Initially a biochemistry major at BYU, Sanderson served a mission in Korea, where his mission president allowed him to write stories on preparation day.
“The most inspiring facet of Brandon and his work is that he understands thoroughly and profoundly how much writing is just that: work,” says Ethan M. Sproat (BA ‘02, MA ‘08), a PhD candidate at Purdue who worked with Sanderson on BYU’s student-run science fiction and fantasy magazine, The Leading Edge .
Sanderson returned to BYU, changed his major to English, wrote a bunch of novels, got a host of rejection letters, applied for grad school (twice), and got rejected from just about every top writing program in the States—except BYU.
Again and again Sanderson was told that his books would never sell because they were too long or too moral. But he was determined.
“At the end of the day if you told me, ‘You will never get published,’ I would have still written the books,” he says. Halfway through his master’s program, he started work on The Way of Kings , which, he says, “I planned to be bigger and full of all the nobility and awesomeness that I wanted to see in epic fantasy. It was flying in the face of what everyone had told me. I wrote the biggest, coolest, epic-est book I could.”
Between working on The Wheel of Time and his other novels, Sanderson eventually finished the 1,007-pager, which debuted at no. 7 on the New York Times Best Seller list in 2010 and begins the anticipated 10-book saga The Stormlight Archive.
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