Well, I think that I’d like to start at the beginning and then come to more recent projects that you’ve been working on and that’s to look a little bit at how you came to be a published science fiction/fantasy author. I did not mention this in your introduction, but you did initially study writing in college and worked long and hard to become a writer. If you could describe that process for us, the process of getting your first novel, Elantris , published.
Alright. It’s funny because Elantris …it’s my first published novel; it’s not actually my first novel. The story starts quite a long time before that, and the longer I’ve been in this business, the more I’ve found that this seems to be the rule rather than the exception. A lot of writers spend years and years writing books before they get published. Elantris was my sixth novel, and my story starts like a lot of stories, with an ignorant kid who enjoyed telling stories and writing books and having no idea really what he was really doing.
I went to college my freshman year as a biochemistry major, actually, partially at my parent’s encouraging, because ‘authors don’t make money’ was the conventional wisdom, which a lot of us hear, and so I was going to be a doctor, which was, you know, the wrong place for me. But, I was under the impression—I had no idea how to do this writing thing, and even taking a few creative writing classes…they don’t really talk about the business side of things, the actual ‘how do you do this; how do you break in’—and so I was completely ignorant.
My sophomore year, I realized after one year of trying hard at the biochemistry that I loved the concepts and I was terrible at the busywork; in fact I dreaded the busywork, and if you dread the busywork—the day-to-day work that you are going to have to do in a career—that’s probably not the right career for you, whereas with writing, I loved the busywork, the busywork of just working on new stories and plugging away at them, and so I changed to English cause I thought that’s what you had to do. I didn’t actually know what you had to do—I had no clue—but I figured that was a good place to start. So I changed my major to English and just started going.
One of the things I did—which I think was actually the smartest thing I did at the time—was get a job where I could write while I was at work; it was a desk job at a hotel minding the desk overnight, with the boss telling me during the interview, “Yeah, as long as you stay awake we don’t mind…we don’t care what you do. Between about midnight and five all we really want is to have someone there in case the building burns down, or in case someone calls and wants towels.” It was actually required by the Best Western rules that they have someone on desk, so it was actually perfect for me, and I spent five years working that job, going to school during day, then sleeping in the evenings, and then going to work overnight, and writing all night. It was a wonderful experience. It was kinda was like my own little writers’ enclave where I was able to practice my art and try different things, and ignorantly I had the advantage of not knowing how bad I was when I began. This is something I’ve noticed with authors: When you get going when you’re younger, you are don’t how terrible you are as a writer, and that’s a good thing. Older writers a lot of times will be very critical of themselves, because they’ve read so much and they have so much more experience with writing that when they start working on their works, it’s sometimes very hard for them. They aren’t willing to…or it’s too hard for them to suck at it long enough to become good at it, so to speak. I didn’t have that problem because I had no clue how bad I was.
And I am…like I said, I did that for five years: writing books and slowly, very slowly, learning about the business, realizing how you have to submit manuscripts, realizing where to…how to go about creating a query letter, and these sorts of things. And the real breakthrough, it came my senior year—I took quite a number of years to get through college; I think it was five at the end—so I guess it would be after four years, during my fourth year of writing books at the graveyard shift, I took a class from a published author who had come in to just teach couple of classes for the fun of it—it was actually David Farland, who is a fantasy writer who is local to my area—and what he talked about was the business aspect of it, the real nitty-gritty nuts and bolts of this industry, which nobody tells you about. You never find out about, in most of your creative writing classes—which, you know, they’re great classes; they’ll talk to you a lot about the craft of writing, and maybe the art of writing, but they won’t tell you about the business—and it was because of him that I realized, “Wow,” you know, “if I want to get published, one of the things I’m gonna have to do is network,” and I never realized that networking would be important for an author. But who you know, the editors you know, that sort of thing, can help you out a lot. And so I started attending the conventions—[?] the literary conventions. And so, WorldCon, World Fantasy Convention, NASFIC…some of these things that you can go to, and editors will attend, and you can hear advice from them, you can meet them, and that sort of thing.
So I started doing that. It’s not a silver bullet; it won’t get everyone published, but what it does is it partially trained me to think like a professional, and partially allowed me to get advice from people who really knew what they were doing. I spent…oh, three years, four years doing that, eventually graduated with my bachelor’s degree, having no idea what to do with it, because I wasn’t really prepared for anything by it except for writing books, so I applied to a bunch of MFA programs, got turned down from all of them—they didn’t really appreciate [?] fantasy novels—and the next year I applied to a whole bunch more, got into a master’s degree—not an MFA—at BYU where I had attended my undergraduate, and got rejected from everywhere else, and so happily went to get that master’s degree, partially as a stalling tactic, to be perfectly honest. My dad was dreadfully afraid that, you know, that their poor son was going to be a hobo, and “Oh, why didn’t he go into being a doctor like we told him”, and so I went back to school to appease them and to stall my life and, you know, to stall myself, give me a few more years to work on it.
And about a year into it, Elantris —which had been my sixth book, as I said—I finally got a call back from an editor that I’d met at World Fantasy Convention, I think in 2003, that I got the call back. It was eighteen months after I’d submitted it. Actually, I had given up on the submission. It was the Tor, whom I love; it’s a publisher I wanted to be with. I was a big fan of the Wheel of Time books; I wanted to be with that same publisher, but Tor is also notorious for having an enormous slush pile, and things get lost into that void fairly frequently. They are one of the few publishers out there who will take manuscripts from unknowns, which opens the floodgates to tons of manuscripts coming in, and they do their best with it, but they get easily overwhelmed. I had sent to them before, and I never heard back, and so this time I assumed I would never hear back, [?] in person. And then I got a voicemail one morning; got up, and checked my voicemail, and lo and behold, there was an editor in New York, Moshe Feder, who left me a voicemail that said something along these lines: “Hello; I hope this is the right Brandon Sanderson, because you submitted me a book eighteen months ago, and now it’s been so long that your email address is bouncing, your snail-mail address isn’t good any more, and your phone number’s changed, so we’re not sure how to get ahold of you, but we googled you, we got a grad student page at BYU. We assume this is the right person; if it is, call us back, because we want to buy your book.” And that’s how it happened. I guess the moral of this story is: leave a forwarding address, if you are sending manuscripts off to publishers in New York.
But, it just happened from there, and the years that I spent as an unpublished writer really—just practicing my craft and not worrying about publishing—served me really well. Elantris is by no means the greatest fantasy book ever written, but I do think that I was able to hit the ground running, so to speak, because it wasn’t my first novel. It doesn’t, I hope, in many respects read like a first novel; I had five other books under my belt by that time, and I got a lot of my terrible ideas and terrible storytelling out of the way, and so I was very aware of what I wanted to do as an author, and where I wanted to make my statement and how I wanted to add to the genre. All of these things, I had…right then, I knew what I was doing as soon as I sold, so I was able to be focused a little more, I think.
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