Recent entries

Sir_JRoddious

I'm curious whether waybound will start with them training or them stepping out, then flashing back to the training

Will Wight

You know, I did consider the flashback angle.

I usually don’t like messing with sequential timelines, but there was an argument for it structurally.

That way the book doesn’t go TRAIN TRAIN TRAIN - FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT since I can alternate between character and action scenes.

I didn’t do the flashback route, though. It might have been the more elegant solution, I’m not sure, but I dislike jumping back and forth in time too much.

I don’t mind real flashbacks—like, to a character’s backstory, or a B Story set in the past—but interweaving the present-day narrative strikes me as unnecessarily confusing.

TallerLindon

If Eithan died when he was Underlord and under the veil… would he die for good?

Will Wight

Under no circumstances could anyone with Cradle-limited powers have truly killed him, but they could have “killed” him. Meaning destroying his body and forcibly ejecting him from the Iteration.

The others would have seen him die, and it would have looked real to them. Body, Remnant, everything.

Meanwhile, his real self would reincorporate in the Way around Sector 11 trying to figure out a backup plan. Origin Shroud intact, because mere physical violence can’t do anything to an artifact on that level.

If he had been killed in this way, his current life in Cradle would indeed have ended, and at best he could try to avoid detection and start over with another incarnation.

Which he very much wanted to avoid.

If an attack on a higher level had been used, like hypothetically if someone had used Penance on him or if the Mad King had hit him with an attack, then it would have forcibly bypassed his restrictions and revealed his power.

Which, for him, would be the worst-case scenario. “Dying” is bad, but having his power exposed would bring the Abidan.

MedicoreWade

What happens when a space like [Valinhall] destabilizes? Does it just evaporate into the void or would it be like adding an extra sun to a solar system?

Will Wight

In this case, it would feel like an earthquake and would gradually interfere with the relationship the rooms have with one another.

Some of the deeper rooms might be lost or destroyed with only a few minutes of un-veiled Yerin’s presence, the House’s layout would shift chaotically, and doors might become unreliable or toss you out into the Void.

The effects would be worse the longer she stayed until she restricted her power or just chose to tear it apart, which would reduce Valinhall to its base components: fragments of destroyed Iterations floating in the Void.

bossmonkey88

I know Will is crazy busy but I would love to see a collection of short snips of the series from Eithan's true perspective.

Will Wight

As one of the stretch goals for the Kickstarter, I promised to write spoiler-free scenes for the first three books. The sort of things you might see in an Extended Edition.

And since the goal was so very stretched, I also promised to write at least one spoiler-FULL scene, which takes place during the first three books but which you shouldn’t read unless you’re caught up on the series.

I’m not saying it’s necessarily an Eithan POV. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Always in motion is the future.

cavapooboi

How fast could Yerin speedrun Valinhall?

Will Wight

Book 11 Yerin entering Valinhall would be a cataclysmic event. She would have to veil herself to avoid destabilizing the space. It would take trivial effort to break the Territory entirely.

Underlord Yerin would probably be the best bet for speedrunning it while still getting some benefit out of it and not completely unbalancing the whole thing.

lcxicey

can we get this happening in a blooper? it would be hilarious to see your take on it. Probably just wishful thinking since im just finishing up travelers gate and would love to see the different worlds interact and how the valin travelers would view her lol

Will Wight

That would be a little too substantial for a blooper, I think, but it sounds like fun to write.

MysteryLolznation

I've re-read this series five times. Ask me anything and then edit the question to make me look like I've never read it, or a horrible person.

Will Wight

[says something which was no doubt profound, witty, or both, which is now lost to the dark depths of Reddit edit history, later edited to:]

What is the true name of the Dark Lord, He Who Lurks Beneath Reality, the Destroyer of All Joy, the Dark Spirit Whose Name Should Not Be Whispered, the Cause of True Suffering, the One Who Canceled Firefly, the Author of Damnation, and the Creature Whose Aspect Is So Vile That Merely Glimpsing His Visage Will Cause Your Face To Melt Off?

…and what are the words used to summon him?

MysteryLolznation

Will Wight. WAIT HOLY FUCK

yourmomyourdad21210

I'm about to graduate, and I'd like to use one of Cradle's quotes as my senior quote.  What would you pick in my position?

Will Wight

“Every day you survive is a new surprise for me.”

-Dross

My senior quote was “Build a man a fire and he’ll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.”

Canaanite_

Asking ChatGPT about books Will Wight has written.  Got some interesting responses...

image

Will Wight

Wow those titles are kinda legit. “The Soulstalker,” “Sorcerer to the Crown,” “The Endless King.”

I’m gonna let AI name my books from now on.

ChefHancock

Gpt was starting to run out of ideas with "Return to First City" lol

Will Wight

I didn’t expect The First City to be such a hit, and it really only made sense as a standalone. Return to First City was the only thing I could do with the sequel, but I felt like the trilogy finally came into its own with The Final Gate.

lysanderslair

I stick to my interpretation that [The Iron Heart] might use 10 times as much madra per second to heal an injury but only take 1% as long to do the healing so it is a net win.

Will Wight

Yeah that’s the answer.

The way I think of it is that the Iron Heart channels madra more efficiently through the Bloodforged Iron body, operating the effect faster but taking more energy.

Overall, it’s more effective. Less energy is being lost in total due to inefficiency and the effect happens faster.

But short-term, it drains madra from you faster because it can handle a faster transfer rate.

Respectfully yours,

The cold-hearted MFer

effortfulcrumload

Does Cradle operate on at 24 hour day, 365 day year?

Will Wight

Really? No.

Effectively? Yes.

Meaning, I’m using the Earth definitions of “day” and “hour” and “year” for the purposes of not confusing real-world readers.

u/SayLessThanYouKnow

[Cradle] is sincere but doesn't take itself too seriously

Will Wight

Well said. And thanks!

That’s definitely how I think of it. Sincerity is higher priority to me than taking the world seriously.

On the one hand, I do take the characters seriously and I want them to live meaningful lives and grapple with sincere struggles.

On the other hand, I’m very aware that this is a series about punching Godzilla in the face.

u/aboredgoat

So many series struggle with that concept. Either they have every instant be incredibly dire and epic and they just pound the reader with maximized stakes until they’re numb, or they turn everything into a joke and are unable to stay serious for more than a sentence, which kills the stakes entirely and makes the reader not care about the characters. Will strikes a good balance in Cradle. IMO, his earlier works were too far on the dire side.

Will Wight

Yeah, I feel like a lot of times sincerity is compromised by taking a series too seriously. There’s some integrity in the realization that “At the end of the day, this story is fantastical and ridiculous,” but at the same time, fantastical and ridiculous stories can still have real emotional impact.

IMO, his earlier works were too far on the dire side.

Funny enough, I agree, but I’d say it was for lack of ability, not lack of intention.

Early on, I thought the inflated over-the-top ridiculousness of the setting was enough to signal to the reader “Don’t take this too seriously.”

Simon’s carrying a doll and swinging a sword bigger than he is. Elder Empire is pirates versus ninjas versus Cthulhu.

But within the world, the characters take it seriously because of course they do. It’s not ridiculous to them, it’s real life.

That isn’t enough for someone reading fiction, though, because so often stories DO want you to take them 100% seriously. And I slowly realized that over a few years and adjusted how I presented them.

If I were to re-write my earlier books, basically through Soulsmith, I’d highlight the inherent humor a little more. Not necessarily ramping up the one-liners, but some more beats where I signal to the reader that THEY aren’t supposed to take this as dire and brooding even if the characters do.

Like Simon tripping over his cloak, Shera treating murder missions as the humdrum status quo, and so on.

For one thing, I could have exaggerated how overly stiff and formal Sacred Valley people are compared to outsiders.

Sincerely Discordant

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?

Will Wight

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.

Questioner

What's your signature dish?

Will Wight

So I'm gonna let you in on another Will secret here, in addition to Will rants. My preferred foods are basically anything on noodles. I just love noodles. I just love them. I will make all sorts of pasta out of leftovers. I just enjoy it. 

Chat

Will is lazy confirmed.

Will Wight

That is accurate, however I will say that I put a lot of effort into these sometimes because I just love noodles so much. I think probably my ideal meal would be mushrooms, onions, sausage, and some kind of seafood, probably scallops, and a brown sauce on noodles. There's probably sausage or scallops, probably not both. I don't know that I've tried those together cause that doesn't sound great. It sounds alright. I'd probably eat it. But those are my favorite things. I just like those things and I like them on noodles. I also love popcorn. Popcorn is just-I'm a popcorn fiend. I eat way more popcorn than I do Oreos, believe it or not. I like Oreos but I don't cram cookies into my face constantly. I'm not Cookie Monster anymore. That was a dark phase in my life.

Questioner

If you could collab with another author, living or dead, who would it be?

Will Wight

I'll answer that question in a second, but first, I would say the idea of collaboration seems really fun to me. I feel like I would enjoy it. However, on the other side, there's the reality that it's just easier to just keep writing books by myself and it's probably easier for whoever I would collaborate with too. So it's hard to justify "Let's take longer to write one book instead of us each writing two books, like we each write one faster." It's just hard to justify.

But if I could magically collaborate with anybody, who would I collaborate with? My obvious instinct I would say is Robert Jordan because he was just a huge influence on me growing up and I would love to learn from him. However, I don't think our styles would be particularly compatible so this would mostly be him going "Will, do this." and I'd be like "Yes sir." and then we'd just be kinda writing a Robert Jordan book and I'd be sort of happily writing on a toy typewriter in the background while he's doing the real work. A more fun collaboration, let's see... Jane Austen. 100 percent. We get the same thing where I get to learn from a master and I get to improve my skills and also now we get to have a Jane Austen novel with her trademark character relationships and well defined people in a Victorian-I guess Elizabethan, whatever-English setting. And at the same time we also get magic and sword fights. That's it. It's kinda like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. 

Sam just suggested D.B. Weiss and David Benioff and then my dad stage whispered "Who's that?" That's about right. I'm gonna move on. There's nothing I can say.

Liam

Outsource the slice of life to Jane Austen.

Will Wight

I'll be honest with you Liam, I would actually just outsource it all to Jane Austen. Again, it's another scenario that ends with me typing with a toy typewriter in the background while they do the real work.

Pride and Prejudice and Dreadgods. That's it, I'll read that, I'll be honest.

Questioner

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?

Will Wight

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. 

Questioner

When reading, what makes you say "This is good writing?"

Will Wight

When I am reading someone else's book, or watching a movie, or watching a TV show, or playing a game, I go "That was good." when the character does something that is organic to them that is contrary to what you would expect from the cliché. Or something that plays on the viewer/reader expectation in a good way, in a positive way. Not something that necessarily surprises or twists you but something where you go "That makes sense for them, I like that." It's when the characters respond organically, so let me see if I can come up with an example from Stranger Things. I still haven't watched the last two episodes so these won't be spoilers. I thought when we got the backstory from the bad guy of the latest season of Stranger Things I thought that was really clever and well done, because I had seen one thread and I had seen the other thread coming, and I had not seen how they overlapped. When I did that I was like "That was really good writing, that was good story construction, they constructed that in a way for a particular effect in such a way that even if you saw both threads coming, you still wouldn't have ruined the effect of the two crossing. Someone said, "Oh no, you've started a Will rant." That's not wrong. But yeah, I see these things and I go "That's good, I like that moment, that landed really well." Whenever they land a moment, whenever they've got this line, there's sometimes where I think the delivery is even better than the line and I'm going "Man, this line was really elevated by this delivery or this actor or whatever." That's I guess the idea, when I go "That makes total sense for the character, it's organic, and I didn't see it coming."

Questioner

Tell the burgeoning writers why alpha, beta, and editor passes are necessary.

Will Wight

I feel like this gets covered elsewhere, but it is a good thing for me to mention because I'm talking about my process a lot. I've mentioned alpha drafts, I've mentioned beta drafts, so on and so forth. The idea behind telling a story is that you are trying to take what's in your head and you are trying to give it to somebody else to evoke an emotional response. That's the entire idea behind storytelling and writing a novel in general. In order to do that, you need feedback from other people. You need people to read your story, you need people to give their honest reactions, you need people to tell you how they responded, and you need to take that and evaluate it in order to understand-okay, because you can never be 100 percent on your own. You have your own strengths and weaknesses, you have your own point of view.

If you write something, people talk a lot about how their artistic vision can't be compromised, and it's just "gotta be the way I envisioned it originally." The way I envisioned it originally is not sacrosanct, it's not holy. It's the kind of thing that you need to change and you need to alter in order to have an effect on your reader because ultimately it's about the reader. It's not about you, it's not about your experience, it's about the reader's experience. In order to accurately understand the reader's experience you have to be talking to readers that you can trust and who can give you their feedback. And of course you're gonna make mistakes. You're gonna make mistakes, you're gonna need people to catch them, you're gonna need people to see things you can't, you're gonna need people to have perspectives you don't have. It's just important for every reason but I think that's probably the concept and the principle behind it all.

Your Benevolent Dictator

Did you use the method of writing that you did for Wintersteel with this one?

Will Wight

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.

Jonathan

Do you plan on writing a LitRPG style book at any point?

Will Wight

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.

Daniel

How do you write a series with so much fighting without desensitizing the reader? I am constantly amazed the stakes remain high despite how common violence is in the world.

Will Wight

Uh, okay so it's mostly this. I'm mainly laughing because of chat's reaction to my previous statement about Charles's question, which- I want everyone to keep Charles's question in mind over the next few days, but Daniel's question, how do you write a series with so much fighting without desensitizing the reader.   Well, in general it's because this is action movie style violence, this is Marvel movie/MCU violence. This is not- if I was trying to go gritty detail realistic violence it wouldn't be fun. So therefore leaning into the anime nature of it right so that's one thing, it doesn't feel like real violence, it feels like fantasy violence because that's what it is.

And then the stakes remain high despite how common violence is in the world... I think I understand what you mean. I feel like there's something at stake in the fight even though really they're fighting all the time and the answer to that is a fight should always be a debate between two characters and I admit I don't do this perfectly a lot of the time, but a fight should always be about a conflict between two characters. So two characters are in conflict and they are competing over something that they care badly enough about to hurt the other person. So because of that it's not just a fight. It's not just them sitting there with lightsabers for 10 minutes, right, like they're competing over something.

And when you don't have that, then it's just as boring as a chase scene the last 10 minutes because nothing's going to change. So I try, emphasis on try, to have it not just be spectacled but also be have the characters be doing this for a reason. And so when the characters are doing it for a reason it feels like something's at stake.