It's not that there is too much or not enough dialogue, and it's not really about interactions.

I haven't read all his novels and apparently he's got better at this later, but what I refer to is very obvious in Mistborn. There are may scenes in which Sanderson relied almost exclusively on dialogues, barely stopping to describe the body language, or even to use descriptors like "xxxx", Y said. It's not what I like in a novel, that's TV/movie or theater writing to me. It's boring unless there are actors to deliver those lines and put life into them. In a novel, that's the writer job to make the scene come to life. He did do some of that in WOT, but he's mostly avoided it (and like I said, he seems aware of his tendency to do that in his earlier novels and has changed this quite a bit since). He would make an excellent TV/movie writer.

It's not a unique personal opinion about his writing, tons of reviews of his early works (Elantris, the first two Mistborn) have mentionned this one way or another (another way to describe this trait would be to say that Sanderson is really good at describing more visual action, but when there's a lot of talking, it's like the narrator vanishes completely. He writes very cinematically, but when it's dialogues (or inner monologues), suddenly it's all gone and it's like you're getting the audio only.

His love for inner monologues didn't really bothered me (the lack of depth and originality of those monologues tend to bore me a bit, though). I find his books good on the whole, they're just not my cup of tea generally speaking. There's a sort of naive/too clean aspect to them I don't really care for, and I find him a bit too juvenile for me too. Take Vin for example. She was a slick kind of action hero, well done in the genre. She would fit well of a TV show or movie, or in a comic book. But Sanderson never made me for one second believe she really had the background he gave her. She was the Walt Disney version of a rough steet kid, or a rough street kid as imagined by a sheltered 14 y.o. boy with very little idea of what being a street kid and living rough really are in reality. Most of his characters were like this, too clean (he's better at geeky/scholarly characters, closer to his own experiences...).


There's depth in his books for sure (Sanderson has tons of great ideas -it's one of his strengths, if his use of them isn't always that interesting, or too superficial), but the most detailed aspects in Sanderson's books aren't the aspects that really interest me (like magic systems. Mistborn's is great, especially for action scenes and would be awesome on screen. I just don't care much for action-oriented books, I prefer movies for this genre). I would definitely recommend him warmly to teenagers into action SF/fantasy. There's nothing wrong with the novels, in their genre they're quite good. Just not books for me.

And I also think (truly) that Hollywood could really use guys like him, to write original sf/fantasy and movies directly for the screen, instead of adapting novels. He's got the flair for visually impressive or simply interesting stuff, he's got rhythm, and a huge imagination. Just imagine how great the guy could do if he had to write for shows like Heroes, or if he could take all his great ideas and create a Fantasy TV show, a whole universe that would exist only for a TV show, exploit the strengths of the medium and take the limitations into account in the world building and cast itself. Mistborn would have been a great universe to carry straight to a visual medium. The novel (the first especially) reads more like you're watching a movie than you're reading a book.