Five Tips for Writing Your First Novel—Brandon Sanderson

BRANDON: Hi. Brandon here. It is National  Novel Writing Month.

This is a challenge that happens every year where writers are  challenged to write a novel in one month, loosely defining a novel as 50,000 words. That  definition is kind of vague. Most of my novels are quite a bit longer.

But 50,000 words is a doable  but difficult challenge for one month of writing. The goal of this challenge is  to get yourself out of a rut, to force yourself to turn off your internal  editor, and to just write. It’s a really great exercise.

I did it numerous times before I became  a published writer. In fact, The Way of Kings, which my new book in the series is coming out  this month, was originally written as part of a national Novel Writing Month challenge. So  I think this is a very worthy challenge.

Like all things in writing, it might not  work for you. You may try it and find out it just—your personal writing psychology just does  not mesh really well with this type of challenge. You might find that the writing you write  trying to follow a challenge like this just is not as good as if you didn’t.

In that case,  feel free to abandon it. However, for those of you who want to try this and have never done  it before, I’m going to give you five hacks, five ways that you can kind of start writing a  novel, perhaps without very much preparation, and kind of force yourself to try this challenge. First one is something that a lot of us authors do, which is called borrowing your structure. 

Now, it doesn’t happen with every novel. In fact, it doesn’t happen with  every writer. But a lot of times, books that we write come from us watching a movie,  reading a story, hearing about an event, and really liking that genre or that type of story and  saying, “Man, could I write something like that?

” Then, as a writer, we dig into that  subgenre, say, the heist novel, and say, “What are some of the aspects of this  type of story that make them really interesting? Why do I like a heist novel? What about it is  great?

You know what? I really like that heists involve a crew of different people who all have a  different specialty, who come together and apply their specialized talents to achieving this really  difficult goal. ” And suddenly you have a story that has a structure to it.

You realize, hey, we have a scene where we outline the problem. We have a scene with  each of the characters being recruited, whether it’s Oceans Eleven, or whether it is Armageddon,  or whether it is Inception, they all share some hallmark pieces of their structure. You  are followed by some extra training or gathering of equipment where they plan on how they’re  going to do this, and then you have an ending where you bring together everyone’s specialized  talents to overcome the problems that pop up.

If you have a favorite genre of story or a type  of story, or even just a movie you’ve loved, one way to get yourself into writing and kind of  maybe have, so to speak, some training wheels on, is to go watch that movie and say, “All right.  Can I boil this down to its fundamental structure, then rebuild that structure with a new set  of characters, and a new problem to solve, and a new character arc that is my own? ” A  lot of times this works really well if you transpose the genre.

If you, say, really love the  stories that are told in Regency romances done by Jane Austen. And you say, “What if I took this  same structure and I made it a western instead? ” These sorts of transpositions can also help  you add a little more flare, a little bit more of your own style, but you still, like I said,  have those training wheels.

Doesn’t have to be training wheels, though. A lot of professional  writers will do this same sort of thing when coming up with a story. They’ll look to the  successful stories told of this trope in the past and borrow that structure.

Do be aware that  you shouldn’t be enslaved by that structure. You should be able to adapt it to your story. But it  really can help, particularly if you’re trying to write something in one month, to have  a structure, an outline, already provided.

Number two, cool way to start writing a book  if you’ve never tried it, is to begin with a monologue. Even if your story isn’t going to  be first person perspective, meaning it’s not going to be told from one character’s viewpoint  telling the story as they experienced it. You can still really get into a character by basically  interviewing them or having them tell you about a really important time in their life.

And you write  it out as if they were sitting there and telling you about their story. A good friend of mine, Dan  Wells, several of his books began with him saying, “All right. If this character were going  to explain their life to me in five pages, what would it be?

” And he wrote those five pages,  and then that was the character kind of explaining themselves to Dan. Really, it was Dan figuring  out interesting things about this character. Now, this probably won’t end up in your  final book.

But one of the cool things is, if you design it the right way, this can become,  pieces of this can be the little blurbs, we call them epigraphs, at the start of chapters, could be  excerpts from the character’s journal or diary or something like that. Maybe you’ll just love this  format and write what we call an epistolary novel, which is a novel written entirely in  journal forms, or in people’s writings, kind of the found footage version of novels. So  give that a try.

Just have the character, write as if you were them explaining about their life. Number three. One way to really dig into a character is to ask yourself, “What does my  character want?

What do they need? How are those two things different? And why can’t they have  either one?

” And if you ask yourself these things, it can help you to generate and construct a plot  even on the fly. You start writing your character. Just sit down, start writing their everyday  life.

Figure out what it is that they really want. Ask yourself how that’s different from what  they need. Just do it as you’re exploring this character’s life in the first few chapters.

Then  start to construct the obstacles that keep them from having these things that they want. This is  just a really good way to start making sure that your story is character centered. If your story is  turning around this character’s needs and wants, then you will naturally be including the  character in a lot of the story decisions.

One way you can go wrong with a book is by  making the character not want or need anything. And a lot of times what will happen is  that character becomes an external observer of some really interesting story happening with  some other character. As a writing professor I see this quite a bit from new writers where  they’ve picked the wrong viewpoint.

Someone really interesting is doing something, and this character  that they thought would be their main character is just observing and commenting on it. You want  to avoid that. You want the story to be personal to your viewpoint character.

You always want to  be picking the viewpoint character who is either changing the most, having the most conflict in  their life, or who is actively working on getting what they want the most. Those are good ways to  choose who the protagonist of your story might be. Now, number four is going to go hand in hand with  this.

Let’s say you’re working on this, but you’re like, “Brandon, I still don’t have a structure  for my story. I know what my character can’t have. I know why they want it so badly, and I know the  difference between their want and their need.

I know what they think they want and what will  actually make them happy, but I don’t have a structure for my story. ” In this case, number  four tip is choose your type of progress. I have an entire lecture on this, but if I boil  it down, stories are built from three ideas.

There a promise, progress toward that  promise, and a payoff on that promise, and the progress part is the important  part. That’s what the bulk of your story is. We get pulled through stories, things  become page turners because we can watch progress toward a goal.

And books naturally have  this just in the shape of the book. You get to watch. You’re like, “This book is 500 pages long. 

As I read, I’m getting closer to that ending. ” But you want to reinforce this with some sort  of plot that you are showing progress toward. Now, in a lot of stories this might be,  for instance, a travelogue.

You say we are starting in the shire and we are going to end at  Mount Doom where the ring was forged. And we can watch on the map as the characters get closer and  closer and closer. We can see their progress.

We can see where they get diverted and can’t go the  direction where they thought they were going to go because it’s difficult. You want always in your  story to be moving in a direction, mostly forward, sometimes backward. And this progress does  not have to be travelogue.

In a mystery, usually the progress is clues. It’s information  progress, meaning you have a mystery. You don’t know who killed this person.

Your characters are  going to get clues, information that build upon one another. And some of them are false clues.  Some of them are steps backward.

Some of them lead you the wrong direction. But you can get a  sense as a reader that more clues are gathering, and the image of who did this is  becoming more and more and more clear. So decide your type of progress and make sure that  you are signposting that progress is being made.

Most of the time when readers complain about a  story not moving quickly enough, not having good pacing, or not being a page turner, it’s because  the author is not signposting the type of progress that the story is supposed to be making. You  can misalign this sometimes. You can say you’re writing a romance when really, you’re writing an  adventure story, and so you signpost the romance.

But the reader’s feeling like, “We aren’t making  any progress,” because you gave a bigger signpost about the adventure and the reader thinks this is  what the stories about. It is possible to do both hand in hand, and a lot of stories do this. But my  tip to you is decide what type of progress are you going to expect the reader to feel moving through  the story, and make sure you split that up, divide it up.

Give us a trail of breadcrumbs along the  way indicating that we’re making that progress. The last piece of advice I would give  you to try to write a book in a month is to prime your mind. Before I write, I really  like to do something else for a little while.