‘It’s got everything you want, plus dragons’: Brandon Sanderson on the joy of writing fantasy | Books
iit’s 1:00 p.m. in American Fork, Utah, and the author of one of the biggest books of the year—in terms of physical size and sales potential—is in his bedroom, having just woken up. This, it turns out, is typical. “I usually write until about 4 in the morning, then I get up around noon,” Brandon Sanderson tells me during a video call, leaning forward in a large chair.
The Nebraska-born author has been writing all night since he was a college student some 25 years ago, when he spent his graveyard shifts in a hotel writing a series of unpublished novels. In 2005 his debut Elantris (about religious extremists and a cursed city) was published to master. His hugely successful Mistborn series (metal-powered wizards battle an immortal tyrant – then deal with the aftermath) began a year later. But Stormlight Archive, a saga that sits somewhere between Final Fantasy and Ragnarok with the addition of Paradise Lost, is Sanderson’s defining work, accounting for more than 10 million of the 34 million copies he’s sold throughout his career.
So a lot rests on Wind and Truth, the fifth in the promised 10-book cycle. “There are a lot of people who would love to take that chair,” Sanderson says, speaking with a focused enthusiasm that barely fades in the hour we speak. “And what it means to me is, wow, I better be good at this.”
Stormlight’s setting will seem idiosyncratic to anyone who still thinks fantasy means orcs and wizards: its world is shaped by brutal storms that leave much of the land capable of supporting only crab-like life forms, tenacious plants and hovering nature spirits. The people have settled, but the god Odium seeks dominance. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and Sanderson cheerfully admits that “epic fantasy can get a little blurry.”
Yet Sanderson’s books, while not exactly tight—he rarely uses a sentence when a paragraph is appropriate, and “Wind and Truth” stretches to over 1,300 pages—move their intriguing plots forward in big, eager strides, regardless whether they present a space drama or present his characters a place for teasing or suffocation within themselves.
“It wouldn’t be a fantasy book without the world-building and the magic, but that’s the least important aspect of the story,” he says. “The Lord of the Rings is not great because of the world building. The Lord of the Rings is great because of the interaction of the characters and this idea of taking someone small and normal and thrusting them into a world of giants, saying how that person’s core values can be as valuable to society as the heroic power of another a person.”
From Wind and Truth, the scale of the Stormlight Archive is epic: cities around the world are under siege and heroes wield supernatural blades, one on his way to godhood. Sanderson says he never imagined things would get this big or capture the imagination of so many readers.
“Success at this level is luck,” he says. “It’s absolute luck.” He calls The Wheel of Time, the series of Robert Jordan books that was completed on behalf of the writer’s estate after his death, “a huge boost,” but credits the success of his works — most of which develop in a shared universe called the Cosmere—was made possible by a cultural shift. “The Marvel Cinematic Universe started in 2008 and Cosmere in 2005,” he says. “And I think the advent of the Internet, which has allowed us to go back and easily find recaps and ways to remember what came before, has revealed a natural desire for stories to become a little more interconnected.” It allowed complexity to enter serialized work in a way that hadn’t really been viable for the mass market ever before.”
Sanderson’s fans flock to him at conventions (he now needs a little buggy to get around) and flood online forums with theories about Cosmere’s lore. Readers also signed up en masse to raise funds for special projects, including a Cosmere RPG. In 2023 he organized a Kickstarter offering subscribers four mystery novels and related merchandise, raising an astonishing $42 million in a month – making it the largest fundraiser ever on the platform.
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He was prompted to mix regular publishing with these direct-to-consumer projects after seeing Amazon remove his publisher Macmillan’s books from sale in Dispute since 2010 about e-book prices. “That’s when I realized, man, I’m working for Amazon,” he says. “I don’t work for the fans anymore, I don’t work for the publisher.” The desire to “get out from under [Amazon’s] thumb” led to the creation of his “own little publishing house”: Dragonsteel, which sells mugs, T-shirts and leather-bound books, owns and handles Sanderson’s proofreading and illustrations.
While The Wheel of Time is now a shiny Prime series, the Mistborn movies and The Emperor’s Soul — a novella that’s a great entry point into the Cosmere — have flopped. “Hollywood,” says a resigned Sanderson, “is a strange place.”
Although he would be willing to write an adaptation himself, he is working on honing his screenwriting skills as he does not feel that his success as a novelist automatically means he will be good at writing for the screen. He gives the example of JK Rowling, who he says made mistakes when writing the Fantastic Beasts series. “She shouldn’t have been allowed to write scripts,” he says. “Think you’re good at one aspect of writing? This does not necessarily mean that you are good with others.
Books remain Sanderson’s love. He rhapsodizes about the thrill of combining the wonder of magic with the “crispness” of scientific perspective and charts the evolution of fantasy as a “brand new genre” by K. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien through George R. R. Martin (“very clever”), NK Jemisin and Joe Abercrombie. “If you haven’t read it, try it. You’ll find everything you want that’s in every other genre, plus there’ll be dragons,” he says. “So why would you read anything else?”
