I met in 1998, on the staff of The Leading Edge, our university’s science fiction magazine. But we didn’t really get to know each other until the first semester of 1999, when we realized we were both in the same creative writing class, and that we were both serious about writing as a career. We started a writing group, invited a few other Leading Edge staff members, and got to work reading each other’s stuff. My early novels had so many fantasy clichés they were essentially fan fiction; Brandon’s were so adamantly devoid of cliché that sometimes nothing happened in them at all.
“Hey, Brandon, when do the bad guys show up?”
“These are the bad guys.”
“No, these are just the guys trying to close the main character’s school of magic. Obviously some real bad guys are going to show up, and this guy’s magic is the only thing that will be able to stop them, and his school will save the day because he fought to keep it open, and yay. We can all see it coming. It’s just, why is it taking so long?”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Of course that’s going to happen. That’s what fantasy novels are about.”
“But they don’t have to be about that. I mean, fantasy can be about anything it wants, right? That’s the point of fantasy. So why can’t this fantasy just be about a guy who’s trying to keep a school open, and that’s the whole story? And it just happens to be a school where people learn sand magic and wear air-powered dueling wrist guns and eat delicious giant insect tofu?”
“Um. I guess it could. So wait, is there really no bad guy? Like, at all?”
And so it went, book after book. Even back then, Brandon wrote books faster than most humans could read them. After a while Brandon got an agent, the wonderful Joshua Bilmes, and our writing group felt delightfully vindicated when Joshua agreed with us: What was the point of writing all these books if nothing was going to happen in them? Joshua’s comments gave us a phrase we used for years, warding off Brandon’s wilder excesses like a holy mantra: “The fabric of the universe needs to be in peril.”
“This is a great book, Brandon, but I really don’t feel like the fabric of the universe is in peril.”
“Of course it’s not, this is just a little story about a guy who feels left out of his family.”
“Okay, first, this is actually a huge story about a guy who can create magical armor with his mind and summon food ex nihilo, thereby angering scary void monsters, who also happens to feel left out of his family. So, come on. Second, and more importantly, that big fancy agent you’re working with told you that the fabric of the universe has to be in peril, and it’s not. You need to start imperiling it right now.”
“But at least I have scary void monsters…”
“Imperil it!”
The great thing about a writing group is that you all learn together. The terrible thing about a writing group is that you say an awful lot of really stupid things before you’ve learned anything. It’s honestly a wonder that writing groups produce writers at all, instead of walking insecurities raised entirely in echo chambers of bad advice. The thing is, Brandon’s instincts were right, and Joshua’s mantra was right, and all of it was right, and we just didn’t know how to interpret any of it. We figured it out eventually, obviously. Brandon owes a great deal of his success—let’s say half of it—to his stubborn insistence that the little human stories inside of the epic were what made the epic worth reading. We care about Mistborn because we care about Vin, and her horrible emotional scars, and her grim certainty that no one could ever love her. We care about the Stormlight Archive because we care about Kaladin’s depression, and Shallan’s insecurity, and Dalinar’s struggle with madness. The other big chunk of Brandon’s success—let’s go ahead and call it the other half—he owes to that relentless insistence on big-picture drama. A powerful, no-holds-barred, universe-fabric-imperiling outer story to wrap around the inner stories and give them weight. Brandon tells some of the biggest stories out there, and he grounds them with some of the smallest and most personal.
At some point in the writing group we finished one of Brandon’s novels and started a new one: The Spirit of Adonis. It had everything: intimate stories of flawed, lovable, wonderful people, perfectly blended with a life-ending curse, a world-shattering army, and a universe-altering endgame that changed everything, for everyone, in ways that made us laugh and cheer and turn the pages as fast as we humanly could. The only problem was the title.
“I don’t get it. Why is it about Adonis?”
“The city is called Adonis, is that … not clear?”
“That’s clear, sure, but what’s not clear is why the city is called Adonis. Is this Earth? Is it Greece and I just can’t tell?”
“Why would it be Greece?”
“Why would it not be…? Adonis was Greek. Is this a planet we colonized in the future, like Pern, and we’re reusing old—”
“No no no, it’s not Earth, it’s not Greek—maybe it has some visual semblance to Greece but that’s not intentional. Adonis is just a place I made up; it doesn’t really have a real-world analogue.”
We stared at each other, each trying to figure out why the other was so confused. It all made perfect sense in our heads! Writing groups are like that sometimes. Finally someone else in the writing group said, “You realize that Adonis is a character from Greek mythology, right?”
Brandon laughed.
“Holy cow, no, I totally forgot about that guy. I thought that word was too good to not be taken. Don’t worry, I’ll change the name.”
The next week Brandon e-mailed us chapter two of The Spirit of Elantris, and a few months later he dropped the “Spirit” and just called it Elantris. It remains, to this day, one of my all-time favorite fantasy novels. In my house, safely hidden away from children and prying fans, is what I do not doubt will one day be the single most valuable object I own: a first-edition copy of Elantris, purchased on opening day, bearing Brandon’s autograph and this simple inscription: “For Dan—My first signed book ever.”
Congrats on ten years, Brandon. You did it. Hundreds of years from now, some bright young up-and-comer will accidentally name her fantasy novel after you.
That’s how you know you’ve really made it.
DAN WELLS