Most years, Brandon Sanderson makes about $10 million. Last year, he made $55 million. This is obviously a lot of money for anyone. For a writer of young-adult-ish, never-ending, speed-written fantasy books, it’s huge. By Sanderson’s estimation, he’s the highest-selling author of epic fantasy in the world. On the day of his record-breaking Kickstarter campaign—$42 million of that $55 million—I came to the WIRED offices ready to gossip. How’d he do it? Why now? Is Brandon Sanderson even a good writer?
Nobody had the first clue who or what I was talking about.
On the one hand, who cares. Sanderson has millions upon millions of fans all over the planet; it doesn’t matter that some losers at a single magazine (even if it is one of the nerdier ones) had never heard of him. On the other, the ignorance goes far beyond WIRED. As far as I can tell, Sanderson, who has been topping bestseller lists for the better part of the 21st century, has not been written about in any depth by any major publication ever. I called his publicist to confirm this. “Well, we have a piece coming up in LDS Living,” he told me. That’s LDS as in Latter-day Saints. It’s a magazine for Mormons.
Which makes sense: Sanderson is extremely Mormon. What makes less sense is why there’s a hole the size of Utah where the man’s literary reputation should be. Is it because he mostly writes fantasy, a—so the snobs sneer—“subliterary” genre? But then, so do J. K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, and George R. R. Martin, and they’re household names. Is it because none of Sanderson’s work has been adapted for the screen? Well, he wrote three of the Wheel of Time books, and an adaptation of that series came out on Amazon Prime in 2021. Could it be, finally, because he’s a weirdo Mormon? But so are Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game), Glen A. Larson (the original Battlestar Galactica), and Stephenie Meyer (Twilight). Mormon, I mean. Only Orson Scott Card is also a weirdo.
Sanderson, when I eventually meet him in person, makes versions of these excuses, plus others, for his writerly obscurity. It’s kind of fun to talk about, until it isn’t, and that’s when I realize, in a panic, that I now have a problem. Sanderson is excited to talk about his reputation. He’s excited, really, to talk about anything. But none of his self-analysis is, for my purposes, exciting. In fact, at that first dinner, over flopsy Utah Chinese—this being days before I’d meet his extended family, and attend his fan convention, and take his son to a theme park, and cry in his basement—I find Sanderson depressingly, story-killingly lame.
He sits across from me in an empty restaurant, kind of lordly and sure of his insights, in a graphic T-shirt and ill-fitting blazer, which he says he wears because it makes him look professorial. It doesn’t. He isn’t. Unless the word means only: believing everything you say is worth saying. Sanderson talks a lot, but almost none of it is usable, quotable. I begin to think, This is what I drove all the way from San Francisco to the suburbs of Salt Lake City in the freezing-cold dead of winter for? For previously frozen dim sum and freeze-dried conversation? This must be why nobody writes about Brandon Sanderson.
So, recklessly, I say what’s on my mind. I have to. His wife is there, his biggest fan, always his first reader, making polite comments; I don’t care. Maybe nobody writes about you, I say to Sanderson, because you don’t write very well.
The world unfreezes. He agrees.
It’s not that Brandon Sanderson can’t write. It’s more that he can’t not write. Graphomania is the name of the condition: the constant compulsion to get words out, down, as much and as quickly as possible. The concept of a vacation confuses Sanderson, he once said, because for him the perfect vacation is more time to write—vocation as vacation. His schedule is budgeted down to the minute, months out, to maximize the time he spends, rather counter-ergonomically, on the couch, typing away. Most days, he wakes up at 1 pm, exercises, and writes for four hours. Break for the wife and kids. Then he writes for four more. After that he plays video games or whatever until 5 am. A powerful sleeping pill is all that works, finally, to get him, and the voices in his head, to shut up.
In the five months or so it has taken me to sit down and write this magazine story, which is 4,000 words long, Sanderson has published two books. During the Covid lockdowns, he wrote and/or edited seven: two for his regular publisher, a graphic novel, and four more in secret, telling no one but his wife until he surprise-announced a Kickstarter in March 2022 to crowdfund their publication. (Hence the $42 mil, raised in a month, by far the most successful Kickstarter ever.) Since his debut, Elantris, in 2005, Sanderson has published 30-plus books, the biggest ones in excess of 400,000 words; there are far more if you count the novellas and graphic novels and stuff for kids. I’ve read 17 of the actual books. Or maybe it’s 20. Exactitude is pointless here. As the major books are all set in the same universe, which Sanderson calls the Cosmere, they’re all but meant to blur together.
Most will hear this and think: At that rate, none of the words could possibly be any good. They’d be right, in a way, and that’s what Sanderson agrees with. At the sentence level, he is no great gift to English prose.
The early books especially. My god. Here’s a sample sentence: “It was going to be very bad this time.” Another one: “She felt a feeling of dread.” There’s a penchant for redundant description: A city is “tranquil, quiet, peaceful.” Many things, from buildings to beasts, are “enormous.” Dark places, more thesaurically, are “caliginous.” On almost every page of Mistborn, his first and probably most beloved series, a character “sighs,” “frowns,” “raises an eyebrow,” “cocks a head,” “shrugs,” or “snorts,” sometimes at the same time, sometimes multiple times a page. I count seven books in which one of the characters frets about their metaphors. “I have trouble with metaphors,” one literally says. Of his own work, Sanderson has said: “I detest rewriting,” “I write for endings,” and “I write to relax.” It shows. He writes, by one metric, at a sixth-grade reading level.
Here’s where I’ll stop using Sanderson’s words, written or spoken, against him. It’s not fair. He’s simply not, I’ll say it again, very quotable. I spent days with the man. I watched his YouTube videos, made a dent in his podcast empire (most of it, incredibly, about writing). Like his books, it all blurs together. I typed some 40 pages of notes for this story, and who knows how many pages of transcripts the AI spat out when I fed it the many hours of recorded audio. Now that I’m writing, I find I’m referring to none of it. Possibly, this is the influence of Sanderson himself, on me. Graphomaniacally get thoughts down. Have fun. Write for the ending.
So I will. This story has an ending, I promise, and I’m sprinting toward it, as if to a vacation. Like the best of Sanderson’s endings, my ending should surprise you. Because, you see, Sanderson actually did say one thing to me, one miraculous thing, that stuck, that I remember, these five months later, with perfect clarity. Just seven words, but true ones. You’re not ready for them just yet. You need more story first. For now, there is only Sanderson, both wordful and wordless, the best-selling writer no writer writes about because writers only know how to talk about words. Sanderson’s readers—loving, legion—care about something else.
Ten seconds to go until the launch. The lights are flashing, the music thumping. “This is siiick,” someone whispers behind me, as a Cosmere’s worth of nerds count down the remaining seconds. At zero, an enormous applause. Then the VP of merchandising and events walks out.
This is Dragonsteel 2022, the second annual convention for Sanderson’s worlds and works. At the first one, the year before, 1,200 fans showed up. At this event, a two-dayer in November, attendance is closer to 5,000. Even though the con is being held in the biggest venue in downtown Salt Lake City, the Salt Palace Convention Center, fans are turned away from panels left and right. The first morning, I was panting by the time I reached the end of the line, down multiple city blocks abutting stony Mormon gothica. Some 7,000 people are expected for Dragonsteel 2023, the VP of merch and events tells me later—and in 2024, the year Sanderson plans to release Book Five (of 10) of The Stormlight Archives, his biggest franchise, the one with the 400,000-word books, a full 12,000 people. The Dragonsteel planners will need to think bigger.
For now, the fans, even the turned-away ones, are in unconquerable spirits. As is typically the case at these things, there’s a general air—warmish, body-odored—of unselfconsciousness. By my rough count, some three-quarters of the attendees are men, boys, menboys, blurring together in a mass of pale, fleshy nerdery in Sanderson-appropriate graphic tees. The women, fewer in number, tend to be the better cosplayers. Lots of billowing cloaks, spritely makeups, precious weapons. (There’s an arena for refereed fights.) If you don’t come prepared, never fear, because the sprawl of purchasable Sandersonalia is endless: art, clothes, figurines, games, jewelry, ornaments, special-edition books, a letter opener (not available yet) in the style of a telepathic sword named Nightblood.
I talk to as many of the fans as I can, some in their teens, others in their sixties, from here in Utah and as far away as India, Norway, Australia. They’re sweet. Many of them have been reading Sanderson since the beginning, since Elantris. A teenage girl announces, “I’m here basically because I’m a huge nerd!” Everyone is smiling, sharing info and panel gossip. One guy from Massachusetts tells me he just spent $170 on a rubber sword (not Nightblood; this one is called Mayalaran). It’s bigger than he is; he won’t be able to take it on the plane home. Another guy, 41 years old, tells me he made his sword (Firestorm; they all have names) himself. It took more than a year, on and off, to design, and then six weeks to 3D-print. I see a young couple with very young kids. “Are you indoctrinating them into this fantasyland?” I ask, gesturing to the stroller. “Trying to,” the dad says.
The one question I ask practically everyone is, Why Sanderson? I only need to ask it a few times to realize the answer is always the same. It’s a two-parter. First part: Sanderson’s characters. “They feel like real people,” everyone insists. Multiple parents say they’ve named their kids after their favorites, usually the princely protagonists who’ve overcome various depressions and triumphed chivalrically. “I’ve done some things I’m not proud of,” one man tells me. Then he read the first Stormlight book, The Way of Kings, and now, reformed, he has a 2-year-old son named Kaladin.
The second answer to Why Sanderson? is his worlds. This is probably what he’s best known for. Worldbuilding, as it’s called. Sanderson dreams up far-off lands—sometimes cities, sometimes whole planets, with rules and systems and politics—and then he populates them with characters whose fates are also the worlds’. So the second answer is just the inverse of the first; you can’t have worldbuilding without characterbuilding. Some characters die, some become gods. The good ones, and most of them are good, are very good. Inspiringly good. No one has sex. They only save lives.
What nobody, not a single person, complains about, in my two days walking the Palace floors, is Sanderson’s writing. If they mention his sentences at all, it’s merely to acknowledge that they’re easier to read than, say, Tolkien’s—whose work they may well graduate to, with Sanderson lighting the way. (Sanderson himself admits he was late to Tolkien, in whose shadow he now happily lives, even as he tries to write beyond it.) Still, I can’t help but try to trip them up. Surely he’s not a great writer? I prod. Polite, embarrassed smiles. They’re suspicious of me, I can tell. They probably think I don’t know my Kaladin from my Adolin. I do! I even like Kaladin! The scene midway through Way of Kings where Kaladin talks to a mysterious stranger (it’s Hoid!) on the Shattered Planes? “A story doesn’t live until it is imagined in someone’s mind,” Hoid says. Do I know what that means? Not exactly. And that’s exactly why I read science fiction and fantasy, why I’ve pretty much only read science fiction and fantasy my entire life: for those plays at profundity, at the essence of storytelling. Storytelling beyond words.
But what am I saying? Gibberish, most likely. And hypocrisies. Sanderson is a bad writer; I’ve already said it. Here at the convention, most of the panelists aren’t even writers. People don’t care about sentences. They care about Sanderson. I sit through multiple panels about the future of his publishing company. Which is called—as is the convention, you’ll note—Dragonsteel. Post-Kickstarter campaign, the company is now 50-some-people/Mormons strong. This is the Year of Sanderson, the panelists keep saying. Four new books, with special swag for backers! New toys and sparkly bookmarks! Now they’re talking about warehouse expansion efforts. Now they’re talking about a possible future bookstore, housed in a castle or something. “When will the Dragonsteel amusement park be built?” someone asks. The audience hoots. All this, I think to myself, is not the spirit of fantasy. If it’s worldbuilding, it’s only worldbuilding one thing: the worldbuilder’s world.
Three days later, I pull up to Sanderson’s built world: his home(s) in a gated community of American Fork, Utah. There are three properties. On the left is the newest one, the subterranean man cave unofficially known as the supervillain lair, officially the Ammonite Club, complete with 28-seat industry-caliber movie theater. The middle structure is the Sanderson family manor, where his three boys play. On the right is the Cosmere House, which serves as Dragonsteel’s HQ. Props and merch and books for days. That’s where I’m staying, specifically in the Elantris Suite. It has cover art from the book on the walls, gold and silver frilly things everywhere, and the world’s best shower.
I already knew about the shower because a few nights earlier I’d gone out for drinks with a friend of Sanderson’s I met at the con. After contextualizing Sanderson’s success for me—basically, he gives fans exactly what they want—she insisted I stay a night in the Elantris Suite. “And you have to try the shower,” she said. “I’ll text him.” The next morning I woke up to an invitation from his assistant.
Sanderson’s assistant is his wife’s sister. As I orient myself within the Cosmere House, I keep running into his nearest and dearest. His doppelgänger brother. Multiple siblings-in-law. Neighbors. People’s children. Friends Sanderson formed a writers’ group with almost 30 years ago, back in college at Brigham Young University, when he was a nobody and worked the graveyard shift at a hotel so he could write the nights away. Dragonsteel is a company, one that’s shaking up the book industry. It’s also Sanderson’s extended family.
The writers’ group still meets every Friday, which is what today happens to be. It’s the most PG gathering of writer types I’ve ever been to. There are chips and sodas. Someone’s baked an apple crisp. Before the meetup kicks off, I corner some regulars in the kitchen. They’re gossiping, cracking jokes. One—Dragonsteel’s new “head of narrative”—lets slip that Sanderson feels no pain. It’s true, Sanderson’s sister-in-law says. Even though he writes for eight hours a day on a couch, he has no backaches. The hottest of hot sauces cause scarcely a sweat. At the dentist, he refuses novocaine for fillings. When I ask Sanderson later to confirm this, he does but asks if I really have to print it. I’m sorry, I say. I really do.
The writers’ group is standard stuff: What’s this character’s motivation? Can the reader follow that fight sequence? Sanderson gives feedback with half his brain, the other half occupied with autographing books. It’s only afterward that the real talk happens, such as Star Wars debates. When those subside, I bring up the pain thing again. Turns out Sanderson doesn’t seem to feel pain of any kind, even emotional. On roller coasters, he’s dead-faced, while his wife is shrieking. “It’s sick and wrong,” she says, smiling. She likes to say she married an android. For his part, Sanderson actually, at this moment, looks pained. He might not feel, he says, but his characters do. They agonize and cry and rejoice and love. That’s one of the reasons he writes, he says: to feel human.
The conversation eventually turns to a theme park called Evermore, located just down the street. Though unaffiliated with Sanderson, it’s Sandersonian to the core: You show up, hang around taverns, and embark on quests. We have to go, I say. But it’s falling apart, everyone groans. Something to do with bad management—there’s a four-hour YouTube video all about it. Still, Sanderson seems tempted. We leave it at that. I go back to the Elantris Suite, where I finally take that shower. There are multiple showerheads. I turn everything on. Water hits me from every angle. I don’t cry, but I could.
I do cry the next night, my last in Utah. We’re down in Sanderson’s below-ground movie theater, in plush red-leather seats that not only recline but also have adjustable headrests. He wants to show the specs off, so he plays the opening scene of The Greatest Showman. I don’t tell him that, while I like musicals, I hate The Greatest Showman, and especially Hugh Jackman. The scene starts. The chair shakes with otherworldly sound. When Hugh, lame Hugh, opens his mouth to sing, I can’t help it. I burst into tears.
What’s happening to me? This story isn’t coming together. To my mind, I still haven’t gotten anything real from Sanderson, anything true. I’m not the first person he has toured around his lair to politely gawk at his treasures and trophies and his hallway of custom stained-glass renditions of his favorite books (Tolkien, Harry Potter, The Belgariad). I’m certainly not the first person he has told about one favorite book in particular, Barbara Hambly’s Dragonsbane, which an English teacher put in his hands when he was 14, probably the day he became a fantasy writer. Or how he first got published. Or about the phone call he got from Robert Jordan’s widow, asking if he might finish the Wheel of Time series. These stories are all over the internet, on his website and many others. Sanderson has lived so much of his life and fame openly, self-promotionally. It’s a major reason for his success. One woman I talked to at the con made sure to tell me which of Sanderson’s pets was her favorite. It’s Jello, the parrot.
After I recover from Hugh in 4D, Sanderson collects his 15-year-old, and we all drive to dinner. This time the food is better: Utah Japanese. Sanderson and I order ramen. He salts his. Then I watch his son salt his yakisoba. I could cry again. Instead, I ask Sanderson if he’s ever so moved by a scene he writes that he cries. Sometimes, he says. Though it might not be the scenes people expect.
He won’t say more, but it’s something. This conversation—from five months ago, remember—I recall fairly clearly. We’re heading toward something now, some kind of admission, I can feel it. When Mormons ask God for a sign, they speak of a “burning in the bosom.” Say you’re a kid, wondering if you should be a fantasy writer when you grow up. You might ask God what He thinks. If there’s a burning in your bosom, that’s probably a yes.
So I press Sanderson on the moments he has felt the burning. He says they’re too intimate, too special, to talk about. That’s fine. Then let’s talk about Mormonism in another way. Let’s talk about it as it relates to fantasy. Because it’s no secret: Mormonism is the fantasy of religion. “The science-fiction edition of Christianity,” I’ve heard it called, with its angels and alternative histories, embodied gods, visions and plates made of gold. I ask Sanderson if I’ve got the ultimate promise of the religion right—the ultimate promise being, as I understand it, that we humans will, if we’re good, and marry well, and memorize the passcodes, eventually pass into the highest kingdom and come into our divine inheritance. We’ll become gods, in other words, and get our own planets.
Sanderson doesn’t balk at the characterization; he agrees that’s the gist, and he knows where I’m going. He knows I want to know if what he’s doing—writing fantasy books—is fundamentally, in some way, some very central way, Mormon. Of course it is, he says. The worldbuilding. The gods incarnate. The systems of magic. So much of Mormonism is about rules; so are his books, where miracles don’t happen unless you put in the work. That’s when, between mouthfuls of pork cutlet, Sanderson makes the connection between his work and the work of his Heavenly Father explicit. This is when he speaks the seven words of truth, the only ones I’m certain he has never said, in quite this way, ever before: “As I build books,” Sanderson says, as I sit there, for once entirely enraptured, “God builds people.”
We descend on one final world. After dinner, it’s time for Evermore, the rundown theme park. The night is misty and cold—caliginous. I remember one of Sanderson’s friends saying the park is only open at night to conceal the decay. I believe it. As we walk around, Sanderson narrates. Those are bad prosthetics. That’s half a costume. Shouldn’t there be more skeletons in this dungeon? At least the apple cider is good.
He gets recognized by everybody. I guess that’s inevitable when you go to a fantasy land with a fantasy legend (who has literally just purchased a $5 million plot of land across the way for who knows what worldbuilding reasons). Sanderson’s son and I start keeping a silent tally. Every time a new fan walks over, we hold up fingers behind Sanderson’s back. We quickly run out of fingers. One girl says she wants to take Sanderson’s writing class at BYU when she grows up. A surprising number of guys ask for autographs “for my girlfriend.” Lots of people have already finished the latest book, which came out, like, yesterday.
Sanderson shines in these situations. He’s your god, but he’s your friend too. He’s also unafraid to drop hints about future projects. He does this to me at certain points. Will they ever make a big movie version of one of your books? I ask him in the fairy garden. Sanderson makes meaningful noises. Even though your systems of magic seem unfilmably complex? More meaningful noises. Everything’s been optioned, he says, but then things revert and discussions continue.
I suspect there will be big announcements soon. There have to be. Sanderson is bigger than ever. A good writer? Who knows. What I do know, now, is this: So many of us mistake sentences for story, but story is the thing. Things happening. Characters changing. Surprise endings. As I drive us back to the house, drop off the kid, and then stay in the car with Sanderson a bit longer, talking about life, talking about worlds, my ending takes shape. The surprise is that it was Sanderson’s ending all along, the ending of his best books. A character becomes a god, and the god beholds his planet below. If Sanderson is a writer, that is all he is doing. He is living his fantasy of godhead on Earth.
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