About that Wired Article Discussing Brandon Sanderson
Good writers deserve good interviewers
Wired magazine recently published a biographical article (no links for bullies) about acclaimed fantasy author Brandon Sanderson. Given that the article’s author states outright that no one at Wired had heard of Sanderson before his successful Kickstarter campaign, it appears that the campaign was the primary reason for the article. The research question for Wired was “how can a guy make $50 million and we don’t know who he is?” Never mind the fact that Sanderson did not, in fact, “make” $50 million. Anyone who knows anything about Kickstarter and about producing publications knows that the majority of the funds raised went to expenses and that profits (aka what Sanderson “makes” are earnings minus expenses), but maybe Wired journalists don’t understand the first principles of business. Given the content of the article, they certainly don’t know the first thing about fantasy fiction.
I could go on and on about the article, as it really pissed me off, but that would be unfair to Brandon. The article made one very specific claim about Brandon, outside of some bizarre rejection of Brandon’s Strunk and White influenced style as being too focused on simple sentences to be “good” writing, and that was that Brandon was boring.
I interviewed Brandon Sanderson in 2010, just when he had been hired to finish the Wheel of Time series for Robert Jordan. It was a great get for my podcast, but I got the interview not because I wanted to discuss Wheel of Time. I got it because I wanted to talk with Brandon about Elantris (his first published novel which is really good) and about his YA series Alcatraz vs. the Evil Librarians (which I read to my daughters at bed time and have such fond memories of that I am incapable of being neutral here).
Needless to say, I found him to be a delightful guest who provided funny stories and some real gems about breaking into the publishing industry. That got me thinking that maybe, just maybe it wasn’t Brandon who was boring. Rather, it might just be that the journalist was a bad interviewer who was incapable of anything other than rudimentary research.
Give my Geekerati interview a listen and judge for yourself.