Tress of the Emerald Sea
Tress of the Emerald Sea
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Brandon Sanderson on Tress of the Emerald Sea
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A secret kept from a million readersThe book’s origin has nothing to do with a publishing contract. Sanderson wrote it entirely outside his professional machinery, for an audience of one, and only changed course when his wife read it and pushed him to go further.
I started writing this in secret, as a novel just for my wife. She urged me to share it with the world—and alongside three other secret novels, with the support of readers worldwide it grew into the biggest Kickstarter campaign of all time.
For a writer who posts public word-count updates and juggles multiple series on fixed editorial schedules, the conditions around this book were genuinely foreign. He has returned to that absence of obligation specifically when explaining what made the book feel unlike his other work.
...a different type of Brandon Sanderson story, one I wrote when there were no time constraints, no expectations, and no limits on my imagination.
The reveal itself was engineered as a misdirection. He released a video that read like a retirement announcement, let the internet run with it, then turned the whole thing inside out. Looking back on the two years he spent writing four novels in secret while publicly maintaining a normal release schedule, he framed the scale of what he had done in a single deadpan line.
Over the last two years, I’ve acted with extreme irresponsibility. [paraphrased from audio]
The retirement video was the sleight of hand. What he was really announcing was the opposite of an ending.
Asked to explain the fake-retirement gambit in plain terms, he described the gap between the performance and the reality: the swan song that was never written because something else kept arriving instead.
I kind of pretended I might be retiring... instead of a swan song, I accidentally wrote an extra novel... in secret. [paraphrased from audio]
How he wrote it
Small by design, cozy by accidentReaders who come to this book from the thousand-page Stormlight Archive novels, the Stormlight Archive being Sanderson’s flagship epic fantasy sequence, will notice the weight difference immediately. He addressed that gap directly, placing the book in a category that would have been foreign to his output five years earlier.
Some people might want to start with Tress of the Emerald Sea or Yumi and the Nightmare Painter, which are a little more what we would call cozy fantasy these days. Small, self-contained stories about some people solving a problem that’s less... [paraphrased from audio]
The sentence trails off in the source, but the contrast is clear: whatever problem Tress solves, it is not a civilization-scale one. That restraint was itself a craft choice, made possible by writing with no series obligations attached.
What he wants us to sit with
YA is not a verdictOne of the consistent threads around this book’s reception has been readers and critics debating whether it counts as young adult fiction, as though the answer determines its worth. Sanderson weighed in on that debate in a Reddit comment captured in a YouTube video, and his position was less a defense of the book than a challenge to the premise of the criticism.
I consider some of my works more YA leaning than others. Some are, like Tress, while some aren’t at all, like Emperor’s Soul or Stormlight. But I never know how to respond to the criticism, as I just don’t consider YA to be bad. It’s just a marketing decision.
He pushed the argument further in the same comment, turning the question of maturity back on the people raising it. The implication is that genre policing of this kind says more about the reader’s anxiety than about the book.
One sign of being mature is no longer being so uptight about worrying if people see you as immature. Read what you like. It’s okay.
When the first physical copies came back from the printer and reader responses began accumulating, Sanderson placed the book precisely within his own catalog. He was not being modest. He was being specific, naming the one book it trails and the category it tops.
It might be my second best-reviewed book. It’s up there in the top five. I think it is right behind Words of Radiance. It is definitely the best-reviewed non-Stormlight book I’ve ever written.