Brandon Sanderson: A Study of His Work and Writing Advice

“Everyone wrote stories about bringing down an empire – but I’d rarely seen a story about revolutionaries forced to become politicians. What happens after you topple a government? Building something up is always harder than tearing something down.” – Brandon Sanderson, Preface for The Well of Ascension

To call Brandon Sanderson a titan of fantasy would be to say launching a rocket to Mars is a bit impressive. The popularity of Sanderson’s novels is a worldwide phenomenon, and he’s considered by some “the 21st century Tolkien.” With 32 novels and counting since his first novel, Elantris, in 2005, Sanderson is a writing machine. Although George R.R. Martin may be more prestigious than Sanderson in the public eye, Sanderson has defined, and redefined how we read and write fantasy today. But he didn’t become a juggernaut author overnight. He fully wrote at least 6 novels before Elantris and was working on another book while he tried to get it published. As he celebrates his 49th birthday we’ll take his birthday as an opportunity to explore the life and work of Brandon Sanderson.

History

Brandon Sanderson was born December 19, 1975, in Lincoln, Nebraska. and was the eldest of four children in a Mormon household. Although he was initially a voracious reader, his enthusiasm for it dropped as he lost interest in the titles suggested to him. This changed in 8th grade when his teacher, Mrs. Reeder, suggested he check out Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly. Newly introduced to fantasy, Sanderson recovered his love of reading, and even attempted to write his own fantasy epic.

These early writing attempts didn’t pan out, and when he entered Brigham Young University in 1994, he was a biochemistry major. However, he would spend 1995-1997 as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Seoul, Korea, and realize he actually didn’t care about biochemistry, but greatly missed writing. He switched to an English major when he returned, and ended up working as a night receptionist at the Best Western CottonTree hotel in Provo, Utah. The owner allowed him to write during work as long as it didn’t interfere with his duties, and Sanderson finished 7 novels there during his undergraduate. He accumulated a mountain of rejection letters, but finally found success with Elantris, his seventh novel. Although not a breakout hit, Elantris was well regarded on release. Much of the praise came from its truly original world and magic system, which would become hallmarks of Sanderson’s work. It was free from the usual genre cliches and had something for everyone, be it romance, political intrigue, mystery, religious conflict, or characters drama.

Sanderson graduated from Brigham Young University in 2004 with a master’s degree in English and was asked to teach a creative writing class on science fiction and fantasy that he had taken during his undergraduate years. Though busy, he still teaches this class today because he enjoys helping younger writers and it gets him out of the house. He married Emily Bushman in 2006. They had been in similar circles at the university, but they didn’t actually meet until a mutual friend set them up on a date. Emily quit her teaching job when their first child was born in October 2007, and she now works part time as Sanderson’s business manager.

Over the next decade and a half Sanderson would expand his renown as a writer. He was chosen to finish Robert Jorden’s The Wheel of Time after the author’s passing. In 2013 he was nominated for the David Gemmell Legend Award 8 times in 7 years, finally winning one for The Way of Kings. He began an award winning podcast. And in 2022 he announced he’d written 4 books in secret and was looking to publish them independently. With over 40 million books sold and counting, and new books releasing every year, Brandon Sanderson has become the captain of sci-fi fantasy, steering the ship to new horizons.

Writing Style

Sanderson’s approach to diction and description can be very direct and to the point. Sometimes to the point of being considered basic. Unless you’re looking at a name or a made up word, most sentences are constructed out of the most accessible words, and more value is placed on clarity than prose or linguistic nuance. This creates a writing style that offers the reader a window into the story, making it clear exactly who our characters are. While this can make the sentences themselves feel a bit dull on their own, put together it makes for a very easy read, and draws the reader into the story when Sanderson does break out his thesaurus for breathtaking descriptions.

One of Sanderson’s most well known contributions to fantasy writing is the differentiation of soft and hard magic. At its simplest, soft magic is magic that works without explanation, and hard magic is magic that functions in a series of hard rules and has some form of cost associated with it. For example, Gandalf in Lord of the Rings can create fire because he’s a wizard. He uses magic, and that’s all we really need to know to accept that. Meanwhile, Vin in Mistborn: The Final Empire can pull herself to any piece of metal, but only if she swallows steel and uses it as fuel, and she only has access to this power for as long as she has steel in her stomach. While the approaches to magic were around long before Sanderson put a name to them, his clear definitions have allowed for greater clarity of discussion in the fantasy community and given writers new ways to think about their own magic systems.

The Mistborn Series: Realtime Fantasy

After Elantris, which had a renaissance setting, Sanderson “wanted something that didn’t feel like it could be our world. That if you walked outside, you saw a Vista that just could not be from Earth..” So Mistborn begins with, “Ash fell from the sky.” It’s the first thing we see, and it defines the world. The color white is considered a mark of wealth because only the nobility can afford to keep something white in a world of ash. The ash must be swept off the streets every day, or else it will bury the city. The falling ash in Mistborn becomes a symbol for everything that’s different about the world. Because of the ash constantly spewing out of volcanos, the sun is blotted out and everyone lives in red light. The lack of light makes it impossible for plants to be healthy, so vegetation is brown and malnourished, and the mere picture of a healthy flower growing in the wild becomes symbolic of everything our heroes are fighting for. The Lord Ruler caused the ash to fall from the sky, he separated society into nobles and slaves. And he has maintained this status quo for 1000 years. The only way to change the world, to stop the ash latterly choking the world to death and return nature to its proper form, is to overthrow the emperor. The unique setting isn’t just flavor, it is the motivation for everything that happens in the story.

But just as Sanderson doesn’t like generic settings, he isn’t content with happily ever after. They overthrew the Lord Ruler in book one, now they have to take his place. There’s politics, and governing to deal with, invading armies and counter revolutionary plots, along with the unfortunate truth that killing the Lord Ruler didn’t stop the ash. The world continues spinning and only gets more complicated with each passing novel. The setting is constantly transforming, and Sanderson has made this a feature of the series. After the initial trilogy he jumps forward 300 years, allowing Mistborn, with all of its fantastical magic and alien vistas, to evolve into an industrial society with a western style frontier. Cars and electricity are coming into existence alongside magic, and technological achievements like firearms are created in imitate of magic only a select few can wield. This political and technological revolution in the 300 year time skip makes the world of Mistborn feel alive in ways other fantasies just don’t. Our recorded history is only about 2000 years old, yet some fantasies have existed in a medieval kingdom for thousands of years without so much as discovering black powder. Mistborn sheds this cliché and dares to ask what it means for a fantasy world to progress. Sanderson also has plans for two other trilogies set in Mistborn’s future. One during the early computer age, and another in the far future which will fully transition his fantasy world into a science fiction setting. This insistence on changing the setting into something we’ve never seen before makes Mistborn one of the most unique fantasy series out there and is emblematic of Sanderson’s approach to writing. Whether it’s a fantasy epic like The Stormlight Archive, or an amusing children’s story like Alcatraz vs the Evil Librarians, the setting is utterly unique, and informs the kind of story set in it.

The Stormlight Archives: Writing the Epic

Following the original Mistborn trilogy, several other series, and while writing the conclusion to the Wheel of Time, Sanderson began his own fantasy epic with The Way of Kings. Projected to be 10 volumes, it rivals the scope of Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice and Fire, while exploring numerous settings and cultures. Where his previous works explore the world through a few allied characters, The Stormlight Archives expand this scope, switching between 3 or 4 stories and characters with radically different goals, cultures, and expectations. Just as he uses his unique settings to push fantasy forward, Sanderson uses them to push his characters forward. George R.R. Martin’s Starks and Lannisters have their own cultures and perspectives on the world, but they are all still of the same class, and mostly playing the same game, even if they might go about it in different ways. In The Way of Kings we have a soldier turned slave turned revolutionary, a sorcerer turned slave turned political assassin, an aristocrat turned thief turned apprentice. The characters are from radically different lives, and each of their stories inform us about the world and create a sense of movement and change within the world. Kaladin is enslaved because he refuses to play by the rules of the world. Szeth is transformed into an assassin because he alone has access to lost magic capable of piercing anything. Shallan’s attempted theft makes the world’s cutthroat politics obvious, while her apprenticeship expands the scope of magic in the world. In his exploration of the world and its rules, Sanderson crafts a compelling narrative about the people who exist in that system, and their own struggle to understand it.

Writing Advice from Brandon Sanderson

It’s difficult to pick a single piece of writing advice from Brandon Sanderson because he’s made it his occupation to teach and advise new writers when he isn’t writing himself. But given his track record before his first novel was published, and his factory like production of new stories, the best advice to take from him is “don’t give up!” Writing takes time to learn, and you can’t let roadblocks and rejection letters stop you in your tracks. It might not be your first novel, or your second. But once you’ve found a publisher you think is a good fit for your book and sent it off, sit down and start working on the next one. Writing isn’t an industry that rewards idle hands, unless you’re staring out the window thinking about your story. The more you do, the more chances you have to be noticed. Persistence is the key to success. For more advice from Brandon Sanderson, you can visit his website, where he’s posted his university lectures on writing fiction and fantasy.

Sanderson Today:

Sanderson’s sheer productivity calls to mind authors of the 18th century who wrote to survive, sometimes living on their last paycheck for any number of reasons, or to otherwise proliferate their ideas into the public consciousness because they lacked any other country wide forum to participate in. As near as we can tell Brandon Sanderson writes because he loves to tell stories. He had written 6 other novels before Elantris was published, and in 2022 he revealed he’d written 4 novels in his free time that weren’t intended for publication, but which he had been convinced to share with his audience. He currently employees up to 64 people who work directly with him and shows no signs of slowing down. Mistborn is planned to have at least another 6 books, and The Stomelight Archive another 5. Never mind his numerous standalone novels and young adult series we didn’t cover in this article. As his career continues to blossom, Brandon Sanderson is poised to become one of the most prolific and influential writers of the century.

Discussion Questions:

1.       Brandon Sanderson’s main rival for the title of 21st century Tolkien is George R.R. Martin, whose Song of Ice and Fire series has captivated tens of millions around the world. But with Sanderson’s prolific output, and the decade long delay of The Winds of Winter, some say Martin has lost his chance at the title. But Tolkien was not just a successful and well known fantasy author. What does it mean to be a 21st century Tolkien?

2.       Many prolific authors have their names carved in the memory of literary canon, but only their most well known works see mass reprintings. As Sanderson shows no sign of slowing down, how much of his work do you think will be remembered in the next century?

3.       When Sanderson began writing The Well of Ascension, the sequel to Mistbon: The Final Empire, he felt it would be easy because he had written so many novels before. But he discovered that writing a sequel is completely different to a stand alone novel. There are rules in place, preexisting characters, and plot threads he has to work with. What challenges do you face with a sequel, that you don’t have for a standalone novel?