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Will, I like when you use easily searchable words for the archive.
Hahaha gotcha, I should say other easily searchable words. Rutabaga I am committed to developing my characters romantically. Aardvark if I can figure out how to write stories more efficiently, I hope to scale up my production to a consistent 3 books a year so that I can try more new things
What is the point writing a Xuanhuan novel where the hero is weak and not winning the tournament and always weak among his peer. Most Xuanhuan novel, the hero if not powerful to fight cross level, they mostly unbeaten on the same level. Can you just stop writing Lindon like he some kind of Batman wannabe who always have to fight using scheme and plot instead of like a true Blackflame warrior who keep advance while just killing everybody in his path. You let blackflame as his path, but Lindon is more like a weak ants, so what is the point?
If I’m understanding your comment correctly, you want Lindon to win all the time because that’s what usually happens in the genre.
I agree, that does usually happen! But I don’t like that, and here’s why: usually in these web novels, the author pretends like the hero has been through a lot of adversity, but they haven’t. They win all the time, and they never lose, and they are always the best forever.
They never fight someone who is their equal because no one is their equal.
I don’t find that very interesting or engaging, to be honest. It’s pretty one-dimensional. I also don’t respect what the character has done if they only did it because they were the best of all time from the first chapter.
I would rather read about someone who becomes the best, not someone who is the best, so that’s where I intend to go with Cradle.
Is Lindon going to lose all the time? No, of course not! He lost here, and he’s as frustrated about it as you are.
But he’s going to buckle down and continue to push forward anyway, because that’s who he is.
Did you use the method of writing that you did for Wintersteel with this one?
I've actually gotten questions like that several times, because I described my writing process for Wintersteel and then of course Wintersteel is a really good book if I do say so myself. I don't, but other people do so I'm glad. I think Wintersteel came out really well and so people want to know, did you use the same writing process? The answer is, I never use the same writing process twice. I try to iterate every time. I really do try to, every time I write a book I try to build on and improve on what I did last time.
The focus is on not wasting time, and what I mean by that is not truly really wasting it. Truly doing something that does not lead to progress in the manuscript. Anything that I do that is lateral progress or is inefficient or is something where I was spinning my wheels trying to decide if this character's design should be red or blue, that's not helping. Anything that I do that adds to the story and is really developing the story I try to keep. The idea behind that is, prior to Wintersteel I had been writing a lot of wasted words. So I'd write 30 to 50 thousand words that wouldn't end up in the manuscript because I would be going off on a tangent and then realize "Well, that doesn't make any sense." So then I'd cut it and then I'd have to come back and start over or I'd have to write another part or whatever. [I'm] trying to stop that. I've gotten better at that every time so I think probably Dreadgod was my most efficient one so far in Cradle. So it's an evolved version of that. It's all steps on the same journey, I guess you might say.
How many books do you think Cradle will have?
I think 12. I said that recently on the subreddit. Which I fully understand, not everyone looks at the subreddit, so why would you know that? But I recently decided there is going to 12 for a couple of reasons. One is cradle is not structured in trilogies, but that's four trilogies. That's enough content. Secondly, it's a good length and I think that's about when I want them to reach an endpoint. That feels right to me, I think I can do the stuff I want to do in five more novels. After that there might be a spin-off or a continuation. Who knows? I would like to do some new stuff, because I just love doing new stuff. One of the things I like the most is coming up with new ideas, I just love doing that, and I don't get to do that a lot when I'm working on one series. That is something I'm looking forward to, and I also would like to go back to Traveler's Gate, it's been a long time. But of course, Elder Empire first.
What's a fanfic you'd write?
No joke, I seriously considered writing a real DBZ-inspired fantasy series. Some of the elements could work wonders in a novel series. Yeah, 90% filler and 9% powering up. The magic system isn’t necessarily too simple, it just isn’t developed. If it were, and given actual rules, it could work. The same fights become tactical and more dramatic when you understand the interplay of the magic system. But the main thing that got me interested was the constant tension they keep the reader in. The false climactic fights, the ramp-up of tension, the continued escalation of stakes... DBZ doesn’t have real rules. Or rather, they do in individual chapters/episodes, but the rules change so frequently and arbitrarily that it might as well not. So people making fan charts and speculating on power levels from Super might as well not bother, because there is no real answer. I vividly remember my collection of DBZ tapes.
What do you want to see in Skysworn
Maybe adding some romantic relationships? I know he has a one track mind of "getting stronger" but he is still a 15 year old boy, he should be thinking about girls at least sometimes.
In most fiction works it is either "one fated love" or "A huge harem", I would love to see a more realistic approach in your work which mean Lindon having 4-5 different relationships during the course of the series.(not at the same time, of course).
You know, I understand and feel the same way, but I'm not sure this is the series for it.
It's not like I spend much time on Lindon's day-to-day life. I've been trimming away basically everything except progression and exploration, so anything focused purely on relationship development would be taking time away from either the story or the world.
It's the reason why so many series default to either a single, fated relationship or a harem: time.
For a harem, you just have one love interest per arc. It's part of the story formula, and you repeat it over and over. It takes no extra time because it's part of the story, and because the girls only get shallow development and have no real lives of their own.
And a single relationship is either gotten out of the way early or is someone intimately involved in the plot, just like the main character is, so their development together can be folded into plot development.
Basically, that's two ways to bake romance into a story without it taking up too much word count.
As it is now, an ongoing series of romantic relationships would mean 20-30k more words per novel. Which means either 20-30k fewer words spent on the meat and potatoes of the story, or a lot more time to develop and write each book.
Plus, writing engaging and organic character relationships is far more challenging than writing fights or cool magical doohickeys. So...it comes down to having a limited amount of time, and having to choose where I spend it.
However, despite everything I just said, I'm not entirely ruling it out. I'm spending some time over the next few days just trying to figure out how much of my books should be spent on plot progression, and how much room I have for other things. This will be part of that discussion.
So, had this weird dream where I read a Will released a post saying he was "So sorry" to his fans. He was sorry because he was releasing Underlord and still hadn't released OK&K's.
That would be weird if I hadn’t already done it...
...five times.
By now, there’s nothing weird about that at all.
Do you create side characters to cause or contribute to pre-planned events in the story or are the events inspired by side characters you want to add?
Kind of both. I mean I create side characters as needed. There's this idea that you hear sometimes where people talk about "Ah! This side character only existed to further the main character's journey or only existed because of their relationship with the main character." I don't wanna draw back the curtain on writing too much, but every single side character exists only to serve the main character's journey and that's it. They have no other purpose. That is why they're there. What you want to do is create the impression that they have their own lives and that they exist for their own purposes but they don't because it's a series. Because it's your own story, whoever the main characters are they're the ones who matter and everybody else is just there to support the stories of the main characters. I just create them as needed. I will say my one philosophy about side characters is, a lot of people believe that side characters that are emphasized or designed cool should then end up being important later and I don't necessarily agree with that. I think if you've gotta have a bartender or stable boy and they've gotta have a couple of lines you might as well make them cool looking. Sometimes I write people that people are like "Oh they're definitely come back cause you would never invest that much time in describing and setting them up just to not bring them back and have them bring an important role later." no I totally would. 100 percent. Just wanted to be cool.
There are authors who are prolific to a fault and make low quality, high quantity stuff while other more famous authors leave us in waiting for years to decades. How do you balance so you don't fall into either category?
That's a really good question, but my first response is there's a lot of grey area between those two things. Between the people who write a book a month and the people who don't ever write a book. There's a lot of flex in there, I think most people probably fall into the middle.
How do I answer this without stepping on any toes? So it's not too hard to fall in between those two extremes, however, what I really like to do is I generally go "What is my experience as a reader and what kind of experience do I want to have? What kind of books have I always wanted to see?" So to me, I want a book series where I know the next installment is gonna come out in a reasonable amount of time. To me, that feels better. I enjoy reading the books more. If I don't know when the next books coming out then I don't know how to evaluate the story because you have a lot of books that are great first books in a trilogy but bad standalones. So if you leave them waiting for two and three and four years then they've just been reading a standalone and it's not a good standalone, it's only one third of a story. So I prefer books that come out regularly. The more I write and the more I read, the more I realize "That's very important to me." So books coming out regularly is important. On the other hand, I also want stuff that I enjoy. So if I were to really dash it off and write quickly, and I know that there are some people like PirateAba, Wandering Inn, who can write very quickly at a high level, and I've struck the balance that I've struck. If I go too much faster my quality will drop off significantly. So I'm never gonna be writing the ten million words that they've written.
Have you ever used the subreddit for ideas?
No. I don't need to use anything for ideas. That's one of the things that's interesting is that it's harder to narrow down ideas than it is to come up with ideas. I'm never like "Man I sure am out of ideas! I'd better go find some."
I guess if I could have seen something in the subreddit if I thought it was really cool, but typically the stuff in the subreddit people come up with are stuff they think is going to happen based on what's already in the books... so it's already in the books. So I've typically already at least considered it.
Now what I have done sometimes is when a fan mentions an idea they have, and then they'll pitch it differently or present it in a way that they think it's really cool, and they'll get me to reconsider something I've set aside. So that is something I've done: I've reconsidered something because a fan said it. Or because when they said it and they're like "Yeah, this is probably what's gonna happen," and I've thought... not because they guessed it, but I've thought: "Oh yeah when you put it that way that sounds like a bad idea." So I've done stuff like that.
But it's very rare that anybody comes up with an idea - and that it all fits the series - that I haven't already though of... just because I've spent a long time thinking about this, that's all.
Actually Will, that's the perfect way to introduce it, Yerin x Lindon kissed between books, but when we get to Underlord, she's pulled back because her blood shadow tried to kill him or something and now she's struggling with it or SOMETHING LIKE THAT totally works it into the plot, see?
I would love to do that, but my challenge is doing more character/relational development in scene. Have to step up.
Do you plan on writing a LitRPG style book at any point?
That is something that I've always kind of wanted to do, honestly. I love video games, I love fantasy novels, and I feel like a fantasy novel about video games is my dream, it's the bread and butter. But I don't like LitRPG. I've read a lot of it, I've read all the staples of the genre, I don't like it. It always feels to me like I could go play a videogame right now, why am I reading about someone else playing a video game. So if I were to write a LitRPG style novel I would be writing someone in a real world with a game-like system. But then I go, okay, so I'm gonna take this game-like system and then I'm gonna go within this real world, what would they call these things? What would their terminology be and how would that shape their culture. Then when I pad that out and plan it out I end up with something that doesn't look like a video game at all, it just looks like a fantasy series, so I've removed the LitRPG components. I don't know how to write a LitRPG that is a LitRPG and is something I would enjoy. I just don't know how to do it. I'm just avoiding it for now. Just kinda dodging it.
I'm not saying the genres bad, it's just not for me. It doesn't resonate with me, I know sometimes people crap on the genre or whatever, I think there's definitely some good LitRPG. Obviously there's a lot of people interested in it. I think even there are some stories I have read that I think are good stories, they're just not my thing. I don't get it. I haven't cracked the code. I don't have it.
I really think we need an extract from Dross's Patreon.
I’m not writing erotic fanfiction of my own or anybody else’s work, BUT...writing “erotic” fanfiction the way DROSS would view it...that’s pretty tempting.
I have a quick questions about your childhood (inaudible). Did you always want to be a writer, or did you want to be something else when you were younger?
I… it’s hard to say, right? ‘Cause on the one hand, I have always, always, always been into reading. I was into reading, I was into books, that was my whole thing. I just read books all the time. I got into trouble constantly for reading books. My parents would have to come into my room and make sure I wasn’t reading books under the covers. So books were always something I was really interested in. But I didn’t necessarily… what I remember is in middle school, really starting to think, “People write these. Maybe I could write these.”
I was in the national spelling bee as a kid, so in 7th and 8th grade I earned my way to the national spelling bee. So, I was really good at spelling and grammar and words and just English in general, so I was just always good at that. I generally, I just write clean first drafts; a lot of writers don’t but I generally do. So, I knew I had that skill set, then in middle school I started thinking maybe I wanted to write some books. And I wrote a few little stories, for class and stuff like that, and I liked that, but it was embarrassing, and I didn’t want anyone to read it. And then in high school, that’s when I really started saying, “Yeah, I want to be a writer,” but I didn’t… I was just really scared of letting anyone read anything I’d written. That was just something, I didn’t want anyone to read it, because I knew it was bad. So, it wasn’t until college that I was really faced with the reality of, I have got to actually write something if I want to do this for a living.
So, what I was doing until then, even in high school, is I was mowing lawns. I started, initially I borrowed my dad’s lawn mower and I went door to door in my neighborhood and looked for lawn mowing jobs, and then I ended up borrowing money and buying a better lawn mower, so I ended up having a real lawn mowing business that I paid for college with. So, I didn’t take out any loans for college. I mowed my way through college; cut some grass. And so, I was doing that for money, and just to support myself. I didn’t have any passion about lawn mowing (I don’t know who does really) so that was just hard work to get myself through college. So, the whole time I became, I just learned on my own more and more about writing and what it takes to become a writer. And then in college that’s what they talked about, and the more I learned, I thought yeah, this is what I want. I’m passionate about stories and I’m passionate about words. That’s where I want to be.
So, I kinda just sorta… slipped into it I guess? It wasn’t, it was always my area of giftedness and it was always my area of interest, but it’s not like as kid I was like, “I’m definitely going to write a book.” I was still just very scared to show anybody anything I had written, so I could always not quite picture giving it, handing a manuscript to somebody and seeing “read this” because I knew it was going to suck because I wrote, so of course it’s going to suck. So that was always my feeling, until eventually I did take the plunge, and write some stuff for school. So that was my journey.
Where did you get the idea for Cradle?
It was really just I was reading a lot of cultivation novels that are mostly Chinese, but then I was also reading a lot of Korean martial arts web comics, so there's a lot of shared mythology there. So that was kind of where I was... that idea started percolating, and I was going to do it as a web serial, just on the website on my blog, at a couple of chapters a week to get some traffic to cover up the gap between writing Kings and Killers. And then I ended up doing the short stories instead, so then I bound the chapters I had left together and turned them into Unsouled, and then I... that took off, far more than Elder Empire ever had, so I pursued Cradle. So that's the long and the short of Cradle.
