Brandon Sanderson teaches creative writing at Brigham Young University and lives in Provo, Utah. He is the author of Elantris , as well as the Mistborn trilogy. He is also completing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, and has his own new series, The Stormlight Archive, coming out in August 2010 with The Way of Kings .
This interview was conducted in November, 2008.
Hi Brandon, thanks for agreeing to do this interview. What made you decide to become a writer and who were your influences?
I decided to become a writer when I was fourteen. Before then I hadn’t been a big reader. A lot of kids, young boys, stop reading about the fourth grade age. It’s apparently a trouble time. I didn’t know that, but I stopped reading about that age. Fourth, fifth, sixth grade not a big reader. Seventh grade, not a big reader.
Eighth grade, I had a really wonderful English teacher who got a fantasy novel into my hands. And before then I just thought books were boring. Someone had tried to give me Tolkien, but Tolkien was just too hard for me. She gave me Barbara Hambly’s Dragonsbane , which I loved. Fell in love with fantasy books, discovered David Eddings, Terry Brooks over the summer. This is before Wheel of Time was even out.
Just fell in love with reading and decided that this is what I wanted to do for a living. Didn’t really look back since then. Started my first book when I was fifteen. It was dreadful. But just kept writing and writing and writing. A lot of my influences were the Wheel of Time books, once they came out. Absolutely loved them. I would often study them, read them, try and see what is Robert Jordan doing here. I remember specifically looking at passages and saying: “Okay, what’s he doing? What’s making this work?”
A lot of my other influences, I’d say, were Melanie Rawn. And Barbara Hambly. And Annie McCaffrey would be some of my big influences. I liked the sort of hybrid fantasy/science fictions. Not the sort where a fantasy world meets a science fiction world, don’t enjoy those as much. What I’m talking about is a fantasy book that treats its magic like a science. I loved, for instance, Melanie Rawn’s magic system. Really worked for me. When I discovered David Farland, his magic system really worked for me. I loved the Runelords magic, those things really sort of jump out and sing to me. And I knew when I got published—if I got published some day—that’s what I wanted to do.
What was the beginning spark that gave you the idea for Elantris ?
The beginning spark was reading actually about people in the olden days who would be quarantined together because of their disease.
Like the plague, stuff like that?
Yeah. Locked in a building because of the plague, or even leper colonies. Locked, forced to live only among other people with their same disease, and that would probably be the seed that made me want to write a book. Now I put it in a fantasy world because I wanted to tell a story about a magical disease. It started more as an undeath sort of thing and then evolved into a magical hybrid between leprosy and undeath that people could catch, and the story of what it’s like to have to live with this disease. Almost a little big of wanting to tell a story that was a put-together the mystery—the pieces—of what made the disease in the first place. Maybe a magical version of Andromeda Strain or something like that.
Yeah, that’s what I like about it, because straight into the beginning you’re in the guy’s head, as he’s trying to figure out what is going on and not taking the answer of we’ve got it and we’re doomed sort of thing.
Ummhmm.
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