Let's Talk About Some Discourse
Wired's "Brandon Sanderson" article & literary criticism.
For those who haven’t been on Twitter in the last three days, allow me to fill you in. On the 23rd of March, 2023, Wired editor Jason Kehe published an article, titled Brandon Sanderson is Your God. Now, I don’t normally read Wired. Generally, it’s not really my scene. Yet, when Twitter lit up with discourse about this article, I figured I’d give it a go.
I haven’t read any of Sanderson’s books; most of my knowledge about him comes from elsewhere in the genre-fiction-writing world, particularly in regards to his worldbuilding skills. To many familiar with the genre-fiction niche, Sanderson is best known for his novels’ magic systems. He has a ton of them—sometimes he has multiple per setting. I don’t believe that he invented the terms, but he appears to have popularized the concept of the “hard magic/soft magic” system distinction, which refers to the presence and audience knowledge of a magic system’s given rules, or lack thereof. Even without reading his books, one comes across this man’s work just by discussing worldbuilding on the internet or reading/watching other people’s thoughts on the subject. However, the Discourse (with a capital D, in fantasy novel fashion to indicate it’s a special version of a normal word!) isn’t about Sanderson’s magic systems or even about his stories in the broader sense. It’s about a profile in Wired.
For the most part, Kehe’s article isn’t saying much that strikes me as incendiary. He spends the first few paragraphs introducing Sanderson and explaining his success as a writer before introducing a theme—that Sanderson, despite his status as one of the most successful contemporary fantasy writers, has an extremely quiet personal profile. Kehe discusses potential explanations: He’s a Mormon, a fantasy writer, whose works haven’t been adapted to the screen.
What really got people talking though, was the way that Kehe wrote about Sanderson. He recounts a deeply strange accounting of his time interviewing the man and spending some time witnessing his quotidien. What follows is a scathing, at-times-painful examination of Sanderson from the perspective of an outsider taking a look at a life that people rarely see. It’s the kind of literary profile that seems to have fallen out of favour—the interrogation. Not, of course, in the traditional sense—Kehe’s not bearing down over “Brando Sando” (as his fans call him) at a table in a dimly lit room—I mean that fundamentally, it’s a profile that refuses to be a puff piece. When I first encountered the Discourse, I was confused. Shouldn’t we want an honest examination of a profile subject? It’s not like Sanderson is just a normal guy—he is fundamentally weird.
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 eight 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.
The writers’ group is standard stuff: What’s this character’s motivation? Can the reader follow that fight sequence? Sanderson gives feedback with half his brain, the other half occupied with autographing books. It’s only afterward that the real talk happens, such as Star Wars debates. When those subside, I bring up the pain thing again. Turns out Sanderson doesn’t seem to feel pain of any kind, even emotional.—Kehe, Brandon Sanderson is Your God, Wired, 2023
Now, I’m not saying that its wrong to feel absolutely no pain, even emotional, but it is weird (in the sense that it isn’t normal). Whatever moral weight you may ascribe to that is your own business, but in any case, it’s certainly the kind of thing that you’d expect the person writing a profile to include. There’s even something kind of sad about the whole thing:
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.
This is the point of a literary profile, is it not? To tell us things about a writer and their work? Sure, there are lines in the article that I found on a first read to be a bit mean-spirited. I think the derisiveness with which Kehe describes the attendees of Sanderson’s…fan convention…borderline on pretentious. But people take particular offense to two parts of the profile in particular: the comments about Sanderson’s Mormonism, and the criticism of his writing.
Most will hear this and think: At that rate, none of the words could possibly be any good. They’d be right, in a way, and that’s what Sanderson agrees with. At the sentence level, he is no great gift to English prose.
The early books especially. My god. Here’s a sample sentence: “It was going to be very bad this time.” Another one: “She felt a feeling of dread.” There’s a penchant for redundant description: A city is “tranquil, quiet, peaceful.” Many things, from buildings to beasts, are “enormous.” Dark places, more thesaurically, are “caliginous.” On almost every page of Mistborn, his first and probably most beloved series, a character “sighs,” “frowns,” “raises an eyebrow,” “cocks a head,” “shrugs,” or “snorts,” sometimes at the same time, sometimes multiple times a page. I count seven books in which one of the characters frets about their metaphors. “I have trouble with metaphors,” one literally says. Of his own work, Sanderson has said: “I detest rewriting,” “I write for endings,” and “I write to relax.” It shows. He writes, by one metric, at a sixth-grade reading level.
This, to me, is on its face, not an unfounded criticism. Sanderson is, in a technical sense, not a very good writer. Moreover, his entire ethos seems to some, antithetical to the point of literature.
Carolyn Petit, writer for Kotaku summarizes the whole thing pretty well to me.
Then, there’s the Mormon thing. A lot of people were insisting that it’s wrong to comment about the man’s religion. I’m not really gonna unpack that except to say that Sanderson has, both in the past and as recently as last year defended the homophobia of the LDS church. Criticisms about Mormonism notwithstanding, his politics are pretty much left out of the Wired article. Kehe points out the similarities between the core themes of Sanderson’s work and tenets of Mormonism, which are admitted to in the article BY Sanderson!
The short of it is that I really don’t understand why people are going crazy over all of this. If a profile isn’t a puff piece, that’s probably fine! Things like this should be scathing and critical, even if a writer’s devoted fans get mad about it. Especially when there are things (as demonstrated in the article) that’re worth criticising. Perhaps someday, I’ll write something about the “Let people enjoy things” phenomenon, which is definitely at play here in the Discourse. For now, I’ll leave you with another Carolyn Petit quote: