Well, when you say that, you’ve obviously done an incredible job of keeping your ego out of it. I think it would be hard, honestly, when you’ve got people that adore you, yet you push away from that. That’s very interesting about you. Tell me about growing up. What was it like growing up Brandon Sanderson?
Well, growing up Brandon Sanderson…I’ve later discovered that my story isn’t unique. I’m not one of those people who’s been writing books since the womb. You know, you’ll talk to writers sometimes, and they’ll say, ‘Yeah, I was two years old and I composed my first epic.’ And those people amaze me. But I wasn’t one of them, I wasn’t a reader. And this happens to a lot of boys, I’ve found, doing research about it now after the fact. When they hit about fourth or fifth grade, something happens and they stop reading. And that’s what happened to me—stopped reading.
I didn’t like books. People kept trying to give me books. And it seemed like they all tried to give me the same book. Which, you know, I think that there are different books for different people, and every book affects somebody. And the fact that I didn’t like them doesn’t mean they weren’t perfect for someone else. But they were trying to give me books about boys who live in the wilderness with their pet dog, and then the dog dies, and it’s traumatic and that’s the end of the book. I read two or three of those and I’m like, ‘Reading is boring. They’re all about boys with dogs who die. And if their dog doesn’t die, then their mother dies. And why are people giving me this stuff?’
And then I got to eighth grade, and in eighth grade I had a teacher—Mrs. Reader, coincidentally. I’ve since sent her several books as a thank you. But anyway, she’s the first who kind of grabbed a hold of me and said, ‘This kid can do more than he’s doing.’ And she wouldn’t let me wiggle out of my book reports and things like I’d done in previous classes. She took me back to her little cart. You know how teachers have these carts of old ratty books that kids have been reading, and they’ve spilled spaghetti sauce on, and all these things. They all have these. She took me back and she pulled out one, and it was actually called Dragonsbane —it was an epic fantasy novel. She handed it to me and she said, ‘Read this one. I think you’ll like it.’ And I hadn’t really tried fantasy except for Tolkien, which as I said earlier, I tried too young for me. When you’re a reluctant reader, Tolkien is really challenging, and it wasn’t right for me. It had been several years since that, though.
And Dragonsbane , what it was is it was a story about a woman who was a witch. And she had been told when she was younger that she could be the greatest witch who’d ever lived. She was a natural prodigy. She could be amazing if she’d dedicate herself to her art. And yet at the same time, she was in love with a man and had had children with him, and was a mother. The story is actually about the last living dragonslayer, who is her husband, who’s called on to kill a dragon when he’s in his fifties—he’s old, he’s not the young man he used to be. And it’s actually her story, and it’s about her kind of trying to juggle her life between the magic, which is like her passion and her career, and her children.
And at the same time, my mother graduated first in her class in accounting, in an age when women didn’t really go into accounting. She was the only one in her class. She had been offered numerous prestigious scholarships. And she had actually turned those down because she was pregnant with me, and she felt it important for a few years to just focus on me. And I read this epic fantasy novel and it had adventure, it had swords, it had dragons. And I got done with this book, and I felt like I understood my mother more.
Louie:
Wow!
Brandon:
And it blew my mind. It was so weird. I’d had this wonderful adventure. And yet, I understood my mother. I understood, because she had always walked that line. She had always been a mother, and she had worked very hard at her career. She was a very great accountant, and yet she had never quite dedicated herself fully to that because she felt that her family was important. And this woman was struggling with the same thing. It didn’t give you answers. It didn’t say, ‘oh she should have done this, she should have done that.’ It just showed her life. And that’s what I think really great fiction does, is it shows someone’s life, and it gives you a perspective on it.
And that’s really what launched me into fantasy, was reading this and realizing I can have fun and adventure and magic and wonder. And the really good books can show me characters, too, characters who aren’t like me. I mean, Tolkien did that. In a way, when you’re reading Tolkien, in part you’re reading about an elf and a dwarf who come from extremely different worlds, from you and from each other, who end up becoming friends. And it says something about racism and about prejudice, about how those characters come together that could only really be done in a fantasy book in that way. And this is what our genre does. It’s metaphorical, and yet it’s personal. And that’s why I fell in love with it, and why I was poised, at age fifteen, to read Robert Jordan.
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