Embarrassed by his efforts, he hid the pages behind a painting in his bedroom so his family wouldn’t discover them. Sanderson began writing his first book, “a bad knock-off combination of Dragonlance and The Dragonbone Chair,” within the next year. “It’s part elation, part an awakening sense of wonder, part a coming to an understanding of something in the world that I love, but not really knowing what it is or why.” “When I think of those days-those first early books that I read-there’s an emotion I feel which is solely reserved for those early books discovering the fantasy genre,” he says.

There’s something about this that is me,’” Sanderson says.īeginning with books that simply had “Dragon” in the title, including Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight and Melanie Rawn’s Dragon Prince, he began to voraciously read. “After discovering, I said, ‘I have to learn how to do this. It wasn’t until an eighth grade teacher handed him a copy of a Barbara Hambly novel that he fell in love with fantasy. Yet Sanderson, who has authored nearly 20 novels and hit #1 on The New York Times bestseller list last month with his latest, Words of Radiance, spent his youth avoiding books (especially ones with “shiny award stickers”). “I had tried reading Tolkien, but if you’re not a good reader, Tolkien is really hard-he’s fantastic, but he’s dense.”įor a fantasy writer known for penning doorstopper-length novels, this admission sounds almost blasphemous. “I was a boy who just didn’t like books,” Sanderson says at this month’s JordanCon, an annual convention in Atlanta celebrating the works of fantasy author Robert Jordan. In answering these questions, revolutionary author Brandon Sanderson is heralding a new era of fantasy for the 21st century. What if you could craft a perfect replica of the human soul? What if the only people who gained superpowers were evil? What if the prophesied hero failed and an immortal emperor ruled for centuries?

What if people were granted god-like powers, only to lose them to a crippling disease?

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