L'interview en V.O.

How are you enjoying your stay in France so far? How did the signing session go on Saturday ?

It was excellent – very busy. I’m glad to have found a science fiction and fantasy bookstore in Paris where I can sign. I like little focus stores like that. I grew up buying all of my books at my corner store, which was a science fiction bookstore called Cosmic Comics. So I have a deep fondness for stores like that. It was a great signing. I think it was the largest signing I’ve ever done in France.

I remember a signing session at WH Smith a few years ago, which was already impressive !

Yeah, that was good, but it’s cheating a little, because that’s an English bookstore ! I was surprised when I first came; I asked Audrey (Petit) if she wanted me to do a book signing in Paris, and she said there really wasn’t a bookstore in Paris that they did science fiction signings at. There’s not as much a culture of greetings and signings in France, as I’ve heard. So I was very excited to be able to try one out here. It was a very successful signing. And yesterday, I went to Musée d’Orsay and looked at Monet paintings and things like that – I’m very fond of Impressionists.

Did it give you ideas for new magic systems ?

(laughs) You know, you never can tell! Things stick in the back of my head. Before we started the interview, you mentioned the award you guys gave me back during my first visit. After that first visit was when I wrote Legion on the way home, and I ended up using the names of all the people I met, including Audrey! Audrey got used, a fan of the Mistborn books I met at a party, things like this – different names ended up in my books. So you never can tell what will become stuck in there and get used!

For those readers out there who might be new to fantasy and thinking: “This man’s name is popping up on every second book at the bookstore, I wonder what novel or series of his I should pick up first?”, what would you advise? One of the stand-alone (so far) novels, one of the bigger series, or a lighter series ?

It’s a good question. I always try to recommend that people start with a series that has a first book that stands on its own really well. That’s the best place to start into fantasy, I feel – or with a stand-alone. With my own, I usually point people at Mistborn, with The Final Empire, because the first book does stand on its own. Though usually, when I talk to someone, I try to feel them out and see what they like. Someone who’s read more romance or humor, I try to point them towards Warbreaker; if they’re a more literary reader, I give them The Emperor’s Soul, which is probably the most literary of the books I’ve written. But if I don’t know anything about someone, I generally point them towards Mistborn. Steelheart is another good one, usually for people who like action films – that’s who Steelheart is targeted at. If you love explosions and fast pacing and things just going crazy, motorcycle chases, try Steelhart.

You have written several big series with thousands of pages: Mistborn, The Stormlight Archives, not to mention the three final novels of the Wheel of Time. What is your state of mind when you go from one of these to “smaller” series like The Reckoners or Alcatraz ? Is it like a holiday for you or is there no difference in the writing process ?

Oh no, there is definitely a difference. The way my writing style works I can trace back to when I was unpublished and trying to break in. Back then I was always excited about the next project. So I would write a book, and immediately wanted to do something very different. So the very first book that I ever wrote was an epic fantasy, but the second book that I wrote was fast-paced science fiction; then I wrote another epic fantasy, then I wrote a comedy, and then I wrote a cyberpunk. These are all unpublished, they’re terrible! But as a writer, I found that jumping projects very quickly was exciting and interesting, and it kept me writing. A lot of people say: “Brandon, you’re very prolific, you write a lot!” This is because the way I take a vacation from writing is to write something else – but something very different. The Alcatraz series came as I wrote books in-between the Mistborn books to refresh myself. You eat grapes in-between bites of cheese, right? You have something that’s very different in flavor to cleanse your palate, change how you’re viewing and perceiving things. Legion and Steelheart were books that I wrote in-between epic fantasies because I needed something different. Otherwise I get burned out.

Last December, you published a blog post called “State of the Sanderson 2015”, where you gave your readers a list of what was to come between 2016 and 2022, no less, with on average two books a year. Does that schedule leave you time to deal with the unexpected, like an idea for a novella that would pop into your head out of the blue? Can it become a little frustrating, or even a little restrictive, for someone as creative as you are ?

You know, I think the greatest tragedy of my life will be the fact that I can’t write all the stories! I can’t do all the things. But at the same time, having structure is very good for me. It helps me plan, and it helps me expect what I’m going to be doing. What I’ve learned to do is write the novellas as a way to get ideas out of my head without having a whole book in series. This has been very good for me. There are fewer accidental series nowadays that I write, and more often it is a novella that I write to get these ideas out of my head. So I plan that I’m going to write a couple each year. This year I wrote one called Snapshot, which is a cyberpunk. It wasn’t in the “State of Sanderson” thing; it was just an idea that I had. So built into that is some flexibility and some room. It’s more me trying to say: “Here’s what I think I will be doing, here’s my expectations”. And then each year, we kind of revisit it and look it over.

Can’t wait for the next “State of the Sanderson”, then !

Well, we’re only about a month or two away! It’s October already – where does time go? I’ve been writing Stormlight 3 for two years now, so I’m very eager to get this book done. My poor publishers, I keep flooding them with books! But it’s slowed down a little bit, because the Stormlight books are so big. I usually plot them like a trilogy. I do an outline for three books and pack them all into one book. It’s like writing a trilogy in one book, so it can be a bit complicated!

By the way, how do you prioritize what to write next? Is that your decision only or do your contracts with your publishers come into account ?

It’s a balancing act between three things, really: what I’m passionate about, what I owe the fans and what I owe the publishers. Usually the publishers are last on the list (laughs), which they don’t like very much, but they have to deal with it. By writing a book and promising it will be a series, I’m making a contract with readers, but my own creative impulses sometimes send me in other directions. So there’s a big balance there. The number one book that people ask for a sequel to right now is The Rithmatist. There’s been a lot of pushing. A lot of people really loved that book, it clicked and connected with them, which I’m excited about – but it is one of the casualties of The Wheel of Time. The Rithmatist was the last book I wrote before The Wheel of Time was given to me, and I put all side projects on hold, which included The Rithmatist and Steelheart, which I’d started outlining and set aside for like five years, while I was working on The Wheel of Time. I do want to do a sequel to The Rithmatist, but I have to wait until the creative impulses push me in that direction. But the fans are pushing hard, so it will happen before too much longer.

You have written a lot of short stories and novellas that were only available digitally before they were made available as physical books. Others are, to this day, only available as e-books. Do you think all of your short stories and novellas would have seen the light of day if it were not for this new medium ?

Oh, I don’t think that they would have. I’ve talked to my French publisher and people here, and e-books have not become the force in France that they have in America. But it’s become a very liberating thing, that you can write novellas and short stories and release them in e-book form in America. It makes them a lot more profitable. It means you can release something, and it’s not a waste of your time. Artists don’t want to think about money all the time; we want to follow our artistic impulses. But you do too many things that don’t make any money, and your agent and your family are like: “Come on! We actually have to eat!” So it’s nice that you can chase some of these creative impulses and have it be kind of supported directly by the fans in this e-book form. I don’t think I would have done nearly as many as I have if the e-book thing hadn’t taken off in the States. It makes it tricky worldwide though, because in most markets, e-books have not taken off like they have in the United States – and in the UK, to a lesser extent. How do I get these stories to my French fans when a lot of them are too short to publish on their own ? Legion and The Emperor’s Soul can be done on their own, but some of them are too short to be viable. This is why you wouldn’t have seen them in America without the e-book thing, because you just can’t print them and distribute them for the low price point that they are. We have found quite the trick in getting them around to people – we’re still figuring out how to do that. We’ve been talking about: “Do we just give them to magazines to get them into the hands of the readers? Or do we try some e-book only in France?” That sort of things.

What about doing a collection ?

The trick is, historically, collections don’t do very well, most of the time – which is kind of interesting. Even in the States, usually, the short stories on their own sell better than the collections do – which is odd! But this is because people see a short story as an impulse buy: they grab it on its own and read it on their e-reader. Let’s say they’ve got a plane flight, it’s three hours long, and they want something they can read in three hours: they buy a short story. The collections don’t grab people in the same way. I don’t know what it is, it’s this odd thing! But we’ll find a way.

That’s when I’m glad I read in English: this way I can impulse-buy all your short stories !

Yeah, they’re really cheap, which is an advantage of the form.

Did you ever have an idea for a short story or a novella that ended up becoming much longer and developed into a novel or an entire series, maybe? Or do you think that some of your longer novellas, like Legion or The Emperor’s Soul, could have become novel-length stories ?

It’s hard to say. As a writer, I’m usually pretty good at judging length. This comes from me having written so much over the years. I’ve gotten very comfortable with my process, and I know basically how long something is. The best story is actually Alloy of Law. I knew I wanted to do more in Mistborn, so I sat down and tried writing a short story (if you’ve read it, it was about Wayne), but the short story didn’t work. Wayne didn’t work as a main character; he was too weird to be a main character. So I scrapped that, and I wrote a novel. It’s not like the short story became a novel, but I realized the short story wasn’t working. As I was really interested in how things were going in this world, I wrote the novel Alloy of Law based off what I pulled out of that short story. That’s the only time that I can remember a short story becoming a novel, though there was a step in-between of me scrapping the short story. I would say that there is a chance some of these might have been novels, but I really like the novella form, so I’m kind of glad – very glad – that it’s turned out as it has.

Could we please have a ten-novel series of Legion ?!

I would love to do more! I’m planning to do one more. I actually pitched Legion in my head as a television show. The first novella is kind of a proof of concept – that’s a term we use in English to talk about something we can send to people who make TV shows to say: “Look! Let’s make a show!” There was a lot of interest, it was going very well, and then Marvel made a TV show called Legion, based on their superhero, and it killed all of our chances. I plan to write at least one more to kind of give some closure to the character and things, but I wouldn’t expect there to be more, unless a TV show does take off.

Even if there’s always a lot of humor in your novels, the worlds and the stories you create always feel very “serious”, so to speak. The only series that stands out is Alcatraz, which reads like a crazy roller-coaster. Where did Alcatraz, the Librarians and the Hushlands come from? It feels so different from everything else you’ve written !

Alcatraz is what taught me that I need to switch projects. The first book I wrote that I had a contract for was Mistborn. I sold Elantris, and we signed a two-book deal, and the second book was Mistborn. So I wrote Mistborn, and my goal was to write the whole trilogy and have the third one done before I had to turn in the first one. That way I could get all the continuity right, because I’d never done a series before. So I wrote the second Mistborn book, and I was really tired of the series. I was so done with it! I’d never forced myself to write in the same world that long before, and I was done with it, I went crazy and had to do something different. And that was Alcatraz. Alcatraz grew out of me being tired of writing Mistborn. I pushed myself too hard in the Mistborn world, so the thing that popped out afterward is the weirdest thing I’ve ever written. That’s where Alcatraz came from. I was actually sitting in church one day, and I wrote in my phone the first line, which was: “So, there I was, tied to an altar made out of outdated encyclopedias, about to be sacrificed to the Dark Powers by a cult of evil Librarians”. It made me snicker and chuckle, and I’m like: “I need to write this book!” As soon as I finished Mistborn 2, my girlfriend at the time went on vacation, so I didn’t have that distraction. I joke that I crawled under a table with my laptop and I wrote this goofy, weird thing for three weeks, to preserve my sanity. All the craziness went out of my head onto the page.

The worlds and magic systems you develop in your stories are incredibly intricate, detailed, and one might be tempted to say “realistic”. How much time do you spend working on a new magic system? Can the planning phase become longer than the actual writing? Do you have everything laid out before you start writing or do you allow yourself to be “surprised” by your own world and see what you can discover along the way ?

Excellent question! I would say that it’s a balancing act. It really is, because you can’t plan for everything, otherwise your writing will lack spontaneity and that spark you need to make it feel alive. I am by nature a planner; I think having a solid outline leads me to a stronger story – but I can’t plan everything, right? So depending on the series and the book, I will spend a lot of time outlining. I spent two years working on Stormlight before I actually wrote the book, creating outlines and things – and that was the 2003 version. But for other books, I let myself be much more spontaneous. It depends on how long I’m planning to go. For something like Stormlight, where I’m planning ten books, I need to have the first book include references to things that will be relevant much later in the series. So I write them in and make sure I have the outlines. But even still, you’ve got to be willing to be flexible. I usually use Mistborn and Spook’s story as example of this. In the third book, there’s a side character from the first two books who becomes a main character. That wasn’t planned; as I wrote the series, I grew very excited and interested in him. So I let myself build some extra interesting things for him in that third book, and those were completely spontaneous and weren’t part of the big outline. I created that sort of flexibility to help me keep my characters alive. It’s very odd: I do a lot more planning on my world and my plot than I do my characters. With characters, I just generally try them out; I cast people in a role, like an actor. I write a chapter from their viewpoint and say: “Is this working?” I did this three times with Vin for the Mistborn books. I tried three different personalities, and it was only the third one that made me go like: “Alright, yes, this feels like the right character”.

What were the first two ?

In one of them, she was just way too confident. She didn’t work because of that. She was more like the Artful Dodger: street-wise, knew what she was doing, was in control of things – and it just didn’t work. I felt like it was too much a cliché, the roguish kid on the streets who knows things. And I actually tried once as a guy, to see if that would work. That didn’t work either. You can read the chapters in English on my website. I posted them up there to say: “Here’s a different person in this role”. I cast different actors until I find the right one.

One of the most incredible things in your novels is the way you make fighting scenes so vivid. If your novels were to be adapted for the screen, the filmmakers would only have to follow the book, because your fights read like movie scenes. Do you draw maps when you write a fight scene – like a street map with every building for the Allomancer fights in Mistborn, or a map of all the plateaus and such for The Stormlight Archives ?

Sometimes I do. Sometimes I go to Isaac, my art director, and say: “I need something that looks like this. Draw it out or have somebody draw it out so I can describe it accurately”. I definitely do that, although writing a great fight scene in a book is tricky. In a film, you can just watch, say, Jackie Chan punching people for twenty minutes, and it’s great – boom, boom, boom. But if I wrote that in a book – “He punched him; he punched him back. He kicked him; he kicked him back. He kicked twice.” – it would just be boring! Learning to write fight scenes was very tricky. The trick that made it work, the thing that clicked, is when I started to write them as problem-solving-oriented. The characters are trying to solve a problem. What is Vin trying to do in this scene? What is Wax trying to do in this scene? What are they trying to accomplish, what are their problems? If we can follow what the character is trying to accomplish, we can feel their creativity as they solve that problem. They’re usually going to solve it with their fists, or with their powers, or their guns, and things like this. But it’s still that sort of same thing: I have a problem, I need to solve it, and hopefully in a creative way. It ends up making a fight scene work.

Elantris was originally planned as a stand-alone novel. What can the reader expect in the two sequels you plan to publish in 2020 and 2022? Was the ending really supposed to be definitive when you wrote Elantris in 2004 ?

During the early days of my career, I wanted to write all first novels that were stand-alone-ish. As I was trying to break in, my philosophy was that if I wrote a sequel, an editor wasn’t going to buy that, right? If an editor read Mistborn and said: “This is good, but it doesn’t work. Send me what else you have”, you can’t send Mistborn 2. They can’t buy that. So everything that I wrote was a new world. What I was searching for was stand-alone with sequel potential on everything. So for every book I wrote, I knew where I would go in that world if I did more – if it sold. The trick is, by the time I sold Elantris, it had been so long, and also, I felt Elantris was one of those that stood best on its own. So I told the editor: “I really think releasing it as a stand-alone is just better for my career. Let’s give people something to try out that doesn’t get them mired in a huge series”. I liked how it felt as a stand-alone. That said, I did have outlines for potential sequels. I have always planned the Elantris sequels to be Anne-McCaffrey-style sequels. She did this thing where she would write a book, and then a character from that book would become the main character in the book about themselves – and a character from that book would then become a main character of their own story. You see this a lot in YA books these days, they do that quite frequently. It’s this idea that the books are a series, but each one can be read individually. I will do that with Elantris sequels when I write them. They will not be about the same characters. Those characters might appear, but the focus of the book will be on different characters. For instance, the children of Sarene’s uncle, Kiin, are going to be the main characters of the sequel. That’s what you should expect.

Did you decide from the very beginning to link your fantasy stories to a great Cosmere and add interactions between them, or is it something that happened after a few books ?

In some ways, I’m very lucky that I didn’t publish for so long. For those who don’t know, I wrote thirteen novels before I sold one. While I was working on them, one thing that I loved that was stuck in my brain was how Isaac Asimov, late in his career, had linked his Robot novels and his Foundation novels. He brought his two great series together, and as a kid reading them, it blew my mind. This was amazing! And I always had at the back of my head: “I want to do something like that !” The other thing that I’d done a lot when I was a reader, particularly in my teens and my twenties, is that I inserted my own characters into the books. I don’t know if you do this – you’re smiling, so it looks like you might do the same thing! So when I would read, I would have my secret character behind the scenes that was involved in the book. And that became Hoid, that character who is invading other people’s worlds. So when I wrote Elantris, I actually put him in. I was so enamored with this idea that I started building the Cosmere right around that point. I went back and wrote Dragonsteel, which was written after Elantris and which is Hoid’s origin story. So I had all these cool ideas, but the books didn’t sell – until Elantris did. Elantris was the first time I’d written him in, and he actually had a character appearance. So when I went to planning Mistborn, I pitched this idea to my editor: the super serious trilogy of trilogies, the Cosmere, and stuff like this. It grew naturally in the time before I was publishing, and then I was lucky enough, by the time I was publishing, to already have built this whole crazy idea. So it’s yes and no: it was there from the beginning of the published novels, but it wasn’t there from the beginning of the unpublished novels. It didn’t exist in my first five books, for instance. Elantris was number six.

Is there a chance we’ll read a novel or a shorter story about world-hopping one day, or is that meant to stay in the background ?

No, you will read more about that. The trick with it is, for those who don’t know, the epic fantasies are all linked. But I don’t want that to be distracting from the story. So when I’m upfront about it, it will be a major plot point, and you’ll know from the beginning of the story that this is what we’re talking about. For instance, Stormlight will never become about the behind-the-scenes stuff, even though that’s all happening there. But there will be series and stories that are focused on this in the future, the first of which is Mistborn: Secret History. It has a large component of world-hopping sort of stuff going on in it. I don’t know when we’ll ever find a way to put that out in French! The plan is maybe to stick it at the end of Bands of Mourning, or at the beginning of The Lost Metal, the last Wax and Wayne book, which would be an even better place. We’ll find a place to put that in. But that sort of stuff is going to happen more and more.

Same question about a novel or a series that would feature several characters from the entire Cosmere ?

Yes, that can happen. But what I’m shooting for with the Cosmere is not the Avengers. It’s not about collecting characters, it’s about the history of a small galaxy. It’s the history of these worlds and their interactions. So you’re much more likely to see new characters from different worlds interacting than you are to see the greatest hits of characters interacting. There are certain characters who will be consistent through the whole thing. I can’t say without giving spoilers, but for the Mistborn world, you already know some of them – those who made the jump between the original trilogy and the Wax and Wayne trilogy. You can see there’s some continuity there. But my goal is not to collect all the greatest hits; it’s to say: “This is the evolution of a world and a universe”. These planets will start interacting, but there are lots of stories to tell that aren’t necessarily just this superhero and this superhero get together to save the world. It’s more about how these planets interact in the future.

You are in the middle of the first part of The Stormlight Archives; do you already know the skeleton of the second part (books 6 to 10) or is it still kept behind a closed door in your head ?

No, I’m an outliner, so I know. I don’t start a series without knowing the ending, for instance. What I usually do is, I come up with a couple pages description of the whole series – beginning and end. Then, I generally outline and write the first book. Once you have the first book, it can really help you understand where the characters are going to go, so then I build a much more detailed outline for the rest of the series. Usually the next book is the most detailed, then it’s the last book. But there’s a little bit about each one. Right now, for The Stormlight Archives, there’s a couple of pages about each book – except the last one, which has a ton, and the next one that I’m working on, which also has a ton. I’ve already written the ending of book 5, for instance. I might change it by the time I get there, but I wrote that, the actual scene that happens as the epilogue of book 5. I also have the ending of book 10. Like I said, I’m an outliner: I need to know what my endings are in particular, and I need to know what each book is going to be about. I know the ten flashback sequences, because it goes: Kaladin, Shallan, Dalinar (which I swapped – he was going to be 5, but now he’s 3), Eshonai, and then Szeth; and the back five will do Lift, Renarin, Ash, and then probably Taln and Jasnah. I reserve the right to change that, but right now I have it outlined that way.

The Way of Kings was epic, Words of Radiance even more so; will Oathbringer stay on the same path and be even more epic than the first two books ?

Well, it’s longer! laughs Actually, it’s only at 370,000 words right now, and the goal is 400, but I haven’t finished it yet! So it’s going to be big. I expect it to be even more epic, but we’ll have to see. That’s really for the fans to decide. I will write the best book that I can, and then we’ll see how they feel about it.

Maybe we should warn your French translator, Mélanie Fazi !

Yeah, poor Mélanie! I feel so bad for Mélanie, because I use those weird words and puns and things. She’s fantastic, by the way. She has a job for the rest of her life translating these books!

I like epic fantasy and that’s why I love your books. But as a reader, I have a problem with fights that feature over-powerful characters and that end up with the most over-powerful of the two winning. With a big series like this, aren’t you afraid of the “Dragon Ball Z effect”?

I am, it’s a big danger in fantasy books. But fortunately, the way you counter the Dragon Ball Z effect is by making the stories revolve around what the characters can’t do. Superman is the best example of this in comics: Superman works as a character because he might be able to fly, shoot lasers from his eyes and be invulnerable, but he can’t make a woman fall in love with him. When the story is working, that’s a big part of the conflict. As a writer of fantastical fiction, you have to be aware of this: what can’t the characters do with their powers? This is kind of where I go with The Stormlight Archives: hopefully each story will be intimate about the character with the flashback sequences. If we look at Dalinar in Oathbringer, he has all kinds of power. And yet, his story is about the fact that he is usurping power over his nephew and his brother. No amount of magic can change the fact that he’s worried he’s becoming a tyrant. In fact, the more power he gets, the more dangerous that is. That’s kind of the core of who he is. The story can be epic and have all kinds of things happening, but that intimate look at a character is what ultimately makes the book work, I feel. Sometimes, like for the fight at the end of Words of Radiance, it’s more like a pay-off of fun after you’ve actually had the character growth and climaxes. That’s where the real story is. The fight is almost periphery at that point, because the character has become – or failed to become – the person that they need to be.

Aside from being a writer, you also teach creative writing. Is that something that inspires you? Do you sometimes get ideas while preparing or teaching a class on a specific subject, or while talking to your students ?

Yes, I definitely do. The biggest part that it helps with is learning to explain your process. I found it helps me as a writer to troubleshoot. Let’s see if I can explain this. As a writer, you write a lot by instinct – and that works until it doesn’t. When the story is broken, that’s when instinct isn’t working anymore. Then you’re usually very lost. What do you do when the story isn’t working? That’s what causes writer’s block for most writers: they’ve just done it off the cuff by instinct, until it no longer works. When you study your process, figure out how it works and start to explain it to people, that allows you to diagnose when something is broken. When you have this moment of writer’s block and don’t know what to do next, you can step back and use these processes that you’ve been explaining to figure out what’s going wrong. I spend a lot of time teaching writing but I still write by instinct most of the time. It’s when something’s broken that all these things I talk about on my lectures become very relevant. I sit back and say: “OK, what’s wrong with the character? What’s wrong with the plot?” And that is extremely helpful. The other reason I do it, though, is because, as a new writer, when I took a class from a professional novelist, David Farland, it was the most important and useful thing. Up to that point, all of my professors had been good writers, but they didn’t live as a writer. They lived as a professor who taught writing. Dave was the first person that I met and had a class from who was in the real world publishing for his living. I think it’s vital that students be able to interact with somebody who’s making their living as a writer. So I give this class to give back. I actually donate my salary to a scholarship on campus. The whole point of teaching the class is so I can film these lectures, put them online and help a small number of students – because I can’t help everybody – have that same interaction that I had and that was so important to me.

How do you schedule an average day in your life ?

I get up at noon, because I’m a writer! laughs I really do, because I’m an insomniac, so I stay up late at night. I get up at noon and I usually work from noon until 5. Then I go take a shower and get ready for the day. So if you come before 5 o’clock, I’m in my PJs, my hair is sticking out and I look like a crazy man who’s been living in a cave with his laptop! Then I get presentable, and from 5 until 8:30, it’s family time. As a writer, I’ve found that if I don’t strictly make family time, if I spend all that time working on stories, I’ll be there but I won’t be there – my mind won’t be there. I had to make a very strict decision: at this time, no more writing, no more stories. I’m daddy at this point. So we’re outside playing Minecraft – not the video game, we’re the Minecraft guys, mining the walls – or I’m going out with my wife. At 8:30, the kids go to bed – or they’re supposed to! At about 10 o’clock, my wife goes to bed, and from 10 until 4, I’m either working or doing something else. Usually I write from 10 until 2, then from 2 until 4, I read a book, play a video game or watch Stranger Things, or whatever I’m doing at that moment. So I end up having a normal work schedule, I work about nine hours a day. It’s what everybody else does, except I don’t have a commute, so I put that commute time into writing. I give a couple of hours each day to read a book or whatever, and I spend three or four hours with my family. So I have the perfect life, I have a very good balance. Except when I go on trips – then everything is thrown out the window!

Earlier this month you published a review of Garth Nix’s Goldenhand on Goodreads. It reminded me of a conversation we had recently with another American writer, Ken Liu, who told us that it was vital for a writer to keep up with what’s being done in his or her genre. Do you agree with this statement? Do you read fantasy novels simply because you enjoy them or because you feel the need to know what other writers are up to ?

I always get very concerned when a fantasy writer says they don’t read fantasy. Once in a while you meet someone who got a little full of themselves and says: “Oh, I don’t read fantasy, even though I write it”. That sounds to me like a brain surgeon saying: “I don’t read the journals about what other doctors have discovered. I’ve got my own methods and they work just fine!” It’s scary! I think that if you don’t read what the writers in your genre are doing, if you aren’t aware of it, then you’ll eliminate an entire source of inspiration. A lot of my books come from me reading what other people are doing and finding the holes in the things they’re writing about. An example of this is Steelheart: I watch superhero films and I’m like: “What if there are no heroes? What do you do in a world where there’s no Superman, no Captain America, only evil people? Something like The Stormlight Archives comes from me reading a lot of fantasy and saying: “Yes, but can we push the setting and the worldbuilding to be more bizarre? Can we do something where it really feels like an alien planet, as opposed to medieval Europe in a fantasy world?” I really like medieval Europe in a fantasy world, but it felt like people weren’t writing really alien planets. That’s what The Stormlight Archives came from. Even if you don’t feel like you want to be writing what other people are doing, if you don’t read what they’re doing, you can’t be part of the dialogue, the discussion that is so important in literature, I feel. I agree with Ken a lot, he’s a very smart man.

What are you currently reading or planning to read ?

The last book I finished was City of Stairs, by Robert Jackson Bennett – very good. I read one chapter of a book that I didn’t like so much, so I won’t mention it. Actually, there were two different books. I do a lot of reading where I read 10% of the book, and if it doesn’t grab me, I put it aside. But I don’t write reviews or mention them. The last thing people need is a famous author talking their book down. What is next on my list? I grabbed a book and put it on it… Oh yes: I’ve never read Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice before. Somehow I just missed reading those, even though they’ve all been on the Hugo ballot and they’ve been fantastically received by everybody. So Ancillary Justice will probably be the next book.

Did you enjoy Stranger Things ?

I loved Stranger Things ! I thought it was great. My wife and I watched it – I was watching it during the wife time. What happened is, I was on tour somewhere, at DragonCon or something, and I told her: “We should watch Stranger Things, everybody’s talking about it”. She was like: “OK, we’ll watch it together when you get back, it will be a together thing”. I called her two days later and she had watched the whole show ! (laughs) Her husband was gone, and she was bored, so she watched the whole show! Then she made me watch it with her, because she’d liked it so much. I really did enjoy it. The Goonies was one of my favorite movies when I was a kid. A lot of people talk about Stranger Things and say it’s 80s nostalgia. What they miss is the fact that it’s 80s nostalgia for film and television. It’s not: “Ooooh, look, Rubik’s Cube!” It’s a long film, really, that takes the filmmaking styles of films like E.T., and Gremlins, and The Goonies, Close Encounters, all this stuff, and uses some of the same aesthetics in a really cool and interesting way. I love that part of it. And the performances of the actors, in particular the kids, were just amazing. If you haven’t seen it, you should! You’ll particularly enjoy it if you like 80s movies. It’s taking these aesthetics to make a film that looks like it could have been made by then. That’s very fun.

Thank you very much for your time, Brandon !

Thanks to you, guys!

Pages de l'article

1. Première partie
2. Deuxième partie
3. Troisième partie
4. L'interview en V.O.