While majoring in English at college, Sanderson took a job as a hotel receptionist, working the graveyard shift.
The managers didn’t mind if he wrote on the job. “In fact, they were happy if I did, because that meant I wasn’t falling asleep like the previous person they’d hired. So I wrote—oh gosh, it must have been nine or 10 novels over the course of five years.”
Sanderson was living one of the standard writer-learns-the-ropes stories—turning out book after book after book, finding his voice, finding the stories that mattered to him, and finding the self-belief to swallow the rejection letters. There were a lot of rejection letters. He made his way through the forest of fantasy and science fiction sub-genres, one at a time. “I did a post-apocalyptic book, I did an epic fantasy, I did a comic fantasy, I did some cerebral science fiction, I did a short action adventure fantasy…”
No one wanted any of them. In frustration he tried to figure out what kind of books publishers were looking for, so he could write one.
“We call this chasing the market and it’s a bad idea. I knew it was a bad idea and I did it anyway. The next two books I wrote were the two worst I’d done. I mean, I’d learned something from all those unsold novels and technically they were okay, but they didn’t have any soul, they were just dreadful books. I didn’t even send them out.”
Instead he sat down and deliberately wrote something profligately, ridiculously unpublishable. “I had to say okay, I’m a writer, I love it, this is what I do. Getting published is not the aim. Writing is the aim. So okay. I’m going to ignore what everybody’s been telling me in these rejection letters. I’m going to write the biggest, coolest, baddest, most awesome fantasy epic I can. All these ideas that I’ve told myself are too big, that I’m going to have to put off using, I’m not going to put off any more. And I sat down and I wrote The Way of Kings . I sank everything into it. I created this awesome beast of a novel, and to be perfectly honest, my skill wasn’t up to doing it justice at that point, but I gave it everything I had.”
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