Brandon said he loves the process of writing and that he would write a book a year for his whole life, even if none were ever published. He has all his unpublished manuscripts and didn’t realize how bad he was before. He was in his early 20’s and able to learn and practice to better his craft. He wasn’t confident enough to submit his first five books, but the sixth was published ( Elantris ) though it took a few years. He had an advantage over other new writers from all his practice. He compared “getting it right” for Elantris to getting a hole-in-one in golf—part skill, part accident. Mistborn was his 14th novel.
He said he avoids reviews unless they are starred since a bad review can spoil his day and when he is feeling down he looks at bad reviews of works he enjoyed, like Pratchett’s works, Watchmen , and Hamlet . He also avoided seeing the Watchmen movie, since it would be ruined if they changed it, or the same as the book if they didn’t change it, and he didn’t really want to see Dr. Manhattan in full IMAX glory.
If you are viewing this on github.io, you can see that this site is open source. Please do not try to improve this page. It is auto-generated by a python script. If you have suggestions for improvements, please start a discussion on the github repo or the Discord.