Sanderson 2013.13 - Various Questions

if I'm looking for the scene to have a strong view bait point I'm looking for it to be concrete and I'm looking for it to be non flabby meaning that you've cut out the repetitive language you've cut out the you've trimmed down basically anything that doesn't need to be there and let the stuff that does need to be there you've taken out the passive voice you've made your descriptions more concrete and there should be an e on that but you know and there was a great example in the writing group today I hope that whoever it was doesn't mind me showing it where they said you know what was the pain coursed through their brain or what was it something like that one of yours was at Aaron's yeah it was yours and know what we all rights we all write sentences like that in first drafts and we all have them in flash drafts sometimes but what what you know seen was just that they say you know pay paying course through him instead saying you know he moved his aren't in Winston Payne those one is more concrete we can see an image to it the other is an abstraction pain is coursing okay but let's do something all right let's let's have active strong viewpoints concrete language non flabby scenes that's what's going to that's what's going to shine in this writing because I can't give you a ton of advice on overarching plots and things like that okay this is what I'll be looking for now as I have said before this is an elective class with a lot of you being upperclassmen I'm not going to I'm not going to you know stomp your face in the ground I'm grade wise if you've done what I've told you to do if you have come every week read your submissions you hit your thirty thousand words you're gonna be just fine okay if your submission is really terrible you might get an a-minus instead of an A but your grade is mostly on self-discipline and doing the things that I told you to do all right it's easy to get a good grade in this class if you're willing well it's simple to get a good grade in this class how about that do the writing give the feedback do your reading and then you're great I will group you're finally a little grace great qualitatively but since most of your grade is built up based on doing the stuff it's you know as long as you're not dreadful you'll be you'll be fine even if you and there's no one in this class is dreadful so you'll be fine as long as you are actually doing a revision of it if I can look back at your original scene and say hey they put some effort into polishing this they're getting better you're gonna be fine okay all righty so this week is your week to launch me off into whatever random direction you would like me to go in if you don't have questions for me then I'll have to pick something boring and talk about that instead like grammar yes grammar what's that you really like grammar you're Amerian okay okay okay yeah I do a little bit of each if if it's an idea that's not connected to a story yet I will sometimes stick it in my file of cool things that need to be used someday others are so so cool to me they just keep bouncing around and never need to be added that file particularly if there have a novel is forming sometimes when a novel just suddenly comes together that's when I sit down and write it I often explain novels as a made up of different pieces that have been bouncing around in my head long enough to interact with one another in an interesting way but other times you know a lot of times books come from me saying wow I really love this type of story I want to do some of those someday and I sit thinking for years on what's a take on that story that I can do that will be cool what's a take on that story that will an event when something comes to me I open up a new thing I call a book guide and I start writing down plot setting characters just so I have that when I want it yeah and I just write down whatever I have so for me a new book is opened up a new word I'll name the book something it doesn't have to be the final title and then I write plot setting character I make each of those in Microsoft Word heading number one or whatever it is the outline level one and then I go from there put in whatever I have thought of if it's just a brainstorming document like this I'll just list down all the things I have into those and I won't organize them in any way for character it's just going to be character concepts conflicts usually or professions or you know an emotional temperament for setting it's going to be an interesting magic or visual piece and for plot it's going to be you know a moment I've imagined you know one of those one of those scene scenes that are important it's good question when I either have a contract saying this needs to be in by this time or when I'm excited about it and oftentimes when I get done with a novel and it's time for me to do a breather novel I generally do a breather novel between projects whichever one I happen to be most excited about at that moment is the one I write there could be six of these that admit that it have book guides growing for them that I want to write someday and I'm only really excited about one of them at that moment I've seen a movie that's like that or I've you know that that I've had a breakthrough on that one recently and so that's the one I write where the others you know maybe if I had finished this other book a month later I would have written one of those that's that goes for breather novels I'm much more conscious on on the main line books the Mistborn books the Stormlight books though yeah that's that's kind of like that's the spine that's the backbone of what I wanted my career to be are those two series in the Dragon Steel series and everything else is kind of you know sides to that is is breathers between doing those stories so right well we're gonna work our way back well we'll get to you next but okay well I just want to work in order so here I have an orange one I don't like those and reader trust yes yep so there are some things that yes promise of a big series I would say in any of these can be broken you'll notice that Pat Rothfuss broke out with name of the wind which is a very long book with a non-traditional story structure doing you know breaking a lot of rules so to speak he had a lot of trouble get it breaking in when he did it was awesome and I'm you know there was there's a reason why we didn't publish way of Kings as my second novel even though the editor had it and is the second book of mine he read after a laundress and it's because of these things I felt the readers needed to trust me first so length of book the other thing is learning curve way of Kings has a kick to the face learning curve and unless yeah unless you trust me as a writer you know though even if you trust me those early chapters are difficult to get through and I knew writing the book this is the book I wanted to tell that's one of those things that's like if I were reading this new law as a new author I'd be like man your learning curve is off the charts if I read way of Kings I'd be the same way I'd be like you're just being way too ambitious but with the trust of the readers it has become my best-selling and most popular book because readers read it like oh I trust brain and this is going to be awesome and because of the foundation and groundwork I'm able a I can write a book that is that much more awesome at least in my opinion you mentioned non-traditional story okay but well the non-traditional story arc in four Pat's book let's look at how Pat's books a non-traditional in some ways its traditional young orphan who who studies and learns you know magic and power this is a classic story trope on the non traditional method of it is changing view Pilar tenses starts and and in past tense moves the first person they're third-person omniscient or limited and then moves to first right that's a that's a non-standard sort of thing any of these non-standard things they are both awesome to separate your book from everything else but also increase the kind of eyebrow raise that it gets both from readers and from editors because they're like can they pull this off does that make sense how that would be they can both be the coolest thing about your book and the thing holding it back a launch wrist being 250,000 words was that they look in there like you know great writers can pull off a two hundred fifty thousand word book you're nobody you probably can't it's not maybe right of us to all think that but it's how we do so he did that viewpoints shifts he does not have a climax really to his book his book is one third of a book which is a really bad idea to be your first book that you're marketing both the readers and editors unless doing it another way undermines the integrity of the story you're trying to tell so not giving us a full book it is another one of those things it was too long but it was fantastically written and it was interesting and it was charming and it had all these things going for it as well you write the write the book you want to write be aware of what's holding it back if there are things it doesn't need change them if they if changing them undermines the integrity of your work write the work you want to write okay but just I want I want you to be aware of these things that's why it's you know being able to say to an editor this is a standalone book with sequel potentials with potential is is the better thing to be able to say if your book is not that don't lie you know Pat Rothfuss this book is not a standalone book with stable perceptual this is the first of a trilogy it is it ends in the middle and you know you you don't want to lie but it is a check mark against it all right okay it certainly works for some people a couple considerations is a good question to ask because it's not something I have in my standard list of things to talk to you guys about but everyone I've talked to who does it says that it is not half as you know half as hard you don't put 50% each each in you usually end up putting like 85% in each so it's a lot more work to collaborate okay some people are natural collaborators and some people are awful collaborators and you won't know what you are until you try it I warned against doing it as a new writer just because so many new writers I know have tried to collaborate with someone who is not as aggressively interested in doing the writing and it kills the story because you finish your chapters they don't finish theirs and then where do you go however some tips that I've heard Eric Flint give he does a lot of collaborative writing what he does is he says number one divide the work first all right okay and there are two basic ways to divide the work one you break it by viewpoint all right you both collaborate on a story in an outline you come up with it together and then you say you're gonna write this character and I'm gonna write this character and the less they interact with each other you know probably the better so it's like you know this viewpoint cluster here and this you click cluster here you're gonna do this or I'm gonna do that one you know or whatever it is you know maybe maybe you know you've got four and you're gonna take this one and I'm gonna take this way whatever it you just divide it out however you want to do it but try and give each person their own scope to write with the other thing and this is honestly the way that almost all collaborations I know of work Tracy and Margaret said this is how they work air this is the way that he does most of it is one person comes up with the outline and the world-building and all of that stuff that looks like a cue and then the other person does the writing yes and if if you did two different viewpoints of two very different characters that could actually be an advantage because the the characters feel so distinctive however it could also be jarring and so this is how most of it is done and then this person then does the revisions and usually in most cases this person is doing a little bit more work maybe depending but it kind of balances out a lot of times you know when it's the the veteran author and then the new writer relationship that happens a lot with Eric Flint Eric comes out with the outline in the world-building gives it to the new writer who writes the book and then Eric does a draft of it this is kind of how Bain approaches a lot of things one thing that has happened that's kind of interesting that if you like collaborative fiction should be fun to you is malazan anyone read malazan Steven Erikson did you read the other malazan books not written by Steven Erikson they world built this together apparently he and someone else and they both yeah to make a role-playing game and they both had a handshake on both of us can write in this world and so they both write malazan books and and you know they just did the world-building together which has actually been effective for them they publish they no no it's not in the same series they're not in the same series they are in the same world taking place with completely different characters in different places referencing sometimes one another and stuff like that but kind of like Forgotten Realms but owned just by a couple of people that's the only one I know of what's that yes so it started in the UK I believe tour has him here but I don't think I've toured jumped on the bag when Lake bandwagon late on those after they were a big hit in the UK so the editor in the UK is the one that that you would want to yeah Jim Mintz published was the editor at tour before he left to go to Bain and I think Eric Robb is the editor now at tour but I'm not sure oh yeah she did one with sorcery and cecilia yeah and that was a pistol Larry first person would remember when I talked about that go back to your notes where they were lighting writing letters back and forth to each other and they would each write the letters and I think they actually mailed the letters to each other the authors did and then would get them as the character and write a response and then the whole book is just the letters it's a fantastic book but yeah I'm not 100% sure that's how it came from but it feels like that show yeah okay I would market each book just uh just you know whatever don't cross anyone off your list don't start at the top and work out and you maybe that you want to have one the same publisher one thing breaks out and they want to buy the other stuff too maybe not so don't I would just not cross anything off your list all right we're gonna we're gonna actually work our way back to Scott you actually gave these to me but here you go boom hey oh I hope I hit the camera right on the lens that would be awesome don't worry I'm sure these floors are clean there's only like a thousand students a pastor every day go ahead yes practice I mean this is basically the whole class has been about so I can't take 14 hours and tell it to you again but yes what you just said is right and you should practice writing your scenes and saying what is the tension the scene often times when I'm writing a scene I'll say what is the tension here and you know it can be something simple I was I was writing a scene for a storm light to another day and there wasn't enough tension and so I had to I had to change the scene and and and change the setting so that I added setting tension I put them in a cafe where you stand and watch a stye storm coming and then run it at right before it arrives and run and go hide in this bunker that's you know the people are loving to do because now it's all the rat the fad to watch a high storm almost come kill you and so there's this tension the scene of Wednesday going to be here or sitting here chatting but there's something coming it just adds a little bit of tension to a scene the other thing is to keep in mind motivations what if the characters want and how are they going about getting it and that should create some tension I want this out of this you know even if it's conversation character motivation is I need to get this out of this conversation can I do it that adds tension okay yes that is a way and her books I enjoy quite a bit so she's doing some stuff right but yes she is really mean to her characters yeah it can be a gay gets a little bit you know after like I read the whole assassins first trilogy straight through and at the end I'm like ah I should have taken a break between these ohh mmm so but when I took this class ten years ago one of the things Dave said was put your characters through as much pain as you can and don't let don't let up that's one of his right guiding rules I don't subscribe to that I I write different sort of stuff I like to have highs and lows and ups and downs Dave said never let your characters cry to release that emotion I feel like I want to have the release valve particularly in a thousand-page book it's much better advice in a 100,000 word book you know a lot of thrillers you'll notice you don't let up they just keep it going they're meant to be read in one sitting and they they you know ripped you through that book and they use every dirty trick that they can to keep you going and I call them dirty tricks because they are kind of dirty tricks there they're time effective but the reason they're quote-unquote dirty tricks is if you keep doing them too much for too long it will spoil the experience but if you do them in a short burst for a short novel you just go through the book and air dot em this is this is if you watch the television show Lost this is what lost it lost used all the dirty tricks and then a lot of viewers got fatigued of the dirty tricks after a while and that's what that's that's sort thing you know cliffhangers that don't go anywhere are one of the big dirty tricks that's like the huge one but also character always in pain characters can never release their pain everything always gets worse that sort of stuff all right there's another question and I'm gonna go we're gonna go we're gonna work up this time so there you are I was trying to get it on the table so that it wouldn't go on the floor but it did anyway I would get an accountant don't stress too much about the early books just write them but the thing is I didn't stress too much about the early books and I just wrote them so that that's not really good advice for me cuz I did it automatically I don't know I mean I had to muddle my way through this and there I don't think there's any big piece of advice that would have changed anything dramatically for me just keep at it hey you've got my swag suite all right question yes oh well that's I would say good for you you lucky person to have a day job that you enjoy and also want to write this is this is a good place to be writing can be all-consuming you're just gonna have to find the time for it and put it in that box and try to not let it escape because you what you don't want to do is if you have another job that you like you don't want to shortchange that job with your writing which it's going to naturally try to do one will try to shortchange the other and so you'll just have to get really good at compartmentalizing and saying this is my writing evening I do this twice a week I sit down I do my writing or you know maybe the job that you like is standing on an assembly line doing stuff and you can be thinking the whole time and it won't shortchange you but if you know the job you like otherwise is teaching then you can't be sitting and thinking about your books yeah did you were you gonna give advice on that you raised your hand err [Music] right yeah yeah and that's a really hard thing if you've got a job that's that's all consuming particularly there are jobs that are easier to mix with writing jobs that are harder programming is very hard to mix with writing they flex the same muscles the same creativity teaching is very hard to mix with writing again you're doing creative sort of things in the classroom plus it's the type of job that you take home with you and you have to editing you can you can mix with it because usually most editors I know when they put down the thing they're editing they can switch to something else so so those do tenza but the best jobs mix with our jobs where you are going to be doing something like the best job for a writer not to learn how to write but it would be something like ditch digging because you'd be sitting there digging the ditches totally physical and you'd be thinking of your stories and then you'd be able to go home and write you would think oh that's not a good match for writer but it actually is a good match for a writer you know doing it you know being a a sports star you know and practicing your free throws and things like that you can probably while you're running you know cross country be thinking about your stories and things and that actually works really well programming doesn't unfortunately so people I know that are programmers or that have like Dan you should talk to Dan about this Dan Wells go to one of the signings and ask me how he did it because he was a creative writer for Nu Skin and for other companies for a while where he would write their newsletters and it used the exact same muscles he'd get home and it was tired of writing because he'd been writing all day and he would have to squeeze out a half hour more of obscure I telli before he went to bed that's tough so compartmentalize I never had to do it I've basically only ever been good at this thing and I'm pretty lucky that it turned out for me because I would have been awful at him pretty much anything else all right there is another question right there I have a question about research okay yes yeah right did that talk to you guys about this I I follow the the 80% rule meaning you can usually get yourself 80% of the way there with a relatively minimal expenditure of time and then the last 20 like it's like you spend like a few months researching you can get yourself a lot of the way there and then the next ten years is what it takes to get the last 20 percent I gave myself 80% of the way there then I find someone who has the 10 years and I give them the book we gave we gave the we gave way of Kings to a field surgeon someone who was trained in field medicine and said read this and tell me where I'm going wrong and there were a couple places but I got most everything right because you know I'd done enough to get it to where I wasn't being embarrassing and that's what I would strongly recommend to you but primary sources are very useful going and just interviewing somebody if you know like Dan was writing a book with with mortician he said hey tell me about what you do and just wrote recorded it and got a release form and use that sort of thing interviewed people but you know do a little bit of research it actually you know get yourself to the point where you don't sound embarrassing and then give it to someone else I do this a lot with any of my books that has guns because guns are one of those things that you can get so wrong so easily and it can ruin the book for a substantial population of the readership and so I know my way around not sounding stupid but then I give it to uh to a gunnery reader that I know gun nut and he tells me you know where I've gone wrong so I try to get myself 80% of the way there it's probably more like getting myself 50% of the way there and faking 30% of it but that's what you do as a writer yeah boy the amount of times that I've gotten an you know that he's yelled at me for using clip it's hard to get clip out of your head because everybody uses it but it's a magazine you know most guns don't use Clips unless you're in like World War one was a - that used clips yeah yeah you still can yeah no one uses it so Sam yep yep yep what you think of as a clip is a magazine and I yeah clip is clip looks like this I think tell me if I'm wrong here but here's here's your thing of bullets and they're like tied together thing and you stick that in and then you've got your thing right here that's got this and the bullets in it and spring on the inside that's a magazine so there you go something simple that you know most of your readers won't care but the ones that do care you'll lose a lot of credibility by doing some things wrong so I'm actually a descriptivists linguistically that means that if it's in common usage then it's right but there's no excuse that's not an excuse for kicking people out of your story when it's their field of expertise one of my personal sort of this is a personal thing this isn't it writing advice sort of thing but it's a it's a personal sort of metaphysical thing is my job and writing is to present people's viewpoints accurately my characters you point accurately particularly when I disagree with them I think it's the artist duty to represent like one of the things that I hate is when I read a book and there's a character who has my viewpoint and it turns out that they're the straw man who's there to be proven wrong okay drove me crazy about the da Vinci Code right there's a there's a girl who's a theist she believes in God and the whole book is about stove Sophie you idiot so for you idiot Sophie you idiot she never presented a real argument she never I never felt like I felt like she was my character and she was there to be an idiot and I never want to do that to someone no matter what their Creed their their way of seeing the world is I want to have them say this character represents me and they've given the good side of what I would argue and yes maybe some of the foibles too but it's a real representation that's why I want my gun that's to use the right word where sometimes yes gun nut I all I know is you know guns I don't know if you're a Larry Correia but but you know the difference from the clip of the magazine you're probably one of like three in this classroom but I want when they read to say yeah this guy who is who's like me uses right language I want that's just one of my personal things I don't go into my writing per to to teach really I go on my writing to tell a good story and I'll let the characters teach if that's what they want to do some of them well some of them won't personal thing all right questions I don't know that we talk too much about villains we talked a little bit well there are some who do occasionally but for the most part every character is a hero in their own story or at least a protagonist even if they don't view themselves as a hero they will they will have objectives and motivations and they will justify them 99% of the people are gonna be justifying what they're doing serial killers think they're justified the worst people in the world think that they're justified in what they're doing they may not believe that what they're doing is right but they'll think that they're justified they'll have excuses or they'll have justifications and that's a very important part of writing a strong villain now the other question you're gonna ask yourself is what type of villain this is the best way to make a great villain and to put them at odds with the hero obviously the protagonist they are the stumbling block over which the protagonist can't obtain what it is that they want so that you put them in odds with one another but the question is what type of villain are they what are their motivations what do they want I'm that's a lot of readers fairly tired of the the evil overlord who is evil to be evil you know I was on a panel once with the affirmation Pat Rothfuss and we were talking about this the two of us and I'm like I'm so tired of villains that want to blow up the world is like he's like yeah I know like who's gonna really want to do that that's where all their stuff is I'm gonna blow up all my stuff you know but you can create an anarchist like Heath Ledger's Joker who really did just want to blow stuff up and that was believable so there are exceptions to the rule but most everybody's going to want something and and that sort of thing otherwise you approach them like you would a hero except you know you make their motives less pure they're an antagonist because they're at cross cross with the UM the protagonist they're a villain when what they're trying to achieve is is a not good thing I'm trying to work out how to say that you know and you may want to decide if it's just an antagonist or an actual villain that you're looking at I don't know what do you guys think throw it there out through out some advice what makes a good villain in your opinion I like when I see a and it might not be in every single situation but if anyone's ever seen the movie heat I really wanted to Nero to get away at the end I really wanted him to get away so I think that's something that gets someone involved such that I find them to be enjoyable okay right right we'll work our way this way so right here first okay I think when we did our whole list of what makes sympathetic protagonist we pointed out that villains usually going to have two of these but they're gonna be missing you know the one that makes you actually well dig they can be likable too that's just them the motives are gonna be are going to be bad motives yeah so the competence activity and these sorts of things but I also like to have obstacles not necessarily those obstacles and things a working kind the scenes that are more powerful than either the characters can deal with or handle but that's just a plot structure kind of thing they become very interesting by having their passions you know one of my favorite villains of all time is is the guy from diehard Snape when he's in die hard I like you miss nape too but you know in die hard it's like you know this guy is just a thief but his passion for being an awesome thief but don't call him a thief yeah don't come just a thief like is so cool and he's so interesting and he's just a miserable human being like there's nothing really redeeming about him except for the fact he's so competent and he's got a passion and that passion even if his passion is ripping everyone off you know that moment where he gets the locks to open and it's like you know the music is playing and he's like majestic that he's done this I shouldn't be talking about r-rated movies on boa campus I suppose but we've all seen it edited right yes we've all seen yeah so alright alright let's just do two more over here oh wait what the blue three yeah yeah yeah okay okay now now there's nothing there's nothing wrong with that I mean you've got to have your triumph somewhere else there hat there needs to be some sort of resolution it doesn't have to be a triumph there has to be a resolution a satisfying resolution this is something to keep in mind we'll get to you guys to you too next no one else raised their hands on this one though because we got it but you've got to have a satisfying resolution which is fulfilling on the promises you made and if your promises are you know these characters will either get together or not you've got to deal with it that not dealing with it is unsatisfying dealing with it and having it fall apart is satisfying but sad and separate unsatisfying from sad and you'll be okay so if your promises are in the book that you know we are going to defeat the villain realise that you've got to do something with that but if your promises are we're going to come to learn more and grow and understand if you can give those promises instead and the ending where it's like everyone's morally ambiguous and was this guy really a bad guy that can be a satisfying promise right here and then we would Abraham mm-hmm yeah yeah they could have made a great go loki movie about halfway through they ruined loki I felt in that movie that's going off of something else where that first half is go Loki and then it's now I'm just a random evil villain I was really disappointed when he did that I wanted him to be more yeah go yeah yeah all right I remember watching a movie called the guy said that he wanted all of these things and he wanted to become a good person but he was bad it didn't matter what he did he couldn't switch who he was in that perspective and he eventually realized yeah I would say that that's an actual example of the difference between antagonist and villain he thought antagonist was the same as villain when by the end of the movie what he realized is I can play the antagonist in this role but not actually be the villain it was a good movie I really liked it alright let's go to another question onto another topic yes yes how many of you yeah yes yes and it has to do with output make goals for yourself if you're not achieving your goals then reassess if your goal was wrong or you're spending too much time on something else a quick rule of thumb most people will write between 250 words and 750 words an hour 750 is a lot 250 to 500 is going to be where a lot of people are okay that's one thing to keep in mind just so you can kind of gauge yourself but if you're wanting to do this professionally now remember Worldbuilders disease if you want to have Worldbuilders disease and you want to do this and that is what's fun to you there's nothing wrong with that where we're not making moral judgments about what your goals are but if your goal is to write professionally you need to be able to produce a book I would say if you're not producing one book every two years in sci-fi fantasy specifically you've got to look at what you're doing okay now you can find outliers how often does does Connie Willis produce a book if you go look at her bibliography she's probably doing one every three or four years and she's one of the the most well-respected authors and science right now so they're going to be outliers but as a new writer if you're not heating whatever those goals are then look at it one book every two years I would say as a minimum really you should be shooting for one book a year depending on the length particularly if you're doing a hundred thousand hundred twenty thousand word books one book a year is pretty good and then we can break that down let's look at what we're doing so let's say that you were writing let's say you're writing 500 words an hour you should be able to get to 500 words an hour I would say so 500 words so and you're gonna shoot for 120 thousand word book alright someone who does math tell me what this is twelve hundred divided by five what's that 240 all right so you can make a goal on that 240 hours 240 divided by 52 what five five-ish hours five ish hours a week that's not a huge investment of time I would assume that if you're taking this class you can find five hours a week to do your writing so there's there's a goal for you to go right there one one hundred twenty thousand word book a year if you're gonna try and write epic fantasy and you're gonna be in the two hundred thousand word range then perhaps you need to up this and try to shoot for eight hours a week should be fairly doable if you're serious about this you should be able to find for eight hours a week more than eight I can start to see you know that's like you know that's getting really troubling particularly for people have a 40-hour a week job and kids eight hours is going to be stretching it but most people they how much is the average person watching TV a week yeah or playing World of Warcraft or whatever it is that's your personal hobby so you need to find eight hours out of that time don't take the time from your job that is your job or your family but take the time and say I'm gonna you know my leisure time is this maybe you just don't have it but I think eight hours is pretty reasonable and you can be writing an epic fantasy every year if you're willing to do that in old terms we thought of 250 words to be a page that was tight oh this courier 12-point double nobody uses this anymore but that was kind of where was it was between 200 and 250 a page okay 250 thousand you get when we publish it I think it's 212 or something like that I trimmed a lot in there revisions that is something that very few people run into but it does happen to about usually about one out of ten people I think I've mentioned before ends up being being low on that I would say you need to add a subplot which is a conflict related to the character interactions or to the characters personal passion and motivation for instance they want to find through this the course of this what happened to their father or they want to or you know you need a relationship plot between these two characters you know the overarching plot is something completely different you're gonna add that and/or the character is searching for the most delicious perfect apple that has ever been in existence and so every town they try an apple something like that add a few of those things to add complexity the other main way to add to your account is to to add another viewpoint character okay there was one over here I think now maybe yeah you can my novellas have done very well on Amazon and in in ebooks you know they're in print and ebook is but they sell way better on ebook and so it's it's a perfectly viable strategy of these days if that's what you do naturally and you feel the stories are strong that way don't don't inflate them just because but if you're having trouble hitting your workout goals that's you know you feel like you want the book to be that certain length those are things you can do I do but you know it's getting muddied it used to be I had one children's publisher and one adult publisher but I've given the adult publisher some children's books and gone to a different children's publisher for a different set of children's books and so basically it kind of comes down to what we think is the best deal what where we think we want to be with a with a given story which publisher we think is more enthusiastic about it the reason I'm not at tour was still hard as I felt they were more enthusiastic about the rithmatist way more enthusiastic than they were about Steelheart and so having them selling them Steelheart when someone else was really enthusiastic about it felt like the right move to me okay you'll notice that most authors barring insanity which some of them are insane they'll start the book with them with fewer viewpoints and then expand is the book as the series progresses if you know people often point to The Wheel of Time but that book the eye of the world I think had two viewpoints maybe three and Rand is the view point for the entire first half of a 300 thousand word book so 150 thousand words of one character before you had a second one and that works very well there's no there's no answer to you each additional viewpoint adds learning curve and complexity and that's that's just what it does it's gonna lengthen the book add complexity and add to the learning curve but it you know the complexity and learning curve are part of what's fun it's going to also make your your story more immersive more expansive and these sorts of things new writers you know let me tell the story you want to tell I would not go over for for a new writer but that doesn't count throw aways where you do a viewpoint from someone's viewpoint for like one chapter just to show a cool perspective you know missed worn a laundress and Miss burnable three and that worked really well for me as a new writer three primary viewpoints in a given book Scott well Brian McKellen clone who just published his book is coming out this month next month one of my former students brian exhibits a lot of the characteristics and i could have told you all those years ago he's probably one that's going to make it his writing was good there is that but when I saw him a year later I asked what are you working on and he had finished several books and when I saw him a few years after that I saw him at a convention where he was talking to editors and pitching a book I hadn't heard of yet and then he was there the next year and he was there the next year he did not give up he went and wrote a lot of books and he got published he has a book coming out from from orbit so there's that you know Jancy was the same way those are two that I can point to that there's students that they got published they just kept writing books and that's really the thing that's going to probably distinguish a lot of them they keep writing they love writing they say I'm going to do this and it probably will take you ten years it takes it that much time if you read outliers you know Malcolm Gladwell's thing about that or you hear the 10,000 hours or whatnot it takes that long to become an expert at something and make it work the advent of digital publishing allowing you perhaps to jump a few hurdles and you're you know cut in line so to speak and get things out faster might speed that up for some of you I don't know Joe is not having a whole bunch of success doing that you heard him talk about it you know and he's another one that's been very dedicated and working very hard and so far you know not much at all for him a couple hundred bucks a month I think he said when we asked him or whatever but you know they there is an element of luck to this there is no denying there's an element of luck you can improve your luck you can work hard you can continually keep writing I have probably seen more students who had a lot of skill that I would point out said this is nearly publishable who never went on to do anything because they stopped writing then then I've seen you know people who got published that's that's the thing I see the most I see that way more than I see the people who keep at it and then don't end up getting published go for it yeah go for it yes [Music] [Music] yeah Jane you're right in the throes of this tell us about it people say that a lot people say that a lot I'm going to add the nicer side to it I do think that there is a place for people who want to write as hobbyist write a good book you cannot make this a career out of this particularly with the advent of digital publishing and things like that and everyone always told me things like that they really did I took those I just ignored all of that I'm like I want to write books if what you want to do is write books then who cares write the books you should be doing this because you enjoy writing the books and so if this and you say yeah I can do that I want to do that I want to if you're if you're willing to die with 70 unpublished novels then that's the stipe of person that sometimes makes it you have to be willing to do it anyway if that's what you want to do then that's fine do know that you know like Dan is a direct contradiction of that he got a day job one that we took away from his writing cuz he had a family his family was more important to him than writing was important to him otherwise he could have gotten a dopey job like me but his family would had terrible standard of living you know he got married early and had kids he still made it he made it it took him what four or five years more than me he still his first book that you sold was still his sixth book launch was my sixth it just took him a couple years longer to get there because he was doing all these other things so yeah ignore the people who say stuff like that they're trying to scare you away and they have good reasons for doing it but this is what you should be excited about if you're excited about writing stories then you've already won okay and you pick your timeframe don't let me pick your timeframe for you I'm just trying to say what would happen here if what you say is I want to write 120 thousand word book and I'm gonna do it every three years because I have all this other stuff going on and that is fun to me and I want to have these and share them with my friends and maybe they'll sell and maybe they won't who cares go ahead and add it up find out how fast you're right set your goals and do it and that is perfectly acceptable don't let anyone tell you otherwise all right okay no because I mean I'm lucky or if you would have come to me you know ten years ago I would have been like ah man all my friends are married and I'm not but I didn't get married till I was 30 a launch ruse was already out miss Warren was was becoming out I was able to make a full-time living as a writer the second year of my marriage so I mean I can work 12 hours a day and spend four hours with my family which is more than most dads get to spend with their family that's a lot of time so it's actually not that much a problem I did have to do some of this current part mentalization that I was I was talking about where when I'm done with my writing it's time to be done I don't go out with you know in a keep boring I put it out I'd play with the kids I spend time with my wife and then when they go to bed I go back to work that's what I want to do that's that's fun to me that's that's enjoyable but I did have to do that compartmentalization I think it's healthy yeah yeah yeah that's not uncommon if I'm not doing something if I'm not here if I'm not doing something I'm writing I mean what else am I going to be doing I don't you know it's not like I'm gonna sit down and turn on the TV their stories are worse than mine so yeah yeah yeah so you know if I'm not spending time with my family teaching my class or you know hanging out with my friends which I do do I'll do that and things like that but you know twelve hours is not uncommon for me to work but it doesn't it's not like I'm thinking yeah oh this horrible 12-hour day you know I get up I go to work I get done I go spend time with my family everybody goes to bed I go back to work and keep working on my stories unless I have something else to do I'm twelve hours in my workspace answering emails writing building outlines for something new thinking about what I'm going to write sitting and staring at the screen tapping on my computer with one eyebrow cocked that happens a lot stuff like that and I I work like kind of them if you go look at what the modern I've noticed there studies aren't like the modern programmer work it's kind of like one of these things where it's like done some stuff done some stuff done big productive moment okay we finished a chapter okay it's it's like that curve people have done a lot of studies on it and I follow that that normal curve so average output for me recently has been 3500 words a day so I'm basically right around you know if you look at the actual writing time I'm right around the 500 words an hour because of that four hours there's going to be a lot of email and working on other stuff and and whatnot but but ya know 30 I think I was 38 last night I actually recorded when I'm working on a big book like this just to make sure that I'm hitting you know reasonable goals the most I've ever I can do 5,000 some days but not consistently so it'll be like I'll have a 5,000 day it's like you know people talk about the well metaphor and the well metaphor is a real one where you dip things out of the well and so the water level lowers and then you I have to wait for things to kind of come back up before the creativity starts going again and so it's really hard for me to get over 5,000 words in a day unless I'm at the end of a story and I'm just going everything's already there and momentum and things like that Sam so yeah okay here and then there yeah yeah yeah that does happen I have a lot of practice of knowing my own writing style most of the time when that's happening I just I need to like go to the gym or just you know get get moving the the we didn't talk about writer's block at all in this class did way let's this little little talk about writer's block because writer's block it's this weird thing okay because doctors don't get doctors block you don't go to your mechanic for the day and say change my ol and they're like mechanic's block I can't undo those screws it doesn't happen but it happens to writers where we're like you know writer's block and the trick is writer's block is so tricky because it's it's kind of like if you go to your doctor and you say I'm tired some of the time if anyone here has any medical training that could be like 50 million different things causing that and that you know it's like I've got headaches oh great you know only one of the most common symptoms for most diseases you have headaches it's the same sort of thing with writer's block and there are a lot of things that could cause writer's block I can really talk about the ones for me usually if I have writer's block it's one of two things I haven't planned enough for the scene meaning I'm just trying to write the scene off-the-cuff and it's not a scene I can right off the cuff I don't have enough going on it's like that scene that I was talking about before there was enough tension in the scene and Stormlight and I was bored with the scene I'm like something's wrong with this scene and I actually you know that's one of the times where I just stood up and like just went for a walk and like what's wrong with the scene why you know this should be interesting clever things are being said character motion is happening and then I came to him just like there's just not enough tension it's not interesting because there's there's no tension to the same and so I came back and found a way to add tension this happened to another scene with me where it felt like the whole scene that I talked to you guys about this one that everyone was talking heads they were just talking talking talking talking like there needs to be something going on here what can I do to make this seem more interesting and I needed to have the characters doing things I gave one of them a dart gun to blow darts at the wall cuz they're a hunter and they're practicing with the darts I think I talked about that but so these are things that we were gonna it just added a nice visual it's a character thing something visual we can see he wants to use the dart gun so he can actually hunt the way that it's supposed it's meant to be done it tells us about the character plus then there's a character where you know you're standing in a room with this person blowing darts and they're passing by you kind of to close making you uncomfortable there's more tension to the scene he's not a nice person so that kind of adds to that tension so they're just not enough planning it could be bad mood this one doesn't happen to me a lot I'm not a terribly moody person but it does happen where just something cruddy has happened in your life or you've got your you've got a cold or it's allergy season or something cruddy is happening and you're just in a bad mood and you don't want to right you just want to be lazy you had a bag of Cheetos and watch Top Gear or something like that right there like let's watch Jeremy Clarkson swear at people and then then I don't know you're in a bad mood three could be and this is the hardest one for you guys to adjudicate is there's a fundamental problem that is persistent in something that you're doing that your subconscious as a writer is telling you something's off here buddy this is just not working you know the I've talked to you before the writing you learn to write by instinct you learn to write like a baseball player hits a baseball that's what you're going to do all this stuff that I talk about these are things I don't do a lot in the moment these are things that when I step back I say okay what's wrong with the scene and then I can start to analyze it and the answers start to come to me when I'm writing I'm like oh that's cool yes this is funny I need to have a clever quip here I need a character moment here I do them by instinct I just do them and that's what you're gonna want to learn to do this is why we're teaching you to write a whole bunch and start to be familiar with your process the more familiar through process you get the more when there's a fundamental problem you will be too satisfied and you won't be able to put your finger on it the thing about it is oftentimes these two can be fixed easily by writing the scene anyway writing it kind of maybe poorly and if it's this one it's gonna not turn out quite as well as you want if it's this one honestly most of the time it turns out just fine like I had a big conversation with Cory Doctorow about this one once where he's like people you will find that you will write these scenes that when you're in a foul mood they're like this is the worst scene ever and that those will be one of people's favorite scenes this happened to Robert Jordan a lot too he'd say and that's because sometimes when you're in this mood your writing skill hasn't changed you're still writing great stuff but you just can't quite see it and so writing the scene anyway it'll turn out well often if this is the reason it'll turn out poorly if this is the reason but your subconscious will work on it and you will fix it when you sit down to write the next day you'll be like I should have had people doing something the scene is boring because of that you'll reread it and be like oh I can fix this I'll just throw it toss this one aside save it and my deleted scenes file and I'll rewrite it with this fix if you don't write it however this subconscious fix often won't happen I can kind of get myself to do it by going for a walk maybe you'll be able to you'll find your methods but usually particularly early in my career even still this is the thing to do is start writing that scene poorly like when I was writing the scene right at the beginning I didn't stop after a paragraph I got like ten pages in and I'm like yeah what is wrong with this and having done it poorly I could then go back and add the change to it if I hadn't written it then maybe I wouldn't had that been able to do that the other thing to do is to add some more planning if a scene isn't working try a new setting try to add more conflict do it from a different viewpoint something to shake it up a little bit and you can do this with the planning or things like that so this is the this is the hard one and I don't know how to teach you how to fix this because it's going to come to your to your instincts as a writer when this happens with me it's usually because one of my characters is off if you remember when I talk to you guys about my process and this is this I'm talking about individual things to me this well this may not work for you but this my process I do a lot of planning and prewriting on my setting a moderate amount of my on my plot and not as much on my character so for me because I am discovery writing my characters nine times out of 10 if there's a fundamental problem it's because one of the characters isn't working because that's the part I haven't planned I found that planning the characters doesn't work as much for me they feel too stiff so this is a necessary evil but it does mean sometimes I'll get halfway through a book and say this character is just not working there's a fundamental problem and I can't continue writing this character poorly because I'm magnifying the faults of the book and at that point I actually go back and I do a revision it's one of the few times where I'll do a major revision of a book that's not finished when I have to rip out a character and replace them somehow I did this with say Zed and Mistborn 3 the character was not working and I did half way through the book a complete rip out and rewrite of that character it happened at Elland and in book 2 also they just it's something that I have to do sometimes that depends on your process some people do much better with an entirely new edit discovery writers tend to do better with a new edit outliners tend to do better with a just fix but to resist the urge to edit too much as you're going you sometimes you want to fix that scene and just feel like this is awesome but if you do that four times a move-on probably would be my suggestion usually it's sent to my writing group and it's the type of feedback I talked about in the writing groups time when Witten first first first week I want reader response where they bored where are they excited where they confused not really my wife's in my reading group my editor doesn't want to see it usually til it's done I'm saying with my agent so and then when it's done I'll send it to betas which are people who read the whole book and give feedback rather than chapter by chapter friends sometimes some of my some of the hardcore fans you had a question before I didn't get to usually editing is about an equal amount of time to writing for me on a given given story meaning editing a chapter doesn't take as long as writing it but editing it three or four times of solid edits it's going to need is going to be about an equivalent time I least budget that I can also edit more in a long stream than I can for instance that twelve hours you know there's four hours in there of not writing probably editing I could do the twelve hours straight through it's not drawing from a well it's just it's as what does howard call it chopping wood and hauling water it's the stuff that just you can keep you can keep doing for me that's what the editing is and so if you if you if you add this up you know my thirty five hundred words I'm you usually actually only writing these days about six months of the year let's see what would 3,500 times x let's see what some like Paul the calculator thirty five hundred words times five days a week because as much as I'd like to do at six I've rarely get to six so what is that come on calculators you have computers who's got the viewer I need this on a computer cuz we're gonna add we're gonna multiply it okay and now that's a week now times that by twenty six four hundred fifty five thousand so that that sounds about right if you look at my writing career we're at about about 450 so that's like you know a an epic fantasy and a shorter book every year it's about what I do and then a couple of novellas and about so about half my time is spent editing and I'm hitting around five hundred thousand words a little under a year probably is good average yep I have lots of these and I'm not excited about it anymore I wouldn't suggest you do that very often as a new writer the first book I scrapped this book number nine and it was these I had these and I wasn't excited about the book the second book I scrapped was number 17 or 18 these problems again I know enough of my process now to know when I'm just not excited about a book and it's better to just let it go back into the wood chipper all the ideas come out and maybe I'll reuse them later book number nine that I scrapped eventually became war breaker when I started over from scratch I took the good parts of it and if you read the annotations for war break here I'll tell you which parts were good and which parts I tossed away and yeah one character ended up in way of Kings yeah theft who's Caledon skeletons buddy he was originally in book number nine myth Walker yeah all the stuff that I've you know the outline the big outline and all that stuff it's more extensive for something like way of Kings because I have certain goals and the Stormlight of stuff I need to improve in the wiki before this book will be will have you know like I need to get all the cultures down or you know there's holes in the in my personal wiki that's not something you have to worry about so much it's because I'm writing a ten book series of three hundred thousand word plus books that I need to have everything consistent in my internal wiki I just do a chapter and then I I save in a chapter chapter whatever by the character title usually so like I just finished last night you know Shalom 3-7 that's section three chapter seven of Sean's viewpoint then I go and I add that to the full file which is right now called world words of Radiance point zero two or whatever it's not finished so you know point two and then I save that and they both go to Dropbox which is my you know rather the old days of now then I email it to myself on Gmail which was my thing first for my backup and then before that the save it to three disks or whatever the old days of the atrocious need to like you know now I just save it and it goes to Dropbox and when it goes to Dropbox that means that it's then going to go to the other computer but that the office computer is going to go to my assistants computer it's going to go to my wife's computer cuz draw it there I'll synch to Dropbox and so magically suddenly we have this on the cloud and in four places with the click of one button I don't know why I took so long to start using Dropbox if it's so nice it does never have to worry it's it's so it's it's interesting because my computer now is a is a dummy terminal right like I've just moved everything onto that I could I could take my laptop and throw it out the window go walk the Best Buy buy a new one push one button and an hour later it would be basically completely replicated which is so nice as you know someone who makes a living off of that thing so I would I would strongly suggest some sort of cloud service like that whether it be mozi they have a very nice service or it be Dropbox or whether it be Google's new one Google Drive use something like that and take advantage of it and have two computers that sync to it automatically and you'll never have to worry about backups yeah persistently it's not excited not a couple days worth but a couple of weeks worth of it just not and having lots of fundamental problems than like it's going to be I I would have to rewrite this book so much that I should just scrap it and start with a new one no I just don't let myself not be excited about him the everything I've scrapped has been a side project I don't you know at some points you just have to say you know if a major book isn't working you can't scrap you can't just dump it you then say I have to put all of this work in to read into fixing it you have a contract that's what you do yeah yes it was I'd never written a sequel before I wrote a sequel I'd never written one before and I wrote one you're just gonna have to do these things on your own these that these sorts of things are too personal to the writer meaning what I say is not gonna you have to do it you have to do it yourself okay all right we're gonna do this question then we're gonna let you go to writing groups realize that almost all authors will get bored with the story dance we know we share the story on Ryan excuses a lot of Neil Gaiman who once called his his agent at 75% mark truth look and said this book is awful it's the worst book I've ever written I'm and his agent laughed at him and said you do that on every book do you realize this he hadn't realized that at 75% part point he always hates his book you will get two points where you are bored with your book doing this for your scenes is one way to make sure that you're not realizing that everyone that this is work and it is a slog what you can confirm to yourself is by going back to a few chapters you've written before and reading them you should say wow those are better than I remember that's actually really readable and kind of interesting and and that if you're be able to do that then the book is probably still going all right you just need to push through that middle part make sure you're making each scene as exciting as you can and doing interesting things and then maybe in the end once you're done with your book you'll need to cut it by 15% but that does happen to a lot of us and being able to see the reason for this is and I'm glad you asked that question is I can't look at you and tell you when it's this or when you're just in the normal I've been working on this book for a year and a half and it I really want to be done with it and you can't tell I can't tell the difference from those two for you so for most of you that's why you should pretend it's this one and finish the book anyway until you've got the instincts later on that'll tell you when it's one of these all right okay guys we'll do this again next week with more question

Channel: zmunk

Views: 11,596

Rating: 4.9569893 out of 5

Keywords: brandon sanderson, creative writing, fantasy, BYU, interview, discussion

Id: uJl6_tRW3rA

Length: 77min 49sec (4669 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2017