Your stories are often promoted as being unique and unprecedented. What do you think about propositions like that? Have you ever been afraid of being unable to meet the market’s expectations concerning your writing?
In my writing I try to combine the unfamiliar with the familiar. If something is too unique and unprecedented, then readers won’t have anything to relate to and will just be lost.
But if something is too familiar, it will feel stale and cliche. I like to look for twists on familiar tropes that haven’t been extensively covered before. This often comes when I read other books in the field and think of a different way something could go. That’s not to say other authors aren’t doing the same thing, but I like to tackle takes that I haven’t seen before. Trying to do what the market expects of you is a bit of a trap in the publishing field. You want your books to be things that people want to write, but if you try to write to the market you usually end up with something too familiar and boring. Back when I was writing those thirteen books I was sending the good examples out to editors and agents and getting a lot of rejection letters. ( Elantris was the first book I wrote that I felt was good enough to send out, and I also sent out a couple I wrote after it.) After being told time and time again that my books were too long ( Elantris in manuscript form was 250,000 words), I decided to try to do what I thought the market wanted and write books that were a lot shorter. But I discovered that the books I turned out in that format just weren’t any good; they contained some very interesting ideas but were lacking in many areas.
When Moshe bought Elantris and wanted to follow it up with another novel, I first offered him The Way of Kings but we realized that it was too ambitious a project at that point in time. So instead I took concepts from three of those failed novels and rewrote them into the first Mistborn book, writing it at the length my natural style seemed to work best at. And Mistborn was a huge success.
You shouldn’t assume that when you’ve read one Brandon Sanderson novel, you know what the next one is going to be like. From one series to the next I like to try different things. I know that some readers who really liked Mistborn are not going to like The Way of Kings ; Mistborn had a narrower scope and faster pace than a huge epic like The Way of Kings has, and if a reader prefers that sort of book that is perfectly okay with me. I am going to write some books that are fast-paced and others that are huge epics. I like to change things up.
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