Generosity and fame
Sanderson doesn’t just create worlds in fiction; he also helps others create their own fictional worlds. With his friends Dan Wells, Mary Robinette Kowal and Howard Tayler, Sanderson puts out the weekly (and Hugo Award-winning) Writing Excuses podcast . He also teaches one creative writing class at Brigham Young University each year.
In 1994, when Sanderson was a senior in High School in Nebraska, he went to a local science fiction fan convention called Andromeda One .
“The guest of honor was Katherine Kurtz, a great writer,” he said. “She sat down with me when she heard I wanted to be a writer and she talked with me for about an hour on what to do.”
Later, after Sanderson served a mission in Korea for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he took a class on science fiction and fantasy offered at BYU from author Dave Wolverton (who also writes as David Farland) .
“Dave took a ‘pay cut’ to teach us,” Sanderson said. “It was something he did to help us. Both of those situations were so incredibly helpful to me and so wonderfully useful that I basically got published because of things like this—authors spending their time. … These chances I got were so useful to me that I think I would be remiss if I didn’t do it myself.”
But as successful as Sanderson has been, he tries to keep that success in perspective. Although huge lines and crowds will, if past events are any indication, gather for his book launch at midnight on March 4 at BYU Bookstore in Provo, fame isn’t a motivator.
“Fortunately, writers don’t get that famous; even famous writers don’t get that famous,” he said. “Like if you were to walk out on that street and say, ‘Hey guys, Brandon Sanderson is in this room,’ I can guarantee that nobody would care. There might be one person who might say, ‘Hey, I’ve heard of that guy. Didn’t he write those books?’ Nobody would care. … And so it is very easy to keep well-grounded as a writer.”
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.