CP: The short fiction was a “breather moment” while working on a big book. I wanted to write something that had a beginning, middle, and end in one cohesive piece. And I watched your video where you were discussing Sonic the Hedgehog!

BS: Oh, did you?

CP: I did! And for anyone who is an aspiring author, I highly recommend that you watch. The way you broke that story down is exactly how my sister and I break down stories and discuss them. The funny thing is that the longest short story that I wrote, in The Fork, the Witch, and the Worm, was actually because I watched a Hollywood movie . . . the 2014 Godzilla film?

BS: Yeah.

CP: As an audience member I felt that the film fundamentally misunderstood what its own metaphor was, what its own unfulfilled promise was, which was that Godzilla was a personification of death. And so as a result, you can’t defeat death, and the main character has to come to terms with death. So that was my short story—I wanted to do my own little take on that . . . but anyway!

BS: No, that’s really cool! This topic is really cool, because I would say that half of my works are responses in that same way. It’s not that I see something and say “Oh, they did it wrong” but I’ll see something and I say, “Huh, they didn’t take the path that I think would be interesting to take.”

CP: Mm-hm.

BS: So, let’s take that path! See where it takes me. That’s the origin of Mistborn, my first series, it’s me saying “OK, what if the Dark Lord won?” It’s not a critique on The Lord of the Rings, but it is me saying “what if we took it in a different direction?” You know how people often ask “Where do you get your ideas?” For me, that’s the only surefire way—there’s a theme of me responding to other pieces of art, that’s where I think a lot of art comes from, right?

CP: Culture in general! It’s a conversation not only with ourselves, but with other creators. I can read The Way of Kings and I start thinking about how you tackled the creative process, the storytelling process. I carried the hardcover of The Way of Kings in my leather bag for the entire friggin’ book tour of Inheritance. I carried it with me the whole tour.

BS: I am so sorry about that.

CP: [laughter]

BS: You’ll have that experience with this one—you’ll be making people carry giant hardcovers around all over the place.