What’s the most surprising thing a reader or reviewer has said about your work?
When you do something like I do, you live in a perpetual state of surprise. You spend years and years admiring the great authors who you’ve read and loved, and you dream of managing to pull it off yourself someday. When you do pull it off, you have a tendency to think, “Is this me they’re talking about? Really?”
It’s hard to pick out just one that is the most surprising. I would say that the things that struck me most were in the early days of my career, after I published Elantris . That book is about, in part, people who wounds continue to hurt, and the pain doesn’t fade. Their bodies are broken; healing doesn’t work on them any longer. I once got a very nice email, a year or so after it was published, from someone who was dealing with cancer, who thanked me for writing this book and said it was a metaphor for what it’s like to deal with a chronic illness like cancer. Now, I hadn’t gone into this book thinking, “I’m going to write a book about a metaphor for people with cancer,” and yet, the poignancy and power of this letter really drove home to me the strength that a story can have for each individual reader, when they adapt it to their own circumstances. I would say that was something that left me in awe of this whole process.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.