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Interview #428: BarnesandNoble.com Book Club Q&A with Brandon Sanderson, Entry #11

Clippership14

I’m really curious where the inspiration for Elantris came from. I really enjoyed that book. =)

Brandon Sanderson

As with all of my books, there wasn’t one single inspiration, but a number of them. A few of them here were: Chinese and its writing system, and how it relates to Japanese and Korean. The difference between teaching others of your faith in order to help them, as opposed to teaching them in order to aggrandize yourself. What it would be like to live in a leper colony. A king made into a beggar. A woman who, like a friend of mine, felt she was too tall and too smart for men to find her attractive. Magical servants that didn’t look like any I’d read about before. And the thought of telling a story about someone who was basically a good, normal person—without a deep, dark past or terrible hidden flaw—who got trust into the worst situation I could imagine.

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