New Review: The Hero of Ages
May 1, 2009 (9:34 PM) ( link )

Added a review of Brandon Sanderson's The Hero of Ages (recommended).

Sanderson has a poorly designed but very informative website that features his candid thoughts about the writing process. Of most interest to me are his "annotations" for each chapter of the first two Mistborn books: see here and here.

As Sanderson notes in this introduction, he writes these annotations while he copy-edits his books. "I pause after each chapter and write out my thoughts, ideas, and impressions of that chapter. I try to talk about where the ideas came from, what my reaction is to the chapters after the fact, and what I was trying to do with some of the themes."

Some of the annotations are hard to understand without remembering exactly what happens in the chapter, but most of them are quite revealing -- a "behind the scenes," so to speak. Other authors have done "special features" for their books -- Jasper Fforde comes to mind -- but few are as introspective about their writing as Sanderson.