Brandon Sanderson has become a highly renowned fantasy author over the course of the past several decades. He made a name for himself with novels such as Elantris and Mistborn: The Final Empire and for being the author handpicked by Harriet McDougal, the wife and editor of the late Wheel of Time author Robert Jordan, to finish the in-progress book series.
Sanderson would ultimately turn Jordan’s outline for a final novel into three conclusive books, all of which were received well critically and commercially, and launched his career into the stratosphere.
Since then, the author has come to be defined by his unique approach to long-form world-building, having established numerous long-running fantasy-rooted series within the confines of his bibliography.
Nowhere have his talents been put more prominently on display than in his overarching Cosmere universe, which encompasses many of his earliest books as well as some of his most successful recent projects. However, in a recent social media post, Sanderson reveals that sometimes, his penchant for long-term planning and story-mapping can bring about unexpected consequences.
Sanderson’s latest novel in the Cosmere universe is Isles of the Emberdark, which was just released in July, and now the author is coming clean about the surprising movie that forced him to change some of his story’s finer details: Disney’s animated blockbuster, Moana.
The Cosmere universe contains depictions of various cultures from across Sanderson’s storytelling landscape, one of which was highly influenced by Polynesian cultures, including their wayfinding traditions. As such, in mapping out the story of Isles of the Emberdark several years in advance, Sanderson unintentionally crafted a narrative that would go on to bear similarities to the as-of-then unreleased Disney film. As the author describes it, this led to him having to “de-Moana-ify it.”
He goes on to elaborate, saying:
“So, I wrote Sixth of the Dusk about two, three years before Moana came out in theaters. And at that time, I outlined Isles of the Emberdark. Specifically, the further adventures of Dusk himself; what his life was going to be like and all those sorts of things… I outlined it all, and I was ready to work on it, and then I eventually wrote the book a few years ago. I turned it into my editorial team, and they were like, ‘This feels a lot like Moana.’ I was like, 'That’s not fair! I had this whole story before Moana.'”
Sanderson reveals that the core of the novel remains the same, but that certain details pertaining to the use of wayfinding were adjusted so as to avoid unwarranted comparisons between the two works. In an industry in which so much franchise planning seems to happen on the fly, it's interesting to hear the ways in which Sanderson's penchant for long-term world-building runs up against unexpected problems.
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