Because of a friend’s recommendation, I decided to read Sanderson’s Mistborn Trilogy. And there’s something really weird in his writing that I have never encountered in any other author.
His style of prose made me very aware that I was reading a piece of fiction. I know that sounds strange, so let me try and explain.
His writing style made me able to pick his story apart really easily. I read a sentence and went ‘oh, that’s worldbuilding’, ‘that’s characterization’, ‘this is 100% foreshadowing something’ and so on, and so on.
It wasn’t that the story was poorly told or that I didn’t like the main characters or anything , there was nothing technically wrong with his writing, but something in his style of prose felt off. All writing is artificial; Arrakis, Middle Earth and Maine as described by Stephen King are not real places, but Sanderson is the first time I read someone’s work and I was fully aware of how fake it was. It was very off-putting. It was so mechanically written I could feel the artificiality.
I don’t want to disparage the man because I know he has a lot of fans and is very prolific, but this was something that bothered me.
Have any of you had a similar experience, with Sanderson or someone else? It was kind of a unique experience for me and I’m kinda fascinated by it now.
by CanniTheAmazon
34 Comments
Sanderson is a very mechanical writer. He’s engineering his stories more than he’s telling them. You also get that impression from his classes, which is very focused on rules and being by the book and all that.
I noticed that early on because he seems to be the only one talking about “magic systems”. I don’t get that from other fantasy authors. I can’t picture Stephen King sitting down, cracking his knuckles and say “Now let’s design our magic system for IT”.
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He’s a paint by the numbers, formula kind of guy
I didn’t enjoy any of his trilogies until half way through the second book
Before that it was like reading cardboard
Interesting enough to keep going – but it feels like he’s moving cardboard cutouts across the board
But – there’s a Sanderson tipping point where things begin to flow more naturally and his characters seem like people – like now that he’s established the world, he can relax and let things flow
At least that’s how I interpret it
But yeah, his writing isn’t for everyone – and it’s a slog to get to the flow
He definitely follows a formula.
I’ve had similar experiences with twisty thrillers, once you read a handful you can pretty much map out all the others.
I call this type of writing ‘victim of the writing courses’ – when you can pinpoint the exact paragraph of popular writing craft lecture / book that they had in their head while writing this exact scene. ‘Oh, that kid with the rock scene – someone read Robert Mckee’s ‘On character and characterisation’. Oh, that next scene – it certainly written with ‘Save the cat’ on the desk open on page 96′. (In reality the author might not even touched ‘Save the cat’, but he writes so ‘by the book’ that you can’t help but have this impression).
I guess I kind of felt this when reading the final wheel of time book after Jordan’s death. I remember feeling like I could tell the difference between RJ and BS. I was happy with the book and the ending but there was a distinct change, midway, in how it was told in that final book
I only read the first book he did for Wheel of Time, but found it quite plasticky. Oh, a set piece. Another set piece. Each was quite interesting- a village of zombies was the first IIRC – but it just felt plunked down and contrived.
Good on him though. He’s doing really well and there must be something about his writing that really appeals to people.
I feel this way with most modern mystery books. It’s like they all follow the same formula: serial killer+ previously traumatized detective = extremely easy to guess the ending.
I haven’t noticed that. But I read several BS book in English and it’s my second language. So maybe that’s the reason.
I do love the worldbuilding but his books are soooo long
I think the examples of ‘that’s world building’ and ‘that’s characterization’ don’t really jump out as anything particular about Sanderson’s work…I feel this way when I read pretty much any fiction, especially fantasy which is so dependent on good characterization and worlds.
But definitely you are in the mark with ‘that’s foreshadowing’ it can sometimes be like a footnote at the bottom that says this is foreshadowing, all that being said I don’t have any issues with that heavy foreshadowing. I often find that if I think I know what the payoff of the foreshadowing is and I will be quite wrong anyways.
Yeah I feel the same, I finished the trilogy but it left me with no further desire to read anything else by him. The books didn’t really make me feel anything, it was just the most middle of the road mediocre writing I’ve ever read. It was necessarily bad and it’s clearly well thought out (the magic at least) but it just felt so fuckin sterile that I don’t think I could be bothered to read anything else by him
Tried to read his work and I came to the conclusion that he just isn´t that great of an author.
Next to all you mentioned, Brandon Sanderson’s humour made me die of cringe. My friend loves him (mainly for the hard magic systems).
A lot of YA and genre fiction feels like this to me (especially YA authors transitioning to ‘adult’ genre fiction). Very formulaic.
Marvel movies or other franchise movies feel this way to me too and it’s the reason I generally don’t enjoy them. “Ok, we’re entering our character-establishing action scene that should last 10-15 mins tops before we slow down the pace and introduce the main plot.” Like I shouldn’t be able to tell if someone has read Save the Cat!
Wait til r/bookscirclejerk gets a load of this.
I read the first Mistborn book and then started the 2nd and stopped because of this. It just felt off. You have expressed what I was feeling. I agree.
For me this was especially clear in characterization. It was like someone told him he had to have a surface level problem and an inner problem for each and every single character and then he just kept establishing those over and over and over again. I get it. Vin doesn’t know how she feels about dresses. The king feels conflicted about telling people what to do. There was so much mulling over these feelings and so little resolution of the feelings. The series would be ten times better if he’d cut them down by 30%.
Mistborn was my first book by him and I recall like 2 chapters dedicated to the main male character telling everyone the “heist” style plan and it took so damn long because instead of letting it happen, Sanderson kept having the character go “now I’m sure you are thinking “this part of the plan would never work” and let me give you my 5 paragraph rebuttals- and he did that for EVERYTHING
The moment when I realize that I’m reading a video game in the stormlight archive is when a Shardplate requires exact 2 hits from a shardblade to break. It’s almost like this world has a programming language and dnd rule set. It felt so jarring to me.
Also reading through the whole eating gems things felt like the characters were just chugging mana pots and the whole stormlight magic was like reading through a dnd manual.
My biggest issue with the one Sanderson I’ll ever read is that he’s like…scared of plot. Way of kings is a 1200+ page book, and maybe, ***maybe*** 300 pages actually moved the plot forward. I have never been so bored reading a book in my life.
It’s almost like you’re reading a very good DM do long form exposition in a game of Dungeons & Dragons. And to be clear, I enjoyed Mistborn. But I completely get what you’re saying.
Sanderson has a system for everything, including his own writing process. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be able to crank out so many books of similar quality. As such, they can feel very mechanical because any kind of mass production is going to do so.
Yeah his books are like videogame text. Turned me off immediately. But a lot of people like that.
A lot of comments here just sort of saying “he’s got formula style writing “ but I struggle to differentiate this to other styles of writing.
Any got examples of the opposite (where it works)?
Cos there’s plenty of examples of the opposite more fluid like which very much does not work and is like being told gossip than a story
That my sanderson experience as well. Really great fantasy authors write with a certain unevenness or bunpiness that gives their work a unique identity. Sanderson’s written is just a vast flat plain. It’s really noticeable when reading wheel of time that the sanderson books, while loyal to the themes and story, totally lackd the unhinged horny vibes of the originals.
Stormlight series is better than mistborn in my opinion.
Yes! That is exactly why I can’t read his stuff. I get zero immersion. I’m glad the magic happens for others, but it doesn’t happen for me.
Have always thought Sanderson was overrated. Lost track of how many times he writes, ‘Vin frowned’, in the first chapter.
That’s especially prevent in his early work. I’m not sure how early that superhero series is, but it definitely felt the same way.
This is spot on.
Sadly, I have this experience with far too much genre writing. Sanderson is an especially transparent perpetrator of it. I can’t get through a book by him… He has some cool ideas, then uses a “write to market” formula to express them. In his case it’s a bad combination of “see spot run” prose and all too obvious machinations of an author, that has the opposite of the intended effect.
Pane of glass prose is fine, but it should be a pane of glass on the world you’re unveiling, not authorial intention.
I bounced off of Mistborn about a year ago, and I think you’ve articulated why better than I realized it myself. I didn’t actively dislike the elements of it, and stepping away from it I can appreciate the broad strokes of the story being told, but when I sit down and read it, it feels like reading a catalogue of people, places, traits, and events, rather than an organic story.
Hey! Thank You for generating this discussion! I’ve got to read him to finish up Jordan’s series and was waiting to read the Mistborn series until I have them all, cause I’m that kind of guy…
Think I’ll just try his first and see how it goes… Too many books on hand to waste time collecting a bad series!
It almost sounds like AI
I read 3 of his books and I definitely don’t get the hype. People are always recommending him and saying how great an author he is. All I can think is like, was this their first time reading fantasy? Because off the top of my head I can probably list literally 20+ authors that blow his attempts at books out of the water. The characters are boring, the world was boring… 🤷♀️ Plus side it’s a great metric for knowing who’s book taste I can trust. If they LOVE Sanderson I know whatever they recommend is likely to be equally mediocre.