Making a career as a professional writer has never been particularly easy. The road is often filled with rejections and roadblocks, setbacks and false starts and contractual pitfalls that can make aspiring creatives feel like Sisyphus pushing the proverbial boulder up the hill. To break into the business as a screenwriter or novelist is difficult; to have your work blow up in a way that grants any sort of long-term stability is even harder.
For both Brandon Sanderson and House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal, those ambitions are firmly accomplished — and looking at the long journey of their careers, there's a synchronous thing they have in common that contributed to their eventual success: they each drafted 13 projects before they finally broke into their respective industries.
The fascinating parallels between Brandon Sanderson and Ryan Condal's careers
At first glance, the path for these two creatives seems fairly different — though there are some interesting commonalities, including that lucky number 13. Sanderson is one of the bestselling fantasy authors of all time, the scribe behind such massive series as Mistborn, The Stormlight Archive, Skyward, and the final three books of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time. Writing was a dream Sanderson set his sights on as a teenager, and he doggedly kept at it while moonlighting as a hotel night clerk after getting degrees in English and creative writing, until he broke into the adult fantasy market at the (relatively) young age of 28.
Sanderson has been very open about his writing journey over the years in places like his website and Writing Excuses, the podcast he co-founded with fellow author Dan Wells all about the craft and business of publishing. Because of that, we know that Sanderson wrote 13 novels before one of them landed at a publisher — that would be Elantris, his sixth book, which gives you an idea of just how long it was simmering in the pipeline that he managed to write seven other books before that one was picked up. Those seven other books weren't wasted time either. The lessons Sanderson learned working on them were essential when the time finally came to revise Elantris, and to craft a follow-up that would turn that first published book's readers into loyal fans: the original Mistborn trilogy.
Unlike Sanderson, Condal doesn't necessarily shout about his journey from the rooftops every week or two. Sanderson has built a reptuation for being unusually communicative with his fans, and he upholds it with a borderline religious zeal. By contrast, Condal's deep discussions of his past are rarer — which means that when one crops up, it is very much worth listening to.
That was the case this past week, when Condal appeared on the Scriptnotes podcast, hosted by screenwriters Craig Mazin (The Last of Us, Chernobyl), and John August (Big Fish, Charlie's Angels). Condal went deep on this discussion into the overarching story of his career, as well as his experiences working on House of the Dragon. He laid out his path to becoming a showrunner, which August called "unusual" in that he didn't move out to Los Angeles early in his 20s and work his way up from the absolute bottom of the totem pole, but rather rose to that top position on television shows (relatively) quickly after toiling away at screenwriting for a number of years.
How did Ryan Condal become showrunner of House of the Dragon?
Like Sanderson, Ryan Condal also knew he wanted to be a writer from a young age. However he worked in print advertising for around eight years after completing his accounting degree, and didn't even begin getting a foot in the door of the film industry until his late 20s.
"I just started writing screenplays, feature screenplays," he remembered, clarifying that all of these early screenplays were "spec" screenplays — in other words, no one hired him to do them, and there was no guarantee any of them would ever see the light of day, just like Sanderson's first 13 novels. "I had a business degree, so I worked in media advertising and then pharmaceutical advertising, and just kept writing at night. And then eventually got my company to move me to L.A. and I kept writing at night...and eventually number 13, my 13th spec, I sold. This was after the 2007 writer's strike."
Despite selling that 13th spec script, it was a while before Condal actually received a writing credit on a finished project. His real breakout moment came half a decade later, with a television pilot called The Sixth Gun that he wrote and produced with Lost showrunner Carlton Cuse — which, coincidentally enough, featured a young Pedro Pascal in its cast.
While The Sixth Gun didn't end up ultimately going to series, that year still marked a major turning point for Condal's career when another script he'd written the first draft for, Hercules, did make it across the finish line. "Hercules went into production while we were filming The Sixth Gun...2013 was a pretty great year," Condal recalled. "It felt like I had been wandering the desert for, you know six years, but it all kind of happened."
2013 also held another important moment that would change Condal's life: it was the first time he connected with George R.R. Martin. While the two had met briefly during one of Martin's signings at a book convention a number of years earlier, it was while Condal was filming The Sixth Gun in New Mexico that he managed to arrange a dinner with Martin, simply to get to know the author of one of his favorite series. The two hit it off, and in 2016 when HBO was preparing to develop spinoffs for Game of Thrones, Condal's name came up. This was after he had served as the showrunner for Colony, a sci-fi series he launched with Cuse, which successfully ran for three seasons on NBC. By then, Condal had the name recognition to warrant HBO's attention.
Originally, Condal pitched HBO on doing Dunk & Egg, the book series which would eventually form the basis for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. However, HBO wanted something "much bigger and crazier and more expensive" at the time, and so they passed on Condal's original pitch. A few years later when discussions turned to an adaptation of the Dance of the Dragons civil war, Martin himself put Condal's name forward as a candidate for showrunner. HBO brought Condal on board to launch the series along with key Game of Thrones director Miguel Sapochnik, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Ultimately, there is no one way to break into either screenwriting or being a novelist. But if there's one thing to be learned from the common threads between Ryan Condal and Brandon Sanderson's stories, it's that an unwavering commitment to never giving up in the pursuit is absolutely essential. And that maybe there's some special magic that goes along with writing 13 projects on the road to realizing the dream.
House of the Dragon is currently airing its third season on HBO. Sanderson's latest book, Songs for the Dead, which he co-wrote with Peter Orullian, is out now wherever books are sold.
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