Brandon Sanderson Knows He’s Risking Everything with Wind and Truth

“I’m worried,” Brandon Sanderson tells me over Zoom. The shelves behind him are straining under the weight of his books. At forty-eight years old, with a new beard just beginning to turn gray, he’s already one of the most successful fantasy writers in history. But today, he seems a little anxious: “If my career is going to crash and burn, this is the book that’ll do it.”

He’s talking about Wind and Truth, the fifth book in his ten-volume Stormlight Archive series set on the world of Roshar. It’s the fantasy genre’s biggest publishing event since George R. R. Martin’s most recent A Song of Ice and Fire book, A Dance with Dragons, came out in 2011. Since then, Sanderson has published more than two dozen books—including most of the Cosmere, an interconnected fictional universe that dates all the way back to his 2005 debut novel, Elantris—and it’s all been leading to Wind and Truth, the climax of the Cosmere’s first half.

“I’m frothing at the mouth to see how he sticks this landing. It has the energy of Avengers: Endgame,” says Sanderson fan Spiros Mantzoros, a thirty-two-year-old attorney from Chicago. “The Stormlight Archive is his best work,” adds Kritter XD, a sci-fi and fantasy content creator in St. Louis. “His fan base has been waiting almost a decade and a half to see how our favorite characters will save Roshar, and satisfying conclusions are hard to come by in fantasy.”

On December 5, more than eight thousand people like Mantzoros and Kritter will descend upon Salt Lake City’s downtown convention center for Dragonsteel Nexus, the San Diego Comic-Con for Sanderson fans. At the convention, they’ll be able to get their hands on Wind and Truth’s first-edition hardcover, which weighs about six pounds and is filled with original art. There are more people named in the book’s acknowledgments than I’ve ever met in my life.

Mantzoros isn’t the only fan I spoke with who compared Wind and Truth to Avengers: Endgame, but Sanderson doesn’t want readers to expect the same degree of closure. “Wind and Truth is definitely not my Endgame,” he says. “Endgame was a culmination that wrapped everything up. Wind and Truth closes some brackets on some characters, but we’re going to open big questions as well.”

Once called “The Iliad from another solar system” by this very magazine, The Stormlight Archive is a high-fantasy war epic about soldiers, scholars, nobles, and immortal beings who must defend Roshar from the evil remnant of a dead god. It began in 2010 with The Way of Kings, a breakout success for Tor Books that hit number seven on the New York Times best-seller list. The next three volumes—2014’s Words of Radiance, 2017’s Oathbringer, and 2020’s Rhythm of War—all debuted at number one.

Two years ago, I visited Sanderson in his underground supervillain lair beneath Utah Valley (and his sixty-four-person support staff above it) for Esquire, after his $41 million Kickstarter campaign to self-publish four “secret” Cosmere books shattered the platform’s previous crowdfunding record. Back then, he was frustrated by some aspects of the publishing industry but excited about his plans for the future: new and bigger offices for his staff, an independent bookstore, and at least sixteen more Cosmere novels after Wind and Truth—enough to keep him busy until he’s seventy.

So what is it about this book that’s got him worried?

Ten years ago, Sanderson collapsed on the floor of a hotel room. “I just fell down and laid there for an hour by the door,” he says. He doesn’t remember where it happened, except that it was during the book tour for Words of Radiance, the second volume in The Stormlight Archive.

In those days, he made time to sign books and chat with every single person who attended his events. But the Words of Radiance tour was thirty-two days long, and he had no idea how popular he’d become. Night after night, he signed for four hundred to seven hundred people, ate gas-station hot dogs, and crashed for a few hours before an early flight the next morning. “I got physically ill,” he says. “It was the most miserable experience of my life.”

Since then, Sanderson’s popularity has only grown. Each book in The Stormlight Archive has sold more hardcovers than the last, according to Circana’s Bookscan, with 2020’s Rhythm of War moving more than 220,000 copies (a figure that doesn’t include e-books, paperbacks, or translated editions). Around the world, millions of people have read these books.

In Wind and Truth, Sanderson’s heroes have ten days to prepare for a contest of champions that will decide the fate of Roshar and send ripples throughout the Cosmere. It begins like the rest of The Stormlight Archive: heavy on dialogue, saturated with humor, and leisurely paced for the first few hundred pages. Sanderson is a maximalist, so there are more than seven hundred named characters, plus various cultures, mythologies, factions, creatures, and magic systems that become more complex with each volume. I have to use four different color-coded spreadsheets just to keep track of it all.

Each book in the series centers on a different main character, who gets flashback chapters revealing secrets from their past. “It’s the Lost format,” Sanderson says. For Wind and Truth, that character is the mysterious Szeth, a reformed assassin. “It felt natural not to delve into his story until I got to the end [of The Stormlight Archive’s first half]. It matched what I was planning to do in this book for reasons I won’t say.”

Alongside Kaladin, a superpowered soldier who suffers from depression, Szeth travels to the isolated region of Shinovar to ask a demigod—who may or may not have gone insane—for help. At the same time, the noble warlord Dalinar and the orphaned scholar Shallan must find a way to enter the planet’s Spiritual Realm, “a place where the future blends with the present, where the past echoes like the striking of a clock … where the gods live, and it baffles even some of them.”

For the first half of Wind and Truth, the plot moves in what feels like an inevitable direction, though it’s still full of surprises. But then Sanderson starts breaking his own status quo in thrilling ways, and things get really weird. I lost count at some point, but there are at least a dozen things in this book that will make Sanderson’s fans either gasp or scream.

After cameos in earlier Stormlight volumes, characters from Sanderson’s other books—including the Mistborn, Elantris, and Warbreaker series—have larger roles to play in Wind and Truth, and the gods who have been distant presences become three-dimensional characters themselves. Meanwhile, two side characters who become main characters, Renarin and Rlain, are further confirmed to be queer; though Sanderson is a practicing member of the Mormon church (which has a complicated history with LGBTQ rights) he sees himself as “more liberal than the general tenor of the church.”

“It’s a bigger statement not to include queer characters than to include them,” Sanderson says. “It’s a little bit nail-biting because you don’t want to misrepresent anything. Coming from my background, I wanted to be absolutely sure I got this right, so we had professional sensitivity readers, and one of my best friends, Ryan, who one of the characters is based on, has been guiding me along.”

I wouldn’t dare talk about the ending of Wind and Truth here, except to say that Sanderson takes the biggest swings of his career so far across the final two hundred pages. “I actually tried three different endings with three different alpha and beta reader groups, just to see what their responses would be,” Sanderson says. “I ended up with an ending that’s none of the three. It turns out what I needed was an amalgamation with different parts of each, and I hadn’t been able to figure that out until I was reading the feedback.”

During our hour together on Zoom, Sanderson sounds confident and excited about the bold moves he’s making in Winds of Truth, so I ask him why he’s worried. “Moving between eras, changing things, and shifting lanes in a series can be a really dangerous thing,” he says.

He doesn’t mention any examples, but I’m reminded of Frank Herbert’s Dune series, which started strong but eventually went off the rails (sandworm man, anyone?), or even George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, which took a wrong turn somewhere in A Feast for Crows.

But when I start transcribing the audio of my conversation with Sanderson, I notice something else that could explain why he’s worried about Wind and Truth despite his confidence in it.

Thirty years ago during a Nebraska winter when Sanderson was fourteen years old, his best friend humiliated and betrayed him. “Though we went to different schools, he was one of the only other Mormon kids around, so our parents often had us play together,” Sanderson wrote in an essay last year. He and “John” had grown up together, but by the time they got to high school, “John had found his way to basketball, parties, and popularity,” while Sanderson “had not.”

One cold day after church, Sanderson was with John when some teens from their youth group decided to go somewhere fun in one of their cars. “Five seats. Six teens. They’d already counted” when Sanderson approached the vehicle. “Without a word to me, the others climbed in. John gave me one hesitant look, then settled into the front passenger seat and closed the door. They left me on the curb.”

By that age, Sanderson already understood what it felt like to be left on the outside looking in. “It happens when you’re one of three Mormon kids in a large school,” he wrote. Reading Sanderson’s essay, as well as his fiction, you can tell he’s thought about the negative impact of feeling like an outsider, as Kaladin often does in The Stormlight Archive, and the positive effects of feeling like an insider, as Dalinar’s knights do under his leadership.

And here’s the thing I noticed in the audio transcription: When Sanderson talks about writing his books and creating his worlds, he almost always says “we”—not “I.”

When you meet the artists, editors, merchandisers, event planners, and communications staffers “inside” his circle in Utah, you can see why he says “we.” Even broader than that, over the past twenty years, Sanderson has brought hundreds of thousands of people “inside” through his books—the fans who attend his events, moderate his wikis, and theorize on TikTok and Reddit. Could Wind and Truth’s big swings drive any of them away?

“If I don’t do hard things, then am I actually pursuing art?” Sanderson asks. “I hope people are like, ‘Wow, Brandon’s willing to do really interesting and exciting things with his fiction.’ But I don’t get to decide that—the fans do.”

While Wind and Truth may be the end of the Cosmere’s first half, it’s also a new beginning. First, The Stormlight Archive will take a six-year break in the real world (and a ten-year break in the Cosmere) while Sanderson writes a third Mistborn trilogy and two sequels to Elantris. “For narrative and continuity reasons, I need to write those novels first, but you don’t need to read them to enjoy or understand The Stormlight Archive,” he says. “All the series are intended to be self-contained, even with all the crossover elements.”

His current plan for Stormlight books 6 through 10 is that they’ll focus on the characters Lift, Renarin, Shalash, Talenel, and Jasnah, in that order, though things could change when he revisits his outline in a few years. “[These] are going to be main characters along with whoever survives Wind and Truth,” Sanderson says. “Are people going to be okay with big chunks of the books moving forward exploring new characters? By the end [of Wind and Truth], people will know what the lane shifts are going to be, and we’re jumping ten years in-world before we come back. That alone could derail some people, but I hope people will love what we’re doing.”

In addition to his forthcoming books, Sanderson recently purchased land near a former fantasy-adventure theme park in Pleasant Grove, Utah, that he plans on turning into Dragonsteel Plaza, a Cosmere-themed destination for his fans alongside new offices for his team and an independent bookstore.

“We don’t have a big general-interest indie bookstore in Utah Valley right now, so the goal is a community bookstore, not just [my] books, that does all the outreach that great indie bookstores do,” he says. “And then a plaza with a game store, an art store, and a cafe. I would love to have a ballroom wedding venue and some sort of Brandon Sanderson equivalent to making your Harry Potter wand.”

He’s also still carving out time to play video games. “If I couldn’t write books for some reason, I’d write code,” he says. “I took a coding class in college and it impacted my ability to tell stories, because I would do my code work and then be like, well, I’ve just done my writing for the day! I was like, wow, this is dangerous. I can’t take any more coding classes.”

He doesn’t have any updates to share on film or TV adaptations of the Cosmere yet, but he does have thoughts on why so many fantasy adaptations fail to capture the magic of their source material. “I don’t think Hollywood is very good with apprenticeships for writers,” he says. “I don’t think they respect writers. The places like Pixar where you do get really good writing have apprenticeship programs, where you can work on a story with a team. And I don’t think Hollywood respects the original IP. It’s not just what happens, it’s how it happens. Hollywood’s really good at big fights, but The Lord of the Rings [for instance] isn’t about the big fights. You need moments like Sam picking up Frodo, or Gandalf returning at Helm’s Deep. Writers can do that, but they aren’t given enough chances, and there are mandates on high about the whims of the market: ‘We hear this is big, so make the show like this.’ ”

Before I lose him to a Dungeons & Dragons session with his family or a podcast recording with his friends, I ask Sanderson if he feels like the same person who started writing The Stormlight Archive decades ago. “When I outlined the series, I didn’t have kids, and now I have teenagers,” he says. “They’re so helpful for my writing. I get to see through their eyes and remind myself what it’s like to be younger.”

With teenagers and a staff of more than sixty people whose livelihoods depend on Sanderson’s writing, you can understand why he might be worried about taking big risks in his fiction. But after reading all 1,330 pages of Wind and Truth, I don’t think Sanderson needs to be worried. He’s not leaving anyone on the curb.

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