A sense of wonder
There is an aspect of fantasy that motivates Sanderson to create his worlds and that he thinks can also affect people in the real world.
“I want to give people a sense of wonder,” he said, “and a vision of where the fantasy genre has gone that it hasn’t gone before. I feel like the genre has a lot of potential that hasn’t been explored or tapped. I want to be one of those who takes a few steps toward where it can go. To be my own paving stone in the path that is leading the genre toward bigger and better things.”
And fantasy is tied into the imagination, which is tied into the shaping of the real world.
“Before the Wright brothers flew, flying was fantasy. Before the civil rights movement, people getting along together and the races being equal was a fantasy,” he said. “Things change because we imagine a different world, a world that is not. And I think that imagination is one of the most important and defining aspects of human existence: our ability to imagine a world that is not.”
Fantasy, in his mind, is an exploration of reality and capturing a vision of possibilities. In The Stormlight Archive and its second book, Words of Radiance , he hopes to create a work of art that will stand the test of time. But, he said, he can’t do it on his own. Readers are needed to complete that work of art.
“The book isn’t done until you’ve imagined what’s happening in this book,” he said. “I’m only giving you half of it—maybe it is more like 75 percent—but I’m only giving you part of it, and you have to do all the rest.”
In that collaboration, he hopes there is a sense of wonder.
After journeying in Sanderson’s compelling world, one emerges back into the real world. By making the trip, the reader may see, perhaps for the first time, the world in all its variety and with all its amazing characters and beauty. And that may be enough to make trees tremble in anticipation for a book as large as the imagination.
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.