Now, as the stories and legends have a kind of reality for us, we sort of believe them and don’t believe them; we have a kind of ‘nother way of believing, which is different from the way in which we believe in tables and chairs. I wonder how this sits with the fact that you’re a Mormon [audible sigh from Brandon] because presumably that’s a religion that you hold to be true, and here you are creating essentially another belief system that sits alongside your own belief system.
Yeah, that’s actually been very interesting for me, because my love of fantasy causes me to seek out and create these, like, what we call secondary worlds, and it certainly leads me to a lot of interesting questions about my own faith and my own belief, and what parts of things that I believe are mythology, and what parts of things I believe are hard-core truths, and what is the line between those? Sometimes, do we tell ourselves stories that are meaningful on multiple levels? All of that sort of thing is fascinating to me, and you find me working that out in my fiction where I approach, you know, the nature of truth, and what does it mean…you know, capital T Truth and lower-case t truth. Very fascinating to me. I’m fascinated by religion; I’m fascinated by belief, and what causes us to believe and what causes myself to believe.
Alright, and we should mention the scale of your own work because it’s prolific. There are four novellas, three standalone novels, four books in the Alcatraz series, four books in your Mistborn series, you’ve started a new series called The Stormlight Archive….can I just stay on this business of being a Mormon, because it’s been pointed out that there are many science fiction and fantasy writers who are Mormons. Do you think that’s right, that the Mormon writers are attracted to this as a genre?
You know, I’ve actually talked about this a lot with people, and everyone has their pet theory. It may just be that by being part of a kind of distinctive sub-group, we’re noticeable, and so people make the connection. We may not have much of a higher percentage than anyone else. That might be true; I don’t know if it is. It certainly does seem there’s a lot of us. Orson Scott Card, Stephenie Meyer, myself, Shannon Hale….all of these people. We write fantastic stories. I can trace my involvement in it back to the fact that there is an author named Tracy Hickman who wrote Dragonlance and he was Mormon, and I read those books and loved them; I think that’s the first time I experienced an LDS fantasy or science fiction author. I went to Brigham Young University, and there was a class there that was started by someone who just loved science fiction and fantasy and was teaching it, and a lot of us who are now writing it took that class, and maybe it’s just the class. I don’t know; I really don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s the focus on literacy in LDS culture, and—there is a very high focus on literacy; a lot of readers, a lot of writers—and so you find a lot of Mormon writers in all genres. My own pet theory is, for me, fantasy and science fiction was a safe counterculture. Growing up as a kid who basically wanted to be a good kid but also wanted to rebel a little bit—do something his parents didn’t understand—I started playing Dungeons and Dragons. I started reading fantasy novels, and I found myself in them when I read them—something distinctive, something imaginative, something new, but also something a little bit bizarre, and I like being a little bit bizarre.
(laughs) Yes, well that’s a good thing to be in the world; I think “A Little Bit Bizarre” would be a great thing to put on your coat of arms, really. You know, rather than “Seek the Truth” or, you know, “Be Noble”.
Here lies Brandon Sanderson: A Little Bit Bizarre.
Yeah.
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