What happens when one of epic fantasy’s most beloved optimists sits down with one of its sharpest cynics? You get a conversation that cuts like a blade and glints like black humor in a blood-soaked battlefield. During Joe Abercrombie’s U.S. tour for The Devils, Brandon Sanderson took the interviewer’s chair in front of a live Salt Lake City audience for an evening full of laughter and biting insights into the art of fantasy writing.
In true Abercrombie fashion, no topic was too thorny to touch. From the pitfalls of mapmaking and the glory of grim characters to the secret joys of writing sexy male vampires and menacing, invisible elves. Meanwhile, Sanderson offers praise as sincere as it is precise, comparing The Devils to Terry Pratchett "raised by sailors" and pressing Joe on theme, voice, and the quiet horror of rereading your own early work (especially when it was good).
This transcript captures the full interview: a rare longform discussion between two titans of the genre, each with wildly different tonal signatures, but a shared devotion to character, story, and the strange joy of building something real from words alone. If you're a fan of either author, or just of good conversation about how fantasy gets written and rewritten, this one’s for you.
You can watch or read the full thing below!
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BRANDON: Hey, everybody! I'm going to interview Joe Abercrombie for you.
AUDIENCE: (cheering and applause)
JOE: Brandon's career until this moment has just been a warmup, a buildup.
BRANDON: Yeah. My whole career.
JOE: Yeah.
BRANDON: I actually sneakily published just so that someday I'd be able to interview Joe Abercrombie.
JOE: Now your evil scheme has borne fruit.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
BRANDON: Is this your first US tour?
JOE: It's my first kind of proper, serious, multi-date US tour. I did a little bit of West Coast stuff around Comicon one time, and I've been to a few conventions and to New York and things like that. But it's my first proper, big tour of churches.
BRANDON: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
BRANDON: And you haven't started on fire, so that's good.
JOE: It's something. It's a step forward, yeah.
BRANDON: Yeah. It's interesting touring the US versus the UK. Can you talk--? How has it been different? Because we were reminiscing about touring the UK.
JOE: Sure.
BRANDON: Yeah.
JOE: And I toured the UK for a week, well, two weeks ago, and then came straight here. In the UK, obviously, the distances are slightly smaller often. So you can do a kind of train ride to a city, do a lunch time signing, train ride to another city, do an evening event, two events a day, whistle stop tour all the way round. A lot of pies, usually, fish and chips, things like that. Over here, a lot of airports, a lot of flying. I feel a little bit like George Clooney in Up in the Air. You know that film?
BRANDON: Mm hmm. Yep.
JOE: Slightly better looking version.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: Obviously. But yeah, I mean, it's been amazing. It's been amazing to kind of take in a few cities I've never been to before, get a different flavor. You know, each part of America has got a very different mood. Austin is very, very hot. I got consumed by mosquitoes there. And then Denver was kind of very high, dry.
BRANDON: Which version of high?
JOE: Well, you know.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: Combination of the two.
BRANDON: Yeah?
JOE: I would suggest. Yeah. But, I mean, and Salt Lake City has been fantastic. I mean, the mountains. I just was not ready for the mountains.
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: (whooping)
JOE: They hit you in the face like that as you come out of the airport. Amazing.
BRANDON: Yeah. I grew up in Nebraska. Coming out here, I'm like, "Oh, this is what scenery is."
JOE: (laughing)
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
BRANDON: "Ah, it's very nice."
JOE: Yeah, it's been lovely so far.
BRANDON: Excellent. So how long are you on tour? When do you get to go home?
JOE: So I've got, I think, another three dates, Seattle tomorrow, then Detroit the day after, and then Chicago, and then I'm home.
BRANDON: Don't you love how these things go? I don't know if it's been for you. Like, you'll be like, Seattle, then Detroit?
JOE: Hmm.
BRANDON: Yeah. You'll go on tour, and they'll get the dates where they can get the dates. And so it'll be East Coast, West Coast, East Coast, West Coast, back and forth, no rhyme or reason. So that's why lots of airplanes.
JOE: Zigzagging around.
BRANDON: Yeah.
JOE: I mean, partly it's been, you know, they've had some brilliant conversation partners for me. Not today, obviously.
BRANDON: Obviously.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: There've been some brilliant people, and it's kind of when they're available. So, you know, I just go down to Albuquerque when George is available. And George is available, and so that was the only day on that.
BRANDON: You signed in Albuquerque? Did you sign at George's place down there?
JOE: This was actually a different theater, I think.
BRANDON: OK.
JOE: But another theater that he occasionally frequents.
BRANDON: OK. Yeah, it's really fun to visit George Martin--George’s because he owns--he has a theater he has authors in to do events at. It's really fun.
JOE: It is. It is. It's quite something.
BRANDON: So let's talk about the book. Let's talk about the book.
JOE: Let's do that thing. Yeah.
BRANDON: There's no place to put my phone here. All right, the book. No kidding, I told Joe this behind, I think this is my favorite thing you've ever written.
AUDIENCE: (cheering)
JOE: Thank you. There's this weird thing authors get.
BRANDON: Yeah.
JOE: I don't know if you have this too. But when people say, "Oh, I preferred one of your old books,"
BRANDON: Yeah.
JOE: You feel really upset.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: And I don't know why you would feel upset. Because it's like, you know--
BRANDON: Yeah.
JOE: "I like your oldest child a lot."
BRANDON: Mm hmm.
JOE: That's a compliment still.
BRANDON: Yeah.
JOE: But somehow you only have kind of feelings for the newest book. So it's lovely you like this one. Thank you.
BRANDON: So I'm going to give you what I consider probably some of the best praise I can ever give. So don't let your head get any bigger than it already is.
JOE: If you dash for the exits--
BRANDON: Yeah.
JOE: As the head expands, I will understand.
BRANDON: But I was reading this, and this one in particular gave me Pratchett vibes. Like, a kind of--if Pratchett were raised by sailors.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
BRANDON: Right? But it's obviously not a comedy. None of your books are straight up comedies. But that wit, mixed with the pacing, mixed with kind of looking at the people in the thick of it, mixed with just a bit of a heist/team up thing. I'm reading this, and it's giving me the vibes that I've missed ever since we lost Terry. And I think it is just an excellent book.
JOE: Well, thank you. I mean, you're not wrong.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: No, he's--great to hear. Thank you.
BRANDON: Is Pratchett an influence on you?
JOE: I mean, he is somewhat.
BRANDON: Mm hmm.
JOE: I wouldn't say he's a huge influence necessarily. But certainly I read him when I was a kid. And I think, you know, that style of humor, especially as he kind of advanced in his career.
BRANDON: Yeah.
JOE: When he started to become a bit more acid, a bit more satirical, a bit more commentary on the real world issues.
BRANDON: Right. Yeah, middle Pratchett is way better than early Pratchett.
JOE: Yeah. I think I'd agree. And so, I mean, to fit into that space that, sadly, he has left vacant, I think would be amazing. Yeah. Absolutely.
BRANDON: So what made you decide to go, like, full on alternate history? Not giving too many spoilers, because I bet a bunch of people just picked up the book for the first time. But this is like, you know--your previous books have had that flavor. Right?
JOE: Hmm.
BRANDON: It's like how epic fantasy will be like, this feels like the Baltic States. This feels like this. This is a straight up alternate history, diverging from Earth at some point. And you can recognize all the places. Just sometimes they have different names and/or, you know, certain cities are still in force that maybe are in empires that once fell. What made you make that decision? How'd you come about that?
JOE: I suppose I wanted to do something somewhat different really. You know, I'd written nine First Law books.
BRANDON: Mm hmm.
JOE: I mean, they're excellent books.
AUDIENCE: (cheering)
JOE: Thank you. Thank you. Oh, they stopped applauding. That was--
BRANDON: They did. They did. They did not applaud nearly as--
AUDIENCE: (applause)
JOE: I really loved writing those books. But I felt like I wanted to recharge the batteries, try something slightly different. Slightly different in format. Something a bit more focused. Something that was not quite such a big and complicated tapestry.
BRANDON: Right.
JOE: I mean, you'll be familiar with, right? Big, interlinked, complicated kind of stuff. There's a huge satisfaction to bringing that together. But it feels like a lot of weight to carry sometimes as well.
BRANDON: Yeah.
JOE: You know, sometimes it's nice to dip into something a bit lighter, kind of more focused. So I wanted to do that. And it felt like working in a version of the real world was perhaps just a slightly different look. I've always made secondary worlds that are very influenced by history, as you say. But to actually work in Europe, a version of Europe, you don't have to think up so many names.
BRANDON: Hmm.
JOE: For a writer who is as incredibly lazy as I am, that is a big advantage. You don't have to do too much kind of drawing of maps, because the maps are already there.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: You can just trace them.
BRANDON: Don't you dislike maps? Isn't that something I once heard, that you don't like maps?
JOE: I mean, I love maps. But I think they need to be exercised in the right way. I supposed what I don't like is a kind of lazy application of maps. Here is a map because this is a fantasy book and therefore there's supposed to be a map in it.
BRANDON: Right.
JOE: And when I was first writing The First Law, I guess I wanted to write something that was very character focused, that was almost told in tight closeup on the people. And to start with the widest shot imaginable of the whole world felt like exactly the wrong kind of tone to begin with if you want. So I wanted people to be in the experience of the characters, rather than, you know, leafing back to work out how far north one place is of another place.
BRANDON: Right. Yeah. It can get you into trouble.
JOE: Yeah.
BRANDON: And once you put the map in, you run into some problems. Maybe like some later Game of Thrones seasons we're like, "Well, how did they get from here to here?"
JOE: Yeah.
BRANDON: And when you're trying to be very realistic with presenting some of that stuff, it can get you into trouble. I still love them.
JOE: Oh, yeah.
BRANDON: But they definitely can do some things. But I know kind of the arguments against them. Again, Pratchett famously said, "No maps. You can't map imagination." And so he didn't want maps in his books.
JOE: I think there's an upside to not having them that is maybe not obvious straight away.
BRANDON: Yeah.
JOE: And certainly there's this kind of habit people can get into of, "Well, here's my incredibly detailed journey where the characters go," and there's a load of white space here and there, and you fill it in with some slightly squiggly rivers and coasts.
BRANDON: Uh huh.
JOE: So a bit of make believe going on. I was kind of fortunate because when I wrote Red Country I was able to redesign, quite radically, the shape of the continent, because I'd never published a map. And so I could rethink it and get the river the right shape to suit the story. I'd rather the landscape suited the story than have to, you know--
BRANDON: Right.
JOE: Suit the story to the landscape I'm stuck with.
BRANDON: So let's talk--you talked about characters. Your books are often very focused on who these people are, how they interact with the world, and this is no exception. We've got primarily two main characters. A big ensemble and things like that.
JOE: Hmm.
BRANDON: So any stories to tell about where the characters came from?
JOE: I don't know. It's interesting. Characters are vital for me. They're really the heart and soul of what I do, I think. I generally find, as a reader, the most tedious plot can be fascinating if I'm interested in the characters.
BRANDON: Yeah.
JOE: Whereas if the characters are not interesting then no amount of wham, bam action and plotting is going to necessarily salvage the book for me.
BRANDON: Right. I always say the same thing about magic. Everyone talks about my magic systems, which I do spend a lot of work on. But a magic system is only interesting if someone interesting is interacting with it. If it doesn't cause problems in someone's life that is interesting, then you don't have a good magic system.
JOE: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And it's about people, and it's about feelings, and about the reader's relationship with the people in the book. So kind of designing the cast is the first big task of a book generally. I have the basic notion of, well--not wanting to spoil anything--the pope keeps a set of monsters in the basement.
BRANDON: Yeah.
JOE: That's basically the idea.
BRANDON: Mm hmm.
JOE: So then the question became who are the monsters, and what is the particular adventure they're about?
BRANDON: Right. And you take each one of those archetypes and, in classic Joe fashion, really you give a very interesting spin on each of those kind of monster archetypes.
JOE: Yeah, I mean, I suppose I've always been a guy who just enjoys archetypes a lot.
BRANDON: Mm hmm.
JOE: I used to watch a lot of Westerns.
BRANDON: Yeah.
JOE: And the joy of Westerns is not seeing something different each time. It's seeing the iteration of the same stuff each time.
BRANDON: And seeing what you can do with these same sort of kind of ideas.
JOE: Exactly. And seeing the expectation, you know, and how your expectation might be changed one time or another. When you don't get quite what you expect, how does that feel? A film like Unforgiven works so well, not because it's radically original, but because it's hardly original at all, and it's the familiar that makes it exciting. No one ever watches a Western and says, "Oh, a standoff on a windswept street. Rubbish."
BRANDON: Yeah.
JOE: You know, you're waiting for that moment. That's what makes it good. Likewise, a fantasy, you know wizards, and boys with special destinies, and magic swords, and all that stuff, this is the good stuff. This is the stuff you want to work with. So with monsters, a werewolf, and a vampire. Right? You've got to have a werewolf and a vampire, obviously.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: A kind of frenemy pairing. And because, you know, you often get sexy female vampires, I thought I'd go for a sexy male vampire.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: I mean, it's not the most original idea ever, I will concede. But then female werewolves seem like a little bit more--
BRANDON: You don't see that as often.
JOE: Not as often, anyway.
BRANDON: Mm hmm.
JOE: So that seemed like a kind of interesting pairing to start with. Obviously then invisible elf. Because, you know, every group needs one of those.
BRANDON: Yep.
JOE: It's actually a little known fact. Every group has an invisible elf, but you can't see them.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
BRANDON: I actually--again, not to give spoilers, but I loved the sense of the elves in this book.
JOE: Right.
BRANDON: Because as a kind of student of, like, Saxon mythology and things like this, the idea of the elves, or the fey, or whatever you want to call them, as this malevolent force, and just this idea of--and again, this isn't spoilers, very early in the book--but the idea of elves as kind of the dark force of orcs that everyone's worried will come and destroy the world, was really fascinating to me.
JOE: I supposed as well for me. You know, Europe has always had this kind of terror of a terrifying alien threat that will boil out of the East.
BRANDON: Yeah.
JOE: You know, whether it's the Huns.
BRANDON: Mm hmm.
JOE: Or it's the Mongols, or it's kind of, you know, Islam during the period of the Crusades. It's a kind of endless preoccupation of Europe. And so I figured, well, I'd make that an explicit alien thing in the sense that there are these elves who occasionally boil off the edge of a map and provide this horrifying threat to the world. And it'd be interesting if they want to eat everyone. Because, you know, why not.
BRANDON: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: Elron never threatened to eat everyone.
BRANDON: Well, I mean--
JOE: I feel that's where Tolkien went wrong.
BRANDON: You could see it's behind his eyes. Right? In those movies.
JOE: But that's it exactly. You know?
BRANDON: Yeah. It's there. He's just tired of all these people. He's like, "Maybe. Maybe I should just deal with this."
JOE: There's a menace, isn't there, to those elves?
BRANDON: Yeah.
JOE: I mean, you've got to take their word for it that they're good guys.
BRANDON: (laughing)
JOE: But what's going on just behind all those closed doors in Rivendell?
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: Meat. That is what's happening. Butchery. There are halflings swinging by their hairy feet.
BRANDON: You think that was the first fellowship? No, no, no, no, no.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
BRANDON: Couple early tries. They brought--Gandalf brought in those little furry footed weirdos and Elron just couldn't help himself.
JOE: He couldn't help himself.
BRANDON: You got to get him fed and then you bring in the ones that can save the world.
JOE: Exactly. Yeah. Once he's, you know, feeling sated.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
BRANDON: So this is going to be a series? Is that a promise? I read that, and you mentioned it earlier tonight.
JOE: Well, I have signed a contract.
BRANDON: OK.
AUDIENCE: (cheering and applause)
JOE: For three books. I mean, I suppose it's theoretically possible--
BRANDON: Theoretically possible.
JOE: To get out of it.
BRANDON: Maybe you'll get around to it.
JOE: Yeah, but the plan is to write three, certainly. I guess it's not a trilogy in the sense that some of my other trilogies have been. That is, one big story in three parts. The idea with these books is very much for them to be more like a detective story where, you know, each book is its own adventure featuring some of the similar characters. Maybe there's a bit of churn in the central cast, one in, one out kind of thing. Next book's got a talking cat.
BRANDON: It does have a bit of that Suicide Squad feel to it, in the best way.
JOE: They're still enjoying the talking cat thing.
BRANDON: Yeah. They like cats.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: I want that to settle on people because it's a really great idea I have.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: Talking cats.
BRANDON: You should patent that, trademark it. Yeah.
JOE: Again, as I say, originality not necessarily my strongest suit.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
BRANDON: One thing I like about this was the art, the addition of some pretty nice art in this.
JOE: Yeah. I mean, that was totally me. I drew all that.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: My stuff, painted by hand, my own hand. No, a guy called Joel Daniel Phillips did the art. He's here somewhere. Where is he?
AUDIENCE: (cheering and applause)
JOE: He's there. Yes. Well done! Yeah. Yeah. I feel like they didn't clap long enough for us. But they clapped kind of too long for him, if anything.
BRANDON: They know the artists don't get enough appreciation, where the authors--
JOE: No, they don't.
BRANDON: We're--they may know that we may be a little bit full of ourselves. I mean, they have listened to you for 30 minutes now. They know.
JOE: It's true.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: It's true. But it's very much classed up the joint, and I think it's really added--. I like a book as a physical object, you know. And I think it's a really exciting time to be a writer because ten years ago, 15 years ago, it felt as though eBooks were going to swallow the book market completely.
BRANDON: Mm hmm.
JOE: And the physical book was going to disappear. But it really stepped up the game of physical books. And it's lovely to be able to kind of include some nice art, and to--you know, it's art as well that gives a real mood of the book.
BRANDON: It does.
JOE: It's really suited.
BRANDON: It's this, particularly the full art pieces, are these, like--they're just a little bit off, purposefully, just a little bit distorted. So they're not comedic. Again, they are comedic, but they're not comedies. Like, the story itself. You just get a sense, something's going on here, and it really--I actually looked at both end pages before I started reading the book, all four end pages. And then it set that mood.
JOE: Yeah, absolutely. I think it really sets the tone, and I couldn't be happier with the art. I mean, the words are also good, though. Let's not--
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: I mean, you know, he's nothing without me.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: I am the puppet master here. Just want that known.
BRANDON: So, let me ask this. I don't know if you're tired of this question. I get asked this a lot. But you're kind of coming off of writing some YA and then going back into the adult market. How did you approach writing YA versus adult? Like, how do you approach--or anything kind of different when you approached writing this book from what you've done before?
JOE: I supposed, you know, I wrote three YA books a little while ago now. But my approach with those was really to write the kind of book I enjoyed myself as a young adult, I guess.
BRANDON: Mm hmm.
JOE: I wanted to write the sort of book a 12-, 13-, 14-year-old me would have wanted to read. And in the end that's not so different to what the adult me wants to read. It's maybe a bit shorter, a bit more focused, might have a younger protagonist. It may be for the needs of the publication the kind of sex and violence and swearing elements are somewhat dialed down.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: A tiny bit. Whatever I can get away with, obviously.
BRANDON: (laughing)
JOE: But generally the approach was kind of the same, you know. It's to try and write generally from a limited third person has always been my approach, and really put the reader into the head of the character, and try and get the prose to mirror the style of that person so you almost feel like you're in conversation with that character.
BRANDON: Mm hmm.
JOE: When things are written from their point of view. In a sense, with The Devils, it was again the same basic approach, you know. For me, a lot of the work is in the revision. My first drafts--I know you're a first draft guy.
BRANDON: My first drafts are terrible, but I just like the first draft. I don't like the second draft.
JOE: I'm massively envious of you enjoying that process because I find the first draft just--. I mean, the start and the end I don't mind. It's only, like, the middle 98% of the process that I find torture.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: And it's the revision where I really feel--
BRANDON: Right.
JOE: OK, the book's coming together now. And so I've developed this approach of kind of rounds of revision with a certain purpose. I do a round of revision based on the characters where I'm looking at the character voices, the dialogue, trying to make each character as distinct as I can and the secondary cast the same. And then I've got a round of revision focusing on the setting.
BRANDON: Mm hmm.
JOE: Where I'm doing a similar thing, thinking about what time of day is it? What's the weather? What's the nature of this room? Trying to make what is quite indistinct and vague in my first draft a bit more characterful and vivid each time. And then I do a pass for the prose and try and refine that and make that as elegant as I can and as fitting to the subject matter as I can. And so it's really through those rounds of revision that the book goes from being a total mess, which it is in the first draft, to the point where I think, "OK, this is fine. This basically works. I know what I'm doing now."
BRANDON: Where do you find, like, the theme? Is that a dirty word for you? Or is that a word that you like?
JOE: I mean, it's not a dirty word, but it's certainly not my prime focus. I think, for me, books that are too didactic--
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: Yeah? I like that word.
BRANDON: Yeah.
JOE: I haven't known it that long, but I was very pleased when I found out what it meant.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: So I don't like a book that's too didactic. I don't like a book that's too theme forward and feels kind of preachy. So to me, theme is kind of what develops naturally when you tell a story with interesting characters, I think.
BRANDON: Mm hmm.
JOE: It's a discovery thing very much for me. So as I'm writing a book, the theme starts to suggest itself and then you realize you're writing about that, and it becomes more of a focus. And often during that revision it will kind of start to draw out. Some books are more thematic for me than others. So The Heroes, for instance, is one, because it's a war story it kind of naturally lends itself to themes of heroism and kind of warfare and futility and those things that a good war story does. But I suppose as I was writing that book, the title The Heroes was a working title. I meant to find a much better, more exciting title later. But as I was writing, it came to suit the book better and better. And sort of each character became a study of a different angle on heroism if you like. And so heroism became the theme of the book.
BRANDON: Right.
JOE: And that kind of developed the theme and the book developed together. And so I suppose, ideally, theme is what kind of develops when everything else is working nicely.
BRANDON: Right. I would say that's how it happens for me too. I rarely go into a book wanting to say something--. Well, I always go into a book wanting to say something, but I never go into it wanting to say something specific, if that makes sense.
JOE: Oh, yeah.
BRANDON: I put the characters together. I see where they disagree. And those points of disagreement, those points where they kind of are, you know, grinding together in certain ways against each other, is where it develops for me.
JOE: Yeah. No, I mean, I'd agree. And I think, in a way, that's the only way I know how to do it. I think to start with a real point you want to make, you're bound to lose a lot of readers along the way.
BRANDON: Yeah.
JOE: You know, if it feels too preachy.
BRANDON: I'll lose myself. I'll be like, "Oh, man." You know. "I'm bored of this because I'm just saying what I already know, or what I already think." I've got to explore. I've got to see what characters think.
JOE: Yeah. No, I agree entirely.
BRANDON: So, we are going to go to questions from the audience, if you are OK with that.
JOE: I'm looking at them and I'm wondering, you know.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: Hmm, don't know. This audience. Hmm. Yeah, let's do it.
QUESTION: Are you an outliner or discovery writer, Joe?
JOE: I'm kind of a combination of the two, I think, these days. So I started as quite an obsessive planner. But I discovered that it's not until I really write some of the prose I get to understand what I'm doing. As I say, the characters are really important for me. And until I start writing from a character's point of view, I don't really get a sense of who they are. I can kind of know what their background is, the role they play in the story, how tall they are, the physical details and so on. But until I start writing from their point of view the voice doesn't really develop. And then when I do it develops often very quickly, and I get a sense very quickly of what that character's like and who they are. And then that can sort of steer the direction the story's going to take. And usually what I do is I split a book into several parts and plan the first, write the first, get a much better idea of what I'm doing, and then plan the second, write the second, and so on until we get to the end. And then I think, "OK, I know what I'm doing now. I can go back and revise." I mean, these days I also show each part to my editor, or now it's two editors, in the US and the UK, so it's like a three--a triumvirate. Like Julius Cesar, Crassus, and Pompey.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: But I'm hoping we don't all die.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: And I discuss with them with each part, and so they kind of have some input as we go. And that helps me, you know, I've usually got some ideas about what's working, what isn't. They have some input. And then I move forward, hopefully with a better idea. So it's kind of the planning and the writing, hopefully, works together in beautiful symbiosis.
BRANDON: Can I ask a follow-up on that?
JOE: Yeah.
BRANDON: When you have multiple viewpoints, do you ever write one person's viewpoint all the way through? Or do you always write as we're reading, chronologically?
JOE: I've kind of tried different approaches to that in different times. These days I mostly go chronologically. But there have been times, so when I was writing Before They're Hanged, that split into three different storylines kind of for the whole book, and I wrote each storyline on its own, and then intercut them afterwards. I don't know why I chose to do it that way, but I guess it just helped to keep my head in the game of what was going on in each one. And it worked well, so maybe I should start doing that again, actually, thinking about it.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
QUESTION: What is your process for coming up with a title?
JOE: Well, I mean, it's always a worry. Will I find another?
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: With each book, you're not sure where to go. And, I mean, The Blade Itself didn't have that title until quite late, until well after it kind of had a deal and was in preparation to be published. It had no title at all, and it took a while to think that up. I'd always loved those titles that kind of reference a quote, For Whom the Bell Tolls, things of that nature, because they feel literary and interesting. They feel like a mystery, like a sort of puzzle. Why is it called that? And then when you find out the quote it comes from, who said the quote, there's a kind of revelation in how does that then relate to the book, and there's a sort of a puzzle there that I find interesting. And somehow they just seem exciting to me. So that was what I started off doing. And then I sort of ran out around The Heroes time. You know, The Heroes was the working title, as I say, and I thought sooner or later I'll come up with a brilliant, quote-based title. And that didn't happen.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: So it became The Heroes. And then with Red Country, the book was always called--I think it was called A Red Country. And then the US publisher said, "That 'A' is not helping us."
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: So I removed it. And actually it's better without. I think it's a bit more definite. So that one wasn't quote based. But then The Age of Madness ones again I went back to that approach. I don't know. I've just always liked it. And there's such a lot of wisdom out there. I can just basically steal a title from someone else.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: There was another book called The Blade Itself published at the same time. Has anyone read Marcus Sakey's The Blade Itself? No one.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: I can't say I'm not pleased.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: But he wrote an edgy Chicago crime drama called The Blade Itself. And it was optioned by Ben Affleck maybe 15 years ago. I received an avalanche of congratulations.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: And I had to tell everyone, "No. It's Marcus Sakey's The Blade Itself, not mine." There you go.
QUESTION: There are three separate stories in your books talking about an item. Is that item the same one in all three stories?
JOE: The mysterious item around which the stories are based, I'd like to say, well, you know, there's an incredibly complicated and meaningful back story there. And if you read those stories very carefully, you might be able to piece it together. There'll also be in future books a lot of hints. So the best thing to do is to keep buying--
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: Books. And I expect you'll find the answers you seek.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: Eventually. Basically, I mean, they're kind of shaggy dog stories, those, and they require a McGuffin, you know, a thing. And so it's sort of a thing. It serves that purpose within the story. So what it is, in a sense, is not that important. But generally with stuff like that, I prefer to let the writing speak for itself and the story speak for itself. Because I kind of feel like once the author puts their thumb on the scale, it kind of becomes this canon thing. You know? And I like the fact that books are always an interaction between the writer and the reader. The reader brings an awful lot to it, brings their own ideas, their own approach, their own kind of theories. And that's where a lot of the fun is. So I try never to spoil people's fun that way. You just have to make up your own mind.
BRANDON: To this--
JOE: But do buy the rest of the books, obviously.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
BRANDON: To this day, I'm annoyed that Ridley Scott talked about the ending of Blade Runner and gave, you know, the director's opinion on it. Because I'm like, "Well, why did you leave it ambiguous only to go later on say it?" Let it be ambiguous. That's the point.
JOE: Yeah, and I mean, the world is littered with prequels that really better not made. You know because they sort of explain what was so brilliant when it was unexplained. Like, you know, "The Force."
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: I mean, never has anything needed explaining less than that.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: And the revelation kind of that it's midichlorians or whatever, has that improved things? I don't know that it has.
BRANDON: Don't you love how in the prequels also, like, every important event for the character happens in the space of a week, and, you know, they get their jacket. They get their--. Like, I'm convinced that if there were, like, a prequel where they were about American history, you'd be, you know, there'd be, like, George Washington. Right? They'd be like, "Who's that guy that's doing a ton of washing?" Like, "Oh, he's Washington." Like, seriously, they just kind of collect everything together into one, and it makes the characters way more mysterious, way more interesting, because it feels like there was only one period in time of their life that was important.
JOE: Yeah, and I think, you know, in a way, when there's a clamor from readers or fans or something to know more about the past of something, it means you nailed it the first time, because you made it interesting and mysterious and fascinating. The last thing you want to do is to kind of spoil that by explaining it all in a huge kind of splurge, I would have thought.
QUESTION: What is it like writing humor for a character and where does that inspiration usually come from?
JOE: Yeah, it's a tough one, isn't it? Humor is a tough one. Because I try to take all the magical thinking out of writing if I can. You know, I think there's always this temptation to think of writing as this magical special process where lovely ideas are brought to you by cherub on a cushion, you know, while you're on your fainting couch waiting for the ideas to appear. And to me, I find it helpful to think of writing as work, and to take all of that romance out of it. You sit in the chair. You tap away, and the inspiration comes to the man who's already working, if you know what I mean. Or woman, for that matter. But I guess with characters and with humor, there is an element of kind of magic there. It's very hard to say to yourself, "I will make a great character now." They just sometimes happen. And often some characters work straight out of the box and just instantly have this vivid voice and are interesting to me and feel like they burst onto the page like a real person. And sometimes they're just flat, and it takes a lot of time to get them to work better. But you never quite achieve that kind of zing that the effortless ones have for no reason you can understand. And I think humor's a big part of that. Some characters just have this sense of humor. Like Cosca, for example, is one character, I don't know why, just every line of his always seems to drop out funny, and to just work for me. Whereas other characters I have a lot more trouble getting there. And generally, with humor, I just try--I just write, and if anything seems at all funny I try and retain it. And if I can polish it up and make it funnier in the revision, I do so. I kind of never cut anything that's funny. People sometimes ask, "How do you calibrate a scene, you know, so that the laughs are in the right place?" And I don't know how you do that. To me it's like there's no wrong place to have a laugh. There's no wrong place for it to be funny. Funny is always kind of interesting. And in a way, it's the most horrible scenes where the laughs land the hardest, and vice versa. You know, it's in the funny scenes where horrible things land the hardest. So I just try and be funny wherever I can and never remove anything that seems to work.
QUESTION: What made you want to keep writing about Shivers?
JOE: Yes, interesting, actually. I mean, I suppose when I--. You know, everyone's got a book in them, they say. Right? And The First Law was the book I had in me, basically. And when I'd written that, my editor said to me, "What are you doing next?" And I was like, "What? Next?" You never think past the end of, like, the massive, fancy trilogy. The idea of, like, a career for the books, horrifying moment. Horrifying. But eventually I kind of started working up ideas for the books that would be the three standalones. and one thing that I did was I kind of asked myself, "Well, what characters have I got left on the shelf that seem like they might be interesting that have some kind of room for further development and so on?" That hadn't been point of views in the first trilogy that I could maybe make point of views in some of these other stories. And so Best Served Cold I thought, well, you know, it'd be nice to have some continuity of some characters people know and of the cultures people know, so to have a Northman as a fish out of water in this kind of treacherous Styrian setting would be interesting, and he seemed like the obvious pick. Right? So he kind of found his way into that story because he seemed like the best tool for the job, really. Not because I had some overarching plan for him. And obviously, in that story, the idea was that Monza has this kind of upward trajectory as you start to understand what she's about. And Shivers has this downward trajectory really. And by the time I got to the end of that book, it seemed like, "Oh, there's still a bit more to say about that character." And so when I was planning Heroes, and again, the same process, what characters have I got hanging around? All the sort of Northman who'd been in the first series basically had a role in that book somewhere. So Shivers obviously had to have a role in there. It was obvious. And then when it came to Red Country, has anyone seen The Outlaw Josey Wales? Anyone seen that film.
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: (applause)
JOE: Not enough. One of my favorite films, right? And particularly brilliant is this final scene where there's this standoff, as we were talking about earlier, the final standoff between Josey Wales and Fletcher, who's betrayed him. And you're waiting to see who dies, and they kind of walk away. Right? And I'm like, "That's brilliant. That's genius."
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: "I'll have some of that."
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: And I sort of needed two characters to fill those roles. And so Shivers just seemed like the obvious guy. He's got this score to settle. But it's also part of an ongoing development of that character and the movement. And then when it came to Age of Man, this again asking "What characters do I need and who have I got on the shelf?" It just seemed like, "Well, I've still got a use for that character." And I suppose that's always been my approach to the characters. Just happens for some reason Shivers has always been in the right spot to be reused, and so he's kind of become, I guess, the kind of unifying thread. He's not always central, but he's always kind of there. And that just seemed interesting. I just felt there was more to do with that character. Generally, if I feel like I've run out of things to do then you can shuffle them off and move on. As with the characters who, if you want to know their past, you've succeeded as a writer, but you don't necessarily have to tell them what the past is. The same applies to the future. You know? If you're still interested in the character as a reader, great. But perhaps as a writer the best thing to do is not to do another 15 books with that character. So we'll see if we come back to Shivers. But, you know, don't count on it.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: My advice is to keep buying those books as I was saying.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: No doubt Shivers will reappear at some point. Thank you.
QUESTION: Any advice you would give to romantasy writers?
JOE: Well, I mean, advice for romantasy writers, yeah. Maybe I'm not the best person for that. I don't know.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: I guess my approach to romance has always kind of been the same as my approach to everything else, really, which is to try and be kind of raw and honest. My mother gave me a great piece of advice about writing. When I first showed some work of mine to her, she kind of read it, and she had this look on her face. I wouldn't say it was like she sucked a lemon, but it was in that neighborhood. And I'd used some fancy metaphor like "The sky was like a sable cloth scattered in diamonds." Something like that. And she said, "Is the sky like a sable cloth?"
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: And I was like, "Hmm, maybe it's not." She said, "You've always got to be truthful." Whenever you use a metaphor, whenever you use dialogue, whenever you have a thought of a character, you always have to ask, "Is this true?" You know, don't go for the cliche. Go for what feels true. And if you constantly try to do that, then the most kind of hackneyed plot line becomes interesting because there'll be a kind of grain of authenticity to it. And so I suppose that's always a good kind of question to ask. And the same applies to relationships. You know, in fantasy you often get these quite idealized romances of the special boy who would be king and the special princess, and we kind of know what's going to happen there. And I suppose I've always been interested in things that feel a little bit more unpredictable and kind of nasty than that. And so that's always been my approach really. And like with sex, the same thing. Same approach as with violence. Just, you know, in fantasy you often get a lot of very neat and romanticized violence where it's a magnificent jewel and one man emerges the victor. Similarly with sex in fantasy, you know. I won't--we're in church so--
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: Won't go too far. But it's kind of a perfect, transformative moment between two people who then fall in love and spend their lives together. Sex isn't always like that, in my experience.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: So I suppose it's just, yeah, tempting to be truthful, perhaps. But then romantasy is a certain genre, a subgenre with its own kind of rules, and so you've got to make a judgement on what you can get away with and still kind of bring the readers with you at the same time. I suppose epic fantasy, romance is only one aspect. Whereas with romantasy it's clearly the very heart of what you're doing, so you need to be cautious in how you approach the subject.
QUESTION: Would you two ever consider working together?
BRANDON: There's something I've always wanted to do, and this is not a pitch. We're not going to do it.
JOE: (laughing)
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
BRANDON: We are both too busy. But I've always wanted to do a versus book with somebody. Have you heard me talk about this? The idea is that you always have this Author A and Author B. What about an Author A versus Author B, where you have two sets of characters competing for the same sort of thing and at odds.
JOE: OK.
BRANDON: And you mess with each other's characters, and you have an antagonistic co-authored book.
JOE: That's actually starting to make me interested in the idea.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: I must say, generally, because I do a fair bit of film and TV work these days, and that's obviously a very collaborative style of work. Which is to say you just get shafted as a writer.
BRANDON: (laughing)
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: And constantly get notes from 15 different people. And the director emails you and says, "I was talking to my gardener, and he had some brilliant ideas."
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: "Why don't you rewrite the whole first act."
BRANDON: You're laughing. It happens.
JOE: Yeah.
BRANDON: It's usually not the gardener. It's just usually the producer who had an idea and wants to come up with some reason to justify it.
JOE: Yes.
BRANDON: And then they're like, "What if this person was this person's dad? Put it in."
JOE: Yeah.
BRANDON: And you're like, "No. No." But yeah.
JOE: So I kind of get as much collaboration as I can stomach often in that part of the business. I started writing books, in a way, in the first place, because I wanted something that I was in total control of.
BRANDON: Yeah, you think we like people?
JOE: You got it.
BRANDON: We sit in our basements with a computer. We don't like people.
JOE: Yeah. Know we don't, as you'll know if you've read any of my books.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: And so to be in--it doesn't seem too much to ask to be in just complete command of everything. I mean is that too much to ask.
BRANDON: Hmm.
JOE: So, I mean, I've always found the idea of collaborating in fiction kind of intimidating, I've got to say. It'd have to be the right project and the right partner. But I'd never rule it out if the money was right.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
BRANDON: It's always nice to imagine what if. But the chances, I'd say, are very low.
JOE: Yeah.
QUESTION: Who is Joe's favorite character that he's written?
JOE: So I think with characters, it's a bit like with children. You're supposed to not have a favorite.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: But actually it's whoever's pissing you off the least at the time the questions asked.
BRANDON: (laughing)
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: And generally, for me, I hate the characters in the books I'm writing, and I love all the characters in the books I've finished because they no longer require any input from me.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: They're there. It's done. I don't have to worry. But they all serve sort of different purposes, the characters. It's a bit like asking an engineer, "What's your favorite bit of the engine?" You know. You kind of need all the bits to work together in order for it to be effective. So I'm not sure I'd really have a favorite. But, I mean, Glokta and Logen, those two, are the ones people often come back to. And I think are kind of my definitive characters. And perhaps--I don't know if you'd agree with this--but the tragedy of a writer's career often is that they spend a lot of their time trying to recapture what they had effortlessly right at the start. Do you know what I mean? You start off and your first book has this kind of exuberance and this particle of originality that readers will never experience hearing your voice for the first time again. And so those characters did work very well. And when I read them again I feel like, "Man, I used to be good at this."
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
BRANDON: Yeah. Nothing is more intimidating than rereading some of your old work and being like, "Oh, I'm supposed to do that again?"
JOE: Yeah.
BRANDON: Yeah.
JOE: Absolutely. Although the other thing I would say is that Steven Pacey's readings have kind of taken on--
AUDIENCE: (cheering and applause)
JOE: He's not even here.
BRANDON: Yeah. That's even more applause.
JOE: He's not even here. I mean, he is nothing without me.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: But he's a really brilliant reader. And obviously, audiobooks have become a big part of the business, a really important part, especially for me, a big part because he's been so successful as a reader. And he does this incredible thing with Glokta where I didn't know how anyone would do those italicized thoughts, as a reader, and make it clear what's happening. But he has this incredible trick where he does Glokta's speaking voice with a lisp because he has no teeth, but his thinking voice is the same voice but without the lisp. It's like his perfect voice, the voice he wishes he had. And so he manages to achieve making it clear how the prose is working, but also adding this extra layer to it, which is just genius. I mean, he is very, very good at what he does, I must admit.
QUESTION: Any news on Joe's movie? What is the logic to Joe's prose?
JOE: Well, on the Best Served Cold movie, there's not a lot I can say. I mean the difficulty with all the film and TV stuff always is that if an announcement is made, usually that's all you can say. You kind of can't say much outside the announcement.
BRANDON: Is that the one with Tim Miller?
JOE: Yeah.
BRANDON: The director, kind of, the guy who came up with Love, Death, and Robots.
JOE: Yeah.
BRANDON: Yeah.
JOE: Exactly.
BRANDON: Good guy. I like Tim Miller.
JOE: Yeah, you've talked to him. Absolutely. I've been working with Tim for more than a decade on the First Law stuff and we've had a few different stabs at it over time. And so I think that will certainly continue. It's not totally dead. These things flay along zombie-like, always. But it's certainly not in the rudest health at the moment. But you never know. Perhaps it will lurch into life once again sooner or later.
And on the question of kind of prose and rhythm and logic and structure and all that stuff, I supposed I like rhythms a lot with prose, and I try and give each character a different diction in the prose they have. So sometimes, Sunny in this book, for example, she's ended up kind of being written with a long paragraph, then a punchline, then a long paragraph, and a punchline. And that's just a rhythm that seems to make sense with her and this staccato style of thinking she has. A character like Balthazar, by contrast, has these incredibly long, pompous, run-on, complex sentences with lots of punctuation and long words and everything because he's a fool, basically.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
JOE: An arrogant fool. And so I try to make the rhythms and the shapes match the nature of the character whose point of view I'm writing from. That's always my first approach. And that can take all kinds of different forms with different characters. I supposed I've just always liked prose that has bounce in it and a nice rhythm to it. And as I'm revising, that's something I'll try and be, you know, fine tuning all the time. And as I say, I have one pass through where I'm just looking at the prose specifically, trying to get the rhythm right and trying to make the kind of detail and the word choice as sharp as I can.
QUESTION: Any unconventional author/series recommendations?
JOE: Sure. Do you want to take that one?
BRANDON: Unconventional. We get asked this so often that it's hard to think of. Right? The same thing for you? It's like, I have all the things that I've recommended, I recommended because I like them. What is unconventional? I mean, for authors, how about this? Watchman? I mean, it's one of the greatest, most lauded books of all time. But I came to it late, thinking that I wouldn't have a lot to learn from a graphic novel. And boy, was I wrong. Watchman is one of the things that taught me the most about story structure and kind of some of the literary--how to take some literary ideas and really translate into something that is also very mainstream. So that might be unconventional. Go read Watchman. It's fantastic.
JOE: I mean, Lonesome Dove is the book I always kind of recommend first to people.
AUDIENCE: (applause)
JOE: Because I think, to me, it has the sort of virtues of amazing characterization and dialogue, really, and the kind of modern twist on the classic form that I really love. And I just think it's a brilliant, brilliant book. And I think it's a book that most people who like my stuff would enjoy, while also taking kind of into it a different genre, a different form. So that's one I always recommend. James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet I recommend a lot as well. That was kind of a big influence on me. Noir with very strong character writing and kind of voice writing. And then I would always recommend Shelby Foote's Narrative History of the American Civil War. Because if things go bad you can live in it because the slip case is so big you can actually curl up inside and sleep. It's a huge, massive, nonfiction kind of tract, but it's written with a novelists eye for character, and I just think it's a fascinating subject matter. There you go. I think we're done.
BRANDON: Yeah. Though I'm going to ask for one more thing.
AUDIENCE: (applause)
JOE: Oh, yes.
AUDIENCE: (cheering and applause)
BRANDON: So before we let you do that, I'm going to ask Joe to sign my book. I'm going to skip the line.
AUDIENCE: (laughing)
BRANDON: Yep.
JOE: So low. So low.
BRANDON: I'm going to use my privilege to get that signed. And then, hey, thank you all for being here. Thanks for coming out to see us. I think The King's English is happy to sell you many, many books. We have a few of mine, not very many. Mostly you've got Joe books. So go buy some Joe books. And yeah, thank you, guys. And thank you for signing my book, Joe.
AUDIENCE: (cheering and applause)
