got the story idea for this back in 2006 maybe 2006. and and i wanted to write it back then but i had to finish the inheritance cycle so it just took me this long to get the freedom to do that that's yeah well that's good i'm fine i'm really happy that you've finally been able to express that uh so i know that you like technology and that's a big part of this book uh another question is do you have any perspective on how fast the light travel affects the human psyche or the physical state like in a way that makes this book different ooh well it certainly affects culture and the way information travels between the different human settlements and that's something that's touched on a little bit in the book as far as like physical effects on the body the way my fashion light travel works the human body is essentially protected the ship itself is protected during the ftl travel one of the big things i did delve into in this book that a lot of sci-fi franchises don't actually avatar might be the only one that even visually hints at it is the problem of radiating heat in space space is an excellent insulator you know your your hot thermos cup has a vacuum in it because that helps insulate the stuff so it's very hard to dispel waste heat in in space which means that if you go faster than light and you have like a basically a protective bubble around your ship you can't get rid of the waste heat which is a wonderful explanation for why all the characters need to be in cryo sleep when you're in ftl ah right that's that's a nice connection i i that's something you know i i hadn't thought of before yeah and then of course it makes your spaceships look different because my spaceships all have to have radiators made of diamond with uh molten veins of molten metal flowing through the radiators to to shed off that heat okay that that's really cool uh what in terms of you growing as an author over the last long while because i'm sure that you have you know uh what was the harshest kind of criticism that you felt you had to face like that you were like oh you know and did that help you grow or did it hurt you as a writer because you know you were young yeah i mean i think the harshest criticism was criticism that was based around my age and lack of experience because quite honestly it was justified but there was nothing i could do about it right you know it's one thing to be criticized for something that you can fix it's like okay i get where you're coming from i'll do differently in the future but when you're criticized for something you are that's very frustrating um and of course you know eragon did get quite a bit of criticism for essentially being the archetype of the traditional hero story which i i whether or not that's justified i'll leave up to the reader's audience to decide but what was frustrating for me was that i had consciously set out to do exactly that it was essentially a writing exercise for me i never actually planned to publish aragon i didn't even know if i could write something was two three four five hundred pages long so i thought okay i'm gonna plot out a trilogy because all great stories are trilogies i'm gonna use the arc tipple hero story you know as used by everyone from you know wagner all the way up to modern day and of course further in the past you know looking at all those archetypes say what i want to say about that sort of a journey and i'll write the first book and then i'll go and write a real book after that well to sleep to sleep was the real book and it took me this long to get there so that was that was a little frustrating that that criticism was there um but you know it is what it is and i'm still very happy with what i wrote and i know a lot of people enjoyed it so you know absolutely and i i did too and i think you know there's so much to be said for the fact that you got so many people reading like genuinely you are someone who pushed people into reading in an era when people are reading less and that's totally to your credit and the fact that you were actually a younger author for me at the time was something that resonated with me uh when i was when i was you know younger and reading fantasy that's part of why i picked it up that you were in you were inspirational you know uh given that that we were on that same level uh thank you so that's that's that's really cool and last question what are you most excited about in uh in terms of where the fantasy and science fiction genres are going for the future i mean just the variety of it i think there are so many talented authors working nowadays that it's it's it's hard to predict where the genre is going to be year to year and it's it's all a giant conversation going on between all these different authors uh reacting to each other seeing what we're all writing and then doing new things so it's hard for me to say one thing i just love the variety i love the fact that we have so many different types of fantasy stories to read you know if you want to read urban fantasy you can if you want to read high epic fantasy if you want to read you know and the same thing with science fiction too i will say with science fiction one of my reasons for writing to sleep in the sea of stars is a lot of the sci-fi writers i grew up with in the 90s and then early 2000s there was a trend where the stories were getting more and more esoteric you know it was far future these were post-humans a lot of times you know where it was post singularity and sometimes oftentimes it got to the point where it was actually hard to relate to the stories in a way that you could relate to a lot of the earlier science fiction um and and yet still explore interesting ideas so with to sleep i wanted to i don't want to say take a step back but maybe take inspiration from some of that newer work but also still have characters who are recognizably human and i don't think i'm the only one who who felt that urge i'd say you know the expanse is a good example of a similar feeling um battlestar galactica also okay that that's that's that's really cool and i i i think i've seen the term like human determination or perseverance or something being kind of about what that that's that the story has something to do with that kind of idea uh so i'm glad that you know you're trying to connect it to kind of like a very grounded human feeling behind it even if there's these sci-fi trappings while while still keeping a sense of the weirdness of the world because boy is the world weird and i don't think it's going to get any less weird as it moves forward tentacles exactly uh well i actually really hope you enjoy the book when you read it and i would love to talk about some of the more world some of the like the deep world building stuff that went into um i have some fun aliens in the book uh they're they have a scent based language they have a crazy butt yeah that's awesome crazy biology i mean this this stuff is fun fun to to work on and fun to talk about and it takes it takes a lot of thought but boy when it pays off it's worth it yeah well absolutely we'll tell you what you know when the book's been out for a while given people time to read it feel free to come back on the channel and you can talk as much as you like about that language and and the world building because i'm sure people would love to hear about your process for coming to where that is uh yeah so that's uh yeah i'd certainly enjoy doing that and you know the thing is is that if you're an aspiring writer these sorts of technical things are actually incredibly important you know it's very easy i think to feel like oh no it's not important you know i have this great emotion in me i have this great idea you know if i if i pay too much attention to attention to some of these technical things it's just gonna bog me down and drain the life and emotion out of this wonderful idea i have but i really don't believe that's true i think the more you focus on these technical things the stronger your presentation of whatever story you want to tell is going to be and i've seen that again and again with my stories and with other people's stories and the more you can master these technical things the better everything else gets hmm that's awesome and i think it's going to end up as a really good book so that is uh to sleep in a sea of stars coming out september 15th that's right of september september 15th this year it's going to be his new sci-fi novel and it's going to be fantastic from everything that we've talked about very much for coming on the channel my pleasure thank you for having me and i understand you have a book of your own don't you i i do have a book of my own i actually have like a stack of them here uh and but uh i'm i'm actually overwhelmed with how successful that's uh that's been i've managed to sell about uh 20 000 plus copies in a year wow so you do realize uh that you can now get a traditional publisher very easily if you want i i don't know i haven't looked into it but um well we'll talk about that later yeah this has been an absolute blast i actually want to get a copy of your book i'm sure i'll enjoy reading it and let us know let us definitely do this again in the future once the sleep is released that'd be great thank you very much coming on and uh see you next time you too my pleasure

Channel: Hello Future Me

Views: 81,303

Keywords: explained, theory, lore, analysis, how to, paolini, interview, fantasy, daniel greene, eragon, eldest, brisingr, inheritance, sci fi, science fiction, book, writing, conversation, Q&A, answered, answers, plotting, drafting, sleep in a sea of stars, tsiasos, alagasia

Id: t8vTYdqxb9o

Length: 57min 12sec (3432 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 07 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/MountainShade]

As someone that absolutely loves Eragon series, enough to have a sleeve tattoo with Saphira and Thorn on it, how does this book compare?

I'm all for old school fantasy with magic and dragons like Eragon but love futuristic sci-fi like Mass Effect.

Worth a read?

[u/JackRaynor]

Omg...hello future me and CP together? Awesome!