The Magic and Mastery of Brandon Sanderson’s Writing Universe

To say Brandon Sanderson is a prolific author does him a disservice.  His most recent book, Wind and Truth, comes in at 1,344 pages.  That brings the series the book is a part of—the Stormlight Archives—up to 5,890 pages.  It contains a cool 2,181,623 words.  For a frame of reference, that’s about three times as long as the Bible, which is a compilation that took hundreds of people thousands of years to put together.  Oh, and this is only the halfway point for the series.

So yeah, Sanderson can put words on paper like a machine.  But that’s just the impressive part.  The intimidating part is how those words are linked to millions of other words across multiple other series.  Sanderson did the whole “combined universe” thing well before Marvel started pumping out their movies.  His latest book has interplay from almost all of his other interconnected books, making it both fascinating and daunting to read. 

As someone who cosplays as a writer on weekends, I am astounded by the level of intricacy Sanderson has built into his universe.  I struggle to keep my plotlines succinct and on point when I’m dealing with a single character on a planet I’m relatively familiar with—Earth.  Meanwhile, Sanderson has dozens of planets, hundreds of characters, multiple realms of existence, oodles of unique magic systems all reliant on the same underlying energy source, and a bevy of gods each playing a grand cosmic game of 4D checkers with each other.  It’s a level of mastery of the craft I don’t know if we’ve seen before.

That said, I’m sure we will see it again.  That’s one of the most interesting parts of human nature, how the achievements of one can inspire a host of follow-on achievements either matching or eclipsing their progenitor.  After all, Sanderson isn’t the first to link a single overarching storyline across multiple series—Steven King has done it for years, as one example. 

But what Sanderson has done is elevate the process to more than an occasional easter egg or cameo.  The linkages are an essential part of his overall story, and each book he adds exists as a chapter in a larger tale.  It’s the work of a lifetime, and he’s on record as saying he’ll need his entire life to finish everything he wants to accomplish.

I look at that drive and I can’t help but feel chagrin looking at the number of pages and words I have written.  It’s especially mortifying to consider that his numbers are actually published words, while mine are just what Word tells me at the bottom left of my screen. 

But one of life’s most important lessons is that the race is long, and in the end it’s only with yourself.  Every word I write is another in my column, and another towards my own writing goals.  I wish the best to Sanderson on his journey—especially given how much I enjoy reading his works—but mine will take me in different directions.  Will it be an integrated master piece like his?  Probably not.  But will it serve my ultimate goal of enjoying the art and process of telling a story uniquely my own?  Absolutely.