Many times in the past when you’ve been interviewed, people have asked you how being LDS (a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) has influenced your writing. I would like to ask the inverse: how has the experiences of being a successful fantasy writer influenced your faith?
That’s a great question. One of the things I consider the mandate of a writer is to get inside the heads of people other than yourself and present them accurately, on the page, in a way that people who have that belief system or that philosophy on life would read it and say “yes, you got it right, that is how I believe.”
… I get really, really annoyed when I read a book and the only person who has a faith like mine in the book exists to (show) how stupid they are. That is my biggest pet peeve. I love reading books where people have a different philosophy on life than me, I have no problem with that, but if you put in a character who is like me, and that is the only character who exists to be shown how stupid they are, or if you just get it wrong, horribly wrong; we’ve all read that where we pick up the book and it’s like “oh no, there is an LDS person. Oh, yup, they’re talking about their horse and buggy.” Nope, they meant Amish. Things like that drive me crazy, and I never want to be doing that to someone else.
So one of the things that being a writer has done and has influenced and informed my faith is by making me — driving me — to go look at how different people see the world; look at different belief systems, study them, ask myself “why do we believe what we believe?”; ask myself what the nature of belief is (and) why do I believe. These sorts of things have been a really great experience, forcing yourself to dig down in your soul and ask yourself these hard questions.
When I write a character, I’m going to say, “OK, I’m going to write an atheist,” one of which is in Oathbringer , who speaks and makes the arguments that actual atheists make, not strawman arguments. I want people to read this, and when they read that character, and say “oh, Brandon must be an atheist.” And then when they read another character they think “he must be a theist,” or read another character and think “oh, Brandon must be a socialist, oh no Brandon must be a monarchist,” depending on who they’re reading.
… So looking at these different characters — maybe again, this is me over-inflating the importance of a writer — but I think it’s part of the purpose of fiction. We read these books, we see people through different eyes. … You can argue ‘til you’re blue in the face with someone, but if they read a story with somebody who sees the world differently than themselves, I think that helps a lot more with just kind of saying, “oh, this is a real person. This is why they believe. I still don’t agree with them, but I can see now.”
That’s one of the points of writing, one of the purposes of writing fiction. So that has certainly had a big effect on me, asking myself “what do I believe?”
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