What I Took Away from a Brandon Sanderson Lecture

Happy Halloween! Even though I just got back from Sirens, which I attended with Kate, I’m still on my WWC topics. I’ll get to my Sirens stuff at some point but my readercon lessons have had a longer time to percolate.

Plus, Brandon Sanderson is a great speaker/lecturer/teacher and I really want to share some of the finer points I took away from his two hour talk. A talk I nearly didn’t get in to, and that was almost impossible to pay attention to with the man who sat beside me 20 minutes in who proceeded to eat cough drops like candy and then floss his teeth. I’m still working on forgetting about that.

Anyway, I’ll focus on Sanderson.

First, I learned about myself as an outliner-type writer. Sanderson made a list of outliner characteristics that went something like this:

Outliners like their ducks in a row otherwise it’s pain starring at a blank screen,
Outliners tend not to revise –planning and writing seem to take a lot of energy so when the story is “done” they like to move on,
Yet, revision is so necessary because outliners can have wooden characters who move like chess pieces through a plot.

All of these points were compared to discovering-type writers, who are more like this:

Discovering writers tend to have terrible endings because the emotional impact is greater while the plot ending flops and fizzles, and,
Discovery writers tend to be better revisers and have living, breathing characters.

He said a lot more but these were the parts that stuck out to me because they rang so true! When I’m writing academic papers I painstakingly outline otherwise the paper takes me three times as long to write. My outlines aren’t fragmentary, either. They’re essentially the paper pre-written without segue statements or joining words or flow. And my favourite part is revision. When I finally have a whole entity to work with and I can get my red pen out I am elated.

I can’t say the same about my fiction. My academic outlining does not translate to fiction writing at all. My fiction outlines, depending on the length of the piece, only have notes about major incidents (usually ones that mark the start, middle, and end), subplots, characters, and setting. Besides the fact that sometimes the story decides it doesn’t want to work with the outline. And I’m learning that I don’t love revising my stories as much as my papers. Fiction writing requires so much more energy than academic writing, and when I’m done a story I just want to be DONE.

And we all know you’re never done-done when the first draft of a story is finished.

Sanderson identifies as an outliner, and he said that until he learned to go back and revise, his work was constantly rejected because of the issues that need to be edited out. If you know anything about Sanderson you know he wrote six books before his work was finally accepted by a publisher. This real-life lesson from someone who has turned out to be so successful as a writer made an impact on me. I know he’s not just blowing smoke!

Pantsing terrifies me. It is incredibly painful for me to sit in front of a blank screen without knowing what I want to attempt to put out. Even when I write blog posts I have an idea ahead of time. I will never be a discovering writer or able to claim the positive attributes of that type, but I can sure as heck learn to edit those in afterwards. And I am determined to.

Second, Sanderson emphasized something that resounded with the room. Everyone went silent and wrote it down (I looked around). “Writing is an art that must be practised to be mastered. You have to train and dedicate yourself to writing.”

Then he challenged us all: “Don’t write a book –don’t be that person who has just ‘written a book.’ Do train yourself in the craft –work hard and master the art of writing.”

I don’t want to be that person ten years down the road who produced a mediocre book just for the sake of writing a book. I want to be a person who has crafted stories, who continues to master the art that is writing with every new experiment produced. And I do expect said mastering to be a lifetime endeavor.

Every time I write a piece I learn something new about writing, in general and about my process. I hope that never changes and I hope that I eventually produce stories that I am immeasurably proud of.

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