The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson

Beaten down by a life on the streets, Vin doesn’t realize that she has the power of a Mistborn (the magic in this book, which many say is its prime selling point.) Her dynamic with Kelsier, the charismatic leader of the gang of thieves, is really what drives this novel. Instead, the book focuses on Vin, a young girl who gets recruited into the team. It’s still there, don’t worry, but it’s more of a backdrop now. As early as the planning stages of the series, I felt that I wanted both more scope from the plot and more focus on character.ĭuring development, the story moved further and further away from the heist. The truth is that while Mistborn grew out of my love for heist movies, it didn’t end up being much of a heist story itself. If I talk about it more conversationally, however, the plot takes a back seat to characters. They decide to take matters into their own hands, and plan a daring heist of the dark lord himself, planning to use the emperor’s own wealth to bribe his armies away from him and take over the empire.Īnyway, that’s the ‘back of the book’ movie trailer type explanation.

In this setting, a gang of thieves decides that the prophecies were all lies and that they can’t trust in some fabled hero to save them. Ash falls from the sky in this barren land, and mists come every night, deep and mysterious. Only, he lost, and the Dark Lord took over and has been ruling with an iron fist for a thousand years.

A thousand years ago, the prophesied hero from lore rose up to overthrow a great and terrible evil. What if the Dark Lord won? What if, in the final climactic moments, he killed the hero and took over the world? I wanted to take the standard fantasy story I’d read a dozen times, that of a young peasant hero who went on a quest to defeat a Dark Lord, and turn it on its head. The second idea was to write a story about a world where the good guys lost. I wanted to tell the story of how their different magics and abilities worked together for them to pull an incredible caper. The first was that of a heist story, like Sneakers or Ocean’s Eleven involving a gang of gentlemen thieves who each had a distinctive magic power.

I came into this book with two big ideas for the plot.

The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson