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 how they are written, everyone thinks that Roark is the hero of The Fountainhead and that John Galt is the hero of Atlas Shrugged, but, in fact, Dominique Francon is the hero of The Fountainhead and Dagny Taggart is the hero of Atlas Shrugged, because those are the two main characters who have an arc, who see growth and change over the course of the novels, whereas Roark and Galt never change, so they are, analytically, merely highly important secondary characters, they are not protagonists. This actually makes sense, because, after all, Ayn Rand was a woman, so it makes sense that her real point-of-view protagonists in her two bestselling novels would both be women. Ayn Rand's success is not random; she actually knew a lot of the tricks that professional novelists use. One theory is that she learned these tricks because screenwriters tend to know them, and she picked them up while working on scripts in Hollywood, which is what she was doing before becoming a novelist.