In a general way, does your religion have an influence on your work?
I think that it does, and yet it’s not a direct influence; it’s more of an indirect influence. I’m practicing LDS, Mormon, for those who don’t know. It shapes who I am, and who I am helps shape my fiction. There’s been a long-running sort of argument, so to speak—a nice argument—in fantasy, about how much of it is allegorical and how much of it isn’t. If you look back to Grandpa Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, you can see from C.S. Lewis’ work he was very allegorical, whereas Tolkien was not. Tolkien was doing story and letting theme grow, and I actually prefer his way of writing. I feel that as wonderful as C.S. Lewis was, when you specifically embed messages, then the story becomes about a message, and not about the characters.
And so I don’t go into my work saying: “I want to prove X, Y or Z”, I actually go into my work with the opposite opinion. I really believe that one of the great things fiction can do is that it can explore ideas from lots of different viewpoints. And I think because I’m a religious person, religious ideas and conflicts are fascinating to me. But I like to explore these things from different sides, and people who believe in different ways, and I like to make all of their arguments equally sound and equally powerful, because that way when you read the book, you get to see an exploration of a topic, rather than someone taking an answer and shoving it at you, over and over again. It offends me when I read fiction and someone expresses my viewpoint, but they do it poorly. I’d rather they just not have my viewpoint at all than do it poorly.
So I think my religion affects me to be fascinated in these concepts, so religious concepts are in my books. I like to hope that I’m approaching them from lots of different and interesting aspects, but the nature of faith, the nature of hope, the nature of rational thought versus faithful thought: these different things are very fascinating to me, and so they tend to be fascinating to my characters.
It makes me think about your character Sazed in Mistborn , who’s fascinated by religions…
Oh yes, there’s definitely connection between him and my own kind of feelings about religion and explorations of religion and things like this. He was a character very much out of my heart; people ask who I’m most like and it might be him. I don’t know, it’s hard to say. I’m not much like Kelsier: he is too gregarious, he is not me, but there’s a little bit of me in all of them I suppose.
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