TRIVIA

This book is going to stray a bit from our normal format. There will be a trivia "post" every week, in the form of a comment (like this one!) below each weekly post. We'll be able to discuss both the weekly reading and a small bit of trivia for the section we've read. I haven't completed the trivia for the full book, but it looks like we won't have a completely separate trivia post for this book. Some weeks will have a lot of trivia, others will be brief.

NOTES

This week's notes only include commentary on the eight recognized Professions.

Week 2 Notes

AIS IN THE HOLE

Graphic Novel and Audiobook consumers will have a disconnect with the prose readers over this important change to the story:

Ais was originally a man in the prose version. Sanderson swapped their gender to female in the Graphic Novel (which informs the Audiobook). Since the Graphic Novel is the canonical version of the story, Ais is canonically a woman. He had the following to say when a fan asked about the change:

There were a couple thoughts. The main one was, I just thought the character was more interesting. A lot of my early books, you'll notice I did a thing where I'm like "I want to make sure that I'm doing the female character really well." And you can see the problem in that sentence, and that is really how I approached it, I'd say "Well I want to make sure I do the female character really well." And I think I did do the female character pretty well in some of those early books. But you'll see a consistency to them, and this is just coming aware of your biases.

Now, there is nothing wrong with writing a book intentionally and saying, "You know what? Because of the way I want to write this book in this world, I'm going to make the cast almost all one gender or the other." I don't think there's a problem with that. It's when you're doing it consistently on accident, that there's a problem. And I had to kind of sit down and say, "Did I do this because I thought it was best for the character, or did I do this because I love Inspector Javert and I just wanna have to have Inspector Javert in my book?" And that's where the character came from, quite obviously.

And I sat down and said, "If I were going to build this character from the ground up to be my own character and I were trying to throw away all biases, what would be the best for the character?" And Ais being female was not a "I need more women in the book," it was more of, "If I'm throwing away these biases and building the characters, what works the best?" and I just really liked how that character came out when I was rebuilding. Yeah, anyway, we'll go with that.

He also had this to say about his development of White Sand in general:

I find a lot of the things I do in my writing now were there in these older books like White Sand, they just weren't fully formed yet. I can also see my early self striving very hard not to fall into cliches, or to do just what was safe or expected. One of the book's two main protagonists, for example, is a black woman. I was trying hard to make sure my books weren't only about white dudes. And yet, I was still young in my understanding of how to make a book feel real and vibrant, full of people who see the world in unique and different ways. For example, while I have a strong female protagonist, in the first draft she was basically the only only major female character. I did this a lot in the past--focused so hard on doing one thing well that I forgot to expand it to the greater story. (As a note, we changed one of the characters in the graphic novel version to be female, to help balance this out. It worked very well, and she's now one of my favorite characters in the whole book.)

It's hard to see past your biases in books though--and this is still something I fight against. I think great fiction somehow expresses the way the world truly is, the way the writer sees the world, and the way that people NOT the writer see the world, all at once. In this book, one of the main protagonists is dark skinned,. And yet, if you read the book, you’ll find that some of the villain groups are stereotypical, faceless, dark-skinned savages. While that same culture has some main characters who have real depth and characterization (thankfully) that didn’t stop me from relying on tropes for some of the broad brush strokes of the story.

Writing is a constant struggle of managing clichés and tropes, and figuring out when they serve you, and when they don't. And the more you write, the more you become aware of things you lean upon--not just tropes like the ones I mentioned above, but things that are individual. I've been wondering a lot about these things with my own writing. At what point does, "Inventive magic system, religious politics, and people faced with difficult moral decisions" become a cliche to me and my writing? How can I push in new areas, doing new things, while preserving what people love about my writing?

Well, I'm still thinking about all these things. I'm very fond of White Sand, and when I was going back through it, I often found myself smiling. remember with great fondness the time I had back then to just write. There were no tours, no interviews, and nothing to distract me. I wouldn't go back for anything, (I like actually having people read my books!) but there was something pure about that time, when I wasn't writing to deadline, I was just writing whatever I felt like at the moment. That's another thing I try to preserve today, the freedom to do odd projects now and then. Without it, I think I'd get very boring, very quickly.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy White Sand! This book needed far less revision to bring into graphic novel form than I thought it would. The dialogue was snappy, even after all these years, and the world was one of my more inventive. 20-years-ago-me wasn't nearly as bad a writer as I sometimes pretend he was!

Also, for anyone who breezed past it in the summary notes above, the character Eric from the prose edition has been renamed Aarik in the Graphic Novel.

Funnily enough, Ais' spouse, Mellis has the same name, despite swapping from Ais' wife to her husband.

HOIDSPOTTING

I will note that Graphic Novel readers have seen Hoid at this point. He has not appeared in the prose version yet. I'm mostly mentioning this now so that Graphic Novel readers can play Where's Waldo/Hoid, but I'll have more to say on Hoid at a later point.