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Interview #577: Utopiales Convention, Nantes, France: Interview with Brandon Sanderson, Entry #12

Question

You recently created a discussion about postmodernist fantasy. Is this will to intellectualize fantasy a component of your ambitions, of your approach to writing?

Brandon Sanderson

Yes and no. I do have a master’s degree in English with a creative writing emphasis, so I do wear the hat of an academic. When I’m sitting down to write, I’m actually not wearing my academic hat. Now, after I get done, my academic side does like analyze what I’ve written and look at it and think about it.

But when I’m writing I really let the artist take over, and I find that if I let the academic take over, it loses a bit of its life, because it becomes something that’s contrived rather than something that’s created. So I don’t let the academic have too much power, but I do like to talk about these things. I wrote that essay on postmodern fantasy, which is really more accurately an essay about self-aware fantasy. I talked about it a little bit earlier: the next stage in fantasy that kind of looks at itself and is self-introspective. And I see myself doing that, not because the intellectual side of me says: “Oh, you need to do this”, but because the artist has been tired of some things and wants to create a response to them.

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