BRANDON: Let’s talk about what it takes
to do a first draft on a 100K-word novel. Now, some of you watching might have
full-time jobs and families and things, which, for you if you can get 100K words a
year, good job. If you are single and a student and maybe only working part time, then this is a
great time to build some of those habits. Because I did that for many years, and I know that
there is some free time in there. You may feel really scatterbrained. You may feel like you’re
doing too much. And some of you may have, like, overachiever 18 credit hours stuff.
I bet you were one of those. But just wait till you have kids. The audience
is like, “Yeah, kids.” Yeah, they’re like, “Oh, yeah.” So now is a good time to build that habit.
But what I would recommend is, average writing speed for a writer
is between 200 and 500 words an hour, writing new prose in a story. Good rule of thumb
to have. If you are outside those bounds, it’s OK. Everyone is different. But that’s a pretty
wide range. And my experience has been that if you’re well below that that you can speed
it up with good habits and good practice. Good habits and practice would be things
like learning to turn off the Candy Crush and the email and the social media and learning to
focus on your storytelling. And if you have real trouble with that, getting a notepad and going
outside and writing longhand or things like that, to shake the need to be checking your email
every few minutes. If you’re well below, if you’re at, like, 50 words an hour, then
you are spending too much time on email, or you are worrying about each word way too much,
to an extreme amount, which does happen as well. One of the things you want to learn to do
is you want to learn to write consistently. One of the problems that you run into
if you’re focusing on each word is, you aren’t good enough yet to focus on each word.
You aren’t going to be—to get better at writing, you’re going to have to get to the point
where you’re writing big chunks of writing and then trying to teach yourself to do things as
you’re doing that. It’s really good as a writer to kind of keep in the back of your mind, “I am
usually a little bit too passive in my voice. Let me practice not writing with as much of
a passive voice.” That’s a good thing to do. But you need to have written enough to know
that that’s consistently a problem in yourself. And I would recommend that you do the revision
after, because then you’ll see what you’re doing by habit. If you’ve got a whole book you can look
at, and you can go through that book and be like, “I’m going to cut all the passive voice from
this book,” that will teach you more about not using the passive voice than thinking
about every sentence while you write it, if I’m using the passive voice. And in
fact, after doing that whole book revision, the next book you write you will have internalized
already some of those things and you will just stop doing it by custom, just by writing.
So you need to turn off the internal editor, and you need to turn off Candy Crush. What do
kids play these days? They don’t play Candy Crush. That’s like 50 years ago.
STUDENT: Among Us. BRANDON: Yeah, play Among Us. Oh, Among Us would
be even worse because you’re interacting with people. Like, Candy Crush you could, like, flip
a few things and then go back. But Among Us, you do that, you’re dead. You’re like a little half
person with a bone sticking out. So yeah, whatever it is, you need to learn to be able to turn it
off and shoot for that 200 to 500 words an hour. The fast writers I know--. Hey, Rachel,
what do you do in about an hour? RACHEL: A thousand.
BRANDON: A thousand words an hour? The fast writers I know go at about a thousand
words an hour. And that is not a ridiculous speed. That’s actually a lot of pros I know do between
750 and 1,000 rough draft words in an hour. If you’re doing that, even if you’re—let’s say you’re
at 250 words an hour, which is really kind of slow. You really should be able to get to 400 to
500 pretty easily. You’re doing 250 words an hour. To do 100,000 words then, you need to find
eight hours a week. If you’re not willing to find eight hours a week, then that’s when you
have to say, “Maybe being pro in the next 10 years is just not something I can do. Maybe
I’m going to go pro in the next 20 years.” But most people with four hours on a Saturday,
where you go--. I would recommend getting your loved ones involved in this and saying, “I really
want to try doing this writing thing. Sanderson says I should be shooting for 500 words an hour.
Then in four hours on a Saturday I can do 2,000 words, and that is my writing for the week. Will
you guys protect my writing time? Guard the door. Make sure during these four hours, will you take
the child, the toddler, and entertain them so that I can have four hours. And if I have those four
hours, then I don’t have to stress for the rest of the week.” If you can do that then you can
write a book every year. 100,000 words, 2,000 words a week, gets you a rough draft every year.
And you will find that you will pick up speed as you do this. My first book, it took me, like,
three or four years. But two of those years were on a mission, and I was not getting a lot of
writing done on my P days during the one hour I had, or two hours while my companions were playing
basketball. Actually, it was ping pong because I was in Korea. But people find it odd that
missionaries play ping pong. But you’re in Asia on your mission, you will know ping pong is
the thing. Regardless, you probably can find four hours a week to work on being a professional
writer. And that’s what I would recommend doing. Here’s the caveat though. I have a good friend,
Janci, who is a binge writer. I don’t know if she still is. I’ll have to ask her. I know she
was a few years ago. And this is an uncommon but not unheard of type of writer. I believe
Scott Card was a binge writer at one point in his career. I don’t know if he still is. Binge writers
are people who prepare and prepare and prepare and think about their story. Even if they’re not
outlining, they’re thinking about it for, like, nine, ten months, and then they sit down in
a month or two and they write the whole book. If you’re a schoolteacher, binge writing is a
very good way to do it, because my experience with schoolteachers has been, having married one and
knowing several, that writing during the school year is just really hard, because school teaching
is one of those jobs that consumes your entire life, and there are always more things to be
doing for your students. And so taking the summer and saying, “My summertime is my binge writing. I
focus on my books.” That might be the way you go. There’s an exception to every rule of thumb in
writing where somebody really successful has done the opposite thing and it has been the
right thing for them. So keep that in mind.
