Okay, Brandon. Brandon, I’m going to interrupt you. Where does the heart come from? I find so many men, especially, disconnected from emotion and heart. How is it that you are so connected to your heart? I love this with the eulogy. And I’m going to tell you—I’m not a writer, I don’t have your skills—but I wrote some blogs. I wrote one once called…I called it “The unanswered knock of love”. And I ended up doing ten of them because women were writing, and women were writing, but not men about it. Tell me about your attachment to your heart, your connection.
Well, it’s very interesting because I as a person—and my friends will say this—I’m not a terribly emotional person. I’m actually pretty even keeled. I don’t generally feel negative emotions. I don’t get angry, I don’t do these things. Yet the thing that can get me is fiction. I think one of the reasons I’ve always been attached to fiction is the thing that will make me feel emotions is reading a good story, and that’s one of the very few things that can do it. And one part of my fascination with writing, why I became a writer, is because it feels to me that when I’m reading someone’s story, when I can see into their heart, that’s what gets me that connection, and that’s what actually gets me those emotions.
There are things that I don’t think that I would ever feel as strongly if I hadn’t felt them through fiction. And I don’t know why that is. I don’t know why I can connect on the page. Maybe it’s because I was an introvert when I was young, and I discovered reading. You know, these characters in these books became my friends. I wasn’t a popular kid—I was a nerd, I was a fantasy reader. Fantasy as a subculture hadn’t gotten really big back then. I was kind of a loner, and I could find emotion and friends in these books. And it’s always just meant so much to me that these writers were able to do this. People like Robert Jordan and Anne McCaffrey, and David Eddings, and my favorite fantasy writers.
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