The Philosophy of Professional Writing: Brandon Sanderson's Writing Lecture #1 (2025)

BRANDON: Hey! Brandon Sanderson here. Welcome to the 2025 lecture series. These are lectures that I give at my local university, Brigham Young University, about science fiction and fantasy writing. Every week I'm going to have a new one for you. This week we're doing mostly introductory material. I'm going to talk about my philosophy in teaching this class. I'm going to talk about the difference between a discovery writer and an outline writer. I'm going to talk about a lot of interesting sort of philosophy of how to approach being a writer with the eye toward being a professional,

as long as we're in this class. It's not how you have to do it, but it's what I'm going to assume for the hours that you're here with me. So join me here, and then I will see you back every week, hopefully, for another lecture. Hey! Welcome to class! CLASS: (cheering and applause) BRANDON: Oh, I surprised you. CLASS: (cheering and applause) BRANDON: This is How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. If you're not here for science fiction and fantasy, well, you can stay. We'll convert you. We love having you here. So, what this class is,

is Brandon lectures at you for approximately an hour and a half, I believe. And we started this up with it being kind of a normal 218 class, How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy. The class burgeoned. It grew as my notoriety grew to eventually the point that people were packing in, and we had to move to a lecture hall. Hey, how you doing? STUDENT: How are you doing? BRANDON: I'm doing all right. So, these days it really is, and this is how I run it, a lecture series. Now, after this, there is the second class.

I should have my 15, 16 this year, people here who are in that class. That's the by application only. We'll figure out what we're doing with you afterward. And the rest of you, you're welcome to apply for that class. That one's by application only, and we do it every year after this class. So what are we going to do in this class? Well, I am going to come every week, and I am going to turn on a firehose of information. Right? And I'm going to blast you with this firehose of information, and you're going to

try to drink some of it. And that which you can't drink, you can hopefully come back and get on the videos that we are posting this year on YouTube. So you're being recorded. Not much of you. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Only your laughter and maybe the backs of some of your heads. That's why we're in this new, fancier room. ADAM: We have a camera that's going to be capturing their faces. BRANDON: Oh. Your faces are on the camera too. CLASS: (cheering) BRANDON: You should have had to sign a thing. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: That says we're going

to make you internet famous, Nate. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: By the way, who here took the class last year? Those who were here last year, Nate finished a book! CLASS: (cheering and applause) BRANDON: Nate finished a second book! CLASS: (cheering and applause) BRANDON: He's actually finished three, which means he's one off from running a Kickstarter. CLASS: (cheering and applause) BRANDON: Joking. Joking. Joking. So I might make some of you--. So anyway, last year he had expressed that he had trouble, as many authors do, getting really into a project, starting to write, and then losing momentum and

revising the same chapter over and over again and never finishing anything. Am I paraphrasing it right, Nate? And so I started checking up on him every week and embarrassing him in front of class, and he was a very good sport. So I'm happy to see you back, and congratulations. Well done. You're back, too, aren't you? STUDENT: Yeah. BRANDON: Yeah. Good to see you. Some of you I recognize. Some of you--do I recognize you? STUDENT: Yes. BRANDON: Yeah. People take the class so often. You guys intimidate--. Hey! They're all up here. Hey, I recognize you. That's

Skar. CLASS: (laughing) STUDENT: He's annoying. You probably don't remember. BRANDON: I totally know your name. EL: Elle. BRANDON: That's right, Elle. I told you I was going to remember your name. I promised I would at some point. EL: You even put me in a whole book. BRANDON: Yeah. Welcome, Elle. You told me that last time too. I spelled it differently though. EL: E-L. BRANDON: E-L, not just the letter. OK. Well, welcome, El. Good to see you again. So, we will have lots of people running around, doing video recordings. Ignore them. Pretend they're not here. So

what do we got? Well, because we're getting recorded this year, I'm going to try to do better to write on the board what we're going to talk about each week, and then actually keep to it. We'll see how much I deviate from that with various tangents, which I do love and enjoy. But we are going to approach this class from a sort of--we'll talk about this later--a nuts and bolts approach. This shouldn't, hopefully, ruin your artistic expression. In fact, it should help elevate it. We'll talk about that. We are going to spend two weeks each

on plot, setting, character, and the business of writing. All right? Those are kind of our core ideas that we'll cover. I'm usually gone at least one week, and I bring in guest lecturers. In the past, guest lecturers have been people to focus on short story writing, or on indie publishing. And I'll try to get somebody like that who can cover a realm of publishing that--from a place of more expertise. Right? Because on one metric I'm the most successful indie published author ever. But that metric was trading on my already established traditionally published name. So I

usually--we'll see what happens that week. So that'll cover nine of our weeks. Several of our other weeks will be Q&A sessions. Usually what I like to do is I like to have two weeks on, say, plot, and then a Q&A on plot; two weeks on setting, then a Q&A on setting; two weeks on character, Q&A; two weeks on business, Q&A. Right? And that should basically cover the class. In there somewhere I do tend to try to squeeze in mini lectures on revision, and a mini lecture on prose. So we'll see what we can do with

those sorts of things. But let's talk about the beginning idea, my philosophy for this class. What is my philosophy for teaching and for teaching writing in particular? Because writing is kind of hard to teach. Not to make my job sound more cool, because it's kind of hard to teach because you will learn more than I can teach you in this class. Hey, how you doing? By writing your first book, than myself or any person can possibly teach you. Right? Writing as an art requires work and effort. Everything requires work and effort. But the thing about

a lot of artistic pursuits like this is, you need to start exploring with your style. Hey, you're back too. Good to see you. Exploring with your style. Seeing how it goes. Revising. Trying different things. And as you explore writing, you will get better and better, and you will know how to use the tools that people like myself give you. You will also know which tools to ignore. Because one of the key philosophies I have is, writing advice is only as good as its ability to help you individually. You will get bad advice for you. You

will get bad advice for you from me in this class. OK? I try hard not to give you too much of that. But the thing is, writing is so individual that what works for some writers doesn't work for others. For example, the one I often use because it hit me when I was young, and I was working. I was reading a book by Orson Scott Card where he talked about writing, and in it he talked about how important an outline was to his writing, and without it his writing would become a disaster. I then later

read an essay by Stephen King. It may have even been in On Writing, his famous writing book, where he talks about how an outline is the great destroyer of stories. And if you have an outline for your story, it's going to ruin your story. And these are polar opposites. Right? And can you do both? Well, the answer is yes. Most everyone in this room is going to be some mix of what George R. R. Martin calls a gardener versus an architect. He's very good with words, and that's one of his descriptions that I love. He

says some writers are an architect. They build themselves a structure for their story, like a house. And then they hang a story upon it. Other writers, he says, are like a gardener. They go out in the garden, and they nurture something as it starts to grow. And then they see what it becomes. You might have heard the term pantsing for writing. People use that. The truth is that most writers are somewhere in between those two extremes. But you won't know where you are, and indeed what a given project requires, until you try both of them

and make your own Frankenstein monster of a style and a process out of the things that everyone tells you, and what you discover on your own, and that monster will grow and change through your career, and you will do different things. So why am I sometimes going to give you bad advice? Well, it's because it works for 90% of authors but you're the 10%. Or it might be the advice that is good for you 20 years from now when you've changed as an author and you're like, "Hey, I remember that thing. Let's try that." But

right now, it could be destructive. Our philosophy, my philosophy, is to treat you like a chef and not a cook. Those who have been in this class before know I love this metaphor. What does this metaphor mean? Well, in my definitions, a chef is someone like me when it comes to baking, who can follow a recipe. And if I follow the recipe, usually I'll get what I'm trying to make, and it usually tastes something like what I'm trying to make. The problem is, if something goes wrong, I have no idea why it went wrong and

what I could have done to change it. I have no idea what temperature does to baking, only that on this page it says bake it at 325, and if I do that it usually turns out. I don't know the difference between baking soda and baking powder. Except on the page it says use one and not the other, and if you mix them up it's bad. Right? That is what I will term a cook. What is a chef? A chef is a person who can tell you, "Well, when you add this ingredient, it does this." A

chef is a person who can taste something and be like, "Oh, this is what went wrong. Let's try it this way next time and see if it improves it." A chef is someone who can take the various styles of baking that different people use and apply them to their own process and create new things, not from a recipe, but that use the knowledge of previous recipes to create masterful new works. I want you to be a chef when it comes to writing. I want you to learn all the tools and processes. I want you to

learn all the tools and processes. I want you to try them. I want you to work with them. And as you do, learn how to create the effect you want to have with your stories as you write and finish them, rather than the effect other people say you should have. Your goals can be your own. And I'm slightly out of order here because let's talk about being a pro versus being a non-pro writer. It is OK. In fact, it is wonderful, to be a nonprofessional writer. You can be in this class for any reason. You

could have wandered in accidentally, seen that there were people here, and taken a seat, you weirdo. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Right? You're welcome. You're welcome here. You can be here because you're like, "That Sanderson guy, maybe if I take his class I'll get a book signed." You shouldn't be doing that, but I'll make you learn anyway, and so it's good for you. You might be here because you're like, "Well, I need to have a certain number of writing credits and, you know, this is the class that's in the evening that I can take." You might be

here because you want to be a better GM. You might be here because you just love the process. Or you might be here, as the majority of you probably are, because you're like, "Maybe I could become a professional science fiction/fantasy writer." Those are all valid reasons to be here. I would guess the most--the balance, the most common is those who want to be a pro, and those who would like to learn to write a good book now and then as a hobby. Those are my most common students. Wonderful. I think writing is good for you.

And one of the things you're going to have to confront, when you're writing stories and you tell people about it, they're going to ask you a question. Have you been asked this question? What is it? CLASS: Are you published? BRANDON: Are you published? What are you going to do with this? How soon till you can take me out to dinner with the money you make from your books? CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Right? We live in a society that likes to approach things from a utilitarian eye. There are advantages to that. Right? There are advantages to my

mother, when I was 16, discovering that I wanted to be a writer, and saying, "That's nice, dear. You should be a doctor." CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: And I'm like, "But doc--." She's like, "Doctors have a lot of free time. You know how doctors are always golfing? Right? Well, you could be a doctor who writes fantasy novels instead of golfing and also feed your family." CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: She really wanted a doctor, and she got none out of her four children. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Yeah. No doctors. No doctors. She got me. She got my brother who's in

computer programming. That's close to being a doctor. He got the closest. She got a teacher. And she got an artist/fashion designer/charity organizer. That's Jane, who runs Lightweaver for me. And so she got no doctors. She got none married to doctors. But she loves us anyway. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: There is an advantage to people saying that because you do need to ask those questions. Right? But our society treats art too utilitarianly. It doesn't look at the primary purpose of art, which is making the artist's life more enriched, is sincerely what I believe the primary purpose is.

It is to make your life better by creating something. When you go play basketball, unless you happen to have a Wemby-esque height, people are probably not going to ask you after your game in, you know, the church gym, and you're like, "Oh, I can--." You know. And you maybe look more like me. They're not going to say, "So, when are you going to the NBA?" They just--they won't. But they will ask you when you're going to sell your writing. They're going to ask you if you're published. And that's OK. But I want you to understand

that's not why you have to write. In fact, it's probably not why you should write. Writing is good for you. Expressing yourself is good for you. Creating art is good for you. That all said, we are going to pretend when you walk through those doors, that every one of you is in the category that I mentioned that wants to be making a full-time living as a science fiction and fantasy novelist within the next 10 years. The reason for that is, all the other advice that I would give you to be a better GM, or to

be better at writing in your journal, or to be fulfilled as writing a book every 20 years, or every five years, for your sisters like Jane Austen did, all of that advice is circumscribed in the advice I would give to the aspiring professional. And I want to give you all the possible tools that I can so that you can become that professional if someday you decide that you want to. But let's take a moment to look at it realistically. Probably the only time in this class that we will do that. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Making a

living as a professional novelist, or as a professional musician working on kind of the highest record label touring level, or as a fine artist not working in commercial illustration, these jobs are hard. Not that they're any harder to do than other types of jobs, but they are harder to make a living at than other kinds of jobs. As a writer, there are lots of options open to you, and I'm sure the university will tell you what they are. Skar wrote for a hearing aid company for how many years? SKAR: Ten. BRANDON: Ten years wrote copy

in the hearing aid company for their hearing aid books about, you know-- SKAR: How to operate the hearing aids. BRANDON: How to operate the hearing aids. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: You can tell the enthusiasm in his voice. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: By the way, if you don't know Skar, Skar works at Dragonsteel. He is one of my executive assistants. Becky is the other one. She's back there. They are here to facilitate making things happen, and to get me in the place where I'm supposed to be at the time I'm supposed to be there. Dan went on--Dan, friend

of mine--he wrote for the newsletter for a scrapbooking company. There are lots of those kinds of jobs. Writing fiction and making a living at it is hard. Now, it's not as hard as they told me when I took this--was taking classes like this when I was young. It's not as hard as my mom thought. She would have told you it's one in a million. If you had asked other people they'd be like, you know, one in 10,000, whatever. I took this class in 1999. (sighs) CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Yeah, I know. I used to think of

myself as the young guy. Now this is the young people over here. When I took this class in 1999 from Dave Wolverton who has since passed on, in that class was myself, Dan Wells who went on to become a professional novelist, and Stacey who became a professional editor, and Peter who became a professional editor, as well as two people I would list as semi-pros. But there's four pros in that class of around 30 people. OK? That's pretty good. My odds have generally been, in my 15-person class, one to a half of a person every year

going pro, depending on your definition of going pro. More than one will get a book published professionally. But one to a half of one a year, so one every two years, will go on to make a significant portion of their living from writing, is about the odds that we have had. Janci took my class, and she went full pro. Brian McClellan took my class. He went full pro. There's a bunch of them. I can't list them all right now. That's not because I'm such a great teacher. I hope that I'm good. But it's more along

the lines of if you are seriously dedicated to this and willing to invest 10 years in it, you've probably got more like a one in 20 shot of making a significant portion of your income from writing than one in a million. Now that does not count the fact that a lot of people are going to give up before then, so it's probably better than one in 20. But, you know, that's better odds than people pretend. Right? You would not have thought that. Let's acknowledge that of the people that went pro that are my friends or

in that class, only one of them is regularly hitting the New York Times best-seller list. Right? But you can make a living without doing that or significantly contribute to your income. That said, if you went and took a class in the Computer Science Department and the professor got up and said, "I think maybe one in 20 of you can actually make some of your living at this, maybe one in 50 fully on professional are going to be able to," you would leave. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Right? You would be like, "I am going to chemical engineering."

STUDENTS: (cheering) BRANDON: Oh, the chemical engineers. They have a 90-something-percent placement rate. Right? Do you guys know what it is? It used to be the highest at BYU, which is why I used that one as a joke. Are you chemical engineers? STUDENT: Yes. BRANDON: My freshman roommate was a chemical engineer. If you've ever read the Mistborn books, Captain Conrad is based off of Tom Conrad, a good friend of mine still. He went on to work for Intel. He is a glorified sewage treatment plant engineer. Right? Because he cleans their water for Intel. That's his job.

He loves cleaning water. He gets the dirty water and he figures out how to separate all the stuff out that you can sell for money, and then make the rest of the stuff nontoxic so you can then dispose it, or purify it so that it can be used elsewhere. That's Tom's job. He's very good at it. But it's good to bring up chemical engineering because when I was in school, in this class, taking this class, Tom was getting put through the wringer. You people, I'm so sorry. He would come back and be like, "Ah, I

got a 61 on my test." And I'd be like, "Oh!" You know. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: "I'm in the arts." Right? Like, we don't look at those numbers. And he's like, "Oh, no. I was second highest in the class." CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Yeah, we talked about sonnets and shared our feelings, and all got A's. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: But if you want to be going pro in the next 10 years, you're going to have to pretend you're in the Chemical Engineering Department, but for writing. So my philosophy, again, is to encourage an aggressive, for whatever your definition

of that is, writing schedule during your early years in order for you to learn your process. Your job as a writer right now, if you have not finished at least three novels--I'm just pulling that out of the air. It could be--but let's just go with that. If you haven't finished at least three, maybe if you haven't finished five. I sold my sixth. Dan sold his sixth. You sold your-- RACHEL: Seventh. BRANDON: Seventh. Right? If you haven't, you know, if you haven't done that many, that's not where you are, your job is not to sell books.

Even if you want to be a professional. Your job is to write enough books to learn your process and what works for you. And this is where the bad advice comes in. Once in a while there's a stupid Pat Rothfuss who writes a brilliant book their first time. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: And then revises it a ton, because he did, sweat and tears. You know Pat. He revised it maybe to insane levels. But once in a while there's a stupid Pat Rothfuss who's brilliant at the start and just writes a really great book. Harry Potter was

a first book. Twilight was a first book. Name of the Wind was a first book. Elantris was my sixth. Mistborn was my 14th. I find a lot more of those than I find of your first book. And most of the people I know whose first book got published kind of wish that they had then written several more books before they published it so that when they published that first book they already knew their style, so that when the weight of deadlines hit them, they already were practiced at consistently writing. And that for--if you are so

lucky as to get published, you're suddenly going to have deadlines. You're suddenly going to have to write while the entire world is critiquing what you've done. You're somehow going to have to keep writing as you stress about whether or not your books are selling any copies, and worrying they're not selling enough copies, and trying to deal with publicity, and trying to deal with all of the headaches and heartaches that come from being a professional. And if you have not spent years practicing so that writing and the habits of it are secondhand, that part is so

much harder, so very much harder. So, if you have not finished several novels, let's say--. I heard early on that your first five books are generally crap, and it was good advice for me because I said, "Oh, I don't have to stress about this for five books." And I wrote five books, and they were mediocre. And I said, "I love epic fantasy. I've spent this time learning this." And then I sat down, and I wrote Elantris, and it sold. Still took a couple of years, but it sold. Who knows? That was definitely the right advice

for me. Is it right advice for you? I don't know. But I'm telling you right now, you should probably approach your writing as you might approach playing the piano, and your first books are learning your scales. This can be really hard for some people. It can be really hard generally for most people, knowing that this beautiful thing that you're working on--. You have this baby that you've cherished. And you might have cherished this baby since you were a teenager, meaning "I'm going to write this book someday." And you might have written in your books in

school, as I did, sketches of your characters and ideas for plot lines for that book that you're going to write. And you may have this book that built over many years. And you might run into the situation upon writing it that suddenly your baby is ugly. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: It's here and it's ugly and what do you do? Oh no! And it's even worse than the baby being ugly. You know the baby is actually--well, the baby was perfect in your mind, this book. It was gorgeous and beautiful. And then you made it ugly through your

fat fingers being unable to accomplish what you want to accomplish. Very deadly to new writers because they get stopped, because their skill isn't up to their aspirations yet. You need to push through that and keep writing. You need to learn early on that the product of your writing time is yourself. You are the artwork. The time you spend writing will change you. It will make you better at expressing your ideas. It will make you--you'll have a wonderful time. It's just wonderful writing. But you will also grow as a person. You will become more empathetic. All

of these things will happen to you. The product of your writing time is you. You are the piece of art. Now, as you get better and better at that, that time spent making yourself better does start producing things that hopefully you can sell. My philosophy on artistic expression is, while you are writing the book, the artist should be in control. You should be making the decisions that the artist thinks are genuinely the best decisions for that story and those characters. The moment you finish that book, there should be a second person inside of you who

takes the artist, shoves them in a closet, locks the door, takes the manuscript, and runs away cackling. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: And then figures out every mercenary way to exploit that book for profit that is legal in our system. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: So that you can let that person back out and they will have enough, you know, food to eat so that they can go and be artistic the next time. That's the perspective we'll take in the class. Go. STUDENT: Should the second person worry about how the artist feels about what they've done with their baby?

BRANDON: Yes. You definitely should. I'm being a little exaggerating in that. Your artistic integrity maintains. You are the same person. Right? There are certain things that you will not do as an artist with your book. And that's, you know--yes, absolutely. Right? I'm just talking about this idea of the business person shouldn't be in charge when you're writing. But as you finish the book, learning the business and letting the business person take charge is a good idea. But yeah, definitely do not compromise your artistic integrity through revisions because of what the business person thinks. But sometimes

you might. Let me give you an example. John Scalzi wanted to be a novelist. He's a very good writer, good friend of mine. He had been a blogger for a long time. He decided, "I'm going to be a novelist." So he went to the bookstore, and he said, "What's selling right now?" He picked up a few books and said, "These look like they're selling. I'll write one of these." And then he went home and then the artist took over and he wrote one of those. I wouldn't say that John compromised his artistic integrity, but there

definitely was a back and forth between the business person and the artist when it came to choosing that project. Right? And how he chose to release it, and sell it, and things like that. So there definitely--I think there should be communication between the two sides of your brain. But I do think that letting the artist make the artistic decisions and letting the business person then learn how to sell that book rather than to dictate what the book should be is generally the way you'll want to go. Once in a while that's bad advice. It might

have been bad advice for John. Right? Other questions on what I've said so far? Yeah, go ahead. STUDENT: If our first five books are going to be not so great, should we spend a lot of time revising them? BRANDON: Yes. But here's why. Revision is a difficult skill to learn, on par with learning to write a book. I learned, while I was not selling books and getting very close, I learned a lesson that some of my friends who were creating the best artwork were better revisers than they were writers. And I might, if I were

you, like, there's an argument to just putting aside the first book and then writing the second one and then coming back later and maybe revising the first, or maybe not even ever touching the first. But the truth is, a lot of people's second books are publishable. It might be better if you think you're going to write five and then publish number two. But most people wish they'd written a couple, even if they are starting off a genius. And revision is a really important thing to learn. I would say the reason it took me as long

as it did to sell Elantris after I wrote it, because it came out in 2005 and I wrote it in '98, was because I hadn't learned revision. I would write those first five books, I never did a second draft. I wrote them and then, you know, I figured--I'd always--the next book would be better, so why not just write that. This is a classic--. I'm more of an outliner. This happens more often to outliners than it does to discovery writers, that they think, "Well, I'm excited by the next book. I'm going to go write that." Discovery

writers have the opposite problem. They do tend to over-revise. They write a chapter and then they revise it, and they write a chapter and then they revise it. And they go back and revise the first one again. And then they write Chapter 3, and then they revise the other two. And then now they need to do this, revise Chapter 3. And then they never get anywhere. Oh, we've got another Nate up there! Your name isn't Nate, is it? CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Because--this is funny because last year I was telling a story like this, and I

had a guy in my writing group whose name was Nate who did this. And this guy's like, "I do that. My name is Nate!" CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: So this does tend to be more of a problem. But I will say those writers who constantly revise the early chapters, they don't tend to make it, has been my experience. Because having 80 first chapters doesn't get you very far. Now, you could be a fantastic short story writer. Short stories don't earn any money anymore. So it's really hard to make a living at short story writing, in fact

kind of impossible, unless you're also doing lecture series and being a professor. So yeah. So yes, learn revision. It's really important. By the way, you were in the class before too, weren't you? Good to see you. All right, we'll go here and then we'll get some in the back. STUDENT: When you first started writing. BRANDON: Mm hmm. STUDENT: And you weren't good at it, what was it, do you think, especially like, when you knew you had to practice and spend free time when you could be, you know, doing something else, what was it that got

you to go back and write? BRANDON: OK, what made me write? What gave me the motivation? There's a couple of things. So when I was brand new at this, I saw that if I didn't learn to write I was going to have to get a job that I did not enjoy as much. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Because I genuinely enjoyed writing. So I came to BYU as a chemical engineering. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Actually I was bioengineering. But you know, yeah. Something like that. Because my mother convinced me that engineers got--I was biochemistry, that's what it was--that

engineers got scholarships, and she still wanted a doctor so badly. And I came to BYU, and they threw me in the weeder classes for chemistry, which I actually really appreciate because they taught me I did not want to be doing chemistry every day. Right? Oh, boy, did I not want to be doing chemistry. I went on a mission to Korea and I'm like, "I'm on a different continent from chemistry! Oh, it's so nice!" CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: But writing, when I would sit down to write, hours could pass, and I wouldn't know what time it was.

That doesn't mean that writing was easy. Right? Usually starting is hard. Or if I hit a rough patch, you know, I would still give up or things like that. So I still needed this motivation. But that was a key sign to me, that I loved the busy work of writing so much more than other things. So good sign there. And so the thing that worked best for me is that I would start keeping a spreadsheet with the amount I'd written each day and my goal, and if I hit my goal then I didn't have to

worry about it anymore. I was making the progress that I need to, and I could go play Halo. Right? I could go do whatever I wanted because I had hit my goal for the day. And a lot of times I made it such a goal that it was a little difficult to hit but not impossible. It wasn't actually hard. It was just like I had to actually work. Most days I would double that goal. Right? Because it was a goal that--it was something like 1,000 words. Right? Enough that I actually had to sit down and

do it, but once I got into it I would keep going. And then I put that on my spreadsheet, and I watched those numbers counting up. And it worked for me like the progress bar in an MMO for getting your next level worked. I'm like, "Hey, I will hit 25% soon. Wow! I will hit 50%! I'm almost done!" And that every day was a balance of making me feel like, "Man, I've got my work done. I can relax. I don't have to stress about this." My job right now isn't to publish books. My job is

to write those first five books and to learn from them, so if I today have hit my 1,000 words, I'm on my path. I've done basically all that I can do realistically with my, you know, a normal person's mental health and things like that, in order to hit that goal in 10 years. And it worked. Granted--I'm going to get to your question up here. Let's talk about survivorship bias. We're recording this this year, so I think every person entering into a creative or even a professional field needs to know about survivorship bias. Because there are

a whole lot of grifters out there who coast on survivorship bias. Survivorship bias is our brains are more likely to weigh the words of someone who's been successful, even if their success was random, than someone who has not been. If we didn't know that flipping coins was random, and we had a competition and everyone in here flipped coins until we had one person left that had flipped heads the whole time, everyone in this room would be asking them for advice next time. And indeed, they may go on the guru circuit, earning big money writing books

about flipping coins and about how you do it and their process. And they might even name it and come up with a YouTube course that you can pay for. Right? CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: That's survivorship bias. We cannot say whether what contributed to my success. This is why I try to give you lots of tools. Right? That worked for me. I am a survivor of that system working. Who knows? Right? But that's the best I can give you. So I like the way you phrased your question. What, for me, kept me going? And that's what kept

me going. Now, something else you need to hear about. What time is it? RACHEL: It's 7:46. BRANDON: 7:46. We go to 8:30? RACHEL: 8:15. BRANDON: 8:15. OK. All right. I've got time left. STUDENT: [inaudible] BRANDON: Yeah. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Yeah, I've got another class. But we've gotten through almost all of this. So I can do lots of questions. Let's tell you the story of Brandon almost giving up. Some of you have heard this story before. I am, in this story, applying to grad schools and getting rejected from all of them. NYU, rejected. Columbia, rejected. Iowa,

rejected. Everybody rejected me. I had written, at the time, around 12 novels, and I hadn't sold any. My father would call me and give me father-speak for "I am very concerned" by saying, "Son, your mother's very concerned." CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: That's father-speak. A little interpretation for you if you ever get that. They were worried, both of them, that I was going to end up begging for beans on the side of the road because instead of becoming a doctor I had decided to be a science fiction novelist. And they were kind of right. Right? Like, I

talked about it earlier. Having a backup plan is a good idea in a career where one out of 20 talented people who work very hard for 10 years are going to make a living. Right? Nineteen of them won't. And Janci will tell you that it took her, even after she started selling books, over a decade to start earning what people would consider even close to a livable income. right? I think the first year that she made--she said she made enough to live on by itself with her writing was the year she co-authored a book with

me. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: And she is very good at self-publishing. She knows her stuff. So it's good to have a backup plan. Right? And I didn't have one. I had decided to--eventually I got into BYU's grad program. Right? I did get into BYU. Everyone else rejected me. I went through one round of all the top schools. They all rejected me. Then I went to the second-tier schools and BYU, and of them, only BYU let me in for grad school. You don't usually want to go to grad school in the same place that you went to

undergrad, which is why I applied everywhere else first. But I was only applying to the schools that if I got a degree from I could then go on to get a job, you know, as a writer. Because BYU, at the time, didn't have an MFA. An MFA was considered the degree you needed to be a professional teacher in creative writing. Getting a master's from BYU in creative writing actually--my parents didn't know it--at that point would not do anything for me becoming a professor. It was virtually useless as a step to being a professor because it

wasn't an MFA, wasn't a Master of Fine Arts. They now have one, and their program has gained reputation because of that. So those who are in it now, don't panic. But back then it really couldn't do anything. That said, Andi was in my class, and she's a professor at BYU right now, and she's really good. I don't think she got an MFA though, did she? Or did she go back and get one? She was in my class when it wasn't--. We didn't get the F. We just had an MA. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: So I got

into BYU. But my parents are calling me and I'm like, "Oh, man. I'm stalling. What am I doing with my life? I can't teach." I went to class the first day in university as a creative writing major, and Lance was teaching the class. Anyone here--did Lance retire? Does anyone know if Lance retired? Lance Larson? STUDENT: He's still here. BRANDON: He's still here. You said he retired! You're wrong! CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Ha ha. RACHEL: OK. Sorry. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Lance was the poet laureate of Utah. He's a very good teacher, very good poet. He was in

charge of graduate students in the master's program in creative writing, or in just the Masters of English program. And he got up on the first day of kind of your, "Here you're a grad student now. Let's talk about it," and said, he pulled out a thing and said, "Here is the CV," which is kind of like the resume for students for those online who might not know, "of someone who got into a top tier school for a Ph.D. and went on and became a professor in English." And it went to the floor. Right? He said,

"They were on every journal. They worked with this many professors on these. And they spent something like 40 hours a week outside of school working in order to build their CV so that they could get into a top school so that that school could then propel them into a career. That's what you're going to need to do if you want to become a professor at a prestigious university on a tenure track." And I looked at that and I said, "I cannot write books and do that. So I'm not going to do that." And I didn't.

But I didn't have a backup. Right? And I kind of had to, at that moment, confront "What do I do?" Right? Do I give up? Do I go get a real job? I was working at a hotel, a graveyard shift, so I could write at work. Right? Overnight. Worked very well for me. It was bad advice for Isaac, who tried to do that, a friend of mine who's now at my company. He tried to do the same thing, and he is not a night person, and it did not work for him. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: So

I looked at this and I thought, "Am I going to stop writing?" And looking seriously and honestly at my heart, I said, "No. Whatever I end up doing, I'm not going to stop writing. This is who I am. I'm going to keep writing. And if I'm age 90 and I never sell a book, and my books are only for my family and my friends, then I'm a success. That's the success I can control, and I'm going to do that." Now I'd been doing everything I was supposed to do. I'd been submitting. But people--this was when

George first got big, and grimdark was the new hotness. Right? Brandon is not grimdark. I tried. It was not--. I tried writing grimdark and it turned into the story of a grimdark assassin who found hope and love. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: I'm not even kidding. Right? Like, just grimdark is not my thing. And so, you know, darkness in a world, great. But not my thing. So I'm like, "I can't--" you know. And so I sat down and said, "Well, they keep telling me, the publishers keep telling me I'm writing books too long." They wanted shorter books.

What they were really hunting, those of you who know your fantasy history, they wanted George's aesthetic, but they wanted it to be cheaper to publish. Right? The bigger the book--you can't--. So here's some economics of books for you. A 400,000-word book, which is the length of the Stormlight books, and the Game of Thrones is even longer sometimes. Right? That is four times more expensive to edit, four times more expensive to--well, maybe not four times, but significantly more expensive to print, significantly more expensive to ship, and to the bookstores, it's four times of the 100,000-word book,

more expensive to put on the shelf. Because if you can put three books on the shelf or one book, which one do you want to put on the shelf? Right? The problem is the way that economics of entertainment work in our world is you don't charge much more for longer entertainment. movies cost about the same no matter what length they are. Books maybe go up a buck. But a Stormlight book should probably, like if a normal paperback is $8, a Stormlight book in paperback should, for the amount of, like, money and time and all of

these things, should probably cost, like, $25. But we can't do that. And so they don't like long books. They're better with them now that eBooks are a thing. But audiobooks still, you know, more expensive to produce. Anyway, they wanted Joe Abercrombie. They wanted George, like grimdark aesthetic but short. And I was like the worst for them then. Right? I was long, and I was, like, hopeful epic aesthetic. Right? CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: The big hotness was low magic, and I was like, "There's 30 magic systems." Right? CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: And this is the era when people

didn't even use the word magic system the same way they do now. They didn't know what to do with me. And so I got all these reactions. Like, I remember walking up to someone who rejected me and I'm like, "Thank you for the rejection. Do you have any advice?" It was a form rejection. He said, "Read the first chapter of Game of Thrones and write something like that." Steve Saffel at Del Rey. That's exactly what he told me. And so it's like, whatever. So I'm like, "All right. I'm going to write what I want. I'm

not going to care. They tell me to write short. I'm going to write the biggest darn book." Right? CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: They tell me low magic. No, no, no! Right? CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: And I wrote The Way of Kings. The Way of Kings Prime. Right? And as I was finishing that book is when Elantris sold. And I still remember that kind of, you know, that belly of the whale, if you want to use your writing metaphors, that long, dark tea time of the soul. STUDENT: (laughing) BRANDON: Dirk Gently. Douglas Adams quote there. That moment was

really, really helpful for me because I had gone through making the hard decision that I was going to write for the rest of my life before I became one of the most famous writers in the world. And that was really handy to have made that decision before I sold and things like that. Tangents, I warned you about those. We got time left? All right. Question back there. Hit me. I'm going to do a rapid fire round. I'm going to actually do them fast. STUDENT: If you're too attached to a world you built and don't want

to, like, go to the effort to jump ship and worldbuild a new thing and plan all these new things. BRANDON: Yeah. STUDENT: Would you say it's detrimental, or is it fine to still write, like, five books but in the same setting or the same world? BRANDON: I think that's good. That's great. Totally worth doing. The question is, let's say you want to write five books, but you don't want to abandon all your worldbuilding. Totally OK to write those all in the same world. Now what I would tell you is there's a gambit for you here.

All right? You can do a Sanderson, and you can write five different books with five different protagonists, just you can share some of the worldbuilding. It's more like an Anne McCaffrey. She used to do this and things like that. Or you can do a Temeraire. Temeraire, she wrote four of those, I think, maybe three, four, straight in a series. Those were her, you know, she just wrote those books without selling any of them. Now why this is a gambit is, you cannot send Book 2 of a series to an editor, or sell it to indie

publishing, until you've, you know, like, if they reject Book 1, you can't send them Book 2. But if they're the same world, you can. But if it's a sequel, you can't. She put all her eggs in the same basket but then when Temeraire sold, the publishers knew they had gold on their hands because they had three finished books and maybe a fourth. So they put just an enormous marketing campaign behind that. You won't understand how big a deal this is because you're all young, but some of you will who are not, you know, quite so

young. Her cover blurbs on her first three books were Stephen King, Anne McCaffrey, and Terry Brooks. CLASS: (oohing) BRANDON: They sent all of them all three books and they're like, "All three are done? Well, I'm going to read them." Right? And they cover blurbed them. It was amazing. And then she stomped me at the Hugo Awards for best new author because of that, and she deserved it. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: So anyway, there's your gambit. Writing all in the same world but not direct sequels is kind of the best of both. So if that appeals to

you, totally do that. It's what Rachel did. It worked for her. STUDENT: So I was wondering, like, if you have a world that you're, like, incredibly proud of and you've been working on for years. BRANDON: Yeah. Uh huh. STUDENT: How do you escape, like, the fact of, like, using the first, like, four or five books to, like, throw away those so you can get to that sixth one? BRANDON: OK. So you've got a world you've been working on. You're so excited by. You don't want to throw it away because it's your baby. You got a

couple of options. Number one is, write that first book, get it out of your system. Know that you're probably just going to then come back and write it better. OK? That's the one I kind of recommend. Way of Kings Prime didn't sell. There was stuff wrong with it. Years later when I had more experience I just wrote it up from scratch. And kind of having a book that was a rough draft of the book I wanted to write, where I could see all the flaws with my now experience and write a much better version--I didn't

revise it, I just started on page 1--but it's almost like I had an outline that was the wrong version of the book. It was really handy. And it is part of why Way of Kings is so strong as a series, is because I know stuff about that world I don't know about others because I wrote a whole book that I threw away. Right? So that's what you can do. But another thing people do is they just--ideas are cheap. This is what you will learn as a writer. The ability to take ideas and make them great--and

you're going to be my last question, so I'll get to you. The ability to take ideas and make them great is what people are looking for. Two stories for you. Maybe one. We'll see how much time I have. RACHEL: 8:15. BRANDON: There is a writer who, he was hanging out on some forums and he was arguing with some people, and he took this stance. He was a new writer, unpublished. And he said, "I think ideas are cheap." And the other person's like, "No, no, no. Ideas are what make science fiction and fantasy. If you don't

have good ideas then you've got nothing." And the first writer's like, "I tell you what. Give me your three worst ideas." Or your two worst ideas. It was two, I think. I asked him this at dinner, and it's true. So I'd heard it apocryphally before. But he confirmed it to me. You can ask him in person. He said, "Give me your two worst ideas." They said, "All right. Pokémon meets the lost Roman legion." And Jim Butcher took that, and he wrote a book series called Codex Alera. I heard it over here. They're fantastic. In the

hands of a great writer, great being someone who's practiced a bunch, you can take basically any idea, and you can make gold from it. A writer with good ideas but not the skill, it's like playing piano. That's my other thing. We've mentioned playing piano. The other story is, if we had someone come up here who'd been practicing piano for a few months and someone who had been practicing for 20 years, how long do you think it would take you to tell which is which. Very short amount of time. Right? It's the same thing in writing.

Editors, readers, they can tell if you've put that time into it. So ideas are cheap. Find some idea that just, you know, a writing prompt. Mash it together with another idea and add the plot line of a film that you love that's in a different genre and just write that book. Right? You'll be like, "I'm going to write The Godfather. I love the Godfather. Except it's mice, and, you know, the magic system is magic cheese." CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Right? And I'm going to write that book, and then that gives you your practice, and you will

then discover that ideas kind of are cheap. And you'll get some practice in. And then you save that book until later on. Either of those are perfectly viable. All right? Last question. STUDENT: How do you make yourself get to the point of, like, just rewriting a story? Because I've written some-- BRANDON: Yeah. How do you force yourself to rewrite? STUDENT: --novels but, like, they need rewrites, but I don't know how to make myself do that. BRANDON: So, good question. How do you make yourself revise? I am there with you. I hate revision. It's my least

favorite part of everything, the whole process. And that's why it took me so long. I am really good at revision. People hear this and they assume I'm bad at it. The things that you're bad at, that you have to force yourself to learn, or you will not be able to succeed professionally, tend to end up as your strengths. That won't help you because blah, blah, blah. My weaknesses become strengths. Yeah. I know. That's hard, and I don't want to do it. Right? CLASS: (laughing) STUDENT: It's like a mental burnout. BRANDON: Yeah. Yeah. So watch--you need

to--. Well, helpful for this is learning your--whether you respond to carrots, or sticks, or something else. What makes you consistently do the things you want to have done? Right? There's probably other things in your life you want to have done that you are able to get yourself to do, whether it's get up in the morning, whether it's go to the gym, whether it's read scriptures. Whatever it is, what do you have that you have built a habit out of already? And number one, what made you do that? And number two, can you bundle your habits?

If there's something you already do every day, you're like, "Every day I go and I get my favorite dirty cola from the random dirty cola place that also sells cookies, because why not all the diabetes in one place?" CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: "And I know I do that on the way home from school. I am going to stop in that shop, and I am going to revise for only 30 minutes. And then when I get home, I get to do something else that I find fun." Well that, that's what we call kind of bundling, when you

group something you don't want to do with something you've already built a habit to do so that the thing you don't want to do but you want to have done also becomes a habit. That works very well. Learning whether you respond to, you know, like for me, counting up, I can see the percentages, and small bites. Or whether--some people binge. Right? Like, "I don't like revision, so I'm going to take this week that I'm off of school in the summer, and I only revise. I don't get to go do anything else. I do it for

12 hours a day. Then I collapse. And then at the end of the week I'm done, and I get to take the summer off. And then I'll start writing a new book when Fall semester starts." You have--like, your job as a new writer is to figure out what triggers these things and makes them work in your mind. Helpful for me is to make a revision guide. If you're an outliner naturally, which you might be if you don't like revision, having an outline for your revision that has targeted goals, kind of like--have you ever done any

programming, computer programming? STUDENT: A tiny, tiny bit. BRANDON: OK. In programming you might have a bug list, starting with your most important bugs. You're like, "In this book, I've gotten feedback this character doesn't work. Here's a plan for fixing the character. It's my most important thing. The main goal in this revision is to fix that character. If I have room in my brain for a second goal, here's the second most important thing. And I'm going to find three places to foreshadow this or to add a scene that fixes this problem." And then you do a

revision, checking things off that list so you feel like you're making accomplishments, and you're basically killing bugs in your bug report. That does tend to work for some people as well, particularly if they are naturally an outliner, having an outline. But to do that, you need to get feedback. And to get feedback, we're going to talk about writing groups. STUDENT: Segue! BRANDON: Segue. STUDENT: Yay! CLASS: (applause) BRANDON: Welcome. So segue. By the way, I used to think that you spell--that S-E-G-U-E, anyone else have that, was short for segue, and there was actually a word that

was that plus WAY that was segue, and that the shortened version was seg, and you'd just say seg, or people would just write it. Right? Did anyone else have this? STUDENTS: Yes. BRANDON: Like, why does that word say segue? French! French! Oh, you Normans. You Normans came in. You took our nice Germanic language that liked to crunch and kill and eat, and you made it instead so that we, you know, that we had rendezvous. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: And we didn't give up. We surrendered. And now we have two words for everything, one Latinate and one

Germanic. It's actually really good for writers because the Latinate words naturally sound very upscale to us. And if you can learn to watch for the Germanic words, because those were the lower level words back in middle English era, and the Norman/Latin words were the high class. And that's still around in our language. So if you say, "I surrender" that indicates education. If you say, "I give up" that indicates lower class. You can use that as a writer so it's actually a useful thing. So it's good. But it is annoying. All right. Writing groups. Writing groups.

Writing groups aren't for everyone. OK? In fact, writing groups can ruin your book. Learning to take feedback is important for the majority of writers. Writing groups are one of the ways that we can do that. And I am able, in my class, to do it in a controlled situation where it will not ruin people's books. I put a TA in every writing group, and the TA knows how to make sure that no one ruins each other's books. It is a good tool to try. Part of this is, part of the reason for this is, when

I took this class in 1999, I formed a writing group with four people: me, Dan Wells, Peter Ahlstrom, and Ben. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Dan and I went on to become pros. He sold, like, he found an editor, I sold to that editor, and then he sold to that editor, and we both went full time. Peter became a full-time editor at Tokyopop, and then I hired him to be my Editorial VP at Dragonsteel. All three of us went on to become pros, and we are three of the four people from that class who went on to

be pros. Now, part of that was because I was in this class and we were reading writing samples, and I zeroed in on Dan and said, "He's a good writer. I'm going to put him in a writing group with me." And he said, "My friend Ben wants to join." I'm like, "Sure." Ben's a CS guy. He's our friend. He doesn't really write. But we make fun of him on my podcast. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: And then Peter was at the magazine with us, and I knew that Peter had a really good editorial eye. And I'm like,

"I'm going to put him in the writing group because he's an editor and he knows what he's doing." So I specifically picked out the two people in the class that I thought were most likely to make it, and I formed a writing group with them, and I was really good at that, apparently, of picking them out. Right? But another reason is, for the same reason that Tolkien and Lewis were in the same writing group. Right? Success breeds success. Writing groups from my class that stick together often do give each other help and legs up and

things like that. So while writing groups aren't for everyone, I do think they're worth trying. So I'm going to give you today the best inoculation against writing groups ruining your writing so that you can try them out if you would like. And then after this class, if you would like you to split you in this group into writing groups, I will do so. All right? If you don't want to be in a writing group, then you can leave and you can laugh at us all with your other cool writing group with cooler friends. CLASS: (laughing)

BRANDON: So here's a couple of simple rules that if you follow will help a ton. Number one, if you are a discovery writer, be very careful about taking any advice for your book until after you have finished said book and are working on a different one. This is because people who tend to discover their story can be taken over by the whims of other people giving feedback too early. And Stephen King is the quintessential discovery writer. One of the reasons he doesn't like writing groups, which he doesn't, is because they will do this to him.

One of the reasons he doesn't like outlines is because if he writes an outline he feels like he's already discovered the book, and his enthusiasm and excitement for that book vanishes. Both perfectly valid ways to be a writer. This is why it's important to understand these things. Right? So if you are a discovery writer, try not to submit too early, or if you do, be aware of what can happen if someone hijacks your book. I had someone in a writing group once come and submit a chapter and we gave some feedback. And they submitted another

chapter, and it was wildly different, but it was in the same book. And the third chapter was wildly different. And we're like, "So you were writing a romance, and now there's vampires." And she said, "Yeah, I took a class at BYU, and the people in the class said, "You know, vampires would be really good in this, and they're selling really well right now, so I added them to the book." And the next one they're like, oh, it's not exciting enough. You know, thrillers are doing really well because The DaVinci Code had just come out. And

she was like, "Well, maybe I should make this a thriller." And her book was a different book in every chapter. Writing groups can do that to you. OK? Now you're warned about it. Hopefully, that will inoculate you. Number two, if you are getting feedback, try not to say anything. This is really hard. Your job getting feedback is to be a fly on the wall while people are talking about a story and write down what they say. In Hollywood they do this cool thing where for years they would bring people in and they would show them

a pilot for a new sitcom and tell them, you know, 'We're going to ask you what you thought of it afterward." And people would watch it. And then afterward they would say, "All right. Now there was a commercial at break number one. What brand was this commercial for?" Because they didn't want people to actually be paying attention to the commercials, just to the thing. And they'd use the same sitcom for years because it was just to test the commercials. Because they didn't want people to be too aware. You want to be like that. You don't

want your audience, who is your writing group, to be aware of what you're planning to do. And if you defend yourself, if you ask too many questions, you will predispose them, and you will not get authentic feedback. The best thing you can do is stay quiet. Now, you are going to ask questions now and then. Try not to ask too many questions, trying to just write down the feedback and use it later. And this is, you know, later is important. Most new writers I recommend taking feedback on a book you've finished while you're writing something

else and then coming back to that feedback months later when you're in revision mindset, reading through it all, making a revision guide. Usually I throw out--I take maybe a third of the feedback that I'm given. And I have a really good writing group. So you're not going to take most of it, but there's going to be a lot in there that's going to help you build this revision guide. Then you're going to revise your book. And then you're going to find a new audience and see if you fixed the things that you thought you fixed.

This will be really good for you as a new writer learning to target people. So write it down. If you are giving feedback, last point of advice, be descriptive, not proscriptive. Did you say it before I got to it? You're cheating. You took the class before. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: You want to describe the piece's impact on you through words, emotion words, not try to fix their book. Your job isn't to fix their book. Editors fix books. Beta readers, writing groups, just are a test audience so that the author can tell what people are authentically feeling

as they read the book. So you just say, "I really enjoyed this. I really enjoyed this. This part was confusing. I wasn't emotionally connecting right here. I lost blocking right here." Not, as Janci got, "You should add rats with swords to this scene." Ask her about that if she comes and teaches the class ever.