I know your Mormon faith is very important to you. In a lot of your books, religion plays a major role in the story. How important is it to you to include religion in your stories? Do you ever try to subtly influence your readers views on religion through your writing?
I tend to write about things that interest me. My religion is important to me, and so religion in general fascinates me. I find myself including it not as a requirement, but as an aspect of what I find interesting.
As nothing bothers me more than reading a book in which the person who believes like me is treated like an idiot, I try to be aware of peoples beliefs (or lack thereof) and explore the issue in multiple dimensions.
My intention in writing stories it to write great stories. Who I am, and what I find moral, is going to seep into it—I don’t know that I’d want to stop that. However, I’m not trying to influence people specifically. I do try to present interesting ideas, but I let those be driven by the characters.
This is actually a harder question to answer than, at times, I’ve realized. I feel that people are given talents to enrich the lives of those around them, and I feel our job as people on this earth is to do our best to make life better for everyone involved. Can fantasy stories do that? I hope so. But I don’t sit down to say “What am I going to teach people today?” I sit down and write, “What can I do that is awesome.”
I guess I hope that increasing the awesomeness in the world will make people’s lives better.
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