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Brandon Sanderson is an ambitious young author with a talent for fantasy world-building. With eight books already out, he introduces us to Warbreaker, a story of god-men and their followers, of forced marriage alliances, impending war, and desperate times. Today he talks with us about his writing career, how it developed, and what he plans for the future.

Tell me a little about yourself and your background. What are your education and career like? What’s your favorite subject?

I got my bachelor’s and master’s in English from Brigham Young University. While I was working on my master’s I found out editor Moshe Feder at Tor wanted to buy my book Elantris, which was the sixth novel I had written—at the time I was working on my thirteenth novel, but I shelved that and made Elantris my master’s thesis. I did some teaching in the English department—I still teach one creative writing class each year—but beyond that I’ve never had what you’d call a regular day job. As soon as I sold my first novel I became a full-time writer, and as far as time spent writing per week I had practically been a full-time writer for years.

As for my favorite subject while I was in school, I did enjoy my creative writing classes since I got to do what I love. But as a writer I’ve actually found it far more useful to keep seeking out new subjects instead of sticking with something I’m familiar with. Taking a class or picking up a book about something wildly different from anything I’ve studied before opens my mind and broadens my experience pool to draw from when writing.

Where are you from? Has it had any influence on who you are as a writer?

I grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. I wouldn’t be a writer if it weren’t for a wonderful English teacher I had in junior high there who told me I couldn’t keep doing book reports on novels that were four grades below my reading level (the Three Investigators books—I loved them as a kid, and I’d been bored out of my skull by the realistic fiction people had been handing me the previous four years). When that teacher gave me Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly, it opened up a whole new world for me.

Mac or PC?

PC. Not out of any avid devotion, but because it’s what I’ve grown up on. My wife is a Mac person, though.

Tell us about your latest book.

My most recent novel is Warbreaker, which came out June 9th. I’m a big fan of the stand-alone epic form for fantasy—some of my favorite fantasy novels (such as Dragonsbane) were of this style.

My first novel, Elantris, was a stand-alone, and I have always planned to return to the form on occasion. A stand-alone can give things that a series can’t. I’m particularly pleased to be releasing Warbreaker now, with a lot of attention on me for the Wheel of Time (the next book of which I have completed based on Robert Jordan’s partial draft and notes; it’s called The Gathering Storm and comes out on October 27), as it will give people a chance to try out my work and see what kind of writer I am without them having to invest themselves into a large series.

Warbreaker is the story of an impending war between two kingdoms. In a desperate attempt to stop an invasion, the king of Idris sends his daughter to marry the God King of the Hallandren people. And yet there are clandestine forces within both kingdoms who are still pushing for war. It’s the story of people who die and come back to life to be worshiped as Returned gods (one of whom doesn’t believe in his own religion), a princess from Idris in over her head, and a mysterious man with a sentient sword tied to the magic of the Returned and the original division that shattered the two kingdoms in the first place.

There’s one more book I have coming out very soon—the latest in my middle-grade humorous fantasy series that started with Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians. This one’s titled Alcatraz Versus the Knights of Crystallia and it’s due to be released October 1, though previous volumes have hit bookshelves long before the release date so you should be able to find it in stores in early September. The series is about a boy who discovers the world is secretly ruled by a cabal of evil Librarians who control all the information and don’t want us to know that there are whole continents out there free of their control. I have fun with the series, and it’s gained a lot of fans of all ages.

What’s the weirdest fact you learned while researching for your book?

When coming up with ideas for Warbreaker, I did a lot of research into imitative magic—the belief in many cultures that like influences like, that an object that is similar to something or someone else can have power over that thing or person. It was very interesting to me to see how people have believed in concepts like that. For example one idea I kept running across in mythology and folklore was the story of the villain whose soul exists in some kind of external object, and destroying that object is the only way to defeat them. That’s partly where the idea of using Breath in Warbreaker’s magic system came from.

What inspires you?

The evolution of a novel is such a complicated, complex, and strange creative process that it’s hard to step people through it. I don’t think even I can fully comprehend it. Keep in mind, a good book is more than just one good idea. A good book is twelve or thirteen or fourteen great ideas that all play off of each other in ways that create even better ideas. My Mistborn trilogy is a good example of how many different ideas I’ve had over a period of years eventually come together to form a compelling whole.

Some of these ideas I get from the world around me—one idea for Mistborn came to me when I was on the freeway and hit a fog bank at seventy miles an hour. Even though my car was actually driving into the fog, it looked like the mist was moving around me instead of me moving through it. It was just this great image that I wrote down in my notebook years before I ended up writing Mistborn.

Other ideas come from books I read or movies I watch, when a plot doesn’t go the direction I think it should, or when it goes a great direction but leaves something unexplored. For example, a lot of fantasy focuses on the hero’s journey, and I often thought to myself, “What if the dark lord won? What if Frodo got to the end in Lord of the Rings and Sauron said, ‘Thanks for bringing my ring back. I really was looking for it,’ and then killed him and took over the world? What if book seven of Harry Potter had Voldemort defeating Harry and winning?” I didn’t feel that this story had ever really been approached in the way I was imagining it, and it became one idea that bounced around in my head for quite a while.

Another idea I hadn’t ever seen in fantasy novels quite as I pictured it was the classic heist plot like in the movies Ocean’s Eleven or The Italian Job, where you get together a gang of specialists to pull off the ultimate heist. After a while, all these different ideas, like atoms, were bouncing around in my head and eventually started to run together to form molecules (the molecules being the story). Suddenly with Mistborn I had a world shrouded in mists where the prophecies were wrong, the hero had failed, and a thousand years later a gang of thieves says, “Well, let’s try this our way. Let’s rob the dark lord silly and drive his armies away from him. Let’s try to overthrow the empire.” These are all the seeds of things that make bigger ideas.

What compels you to write in this genre?

Fantasy as a genre has the advantage of being very versatile. Anything you can imagine you can put into a book. When I first read Dragonsbane, I was amazed—I had no idea books like that existed. It engaged my imagination like no other book ever had. At that point I started reading every fantasy book I could get my hands on, including Robert Jordan’s first Wheel of Time book, The Eye of the World, when it came out in paperback. I was hooked, and as I read more and more books, my grades went up in school—I went from a low-end average student to someone who got top grades. I write fantasy because it’s still the genre I love, and every time I hear about some kid who used to be just like me and got turned on to reading by one of my books, that just reinforces its worth to me.

When did you first start writing?

I made my first tentative steps as a writer not long after I read Barbara Hambly’s Dragonsbane at the age of 14 and then read McCaffrey and Rawn. And once I started reading Robert Jordan, it was a foregone conclusion. Those early stories were pretty terrible, though. As a curiosity, I’ve posted a story from my late teens on my website—but I’m almost embarrassed to have it out there. It took me years of practice to get any good.

When did you start writing your current book, and what gave you the idea?

My current book? Right now I’m working on a book called The Way of Kings, but Warbreaker is one of those combinations of ideas that took a long time to bear fruit. I came up with the plotline of the two sisters and the God King back in 2001 and started writing about them in a book that I later abandoned for various reasons—it just wasn’t working out the way I wanted to. So I kept them in the back of my mind while working on other books like the Mistborn trilogy. Then when that series was done I decided to take a break with something shorter, and I came up with the idea of a god who didn’t believe in his own religion and the idea of color as life—when something dies, color drains from it, so it followed that if you used something’s life force while it was still alive that would also drain color. I connected that with the idea of imitative magic and added in the storyline of the two sisters, and Warbreaker was the result.

How did you get involved in professional writing?

Toward the end of high school I let myself be convinced that writing wasn’t a realistic career for me, so I started college as a biochemistry major. But before long I realized I just didn’t enjoy chemistry and missed writing, so I changed my major and threw myself into writing. I still wasn’t very good, but I set out with the goal of practicing until I was good enough to get published. I’d heard the old writing adage that “your first million words will be crap,” so I didn’t worry about revision at the time; I just wrote book after book. I paid my way through college by working as a night auditor at a hotel—about the best job possible for me at the time, since I had a lot of hours to myself that my boss let me fill by writing. The first book I eventually sold, Elantris, was written right after that million-word mark.

Who is your greatest champion?

My wife Emily supports me all the way in this crazy job I have where most days I don’t leave the house, I hardly ever get dressed up, and I pick my own hours—though that’s usually north of sixty hours per week. Emily is my business manager and handles all the behind-the-scenes stuff that readers never hear about that would distract me from writing. All that and she’s a fantastic wife to our son.

Who is your favorite author in your genre, and why?

Currently living? Terry Pratchett. Honestly, I think he’s a genius because of his ability to mix characterization, drama, wit, and philosophy—we haven’t had a writer in the English language as good at that as Terry is since Shakespeare. Like Shakespeare he’s so good at speaking to different audiences—a little base humor for one crowd, a little elevated character drama for another, a little witty banter for another, and a little action-adventure for yet another. Plus, I think that all of those different crowds are often the same crowd, and by engaging us on a variety of different levels, both Shakespeare and Pratchett make for a compelling piece of art.

As for a writer in my genre who’s no longer with us—well, Shakespeare did write some fantasy! But I’d have to go with Robert Jordan. I still think The Eye of the World is one of the greatest fantasy books ever written. It signifies an era, the culmination of the epic quest genre which had been brewing since Tolkien initiated it in the ’60s. Robert Jordan showed us what it was to have vision and scope in a fantasy series—he did a wonderful job giving his readers a sense of immensity to his story, while at the same time focusing on the specific lives of his characters. He did an excellent job of creating a large set of empathetic characters and keeping them straight in the reader’s mind. He’s a model writer for walking the line between familiarity (the “farmboy saves the world from an evil overlord” story) and originality (his use of magic, his political worldbuilding). The descriptiveness of his writing is great. And the prologue to Eye of the World is hands-down one of the most interesting introductions to any series. All those factors have won readers over and cemented the Wheel of Time as one of the most popular fantasy series of all time. Nobody in the adult fantasy market today has left more of an impact on more people’s lives than Robert Jordan.

Who is your favorite author outside your genre, and why?

Victor Hugo—Les Misérables has long been one of my favorite novels. I really admire Hugo for his characters, who feel like real people to me. Hugo has an ability to portray people from all different walks of life to show the best and worst of human achievements—to show people who are capable of terrible things yet to do it without condemning them, and at the same time to show inspiring examples of the nobility of the human spirit without getting preachy. That’s a skill any author should try to work toward.

What is your favorite genre outside your own?

If I’m not reading fantasy or science fiction, you’re most likely to find me reading a historical work of one sort or another. They can give the same sense of wonder as fantasy and science fiction—seeing another time and another place—and they’re often just fascinating; historical books often start me thinking about something that later blooms into a story idea.

What are you doing now, besides writing?

I keep up a social life by role playing every couple of weeks and going to church regularly, but most hours of the day you’ll find me writing. Getting the chance to work on the Wheel of Time, while still working on my own projects like Way of Kings, means I’ve had deadlines to meet, so I’ve let some hobbies slide, like playing Magic: The Gathering and video games. I don’t mind that at all, since although writing is my day job it’s also what I do for fun. I do it to relax. Even when I’m out of the house and not writing, I’m usually thinking about what I’m going to write when I get back home. Or coming up with ideas for other books that I know I have no time to write. If I stopped coming up with ideas right now, the ideas I already have would last me well over a decade even if two books came out every year.

Oh—I also have a weekly writing advice podcast with fellow writer Dan Wells and cartoonist Howard Tayler. Episodes are only fifteen minutes long so it doesn’t take a huge time commitment (either for us or the listeners), and you can find it at WritingExcuses.com.

Will there be a sequel?

There will be a sequel to Warbreaker in a few years. Partway through writing the book I realized that the ideas I had for it couldn’t be fully explored in the space I had. The story is complete—the major plot arcs for the characters introduced at the beginning of the book are finished by the end—but it’s a look at just one small geographical area, and I want to explore how the magic system of Returned and Breaths is viewed in different parts of that same world. Some of the characters have a bit more growing to do, and there are some questions that remain unanswered—I like to leave a few loose ends in every book so you feel like the story is continuing, but in this case there is a definite sequel I have in mind. I originally intended to write it very soon after Warbreaker, but then the Wheel of Time came along and I had to put it on the back burner. If all goes well, though, I’ll have time to write it in a couple years, after the first few books of my next big series (more on that below), and a couple years after that I’ll find time to write a sequel to my first novel, Elantris.

Do you have any other books in work?

Besides the last two Wheel of Time books, which will be coming out next year and the year after, I’m starting a series called the Stormlight Archive that I plan to be ten books. The first of those, The Way of Kings, will come out late next summer. This is going to be the massive epic fantasy series that I’ve been working up to since my first book came out. I was writing the first version of The Way of Kings when I got the contract for Elantris, but I decided that my career wasn’t in quite the right place yet to release something so ambitious—and neither was my writing skill. So I wrote the Mistborn trilogy instead, and was very pleased with the results. Since then, having the chance to work on the Wheel of Time forced me to grow in leaps and bounds as a writer, and now I’m in the right place to do what I plan with a huge epic like the Stormlight Archive. I just finished the second draft of The Way of Kings, and I think people are really going to like it.

Where can we find your books?

In bookstores everywhere! I prefer that readers support local booksellers by buying my books from them. The books are also available in audio and electronic editions.

Where can we find you on the web?

My site is at http://www.brandonsanderson.com, where I have a lot of bonus content for fans of my books. There are sample chapters, chapter-by-chapter annotations (like a special edition DVD director’s commentary), deleted scenes, free short stories and more—even accessories based on the books. My blog is updated regularly and you can also find me on Facebook and Twitter.