“Brandon Sanderson Is Your God: He’s the Biggest Fantasy Writer in the World. He’s Also Very Mormon. These Things Are Profoundly Related”, 2023-03-23 (; backlinks):
…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 4 hours. Break for the wife and kids. Then he writes for 4 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 5 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 7: two for his regular publisher, a graphic novel, and 4 more in secret, telling no one but his wife until he surprise-announced a Kickstarter in March 2022 to crowdfund their publication. (Hence the $42m, raised in a month, by far the most successful Kickstarter ever.) Since his debut, Elantris, in 2005, Sanderson has published 30+ 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.
…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 8 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.”
…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.
…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 7 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.”