Despite battling hordes of rejections and criticisms, author Brandon Sanderson has garnered acclaim with his magical stories.
Adjunct BYU English instructor Brandon W. Sanderson (BA ’00, MA ’05) began his writing career behind the front desk of a Provo hotel.
“It was pretty dead there from about midnight to 5, but they were required to have someone on staff,” he explains of his post-mission job. “And so when I got hired I told my boss, ‘I’m just going to write books all night,’ and he replied, ‘That’s great. At least you won’t sleep on the couch like the person before you.”
Squeezed between BYU homework and what little sleep he could muster, eight novels emerged over five years of Sanderson’s graveyard writing.
“The first five were terrible,” he says. “I once heard that your first five books are generally bad, and so I determined I would write six at the very least.”
Novel number six was Elantris , which sat on an editor’s desk at Tor Books for an agonizing 18 months before Sanderson got a response. Little did the haggard student know then that in a mere eight years, he would publish not only Elantris (in 2005) but 12 more novels, including his acclaimed Mistborn series and the middle-grade Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians series—as well as the final three books of The Wheel of Time, by epic-fantasy writer Robert Jordan.
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