Cover Photo: Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Cropped and resized for Meridian Magazine.
At fourteen years old, Brandon Sanderson did not like to read. This is a peculiar beginning for a man who would become one of the world’s most successful fantasy writers, create an imaginary universe encompassing dozens of books, and eventually raise more than $41 million from readers eager to purchase stories they hadn’t even seen. But in eighth grade in Lincoln, Nebraska, Sanderson avoided books whenever possible. Then a teacher with the wonderfully appropriate name of Mrs. Reeder handed him a fantasy novel, Barbara Hambly’sDragonsbane, and everything changed.¹
Sanderson read it in a day. The central character was a middle-aged woman struggling with family responsibilities and her own extraordinary gifts, a life almost unimaginably distant from that of a fourteen-year-old boy. Yet Sanderson found himself understanding her. Years later, he recalled that through Hambly’s character he glimpsed something of what life might be like for his mother. Fiction had allowed him to inhabit another person’s mind. He also made another discovery: the imaginary worlds into which his mind continually wandered were apparently something people could create for a living. Brandon Sanderson had found what he wanted to do, though it would take thirteen novels and approximately eight years of rejection before anyone agreed to publish him.
There was one problem with becoming a novelist:
There was one problem with becoming a novelist: it was not remotely sensible. Sanderson’s mother understood that, and when he enrolled at Brigham Young University in 1994, he chose biochemistry. His mother hoped he might become a doctor or pursue another dependable profession. It wasn’t bad advice. Writing is a field in which enormous numbers of talented people work very hard and never earn a living. Sanderson could study science, build a dependable career and perhaps write on the side.
Then, at nineteen, he left BYU to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Seoul, South Korea. Somewhere during those two years, he noticed something revealing: he didn’t miss chemistry; he missed writing. “I was very, very pleased to be on another continent, away from chemistry,” he later said.² Korea gave him something else as well. Suddenly he was living in another language and culture, trying to understand people whose assumptions and experiences were different from his own. He has said that the experience strengthened his writing because it taught him how differently human beings see the world.
When he returned from Korea, Sanderson changed his major to English. His mother was not exactly thrilled. He later wrote affectionately that she was “a very practical person,” but he also credited her with giving him the determination that would eventually make his improbable career possible. She had expected excellence from him long before the publishing world did. “Without that sense of self-determination,” he wrote, “I would never have lasted in this field long enough to publish.”³ He was going to need every bit of it.
Sanderson found an almost comically perfect job
Sanderson found an almost comically perfect job for an aspiring novelist: he became the night desk clerk at a Provo hotel. From around midnight until five in the morning, very little happened. Someone simply had to be there. Sanderson told his prospective boss exactly what he intended to do with those quiet hours—write novels. His boss was delighted. At least, he told Sanderson, he wouldn’t be sleeping on the couch like the previous night clerk.⁴
So while Provo slept, Brandon Sanderson built worlds. Night after night, he sat behind the hotel desk writing. During the day he attended BYU full-time. Somewhere in between he slept. He later admitted the arrangement did not produce much of a social life, but it produced books—lots of them. Eight novels emerged during five years of graveyard-shift writing. “The first five were terrible,” Sanderson has said.⁴
That assessment did not discourage him nearly as much as one might expect. He had heard an established writer suggest that beginning novelists often had to write a number of bad books before they learned how to write good ones. Sanderson’s response was wonderfully characteristic: then he would write them. He wasn’t waiting for inspiration to descend and declare him a novelist. He was apprenticing himself to the craft by doing it again and again.
Eventually he had written thirteen novels, and publishers
Eventually he had written thirteen novels, and publishers kept saying no. The young man who would someday have readers lining up for hours to see him accumulated rejection letters instead. He attended writing conventions, met editors and agents, learned about the business and kept working. He discovered that ideas came easily, but turning them into finished books worthy of publication required skills he was still learning.
“I wrote 13 novels before I soldElantris,” he says. “It took about eight years of dedicated writing and being rejected.”⁵ There is something almost audacious about those numbers. Most of us can endure rejection for a while if there is some evidence that success is just around the corner. Sanderson didn’t have that evidence. He had manuscripts nobody wanted, and he kept writing the next one.
The Telephone Call That Came 18 Months Late
Elantriswas the sixth novel Sanderson had written. He sent the manuscript out and waited. Nothing happened for months, then a year, then a year and a half. By then Sanderson had reasonably concluded that this particular submission was dead. He was still working the graveyard shift and writing other novels when he discovered a voicemail from Moshe Feder, an editor at Tor Books. Feder had finally read the manuscript Sanderson had submitted eighteen months earlier. He wanted to buy it.⁵
Imagine that moment not from the vantage point
Imagine that moment not from the vantage point of what Sanderson eventually became, but from the desk of the young writer who heard the message. Years of work had passed. Thirteen novels had been written. Rejections had accumulated. Nothing about the previous eight years suggested that this telephone call necessarily had to come, but it came. In May 2005, Brandon Sanderson held his first published novel in his hands.
Then cameMistborn,Warbreaker,The Way of Kingsand the sprawlingStormlight Archive. Sanderson created the Cosmere, an enormous interconnected fictional universe in which separate stories, planets and systems of magic are ultimately part of something larger. His books found readers around the world. His novellaThe Emperor’s Soulwon a Hugo Award.
In 2007, Robert Jordan, author of the enormously popularWheel of Timeseries, died before completing his epic. Jordan’s widow and editor, Harriet McDougal, ultimately chose Sanderson to finish it. A writer who only a few years earlier could not persuade anyone to publish him was being entrusted with completing one of modern fantasy’s monumental works.
Perhaps the clearest measure of how dramatically Sanderson’s
Perhaps the clearest measure of how dramatically Sanderson’s fortunes had changed came in 2022, when he looked into a camera and told his readers that he had a confession to make. During the COVID-19 pandemic, while much of the world had slowed down, he had secretly written extra novels. Of course he had.
Sanderson decided to offer four of those secret novels directly to readers through Kickstarter. The campaign set a goal of $1 million and reached it in roughly half an hour. Within three days it had passed $20 million. When the campaign closed, 185,341 people had pledged$41,754,153. It became the most-funded Kickstarter campaign in the platform’s history.⁶
Consider the distance between two images. In one, a young man sits alone behind a hotel desk in the middle of the night, writing manuscripts publishers repeatedly reject. In the other, nearly two hundred thousand people collectively put more than $41 million on the table because Brandon Sanderson has promised to send them stories they haven’t even read.
What happened between those scenes cannot be explained
What happened between those scenes cannot be explained simply by talent. Sanderson had talent when nobody wanted his manuscripts. It involved something less glamorous: he kept working long enough for his talent to mature. He revised, learned, failed and wrote another book.
That may also explain why Sanderson continued to teach. After completing his master’s degree at BYU, he began teaching the science fiction and fantasy writing course he himself had once taken. He became famous enough that he certainly did not need the adjunct teaching job, but he continued returning to the classroom to talk to young writers who were sitting where he once sat—full of stories and possessing absolutely no guarantee that anyone else would ever want to read them.
There is another part of Sanderson’s life that is less visible to millions of his readers but inseparable from the man who creates these worlds: he is a believing Latter-day Saint. Sanderson does not write Latter-day Saint allegories, nor does he regard his novels as vehicles for preaching. He has been explicit about resisting that temptation. His job, as he sees it, is to be faithful to his characters, including characters who believe things he does not.
Yet an author cannot entirely escape the deepest
Yet an author cannot entirely escape the deepest questions that fascinate him. Sanderson has explained that his religion shapes who he is and consequently influences his interest in questions of right and wrong, belief and the uses and abuses of religion. He does not intentionally insert Latter-day Saint ideas into his books, “but who I am definitely influences what I write.”⁷
That becomes intriguing when one looks at the worlds he creates. Religion matters in them. Scripture matters. Belief matters. So do doubt, corrupted institutions, revelation, sacrifice, agency and the possibility that people are not imprisoned forever by what they once were. Those themes need not be read as secret Latter-day Saint messages; Sanderson himself would resist such a simplistic interpretation. But it would be equally artificial to imagine that a writer could spend a lifetime thinking seriously about God, revelation and human agency and then arrive at his writing desk emptied of those questions.
Sanderson is also comfortable acknowledging the tension between faith and intellectual inquiry. He describes himself as both a person of faith and a person of reason. He likes questions and does not regard asking them as an enemy of belief. When asked directly why he believes in the restored gospel, his answer is strikingly personal. He does not pretend he can logically compel someone else to believe. He points instead to experience, reason and spiritual feeling. Some of the deepest joys of his life, he says, have grown from living his religion, particularly its teachings about family and marriage. Beneath that is something more intimate: he says he has prayed about the Book of Mormon and received a spiritual witness he cannot deny.⁸
For someone who has spent his adult life
For someone who has spent his adult life inventing elaborate systems with carefully constructed rules, there is something rather beautiful about the limits he places on his own certainty. He can build a fictional universe and tell you exactly how its magic works. God is different. Faith involves questions that cannot all be solved like equations. Perhaps that is one reason belief remains so interesting in his fiction.
Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that religion—or even worldbuilding—is the central reason Brandon Sanderson writes. The clue goes all the way back to that fourteen-year-old boy holdingDragonsbane.
In 2025, Sanderson finally appeared onstage with Barbara Hambly, the woman who had unknowingly changed his life. Fans began lining up at five in the morning for the event. During their conversation, Sanderson returned to the unlikely protagonist of the book Mrs. Reeder had handed him decades before—a middle-aged woman wrestling with family, ability and sacrifice. Reading her story had allowed an adolescent boy to see through someone else’s eyes. “This is why I write,” Sanderson told the audience.⁹
That may be one of the most revealing
That may be one of the most revealing sentences in his enormous archive of interviews, essays and answers to fans. For all the intricate magic systems, fantastical creatures, spectacular battles and imaginary planets, Sanderson believes fiction can perform a profoundly human act: it can let us experience another person’s life from the inside.
He has written that popular fiction does not necessarily need to lecture readers about compassion. It can do something subtler. Put us inside the life of someone unlike ourselves long enough, and perhaps when we return to our own world, we will understand its inhabitants a little better.
That understanding also helps explain something Sanderson has written about his own emotional life. He describes himself as naturally detached in ways that sometimes make ordinary emotional experience difficult for him. Stories are different. Inside them, emotion becomes immediate. “Stories bring me inside,” he wrote.¹⁰ Suddenly the staggering productivity looks a little different. Perhaps Brandon Sanderson doesn’t merely make imaginary worlds because he loves constructing worlds; perhaps he enters them because they are one of the places where other human beings become most vivid to him.
There is a temptation when telling the story
There is a temptation when telling the story of an enormously successful person to make the ending seem inevitable. We look backward from the $41 million Kickstarter, the international readership, the bestsellers and the awards, and begin unconsciously planting signs of greatness into childhood. Brandon Sanderson’s story resists that treatment. He wasn’t the precocious child who had always known he would become a great novelist. He was the kid who didn’t like reading, the college freshman majoring in biochemistry because writing didn’t seem like a responsible career, the missionary in Seoul who discovered what he missed when it was taken away, and the hotel clerk writing while everyone else slept.
Then he was the aspiring author who wrote thirteen novels while the publishing industry repeatedly declined to make him a published author. There is no way to know what would have happened if that editor had not finally openedElantris. Perhaps another editor eventually would have. Perhaps not. The comfortable version of the story says that talent always gets discovered, but life offers no such guarantee. What Sanderson could control was whether there would be another manuscript waiting when opportunity finally arrived.
The sixth novel eventually became his first published book. By then, however, he had already written seven more. There is something almost perfectly Brandon Sanderson about that. Long before the world knew it wanted his stories,he had decided they were worth writing anyway.
- Brandon Sanderson’s official biography— Childhood, Mrs. Reeder andDragonsbane.
- How Did You Become Interested in Being a Writer?— His mission and decision to pursue writing.
- Annotation: Elantris Dedication— His mother’s influence.
- Writing of Epic Proportions, BYU Magazine— Hotel employment and early novels.
- How Did You Get Published?— Thirteen novels, rejection and the sale ofElantris.
- Sanderson’s Secret Novels Kickstarter— Campaign totals.
- Tell Me More About Religion and Your Writing— Religious influence on his fiction.
- Why Do You Think Mormonism Is Correct?— His personal testimony and understanding of faith.
- Brandon Sanderson and Barbara Hambly: Inspiration Comes Full Circle— Their 2025 meeting.
- Brandon Sanderson, Outside— His personal reflections on emotion and storytelling.
