Brandon Sanderson and the Metrics of Spite

or, there's still gold in them hills

Get Colony Collapse and please review it. I’d appreciate that a lot.

I’m still giving away Howl for free right now. I’ll have news about the sequel, Iron Wolf, soon. Also an audiobook for the first two books is coming.

For a different perspective on what I’m about to write about, check out J David Osborne’s essay from yesterday. Also, go buy Dying World if you haven’t yet. Its sequel is also coming soon.

Is Brandon Sanderson a Bad Writer?

or, Unripe pomegranates beneath your heel

If you’re in any way connected to the literary world or even the broad spectrum of nerd culture, you probably saw this rather long profile of Brandon Sanderson, one of the most successful writers alive.

Now, I’ve been meaning to write The Hater’s Guide to Brandon Sanderson since before this newsletter even existed. I have read a decent number of Sanderson’s books—not all of them because who has the time and, also, as the intended essay’s title suggests, me no like him so much—and I have problems with Sanderson that could fill up a library. I’ve been thinking about these problems for a long time because I’m an idiot but also because there’s much to be learned from what you don’t like about something, especially if it’s something you’re also engaging with.

I care about Brandon Sanderson because I write fantasy but also just because I write books at all. Even if you think Sanderson is a terrible writer, there’s much to be learned from him because, to put it quite simply, he’s doing something that you’re not: selling millions of books.

One of the first essays on this newsletter was adapted from my review of his book Oathbringer, but I adjusted it slightly to apply to The Wheel of Time, which is, honestly, a neater fit.

The Wheel of Time is a Sitcom

My thoughts on this have not changed since I wrote that essay. When you ask whether Sanderson is a good writer or not, you are asking the wrong question. Worse, you’re asking a question that doesn’t matter. Not even to Sanderson.

So, recklessly, I say what’s on my mind. I have to. His wife is there, his biggest fan, always his first reader, making polite comments; I don’t care. Maybe nobody writes about you, I say to Sanderson, because you don’t write very well.

The world unfreezes. He agrees.

This is the hinge of the Wired profile on Brandon Sanderson and it is a very dumb question, especially since the author admits to reading 17-20 of Sanderson’s books.

Jason Kehe knows this is the wrong question. He has to. A more interesting question for Kehe and his piece would be:

Sanderson is a terrible writer but why can’t I stop reading him?

I think this simple turn in the perspective of the story would have made for a more productive one.

If you don’t want to read the Wired profile (it’s not very good, sadly, but it is very long), the gist of it is that Kehe doesn’t like Sanderson’s books and doesn’t seem to like him or his family or his friends or his fans. He doesn’t even like the restaurants Sanderson takes him to.

It’s a tremendously meanspirited profile because, in Kehe’s words, he finds Sanderson incredibly dull. So dull that he’s not even worth writing about.

You’d think he could have just…not written the piece then. Or could have wrapped it up in a thousand words rather than five thousand, but, hey, this is the world wide web we live in and space ain’t a budget constraint: your attention is.

I’ll circle back to that in a bit.

I consider this profile an astounding failure in a number of ways and extremely successful in the one that matters to people who own online periodicals. I’ll discuss the failures first.

or, You Called Him Boring?

What’s maybe strangest about this whole thing is the accusation that Brandon Sanderson is boring. Well, I mean, I probably wouldn’t want to hangout with him, though I also don’t like hanging out with most people. But the glimpses of Sanderson that actually make it through this profile are fascinating.

Sanderson is weird!

Everything about him is weird. It’s weird that he compulsively writes, that he writes to relax, that he prefers that to vacation. It’s weird that he apparently doesn’t feel pain! Now, I don’t think we’re meant to understand this as Sanderson having CIP (congenital insensitivity to pain), because that seems like the kind of thing the public would know about. For one thing, many people with CIP don’t live that long! Their inability to feel pain makes them susceptible to serious injury that can lead to deadly infections and so on. Young men with CIP are often extremely prone to accidental suicide by doing dangerous, deadly things that they don’t fear because they don’t feel pain.

But so what does this mean?

What are we meant to think about this declaration that Sanderson simply doesn’t feel physical or emotional pain?

I don’t know, but it sure sounds weird! Sure sounds like someone else could’ve written 5,000 words about only this single aspect of Sanderson.

Kehe hates the food he eats in Utah but never seems interested in scratching deeper. I mean, presumably the reason food is bad in Utah is because Utah is just a giant suburban wasteland to someone from New York or whatever groovy city Kehe currently lives in. But maybe there’s a whole story right there.

Kehe also finds nothing of interest in the legion of fans who show up to a convention devoted to a single author. This on its own is weird! Most literary conventions focus on a genre or something about the business side of books or whatever. But thousands of people show up to buy merchandise and talk about Sanderson and his books and only that.

This is weird!

Even the fact that Sanderson is just a very normal dork who happens to be outrageously successful is weird!

And, I mean, I don’t want to tell someone how to do their job and I don’t want to tell any tales out of school, but if you can’t find anything interesting in this kind of weird shit, maybe the problem is your own lack of curiosity.

or, I tried to fry a hardboiled egg last week

Here’s the thing about this whole profile: Kehe is right.

Sanderson is a bad writer. I could explain at length but it really isn’t the point anymore, and it’s why I still haven’t gotten around to The Hater’s Guide to Brandon Sanderson. It’s something I’m no longer planning on writing, in part because my goal was the same as Wired’s goal here: I wanted to make people angry because I wanted to provoke them because I wanted them to click on my website and spread it around.

More on that in a bit.

I’ve seen people generously assume that Kehe was trying to do some gonzo journalism on this whole mess, since he couldn’t find it within himself to actually write the story he was commissioned to write.

Which I’m sympathetic to. I mean, I wrote a pretty long essay about Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels only for someone to ask me what any of this had to do with Elena Ferrante. Then there’s the even longer essay I wrote about the Final Fantasy VII Remake, which made several people cancel their subscriptions, or the longest thing I’ve written here which was about Final Fantasy VI¹.

So I get it.

I loved Hunter Thompson when I was younger and I love Tim Rogers now so I’m all for injecting yourself into a story. The difference, I think, is that when I inject myself into these essays, I’m not doing it to share autobiography. I didn’t write about omelettes or being a dirtbag teenager in 2004 because I thought that I mattered to The Neapolitan Novels but because those parts of the essay that are about me are about Elena Ferrante.

Now, I forgive you for not making that connection or not even seeing the connection. I am, after all, an idiot, but you’ll have to believe me that the parts of these essays that are about me are still about the piece of media I’m discussing. To belabor this point would make the entire newsletter supremely boring to everyone involved.

But I feel that Kehe just never figured this out or didn’t know how to surrender his sense of self or even the self that he is to the subject at hand.

And so what we do learn about Kehe actually obscures Sanderson. Kehe doesn’t do himself any favors by coming off condescending and incurious, and so this isn’t just a failure of a profile.

It’s a failure as a piece of writing.

For someone who describes himself as a poetic terrorist² and seems to put a lot of emphasis on the sentence and the use of language, you might expect that he’d be a better writer.

Which brings me to the single way this profile succeeds.

or, numbers go up

This weekend, CCN described the online phenomenon of digital black face.

Predictably, people went bananas over this and started sharing and resharing their most sizzling hot fajita sized takes on whatever anyone is meant to take from such a thing that seems engineered in a lab to go viral on twitter.

To tell you the truth, I haven’t read this CNN piece. I didn’t read it because it wasn’t written to be read.

It was written to be engaged with on twitter.

I know that probably sounds stupid, but this is the most viewed tweet CNN has had in months.

You can scroll through the CNN twitter account and see that despite having over 60 million followers, most of their posts are seen by about 150,000 people. The biggest one I saw scrolling through their timeline just now had 1.6 million views.

Nearly 28 million people have seen this digital blackface tweet.

The numbers speak for themselves.

Just tossing chum out to the digital waters to watch all of us gobble it up and turn the whole sea red.

Their advertisers like this. Their owners like this. And the question becomes, as always: why pay someone to research a piece for months and spend weeks editing it into perfect condition when almost no one will see it, whereas we can churn this shit out in half an hour and have it turn into millions upon millions of hits?

I’ve experienced this often here at the newsletter you’re currently reading. I will spend months on a subject and have it seen by some fraction of you, whereas something I toss together on the toilet will be my most successful post of all time.

That’s just how it goes, baby.

I bring this all up because this is the success of this Wired profile of Brandon Sanderson. It made so many people so angry in a way perfectly calibrated to make it breathlessly shared and discussed and argued about.

If you scroll through Wired’s timeline, most of their tweets get seen by 10,000 to 35,000 people despite having 10 million followers.

This Sanderson tweet has been seen over 7 million times.

Is Sanderson a good writer?

Babies, even the writer doesn’t care about this question. If he did, he would have actually discussed prose. He would have shown us examples of good prose and how Sanderson’s pales in comparison.

This was written, no doubt, because Kehe was on a deadline and struggling to come up with something to write about someone who he genuinely did not like. Sweating alone in his apartment, he slammed his hands against the keyboard enough times for this to fill up his screen.

His editors saw the real value, though. If they had cared about the piece’s thesis, they would have pressed him to develop it more.

Why did you cry that night? How does this connect to Sanderson’s lack of feeling? If Sanderson writes to become god, what is writing to you, as the writer of this profile? Is it to become god’s devil or demiurge?

But, no, the value here was in virality.

or, we live in hell

We will always only ever be doing this. Whatever the promise of social media was, it has devolved to only this.

How mad can I make you?

The algorithms of these platforms are designed to show you things that upset you because the best way to keep your dumb eyeballs staring at the dumb phone in your dumb hands is to make you angry. If you’re angry, you might share it with a snide caption or argue with someone in the comments, and if you’re arguing, it means a bunch of people have now been captured in the net.

The chum worked. It brought you all there in a frenzy and now they’re just scooping you up into the boat where you’ll asphyxiate on the air a foot away from the water you need.

You’ll spend your whole stupid life angry and alone and someone very far away who has no connection to you or whatever made you angry will become very rich because they made the perfect human trap.

I really cannot tell you how many people sent me this Wired profile.

I had a completely different essay to post today that has been scheduled for today for literally months. Instead, I’m here, writing his, because I, too, have been trapped.

We have one life made up of a finite number of moments and we spend so many of them staring at our phones, at our computer screens, at our TVs, and sometimes at all three at the same time, which causes us to notice none of them.

We fill our eyes and lives with static to keep from living, to keep from being ourselves.

Anytime my son tells me to put down my phone, I want to cry. He has only one life, too, and will only be the child he is for a finite number of seconds more, and I am scrolling, seeing nothing, caring about nothing in front of my eyes, and I am ignoring him when all he wants from me is my attention.

Now is the time to take your life back. To be better. I could keep scrolling, keep reading whatever dumb shit is in front of my eyes when my son says this, could keep bathing in the viscera of chopped up carcasses whose scent I caught, or I can set my phone down and walk away, go play with my son, talk to him, read a book, take a walk, draw a picture, or anything else.

I like to think I’m quite good at this, at being present with my kids. But no matter how good I think I am, he is a reminder that I am giving up seconds of my life to distraction that I will never get back.

Moments I could have spent with him.

Being his daddy.

I am dying.

We are all dying.

This is hell.

And the worst part of all of this is that Kehe and Sanderson are both right.

Sanderson is a bad writer and we should forgive Kehe for being a worse one.

I do want to make it clear, again that I bear Jason no ill will. I like him. Please leave him alone. He seems to be a sincere man who tried very hard to find a story, discovered that there wasn't one that interested him, then floundered in trying to figure out what he could say to make deadline. I respect him for trying his best to write what he obviously found a difficult article.

He’s a person, remember, just like each of us.

—Brandon Sanderson, on his subreddit³

1. You may be asking yourself why this review begins with 1,500 words about my appendectomy in 2011 and why it ends with 1,500 words about someone I haven’t spoken to in 15 years.

2. this is more embarrassing than anything Sanderson has written

3. It’s also real easy to forgive your critic when you’re making $10,000,000 a year while your critic is making $35,000 per year.