Thoughts on The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged after Taking Brandon Sanderson's Class
I took Brandon Sanderson's free online class on how to write fantasy novels in 2023, and he's offering it again this year and I'm taking it again in 2025. One of the striking things I have noticed is that Ayn Rand has a reputation as a horrible novelist whose success is the result of pure random luck, but she does a lot of things in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged which are absolutely best practices for a novelist according to Brandon Sanderson. He teaches that readers like characters who are proactive. Ayn Rand's protagonists are nothing but proactive. The first scene in Atlas Shrugged is Dagny proactively fixing the train, which, as Sanderson would teach it, is exactly what a novelist should do to make the reader like the protagonist. The Fountainhead begins with a scene that contrasts Roark to his antipode in Keating, and using contrast that way is another thing which Sanderson teaches. One final interesting thought is that, structurally, in terms of the craft of...