Introduction

Welcome to class, guys. This is Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 Brandon
Sanderson lectures.
Thank you, guys, for coming. You do not need to clap.
History
Let me start this class by giving you a little history of why this class exists.
Way back when in the '80s, Orson Scott Card was going to teach a creative writing
class
on campus. Everyone was really excited about it. A bunch of people signed up for
it. Then for various reasons he was unable to teach the class.
So a professor at BYU, who was a literature professor who liked science fiction,
started teaching a class on how to write science fiction and fantasy so that those
people who had signed
up would still have a class. It was popular. People kept taking it. It was very
exciting for them to have a class about sci fi/fantasy.
The Class
This class started in, like, '85 or something, and kept going. I was a student at
BYU from '94 to 2000, and I didn't end up taking the class until 2000.
For various reasons it didn't fit my schedule. In 2000, David Wolverton, also known
as Dave Farland under his pen name, started teaching
the class. Doc Smith, who had been the professor who was teaching it, he had
medical issues and
stepped down from it, and they wanted to get a professional writer to teach it.
When I heard that there was an actual professional writer teaching a class, I was
really excited.
Like, the idea of being able to go and listen to a pro in the field was really
interesting
to me. I didn't know the half of it. That class was the single most valuable class
I took my entire career at BYU.
This is because, while my other professors were really good about talking about
things like theme, and finding your inner writing soul, and all this sort of stuff,
they couldn't
really talk about how to build a compelling character. They couldn't talk about,
here is how you take a plot structure and you adapt it to
your own story in a way that is interesting, compelling, and original. They
certainly couldn't talk about what to do when someone actually offers you a
contract.
None of this stuff could I get from most of the professors. Now, there are
occasionally other professors that teach who have experience.
Why I took this class
I just hadn't been able to take their classes yet. I'm not saying that I'm the only
one that can give you this.
But I took that class and it changed everything for me. I had already written eight
novels at that point.
I knew how to put my proverbial shoulder to the wheel and write stories, but I did
not
know how to refine them, and I did not know how to take them out and actually
publish them.
Dave taught me all of that. Dave eventually retired from teaching and moved off to
do other works, and the class
was going to get cancelled. Some of the professors I knew at the time came to me
and said, "Brandon, will you teach
it?" At that point, I had sold a book, but had not published the book, so I was
very much
an unknown quantity. But they're like, "We don't want the class to be cancelled.
Will you take it over?"
That was 2004. So I took it over and I've had the class ever since. My career since
then has taken off, very fortunately.
Everything's gone very well. But I haven't been willing to let go of this one
class, because I feel like this class
was-- if you can point to a single moment in my career that was the most
influential in me actually getting published, it was probably taking this class in
2000, 20 years ago now.
And so I thought it's a resource that I need to make sure keeps happening. So I try
to format it in a way that it would help me as a new writer taking the class.
That means we are focused on the nuts and bolts of writing. You can get, from other
classes, great things on how to kind of approach your theme and
things like that. We're going to focus on plot, setting, character, and business.
And we will have two weeks on each of those, with some interstitials where I
sometimes bring in other writers to talk about things that I'm a little weaker in.
Like Mary Robinette Kowal is going to be in town and I've asked her if she'll come
talk to you about writing short fiction, and things like that.
So I try to bring in some people who really know what they're doing to talk about
some of the stuff that I'm not quite as knowledgeable about.
The goal is that, like I said, we will use a very nuts and bolts approach.
The goal of this class
For the purpose of this class, I'm going to pretend that you want to be a
professional
writer in science fiction and fantasy within the next 10 years.
You do not have to have that as your goal. Let's make that very clear.
A lot of times in the arts, we, how shall we say, we have this sense that is
actually,
I think, sometimes detrimental. And I can express this best by, I don't know if any
of you writers have had this, but you
tell your friends and your family, "I'm working on a book." And what do they
immediately jump to?
"Is it published? How much is they gonna pay you for it?" Like, that is the first
thing that people jump to, unless they jump to, "Oh, you poor
soul. You're never going to be employed." I once had that actually after I got
published.
It was really great. It was one of those things you dream about. Where you're like,
"Oh, maybe someday I'll be able to actually answer this."
And someone did. I was at a party and they said, "What do you do for a living?" I
said, "I'm a writer."
They said, "Oh, so you're unemployed." I said, "I hit the New York Times list last
week." It was great.
It does happen. Anyway.
Writing is good for you
But you don't have to have, as your goal, that you want to be a professional
writer.
You can write because it's good for you, and I really think it is. In our society,
if someone came to me in their 40s, like I am, and I'm like, "What do you
do?" They're like, "Oh, I love to play basketball. I go play every Wednesday." I
would not jump to, "When are you going to play for the NBA?"
Probably not going to happen to a lot of 40 year olds who already aren't, like--
Let's just say, Utah Valley 40-year-old guys are not going off to the NBA.
But I would think, "That's great. That's good for you." Going and being active and
having a hobby, going and playing a sport, it's just really
good for you. I sincerely believe that writing stories is the same way, that simply
learning to communicate
better, learning to take the stories in your head and put them on the page in a way
that
people will find engaging and will connect to emotionally, this is just good for
you.
So if you're in here because you're like, "Hey, that sounds like fun," you are
totally
You are totally welcome
welcome. If you've never written anything in your life, you are totally welcome. If
you are, like, thought you were signing up for Chem 107 and you got here, and
you're
like, "Oh, no. I'm surrounded by nerds," you're welcome here.
Whatever it is you want to do. If you don't even like sci fi/fantasy, if you want
to write literary fiction about boring
people going through boring problems, you're totally welcome here.
Snide remarks notwithstanding. No, really. You are absolutely welcome to use this
class however it can help you to achieve your own
goals. Oftentimes, I have people who just love to game. They are GMs. They're like,
"I want to build better worlds for my players."
Perfectly valid reason to take this class. I am going to pretend, during the hour
and 15 minutes that I teach this every week, that
you want to be me in 10 years or less. You want to be living, full time, off of
your writing, and being very successful at it.
I'm going to pretend that's the case. Because then I can give you all the
information you need, and then you can take it and pick
out the pieces that you want in order to make
your writing goals happen, whatever they are. Okay?
I do want to give a shout out to the people here who do want to be Brandon
Sanderson,
or, you know, a better version of him.
You probably, I don't know if your life was like mine. You have probably been told
many, many times, "You can't do that."
Or, "Oh, um, that doesn't really happen to people."
I grew up hearing that from people that I loved and who were good intentioned.
They really were, and they did have good points. My mother, whom I love, is an
accountant.
When I said I want to be a writer, she's like, "Hmm. Maybe you should be a doctor,
and then you can write on the side, because all those doctors
go golfing all the time. You could just go write stories."
This was not terrible advice. But it does get a little disheartening when everyone
you tell you want to do this for
a living either says, "Oh, great. Where's the money?" Or, "Oh, you poor fool."
So I want to tell you something I learned by taking this class. Maybe one of the
most important things was just that Dave showed up and said, "Guess
what? I'm a professional writer. I was a BYU student," in '85, I think he was. He
took this class in '85 or '86.
"And now I'm a full-time, professional writer. Him just saying that made me say,
"Oh, wow.
It can happen." And people say it's a one-in-a-million shot. Well, I bet I could
add up how many people took that class.
There would be less than a million people, and Dave made it. When I took Dave's
class in 2000, there were 20 people in the classroom.
Five of us went pro in one level or another. Now, some of us went pro as editors.
Some of us went pro in that we published short stories in professional fields, but
never earned a full-time living.
But I was in that class. Dan Wells was in that class. Peter Ahlstrom was in that
class.
Peter went off and became an editor at Tokyopop, and then became a professional
editor for
them, and then I hired him. Kristy was in that class. She is now a professional,
full-time freelance editor.
So we have two editors and two writers I know about who went 100% full time with
their writing,
and there were several others of us who went half time, which is where I get my
fifth person.
If you look at that and you're like, "Wow. Five out of 20, that's kind of a one in
four shot."
I don't know, we might be a deviant group. But the chances are better than you
think they are.
The problem is, if you went to, let's say, your biochemistry class orientation and
they
said, "One in four of you is going to be able to get a job in this field," you
would probably
be skeptical. Particularly if they said, which I kind of have to say, judging by my
former students,
it's really more like one in 20. One in 20 of my students, ish, over the years I've
taught this, have gone full-time pro.
People who dont go pro
If you showed up to law school and they said, "Yeah, we're going to let one in 20
of you actually be an attorney," you'd be like, "Uh, no!"
Well, what's the point then? So the chances are against you, but they're not one in
a million.
And people that don't go pro that took that class. For instance, I have someone in
my writing group.
She never went pro. She's writing professional quality work. She is a fantastic
writer.
But she likes to write a book every three or four years and publishing them is not
as
big a drive for her as simply telling her stories, because she wants to tell her
stories.
They're fantastic stories. I'm convinced she will sell one one day, pretty soon.
Come to Jesus moment
That is not a fail state. You have to be willing to accept that that's not a fail
state.
At one point in my career, this was after I'd taken the class but before I sold, I
kind
of had a come to Jesus moment. I guess I can say that at BYU, I probably should
have come to Jesus before then.
But a metaphorical come to Jesus moment, where I'm like, "What am I doing?"
At that point, I'd written 12 novels, and I had not sold any of them.
I kept sending them out to publishers, and I kept getting two responses. Number
one, "Wow, these are long."
Number two, "Can't you just write more like George Martin?" No, he was the person
that was selling right then.
His are big, so I don't know why they were complaining about the first one. They
were really looking for Joe Abercrombie.
They were like, "Where is Joe Abercrombie? We know he's out there somewhere. We
want to publish him." They wanted short, fast-paced, George R. Martin style stuff.
They just were rejecting me right and left. I was not making any headway at all.
I thought, "Huh. Maybe they're right, all the people who say, 'We're really worried
about you, Brandon.'"
My dad would call and be like, "Son, your mother's really worried."
Yeah. I kind of had to ask myself, I'm like, "What does my success look like?
What am I willing to accept?" I had to make the call that if I died, let's be
optimistic, in my 100s, right, with 150
unpublished manuscripts, was I okay with that? Was I going to keep doing this, even
if I knew I would never get published?
I realized, yeah, I would. I would keep going. Maybe I wouldn't go at the rate I
was going.
I would have to find a real job, for one thing. Grad school could only delay for so
long.
But I was going to keep writing. I was going to keep telling my stories. And I made
the call that I was just going to keep doing this, even if I eventually never
sold anything and never made a living. And that took a big weight off of my
shoulders, where I realized—
It is important to be chasing publication. I'm going to tell you guys how to do it.
But you should be focusing on the fact that you want to tell these stories, that
it's
good for you, that this is something you kind of have to do. And not in this sort
of mystical way.
A lot of writing classes I took would be like, you'll know if you have to be a
writer.
And I hate that. Because I feel like writing is good for you.
And I don't think there are people who are predestined to be writers and people who
aren't.
I do think luck plays a lot into whether you make it full time. But you can divorce
the "I have to be professional and make a full-time living" from the "I just
like telling stories." And that person, I don't think, I think anyone can decide
that.
If you want to tell stories, tell stories. Don't listen to people who say, "You
must be one of the chosen few."
Um, no. Tell your stories. Tell them the way you want to tell them.
You might not make it
At the same time, I have to warn you, you might not make it. You might spend the
next 20 years of your life writing books and never sell one.
It's totally possible. In fact, it's more likely than you becoming me.
That said, everyone I've known who stuck with this 10 years or more, and has
written the
books, none of them regret it. Every one of them is like, "Yeah, that was great.
I'm so happy I did it.
So happy I kept writing my stories. I'm sad I didn't sell. Yes, of course I am. I
want to sell a million copies, Brandon, like you did.
But it's good for me. I like it. The stories are great.
I enjoy them. And maybe someday I'll make it." You can shoot for that at the lowest
level of success rate.
I have written my stories. I've gotten better as a writer. I'm proud of what I've
written, and maybe I'll make it someday still.
Keep that in mind. All right. That's my kind of introduction number one to this.
Teaching people how to write
The introduction number two is, can you really teach people how to write?
That's a question, but it fits. Can you really teach people how to write? This is
something I have to ask myself a lot, looking back at my life, my career, taking
the class and things like that. What is the role of an instructor? Other than like,
the most useful thing I think I could probably do is get up here and say,
look, you've got to train yourself to write. You've got to spend 10 years, write a
bunch of different books.
Work hard at it. Write consistently. And that's 90% of what you need to do.
That sentence right there will cover it. Almost every question you'll have for me
in this class, and I'll let you ask questions
about what do I do, most of them will come down to try a few things, practice some
more,
see if you get better, if you don't try something else. That's most writing advice.
So why am I here standing on a stage? In fact, it gets even kind of a little bit
worse than that.
Because writers will give you contradictory advice all the time.
You guys had this? Some of you are nodding. Go read a how-to-write book from a
famous writer like, Stephen King's On Writing is
a fantastic writing book. You will read this, and he will talk about what you do to
become a writer. You'll be like, wow, I guess I better do that.
And then you'll read a different book from someone else and they'll be like, "Do it
this way," and it's completely different.
I often use an example of this being discovery writing versus outline writing.
Writers tend to fall into two general camps, and really it's a spectrum that you
fall along
somewhere. The two general camps tend to be what, George Martin uses the term
gardener, a discovery
writer. I really like the term gardener. What a gardener does, is a gardener starts
a story with an interesting premise or some
interesting characters, and they just explore their story as they start writing,
and then
they just kind of go wherever their winds take them. George Martin is a gardener,
pretty famously.
Stephen King is probably the most famous gardener out there. They do not use an
outline.
For a lot of gardeners, if you have an outline, and you work really a lot on your
outline,
what happens is, your brain feels like you've already written the story. You lose
all excitement for working on the story, and you get bored of it as soon as
you start. Now, on the other side are what George calls architects, another term I
really like.
An architect is someone who writes way better if they have a structure to hang
their story
on. Architects tend to work better in this way because what they can do is they can
outline
a whole bunch of stuff up front, and then when they're working on a given chapter,
they don't have to worry about all the other stuff because they've already fixed
that.
They can focus in on this one chapter and do this one chapter the way that they
want to.
The secret is, even the architects are discovery writing. They're just doing it in
smaller jumps.
The architect is leaping between two bullet points rather than into the complete
unknown.
But architects tend to hate revision. Architects tend to do way better with a
structured outline.
But these two are kind of opposites at their extremes. Doesn't mean you can't be a
hybrid. But if you're the type of person that if making an outline ruins the
process for you and destroys
your ability to keep writing, then you can't follow the advice that I have read
multiple times from authors that say you must have an outline.
So what do you do? Well, you have to learn when to ignore me.
Me representing all the people giving you advice about your writing. You have to
understand that writing is really individual, and there is no right way to write
a book. There can be a lot of wrong ways for you, and there can be multiple right
ways for you.
That's part of the fun of writing. In fact, most writers use a different
combination of discovery writing and outline writer tactics,
depending on the book that they're writing at the moment. And they tend to evolve
and change the more that they come to understand their own process
and the longer they go in their career. Really, this whole outline writer versus
discovery writing thing is a false dichotomy, but it's
a model we use to discuss how a lot of writers work and what might help you.
You have to learn that whenever someone gives you writing advice, they are saying,
for me,
this is what works. For me, I have found this experience makes me write stories
that I like.
You have to be willing to say, all right, maybe I'll try that. I'll give it a go
and see what happens.
And treat these things all like tools in your toolbox to help you write better
stories.
And if it doesn't work, you've got to be willing to throw it away. Now, maybe not
throw it all the way away.
Maybe put it in that toolbox and be ready to grab it later on when you change in
your
career. But you have to be willing to understand that all of these writing modes,
these models,
these things, this is just all stuff that we come up with to try to explain what
we're doing and to help us with problems.
There's another thing I'd like you to understand. A lot of the stuff that I'll talk
about in this class is the sort of thing that writers,
professional writers, start doing by instinct, rather than stuff that we always
follow exactly
to the T every time. What do I mean by this? Let me explain using a Magic: The
Gathering metaphor.
We are in a sci-fi writing class, I once heard a professional Magic: The Gathering
player, which is my nerd obsession, talk about how they got better as a Magic
player.
What they said is, when they first started playing, there were so many little
complex minutia about certain things in the game that they had to focus on those
little things just
to make sure that they weren't making mistakes. The further they got playing, the
more they realized that by focusing on things they'd
started to do those things by instinct, and that they then had brain space to start
focusing
on higher level, and higher level, and different tactics in playing the game.
What really happened as someone became professional as a Magic player was that they
moved through doing more and more by instinct and having more and more space in
their brain to focus
on different parts of playing the game. I think this absolutely is true for writing
as well.
Writing
I feel that the more I have written, the more by instinct I have been able to do
simple
things, such as cut the passive voice from my writing while I'm just writing a
rough draft.
The more I've been able to, by instinct, understand the pacing in this chapter is
too slow. I need to speed it up, either by trimming up here, or by making this next
part come
faster, or by putting something in the middle that gives us some sense of progress.
You start doing these things by instinct, and what you can start doing is then
thinking
about bigger and bigger and more important, no, more important's the wrong term,
but different
things to improve your writing. What you're going to be doing as a writer is, you
are going to, by practicing, you are
going to start basically sticking stuff into your instinct.
Your long-term memory rather than your RAM? I don't know. Computer people, help me
out.
You put this in your BIOS? I don't know. I don't know computers.
Don't worry about it. They get it. They get it. But you're going to be able to
focus on different things as you start writing, and other things
will come to you by instinct. This is why the single best thing you can do to be a
better writer is to make good habits
for writing consistently. Now, put an asterisk on that, because what does writing
consistently mean?
Writing Consistently
It's going to mean a different thing for almost every person in this class, like I
talked about earlier.
For some writers, writing consistently means working on their outline every day for
eight
months, and then spending four months working 12-hour days on their book,
completely binge-writing
it and being done. I know people that that is their way of working, and every year
consistently that's what they
do. They write their book in four months after spending eight months fiddling with
an outline.
I know other people who are more like myself, this is what I do, who get up and
they write
2,000-3,000 words every day. I do it in two 4-hour sessions every day, very
consistently.
Build a castle one brick at a time. Just keep on going. That is my method.
For other people who are working day jobs, they're like, that's a luxury, Brandon.
I don't get to do that.
What I get to do is I get to spend my lunch hour working on whatever outline I'm
going to write for that day, and then when I get home I have one hour after the
kids go to
bed that I can work on my story. Other people will be like, I can't even do that.
Four hours on a Saturday, that's my best I can manage, four hours a week.
The Goal is Consistency
This is going to be different for each of you. But the goal is consistency.
Your average writer writes somewhere between 300 and 700 words an hour when they
are working
on new prose. If you fall a little under or a little above this, no problem.
Everybody's different.
But your average writer's going to be in there somewhere, with 500 words kind of
being what a lot of people can do in an hour's work.
That goes way up, by the way, if you spend a whole week thinking about what this
awesome scene you're going to write is, and then you only get one hour to write it,
and you zip
out 1,500 or 2,000 words for that one hour. I've had times in my life where that's
where I had to be.
But on average, 500 words an hour. That means that if you can find four hours a
week, you can write 2,000 words.
Your average novel is around 100,000 words. That's actually a little long for your
average novel. Which means that one year, you're going to write a book if you can
only find four hours
a week, one 4-hour session on a Saturday. If you can't find that, but you can get
two hours a week, you can write a book in two
years. Two years is a perfectly acceptable pace for doing that.
Consistency is going to trump binge writing a lot of the time. But, asterisk, if
you are naturally a binge writer, then you should learn to work with
that, and try something else because it might be easier another way, but if it
doesn't,
then embrace this is how you write, and figure out a way to make your schedule work
for that. It works really well for teachers, because a lot of writing-- Writing is
one of these
jobs that's very hard to do if you have another job that takes a lot of your brain
space.
A lot of people ask, what are the perfect jobs to get while I'm waiting to be a
writer? I say, I don't know what the perfect job is for you, but I can name a
couple of them you
probably don't want to do. One is be a computer programmer. I took one computer
programming class in college at BYU 20-something years ago, and it was
really instructive, in that it was the only class that I would do my homework for,
and then I would sit down to write and feel like I couldn't write because I'd
already spent
all this time and energy on writing code, and it felt like the same sort of thing.
Your mileage may vary. It may be very different for you. You might be like, you
know what? I'm naturally a better writer because I write code.
For me, writing code exhausted me for writing stories. Being a teacher is another
one I hear from a lot of people, that because being a teacher
is one of those jobs you don't leave when you leave school, that it's always work,
thinking
about the students, thinking about papers. This can make it really hard to be a
writer. What tends to be really good is, like, laying bricks.
No one tells you this in college. They're like, oh, yeah, go get an English degree
and get an English major job, when
really, going and laying bricks tends to be a really good job for a writer, because
you can put on headphones, listen to music, and go through your plot outline or
what you're
going to write that day, and then go home and be relaxed and sit in a chair and
write it.
Menial labor tends to actually be really great for writers, for that reason. Kind
of bizarre and inverse of what you would think.
Most of us don't have that luxury, the luxury of becoming a brick layer.
Maybe I shouldn't phrase it that way. But most of us in a college setting need to
major in something that then is going to lead
to some sort of career similar to what they're majoring in, and I get that.
Most English majors are going to go get a tech writing job, or a copy editing job,
or
something completely unrelated to English because it's one of those generic
degrees. But I had a lot of friends who became tech writers, and they still were
able to write
their stories. So it's not like it's going to ruin you. If you're like, "I'm 3-1/2
years into a computer science degree, Brandon," totally can work.
I have code monkey friends who write books. I'm just saying, it's going to vary for
each person.
But this is what I found. I worked a graveyard shift at a hotel. I wrote from 11:00
PM until 5:00 AM every day, and that's how I wrote books when I was
going to school full time and working full time. I had quite the luxury in that.
And you wouldn't think a minimum-wage job is a luxury.
But having the privilege that I could just get a minimum-wage job, and I didn't
have to worry about my finances so that was okay, I was really lucky and fortunate
that I was
in a position where I could work for $6 an hour. That was enough to cover all my
expenses and I could write books at work.
Most people can't do that. You can't just go give up your entire social life, swap
your sleep schedule, and work a
minimum-wage job in order to become a writer. Worked for me.
But maybe do as I say, not as I did. In this case, where are we going with this?
You're going to have to figure out what works for you. But if you can be
consistent, if you can learn how to do that, then you can make writing
a professional endeavor to you, even if you aren't intending to go pro, or if you
never
do go pro. Let's take a moment and just talk a little bit about, this whole day is
just going to
be orientation stuff. We'll talk about random things like this. I'll probably dig
into the whole discovery writing versus outline writer a little bit
more, so that you understand kind of how the class is going to go. But before that,
let's talk a little bit about being a writer and having a real life.
I think it's important to have a real life. We presume that we're going to be
writing about people's lives and telling stories about
people's experiences. And if we don't actually live our own lives, that's going to
be much harder.
I talk about this because the first day of class 20 years ago when Dave taught this
class,
one of the things he said that stuck with me all this time, is he said, "I have a
lot of friends who say, oh, you shouldn't get married.
You shouldn't have a family. That will distract you from your calling as a writer."
I haven't had that told to me a lot.
I maybe move in different circles, but I have heard it happening. Dave said, "I
have found that having a family has just given me way more to write about
than if I hadn't." But there are some things I want to talk about with this, to
kind of help you guys as writers
understand this. One of the biggest division points I've found in relationships
among my writer friends,
Division
and this happens kind of unexpectedly, is that the more consumed you become with
your
writing, the more other people in your life might feel like they are being left out
of
something that is all-consuming and passionate for you. This is a real issue,
particularly with me up here saying you ideally want to try to
write every day for an hour or two. Ideally, if you want to be doing this
professionally in 10 years, you want to jump start that by
writing two hours every day for the next 10 years.
Finding two extra hours every day can be rough, particularly if you have any kind
of social
life. Not everyone can be like me, working a graveyard shift and having no social
life.
Friends
What happens is, with a lot of my friends, and this actually, I notice this. Let me
tell you it through eyes of my wife.
Emily and I got married in 2006. So she didn't have to suffer through all of the
working a graveyard shift stuff.
But she also didn't have to deal with Brandon the superstar. She could just meet
Brandon the wannabe new writer.
Emily and I, she came from the English major world.
She was an English teacher, and I was a writer, and a sometimes professor at BYU.
And so we were quite the good match, and we had a lot of interests in common. We
get along really well.
But I can still remember one time when I went out to dinner with Brandon Mull and
Shannon
Hale, and we were all out at dinner together. We were all chatting, and it was like
this wonderful dinner.
Connecting really well with these other authors. It was one of the early ones
before I knew Mull really well, and it was really fun to
get to know him, this person that people kept bringing me his books on accident to
sign.
We both were like, when a kid does that we're like, uh, we should probably just
sign it anyway.
The poor kid would be like, yeah, Mull, M-U-L-L.
We don't do that. We usually sign each other’s books and be like, "I'm the wrong
Brandon, but I'm still going to sign your book because you waited all this time."
By the way, okay, you get lots of asides in this class.
Brandon Sanderson
I thought I was, like, when I grew up in Nebraska, I was the only Brandon, like, in
my school.
It was a really original, interesting name. I'm like, my parents came up with this
great, original, interesting name. And then I moved to Utah to go to BYU and there
were five in my freshman dorm.
And then I realized, it's a Mormon name. Who would have thought? It's not in any of
the scriptures, but it totally is a Mormon name.
There's a ton. Brandon Flowers. Brandon Mull. Brandon Sanderson. There's a lot of
Brandons out there with an LDS background.
Who knew? But anyway, I'm out to dinner with Mull, and with Shannon, and we're
chatting, and it's
really great. We're sharing ideas about our writing and stuff like that. It was at,
by the way, Mama Chus.
You guys like Mama Chus? Thumbs up. After the dinner, I turned to Emily and said,
"Wasn't that the best dinner ever?"
She was like, "You didn't look at me one time the entire dinner. I just sat there
and felt invisible."
Yeah. And you're like, oh-h-h-h.
Early in our marriage. I'm better now. I'm way better now. But this is a real thing
that I've come to find happens, that because the writers kind
of get into their worlds, and they're doing this thing that is, like, really cool.
Writing is really cool. It's like this-- I don't like to get too mystical about it,
but you've got a blank page and
you make something out of that. And it's like, what's in your brain, and someone
else reads it, and they imagine something
pretty similar to that. It's like you can write things and people across the world
from completely different
backgrounds can imagine this thing that you've written, and you've got a connection
with someone that is completely different from you, that you've never met.
It's really cool. It's really this purely creative thing, where you're taking
nothing and making something
from it. I love it. But you can get so invested in that that the people in your
lives feel really left out.
So I'm going to give you this warning at the beginning of the class. I'm going to,
as a writer, push you to write a lot.
But I'm going to suggest that you also learn to balance your life.
Because it's very easy to burn out as a writer. It's very easy to because so
consumed by this that it destroys aspects of your life.
The thing that I've done, this is, again, just one of these tools to try, is that I
started realizing that when I was with my family, I needed to be with my family.
This was a hard transition for me, because I got married in my 30s. I had spent a
lot of time learning to be a writer, and one of the things you learn to
do as a writer, particularly one who has to work full time and go to school full
time, is that you start to look for those moments when no one is asking you to do
anything,
and you use those to work on your stories. You carry around a notebook. You carry
around your phone.
Writers don't get bored, which is great. People are like, "Oh, you were left alone,
by yourself, waiting for me to show up for
a half hour. I'm so sorry." And you're like, "It was the only half hour that no one
bugged me all day.
I got so much work done, even though it was all up here." I started to use driving
time.
It's great for this. Something about moving while you're going and thinking, is
just really handy for coming
up with ideas. This is why, by the way, Kevin J. Anderson, aside, he goes on hikes
and dictates all his
books on hikes. He uses completely dictation software so he can be moving when he's
writing.
I know other people who've tried it and it actually works for them. It's never
worked for me, because I don't think with spoken word the same way I do on
the page. But I might be able to train myself if I really wanted to. But anyway, I
was using all these moments.
And so when I was driving somewhere, my wife would say, "I know when you're
thinking about a story, because if I say something you jolt, and you look at me
like, 'What have you just
done? I was in Roshar and it was cool.'"
Now I'm in a minivan. Where is my Spren?
I started to realize; this could take over everything.
And if instead I started putting boundaries in place to contain the imagination,
and then
be with my family when I was supposed to be with my family, my life would be
better. So at 5:30, I am not allowed to work on books from 5:30 until 9:00.
Doesn't matter if I have free time. Doesn't matter if the family is away or
something like that.
I have this barrier in place, and it has been so good for my life. Because it's
also good to kind of step out into the real world.
People accuse us of living in fantasy worlds. They don't understand. We're not
living in fantasy worlds. We don't lose track of the real world.
It's not like we are all these people who are schizophrenic and can't tell the
difference
between hallucinations and reality. That is no what it is. People always say that,
and it always bugs me, because that's not what it is.
I am constructing something. I'm building something. It's really engaging. It's
really fulfilling.
But it's not like I'm forgetting the world I live in, and things like that.
Even if, when you interrupt me, I look like I'm really annoyed, because I kind of
am really annoyed, because I was making a really cool connection between two
different parts of
my story. That barrier lets me step out, live my life as it should be lived,
interacting with other
people, and it makes me that much more refreshed when I go back to writing. This is
why I do two sessions, by the way.
Partially because I don't want to get up in the morning, because I'm a writer.
I didn't do this job to get up at 8:00 AM. So I get up at noon.
People are always asking me about it and they're like, "Oh, you learned that while
you were working the graveyard shift." I'm like, "That's right.
I did all those years at the graveyard shift and it has changed me, and now I have
to suffer and live with this whole off schedule."
No, no. I was like this before the graveyard shift. I've always wanted, I like
being up at night.
People leave me alone. So doing two sessions, for me, from about 1:00 until 5:00,
and then about 10:00 until
2:00 is great for my writing, because I have that time in between that just
refreshes and relaxes me.
I get to go do something else. And then when I sit back down to write, I'm excited
to do it again for another four-hour
session. I recommend finding, and at least understanding, what this can do to the
relationships in your
life, and taking some steps, they don't have to be the steps I took, to make sure
that it doesn't consume you to the point that it ruins your ability to have good
relationships.
On the flip side, here are some tips you can give to a spouse or roommates, that
you can
talk about with them, to help them understand. Because one thing that people don't
generally understand about most writers, again, writers
are different, so everyone's different, most writers, takes us a little time to get
into
it. I don't know if this is the case for you. But you sit down with your laptop,
and if you were to time yourself, for me that first
hour, that's not a 500-word-an-hour hour. That's like a 200 words.
And then that third hour is like 1,000 words in an hour. And then, like the fourth
hour I'm starting to run out of steam, and it's like an average
one, and the one in between is like an average one. So if I get interrupted for 15
minutes, after I've spent 45 minutes, like, really getting
it going, what it does is it can reset me back to the first hour, the 200-word
thing.
What my wife didn't understand, and I didn't even understand at the time, is that a
5 to
15-minute interruption can mean more like a 45-minute delay in me getting to that
zone
where the writing's really working for me. Learning that, if this is the case for
you, and being able to explain this block of time,
whatever it is, is so precious, because it's only at the middle where it will
really start coming and working for me.
If you can get your friends and family to be the guardians of that time, so that
they
have a part in it, so you're like, "These two hours, make sure no one interrupts
me, and then I will be with you after I have done those two hours, because I will
be so much
more relaxed that I've gotten my writing done." My wife has learned this. She's
like, "Wow, if he gets his writing done, everything is great.
But if he doesn't get his writing done multiple days in a row, he starts to get
really anxious."
And she will tell people, "Brandon hasn't been able to write in a couple of days.
Give him some space."
This is why tours can be miserable in part. But giving her that sort of connection
to the writing, letting her in to the brainstorming,
when I talk about, "Oh, I made this cool connection. Isn't this cool?" has been
really helpful for our relationship, and for my career in
multiple ways. She's really good at guarding my time. She makes sure that I don't
get interrupted.
In exchange, when, not only-- Best-selling books are really good for marriages,
because
you don't have to worry when the money is coming in. If books aren't selling, it's
bad for marriages, because it can be all the stress.
So there is that. But there's also the idea that we're together on this, and we
have a shared goal and a shared
focus. Let me ask, before I do some stuff on the board, just about discovery
writing.
It's not actually stuff on the board. You'll understand in a minute. Any questions
about what I've talked about here, about writing life, about becoming professional,
and how you're treating this? Q: How do you overcome the sense of despair that
you're not going to be able to make it?
How do I overcome the sense of despair that you're not going to be able to make it?
This comes from a couple of places for me, or did back in the days. Because I spent
a lot of time not making it until I did.
One was, Pandora's box, I still had hope.
It could always happen. There are a lot of writers who toiled in obscurity for a
long time, and then eventually sell.
Don't let anyone tell you that if you haven't made it in 10 years that you just
will never make it.
Go ask George R. Martin what people said to him when he was a mid-lister for 30
years and barely was able to get people to read his books, for a long time, writing
great
books, and then suddenly he became the best-selling fantasy author in the world.
Yeah, there is that hope. You can always still make it.
Another is, for me, learning to focus on, am I satisfied with the writing?
Am I proud of what I've done? And making sure that I am. Because it's a real
achievement to finish things.
I meet a lot of people who want to be writers. This class excluded, you want to bet
what percentage of them actually finish a novel?
Not very many. If you finish a novel, you are in a more select crowd than the
select crowd between people
who have finished a novel and gotten published. The cutoff percentage, the fall-off
percentage of people who never finish a novel is much
larger than the fall-off between those who finish a novel and get published. If you
finish a novel, you are already in a more select crowd, the most select crowd
you could probably be in as a writer, if you're looking at pure divisions of
numbers, pure
drop-offs between achieving certain goals. Be proud of the fact that you're
finishing things.
If you're not, we're going to work in this class on learning how to. Okay? Because
that you have power over.
Focus on what you have power over. You have power over whether you finish your
stories. You have power over whether you're consistent.
You have power over whether you are excited and interested in the stories you're
creating.
You do not have as much power over whether you're going to make it or not. That
helped me a great deal.
Another thing is to be exploring other options. Self-publishing is a real thing.
It's possible that you are totally of professional quality in your writing and you
just haven't
found an editor who's willing to give the books a chance, and you belong in self-
publishing
as an indie author. It's also possible that you write things that are so esoteric
that you have a small potential
fan base, but you can be satisfied that you are writing great books for them, and
you are publishing the books for them, and you find a job adjacent to being a
novelist that
is still really fulfilling to you. I mean, there are a lot of things to do, and
none of them are things, like, none of them
are going to take away that despair entirely. Because there's a part of you that's
like, "I should be selling these books.
These are really good books." Or, depending on your psychology, "My books are
terrible.
I am terrible. What am I doing?" That's equally likely.
That one's more pernicious. Let's point that out. It is probably wrong.
But that's what I did. Ask other people. Ask other writers.
Make sure you're part of the community, and things like that, because that can
help. I got published because Dan Wells met an editor at a convention.
The editor turned out to be a really good match for me and an only mediocre match
for
Dan, and Dan introduced me to the editor, and the editor bought my book. Having
connections with other writers can be really handy.
What other questions do you guys got? Anything you want to throw at me? Yeah, over
here. Q: How do you get into that writing community?
How do you get into that writing community? Well, you are in the right place.
Because after I talk about this next little thing for just a bit, we're going to
split
Writing Groups
into writing groups, and that's part of this class. We're going to talk about how
to do writing groups and stuff like that.
Actually, you know what? We've only got 15 minutes left. Let's move on to that
portion. I'll talk more about discovery writers and things another day.
Let's talk about writing groups. For this class, I am going to require the people
who are in the 15-person session, you
know who you are, you've already applied and gotten in, we will go and chat in
private
after this. That's the class I go to after this. For those who don't know, there's
a 1 hour 15-minute lecture, and then I take 15 writers
who have applied ahead of time and who have gotten in. They're chosen by Karen, my
continuity editor, because I don't have time to do it anymore,
from the applications. And then we do a writing group. We do a workshop.
Taking this class gives you a leg up to where you want to apply to that one. I will
warn you, there's a lot more required of that class than this one.
This one you show up, I give you an A. That one, you're going to have to write a
bunch. That's like, you pretend for a semester you're a professional writer, and
you're writing
as much as that is, and you have to learn to juggle that with all the other things
in your life, and it's training for that.
That class, I mean, I require 30,000 words, is what I think we came up with.
35,000.
35,000 words in a semester. None of your other writing classes will ever require
that much. I remember when I took a 518 class at BYU and they're like, "You're
going to have to
submit twice, and both submissions have to be 2,000 words."
Half the class was like, "Oh, no! How will I have that ready?" I'm like,
"Seriously?
That's an afternoon."
So 35K. I'm going to require them to be in a writing group. The rest of you, I will
not require to be in a writing group.
But I will explain how you do writing groups, and I will give you the opportunity
to split into writing groups to get practice.
Now, here's the thing. Writing groups are also a tool that work for some people and
not other ones.
Part of the reason I force the class to do it, the 15-person class, is I want them
to
give it a good, pun intended, college try at having a writing group. Because if a
writing group works, it is one of the most useful tools for you in your writing
career. I am still in a writing group with the people I formed a writing group from
in this class
20 years ago. Okay? Dan's not in it anymore because he moved to North Salt Lake and
he doesn't want to drive.
But the other people are still in the group with me, and they are the most useful
group
of people for bouncing ideas against, and things like that, that I have ever had.
When Dan was in the group, he got me published. Peter's in the group. Peter went
off and became a professional editor, and then I finally hired him away when I
needed
an editorial director at my company. He is just invaluable.
So meeting these people in this class was, they were all in the class with me, and
they're
all still together, was super, super relevant. But let me give you the dark side of
writing groups.
Okay? Dark side of writing groups. One really dark side of writing groups is,
particularly newer writers, don't know how
to workshop. And one of the things they'll try to do is they'll try to make your
story into the story
they would write, instead of a better version of the story you want to write.
And that is the single worst thing that can happen in feedback, is someone who is
not
appreciating the story you want to make, and they want to turn it into something
else. New workshoppers are really bad at doing this.
In other words, they're really good at doing a bad thing, which is trying-- And
they're doing it from the goodness of their heart.
They want you to be a better writer. They want to help you. The only way they know
is to tell you how they would do it, which can be completely
wrong for your story. This is extra dangerous if you are by nature more of a
discovery writing.
If you don't think about your story ahead of time, if you're not working from an
outline, someone can come to you and say, "Man, it'd be so much better if you did
this."
And you're like, "My story needs to have that. It was a romance, but now it needs a
mystery."
And the next week someone says, "Oh, you know, if I were doing this, I'd make sure
there
were vampires." You're like, " Romances have vampires these days. I'd better write
vampires into it.
I mean, it was completely not a vampire story.
It was a Regency, but now it's got vampires." And someone else is like, "Oh, I
don't really like stories with female protagonists."
And like, "Oh! I'll change the gender so that everyone--" You can just go
completely spiral out of control
with people giving you feedback and you taking it too sincerely.
Now, the good side of writing groups. The good side of writing groups is they can
be a really great support structure.
Before you get published, having a goal and a deadline for submitting is really
helpful.
And it's okay to have to have a deadline in order to submit.
We all have different psychology. Some of us need a deadline, and so you can create
one for yourself.
There's nothing wrong with that. Having a deadline, having a support group of
people who are going through the same things
you're going through, also of people who are likely to give you good feedback.
A writing group that has been working with you for a while are the types of people
who will learn, hopefully, your writing style, learn to like what you're doing, and
they
will be much better at giving you advice on making the story the way you want to
make it, after they get to know you, and things like that.
You can cultivate a group who eventually will give you good feedback, even though
their feedback at the start is not that great.
Writing Group Guidelines
A couple of guidelines for writing groups.
Okay? I assume that this light turns on.
This is new from last year. We stood up here like [eight's bane] banging stones
against it for a while and couldn't
figure it out. I might have my AV guy come and try and figure it out. Eventually
maybe we'll have a light up here.
Until then, I won't write in the shadow. If you are a workshopper, giving advice,
here's a few points to give you.
Try to be descriptive of your emotions, not proscriptive.
Okay. Try to be descriptive. What this means is, particularly when you're newer at
this, saying, "I was bored," completely
valid. There's never a time when "I was bored" is not a valid response to something
you were
bored by. Saying, "You should add a fight scene" can be really bad advice.
Sometimes it could be good advice. If you really know the person, and know the
thing, and you know the submit-genre and what the writer's trying to do, you could
be like, "I feel like a fight right here would really
snap things together." But it can be bad advice. "I was bored" can never be bad
advice.
It's always valid. Your response to the story always is. Now, the workshopee does
not need to take that.
They can understand, well, maybe you're supposed to be bored. Or maybe this book
isn't connecting and clicking with you, and it's okay because someone else,
that's their favorite scene. There are lots of reasons to not take that advice, but
that response is always valid.
Saying, "I'm confused," always valid. Doesn't matter if you missed something.
It's okay to miss things. The writer needs to know if you've missed stuff. They may
not have made it clear.
Maybe you just missed it. Maybe your kids were crying, or maybe your roommates were
doing a raid, whatever it is
that people do, and there's like a Pokémon that everyone needs to catch and you're
trying
to read while they're all catching their Pokémon, and you missed it, and nothing
needs to be
changed. But it's not invalid that you were confused. Let them know you're
confused. Be descriptive rather than proscriptive.
This comes from-- There's this great thing Hollywood does, and I've loved it ever
since.
They do this test audience thing for a bunch of sitcoms, and they will get an
audience
together, show them the sitcoms, and then afterward ask them questions, and the
questions
are all about the advertisements, because it's not really a test audience for the
sitcoms.
They use the same three test sitcoms that never expected to be aired.
They want to get your reaction to the ads, and they don't want to tell you that
upfront because they want to get your natural reaction.
That's what the writer needs from you. They need your natural reaction as if you
didn't know you were going to be giving feedback
on this. Just reading it and giving them the feedback so that they can be like,
"Oh, that's what
I wanted," or "Oh, I was totally surprised by that."
If you're the workshopee, write it down and don't change anything yet.
That's what that says if you can't read it. My handwriting. Somewhere Mrs. Soukup,
my 2nd grade teacher, is shaking her head, because she trained a
best-selling author, and she warned him his handwriting was bad, and she was not
able
to save him. If you're the workshopee, write it down, but don't change anything
yet.
Give it some time. Give it some space. Listen to the feedback and try to
understand.
Try to get where they're coming from. And understand if that's a reaction you want.
Sometimes you want people to be a little confused. Sometimes you want them to want
something they haven't gotten yet, because you're going
to give it to them in a few chapters. Maybe you're wrong. Maybe you've done
something wrong. They're having the complete wrong reaction.
They're all laughing at this thing that you thought was really serious. Really
important for you to know.
But stay silent.
Unlike whatever it is over there making noise. This is good advice, particularly
when you're new.
Don't say anything. Pretend you are a fly on the wall and they're all sitting
around having a book club discussion
of the book, and you're just writing stuff down. Prevent yourself from defending
yourself.
Prevent yourself from explaining. If you defend yourself, it's just going to make
people less likely to give you feedback in the future.
If you explain it, then it defeats your chance to explain it right in the writing
and have
them get it, and you won't know if you are able to get them to understand it
through
your writing, because you've already explained it and tainted them. One more thing
for the workshopper.
Be sure to say what is good.
The way we do our workshop is we start and we make everyone say what is working up
front,
so the writer doesn't actually change the things that are working. Plus, it's
really good for you to get told what is working and that your writing doesn't
suck before everyone launches in to telling you how terrible your writing is.
So we do a few minutes of that, and then we transition to things that could use a
second
look, is what we call it in my writing group. It's not things that are broken. It's
just things that the reader felt, things that they want to highlight, that you may
want to have a second look at, stuff like that. All I think you guys are going to
enjoy the class.
I'll warn you, it's kind of like a firehose thing where I just talk a whole bunch.
I try to make it entertaining, but if you fall asleep, I won't be offended.
This is for you. Come with questions, because I will try to give lots of Q&A
periods where we can talk
about things that are not working or working for you. If you're interested in being
in a writing group, hang out here.
If you're not interested in being in a writing group, why don't you go ahead and
take off, and then I'll deal with the rest of you.
But anyway, enjoy the class. Thanks for taking it.