Adjunct instructor and BYU alum Brandon Sanderson (BA ’00, MA ’05) harnessed his imagination to write 12 manuscripts filled with magical worlds and inspiring characters–but after six years of writing, not one book had been accepted for publication.
These books that I’d started writing—you know, after the first six. The first five I thought, you know, were just practice. But, books six through about nine, I really put a lot into those. I felt I was getting really good as a writer. I felt I knew what I was doing, and I felt I was writing really good books.
I was getting stacks and stacks of rejections. And people were telling me, “Why don’t you be more like this writer over here?” “Why don’t you be more like this writer over here?” “Your novels are too big. They’re too long. We can’t buy things that are this long. Write them shorter.”
And I had to make the decision that, at the end of my life, if I had a hundred unpublished novels in the closet, would I be okay with that? Would I be okay with never selling anything? I decided I was going to write the biggest, baddest, most awesome book that I could. I was going to ignore everything that people were telling me.
At that time, really popular in fantasy was kind of very gritty and dark fantasy. And I said, no, that’s not what I want to write. I’m going to write heroic fantasy—you know, stories like I want to read.
By coincidence, it was a few months after I’d finished that book—I hadn’t sent it anywhere—that someone called me wanting to buy Elantris , the sixth book that I’d written—that I’d really had felt would be the book that broke me out, all those years ago.
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