Although Sanderson has emerged as a powerhouse in the genre, he always speaks of his success as a gift.
“There are a lot of writers who are better than I am who are not successful,” he says. “It’s a measure of luck, perseverance, and providence.”
Perseverance in particular is a virtue he teaches to aspiring writers—both in his BYU fantasy and sci-fi writing class and in Writing Excuses , the weekly writing-advice podcast he cohosts.
“Sit in a chair and write,” Sanderson says. “Ignore this thing they call writer’s block. Doctors don’t get doctor’s block; your mechanic doesn’t get mechanic’s block. If you want to write great stories, learn to write when you don’t feel like it. You have to write it poorly before you can write it well. So just be willing to write bad stories in order to learn to become better.”
One of Sanderson’s first students, new author Janci Patterson Olds (BA ’05, MA ’08), took Sanderson’s lessons of tenacity to heart. “Brandon really believes that anyone who’s willing to work hard can succeed,” she says, “which makes him a fantastic teacher and writing mentor.”
For Sanderson, creating worlds is all in a day’s work.
“I love this job,” says the father of three. “You get up and do something different every day: you become a different character, you work on a different problem, you create something new. There’s nothing as supremely satisfying to me as looking at nothing . . . and at the end having something—a story, this thing that is almost alive.”
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