The last time I interviewed Brandon Sanderson, he’d just released his third novel, The Well of Ascension and was putting his teeth to the grindstone and trying to establish himself in the Fantasy genre. Boy how things can change in just a few years.
Now, he’s the guy holding the reins of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series and carries all the weight of its finale on his shoulders. Luckily, if there’s anything Sanderson’s known for, it’s being able to write some of the best conclusions in the genre.
What’s more amazing is that he’s not only managed to publish two Wheel of Time novels in two years, he’s also published a 1,000 page novel, The Way of Kings, from a new Fantasy series called The Stormlight Archive. The dude’s prolific and the quality never seems to dip. So, enjoy the interview, and thank him for staying up into the deep parts of the night, just hours before one of the most important novels of his career is launched, to complete an interview with silly old me. Few gentlemen still exist in the world, but Brandon Sanderson’s certainly among their number.
The Interview
Brandon, welcome back to A Dribble of Ink. It’s been a while and *a lot* has changed since we last chatted back in 2007!
Ha! Yeah, you could say that. It’s been a busy few years.
It’s been one year since The Gathering Storm was first published. How much did feedback from fans and critics affect you while writing Towers of Midnight?
The relationship between artist and critic/fan is a curious one in this regard. On one hand, I do think feedback is important, particularly on a project like this (where, as I’ve stated, I feel that the project rightly belongs more to the fans than it does to me.) However, a writer must keep their artistic integrity. Allowing yourself to get pulled in too many directions by fan requests can be a disaster for an artist. Basically, you can’t try to please everyone–if you do, you risk ending up with either a completely schizophrenic project, or one that is so bland it lacks emotional depth or power.
So, like I said, fine line. I looked at fan responses on TGS very cautiously and carefully, trying to keep in the same mindset that I use when getting feedback from my critique group. Basically, that mindset is this: “I will do what I feel is best for the story, regardless of what other people think. Even if I’m the only one who feels that way. But if someone raises a complaint that either strikes a cord within me, or which gains a lot of support from others, I WILL look into it and try to approach it objectively.”
That’s a mouthful. Basically, what it means is keeping an open mind for ideas that will make the story a better version of what I wany it to be. On TGS, there were two basic areas I felt fans were right about that I could and should fix. The first had to do with some voice issues in Mat’s narrative. (I’ve spoken of that elsewhere.) The second had to do with continuity errors. I am not nearly as good at dealing with those as Robert Jordan was–I know he made mistakes, but I felt I made more. So for this project, I enlisted the help of some very detail-oriented members of the fan community as beta readers in an attempt to keep myself honest and catch mistakes before they went to press.
There are things in this book, like in any book I’ve written, that I fully suspect will draw complaints. In some cases, I know exactly what they are–and I did them that way because I felt it was best for the story and the best way to remain true to Robert Jordan’s vision. It’s the ones that I DON’T expect, but which ring true, that I want to find and correct.
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