“I grew up in Nebraska. I read quite a lot when I was little, but by high school I was not a reading sort of kid. Some kids read, I watched TV. People would shove books at me in school and I just wasn’t interested. Then, when I was 14, I had this one teacher, called—I swear I’m not making this up—Mrs. Reader. And she said, ‘look, you are going to read a novel, and you are going to write me a book report. I have a box of books in the back room. Go on back there and pick one. Take your time.’”
One of the books had a rather fabulous picture of a dragon on the cover. Never let anyone tell you cover illustrations don’t matter. It changed Sanderson’s life.
“I devoured that book, which was by Barbara Hambly. I couldn’t believe there was this entire type of novel that no one had told me about. I went to the library and checked out every fantasy novel I could find, read them voraciously over the summer, fell in love with the genre, decided within a year that I wanted to be a writer, and started working on my first book. Which was atrocious, but fortunately I didn’t know that.”
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