Brandon Mull reclaimed his place among New York Times bestselling authors last week as the sequel in the Dragonwatch series, Dragonwatch: Wrath of the Dragon King, debuted at the top of the Children’s Middle Grade Hardcover chart. The book topped Wonder, which has spent 168 weeks on the list, as well as several other more recent releases.
The Latter-day Saint author who first discovered success upon publishing his first book series, Fablehaven, recently sat down with LDS Living Associate Publisher Erin Hallstrom to discuss his newest release as well as how building a fantasy world for his books has helped him understand God’s love for His children.
EH: One phrase I know that gets used a lot when people talk about fantasy is the phrase “world-building.”
BM: Yes!
EH: And I can’t help but see parallels with that concept of world-building with gospel principles, right? Building worlds. Do you see those parallels? Do you have a correlation between what you write and what you believe in that way?
BM: Yeah, I can see that. I mean, we worship a God who is a creator and you could say, there’s a line in Rent, “The opposite of war isn’t peace, it’s creation.”* You can think of it that way, where if war is destruction, the opposite of that would be creation. And I know we worship a God who is creative, so anything creative seems to, in some way, pay homage to that heritage, if that makes sense. Whenever we write a book, we’re going to do world-building. It’s just creating a story world where characters can live. . . . A realistic novel, you might just be creating an illusion of a high school out of words. For me, for fantasy or sci-fi, that world-building tends to be an exaggerated element of the story, because sometimes we’re changing the rules of reality.
I totally think about as I’m building story worlds, "Maybe, someday in the forever future, if you ever got to have the opportunity to help create your own spirit family or your own worlds someday," like I’m having these weird practice sessions or something making up these crazy worlds.
EH: Like you have a little leg up on everyone else.
BM: It makes me wonder how much latitude we’ll have, like "Let’s talk about centaurs." But yeah, it crosses my mind that God is a world creator, and we’re His children and He wants us to be like them, so maybe someday we could be doing something similar.
Listen to All In on iTunes by clicking here. Don't forget to subscribe!
*Quote has been edited in this transcript to accurately portray the quote by playwright Jonathan Larson in the Broadway play Rent.
Lead image courtesy of Kimberly Durtshi