Questioner
A lot of people probably ask you how to write better. Do you have any advice for people who want to read better?
Brandon Sanderson
What an interesting question. So I don't know if you can read the wrong way? Upside down, if it works for you, man. One of my speeches previous year, the little things I get up, where I go professor on you. One of those things was where I talked about "there is no wrong way to read my books." And you have the power as a reader, I feel, to have, like, line-item veto. If I describe a certain person a certain way, and you're like, "Nope." You are allowed to change that in your version of the book. I have a good friend, he's still in my writing group, actually, he's Leyten from Bridge Four. 'Cause all my friends ended up in Bridge Four. Except for Dan, who I killed horribly in the Mistborn books. He survived the first time. I let him survive, and then he died. All of my friends ended up in Bridge Four. So Leyten, he was reading The Wheel of Time back when he was a teenager, and we got to the part where Thom Merrilin has a mustache. Have you read these books? He's a guy that has this really awesome mustache. And Alan's said, "Nope. No mustache. He doesn't match my--" When he told me this, I was horrified! I'm like, "That is, like, a central feature of what Thom Merrilin looks like, he has a big, drooping mustache!" Alan's like, "Nope. Not in my version." And I'm okay with that, when you do that on my book. You can pronounce the names the way you want. You can-- like, I give you a script, and you direct it. And you can change whatever you want in your head.So, I don't know if there's a right or a wrong way to read, if that makes sense.
I did take a speed-reading class for, like, three days. No, it was just, like, one day, where they started teaching how to speed-read. And I realized, when I was speed-reading, I was missing kind of the music of the writing for me. Like, one of the tactics of speed-reading is to stop hearing it in your head, the sounds while you're reading. Which is great for getting through something fast, but I was like, "No! This doesn't work. It makes the books-- less musical?" if that makes any sense. And so I immediately dropped out of that class. But that was for me, I need to savor the story a little bit more. If you want to speed-read it, and that works for you, go. It's an interesting question that I just basically refused to answer, I'm sorry.