Sanderson 2016.12 - Q&A

right I have various questions that you have asked over your slips that I can get to if if there aren't enough questions or you know what not I didn't get whatever you wrote on the slips last week because I don't think Donald got him in to us in time so if you wrote questions about agents or prose or dialogue oh yes good asking now but you have about an hour and 10 minutes hour and five minutes to just hit me with any random question that you feel like asking um go for it do you this is to part-time to you ever faced discouragement or writer's block when you're on a long project - okay so the discouragement to end writer's block two-part question both very important things that sometimes I cover during the class so I'm glad you brought this out the part of my life where I was the most discouraged as a writer was when I had finished 12 novels and had not sold any of them this was kind of discouraging when I've been sending them out the rejection letters are piling up my mom is calling my dad to call me to be like what are you doing with your life all right you know the berries like so son this writing thing you know all of that sort of stuff um and I got into a little bit of a funk where I'm like am i doing right I've written all these novels nobody's buying them I'm going to be like my mom always said begging for beans on the side of the road and I kind of I thought a lot about it and I I had some some thoughts the main one was I loved writing these books right this is what I do this is what I'm I think I'm built to do this is what you know I feel I should be doing this is where I am and I'm very proud of these books and I have confronts a question that you might have to confront which is if I hit age 90 and I die and my family finds a hundred unpublished manuscripts in my closet am i a bigger success than if I give up now meaning am I willing to take the risk as a writer that this will never be anything more than a hobby am I willing to accept that that could happen and for me the answer was yes the writing of the books and giving them to my friends as Jane Austen did for her career and never getting any renown or whatnot was enough for me and this led me over the years to some sort of you know philosophical look at this whole writing thing which as I said we take the assumption in this class during the class period that you want to be a pro right but you don't have to do that in fact I don't know if I shared this kind of analogy with you at the beginning in class but how many of you like have friends or you like to go play basketball or you know or volleyball or something like this you know you go play basketball with your friends every Wednesday night that's a pretty pretty solid hobby right you're doing it every week it's something that's taking a substantial amount of your time but people don't come to you and be like oh so when are you gonna join the NBA right yeah they they can accept that you might go play basketball even twice a week or go golfing twice a week that it's your hobby that you love it they will accept that that's good for you and that that's a legitimate use of your time but if someone is writing a book for some reason our society is like so when is this thing that is worthless going to make money right when is that novel going to get published and when you're going to go pro we have this kind of like the arts they feel like they have to prove their validity by being worth money before it's worth someone's time which i think is a complete and utter falsehood if you love writing the books if you enjoy doing this and for you I have a good friend of my writing group he's a bath teacher that's his true passion in life but his hobby is writing books and every summer when he's off for mathy writes one not a whole book would you write something he loves it he's never gonna be a professional writer he knows that he doesn't care he loves writing the stories and you can be anywhere in between that and I seriously intend this to be my career someday and you just have to be willing to accept that it may never become that right now part of the point of this class is kind of prove to you that it happens more often than people think it does I have a student or two every year who get published with a major publisher right I have a student or two every year who goes self-published and consistently put things out like Joe so in this class we've already had one person get a book deal okay so it's not like it's not going to it's impossible it's not like you know people pretend one out of a million make it no I have a class like this of people who are serious I mean my class with Dave that there are what four of us who are pro out of twenty people so those are pretty good odds compared to what people say you know they might be someday they pretend that it's one in a million Hey but still it's if you're looking at a career 25% AUB's even if they're that good which they might not be but if 25% odds of you spend ten years to this and you might be able one in four chance to be pro career wise that's a pretty big gamble so you have to be willing to take that gamble decide where you are on the scale of I love doing this you should do it because you love it and if the pro happens then great and if you really want to go pro there are lots of things you can do we've talked about this class to really improve your odds but so does that make sense that's part one of your fit of your question is if you're getting discouraged about your writing you have to ask yourself why you're doing it okay now writer's block is something separate because writer's block can be a symptom it's kind of like having a headache if you go to the doctor and say I have a headache they're like great that narrows our list of you know a thousand different to 990 possible causes right what what is kind of yet where what but even doing they'll go through all these are the questions same thing with writer's block so many things can cause writer's block and different writers will have completely different methods of getting over writer's block and this is where you have to learn your psychology and try different strategies and see what gets you past writer's block for me if I have writer's block there are two main causes and I've only been able to figure these out over years of practice which is which number one is the one that you probably assume it is every time you get writer's block which is something is fundamentally broken with the story and I can't continue because I can't write this character as who they are without Shane without fixing their entire character arc because each step I'm taking is taking me further away you know something is so broken that each step inside it's taking it away from my goals so I have to stop and rebuild the story and that's really hard and frustrating that's one out of I don't know one out of a hundred writers blocks but it does happen you assume that it's every one of them it's not for me most writers blocks are I'm having trouble at the scene I'm not feeling like writing today oh I got a bad review oh you know I said something stupid to my roommate and or significant other and they're mad at me and so it's hard to keep keep focused it's one of those many things and so you just feel cruddy about your writing that day that's most of them for me the best way to get beyond that is to write the scene anyway write it poorly this part of writer's block is the fear that you're writing something bad the secret fear that you're a hack is part of what's the motivation for this writer's block and really it also it happens a lot in the early career of writers that their ability to see good writing has outstripped their ability to write it so they get discouraged about what they're creating because you see on the page something you're like this is not what I imagined when I took jazz band for the first time I was a pretty good trumpeter at that point I had taken lessons for like eight years took jazz band could not improv I could hear an improv song and the notes would not come out the front of the horn and I was so frustrated and my teachers like yes you need to go really reinforce your scales it's a new way of thinking it will take you years to figure this out you're like I know stories I've read lots of great stories I know how how to write I've been trained in writing since I was in kindergarten I know how to write but storytelling through prose is a completely different way of writing that you're gonna have to rebuild your thinking about and practice a lot and you can you can recognize as bad so these sorts of things you just need to write it poorly first even you know if you're a professional writer and you're having a bad day you just need to write it in anyway and I will tell you 9 out of 10 times that I do that the chapter doesn't suck I go back the next day I'm like ow I was just in a funk but my skill that I prepared myself with 4 year of years of practice skill came through and I can do a quick revision and the chapter looks just like the one that I wrote the day before when I was totally on fire one out of 10 times it didn't but the mere fact of writing it poorly now that there's something there to fix my brains like oh I know what you did wrong let's take this a completely different direction that chapter and we'll fix the chapter so I often say that if you have a serious bout of writer's block try just having ninjas attack right just do something write that scene in some way I'm ninjas attack or write it from a different viewpoints put it in a different location do something to shake it up and make yourself excited about it have something go wrong in the chapter you weren't planning don't assume it's going to end up in the book just write it and let your subconscious work on it that tends to work for a lot of people it's students that have had writer's block they've come in like and I've told them to do these separate things it almost always gets them out of it another one you can try is try a monologue by your character's explaining their their motives why they what they feel about the outline that you've given to them you know do some of those free writes with your character viewpoints try moving to writing along hand is another one that helps a lot of people if you have writer's block just for that chapter write it in longhand helps you turn off your internal editor just write it out to yourself it doesn't have to be good to actually type in the computer stuff like that okay all right other questions hopefully once I will answer faster than that okay so I can talk a little bit about publishers and I'll try to do kind of a quicker version of this but I think we'll leave Show versus Tell for go research so versus tell online I've talked about it it is just one of these fundamental things to do in writing with prose learn how to show versus telling it's so much easier if you can find like an exercise online where they'll say try to trim this down by 10% try it with your writing trying to make it more active try to get rid of passive verbs like you know highlight all the was is and to be some things like that he was a man like this they highlights it you say well how can I show that he wasn't and like this try some of those exercises it's one of those hands-on things you really have to do a lot of publishers so here's the thing um I how many of you guys are writing teen or middle grade so you guys I can help a lot less the reason for this is that I broke in through epic fantasy not through teen I have published in teen and I started publishing a middle grade like two years after I broke in but I already had an agent and my agent handled it and so I have much less in the trenches advice on team when I've asked about a lot of people say that team does tend to be more corporate meaning that it's a lot less easy to break in without an agent into team and middle grade and this kind of follows one of the fundamental rules of bad writing in that it's really hard to write a good team book just as hard as it is to write a good adult book but because they're much shorter it's a lot easier to write a bad one so for instance picture books which are the easiest to write bad versions of still very hard to write a good one but you know it takes you could probably write a bad one in an after new they get so many submissions right and middle grades in chapter books the same way so much easier to write a chapter book you take a few weekends you write out you know the five thousand words that could go in one of these short chapter books and then they send them in and you're like yes but it doesn't take as long to review but you got to remember they're only reading one page of it no matter what it is so the people who are having the the team submissions are having is way more submissions because more people are writing them poorly so that what this has resulted in is that team publishers tend to be a bit more corporate the other big distinction here is science fiction fantasy had a very grassroots start a lot of writers and a lot of fans said nobody's writing the stuff that we want we will go ahead and write it create our fanzines publishers grew out of that all the big publishers and science fiction that I can think of that having a legacy that weren't just started brand new were started because some fan became a publisher to publish these books and started as a small press and so things like da was done Wilheim right and things like Del Rey was Lester Del Rey and tor was Tom Doherty man these are started by fans basically no one got into science fiction because of the money they if you wanted the money you into other areas of publishing you into science fiction because you like science fiction so what this means is there are a lot of publishers in science fiction still have this kind of tradition of grassroots this kind of tradition of we don't need no agents you know we are fans and we like publishing fans this also means that some of the publishers in science fiction are a lot more open to new writers but also have more of a chaotic approach to publishing and will kind of move up the list the on this side the most chaotic is tor tor is the biggest and the most wonderfully chaotic of them all when I published with tor when I said I really want to be with tor my agent said that's good as long as you understand one thing there is no adult supervision at or that's what he said he said Tom Doherty is the benevolent grandfather and he lets the grandchildren do whatever they want and that is a tongue-in-cheek summary of what tom has created in a publisher that is capable of publishing any great science fiction regardless of editorial style they can publish something by Gene Wolfe that is really literary they can then go publish something like me or John Scalzi which is very market friendly they can do everything in between they've got you know they got clear fiction they've got they've got steampunk they've got you know stuff that feels like a thriller that's an action thriller they've got everything at tor anything that you would want to publish that has a science fiction fantasy event tour will take that's different than a lot of the publishers some of the others are like that but many of them are not they have we only publish you know a hundred books a year or fewer republish like you know 30 or 40 we have to have a consistent editorial vision for our for our line so they feel similar that's kind of the standard way you do publishing for a lot of these imprints so at tor your biggest tour will take on agent its emissions it will take unsolicited submissions most of the time you look on their website they'll tell you but they are the most open to new writers but they are also the ones who get the most submissions have the most editors who are very different from one another and what they want to publish they have a wall of slush and whether or not you you get published by tor can depend entirely on if you've got your book in the hands of the editor who likes the type of verse or your writing instead of the one who doesn't so if you want to publish with Torque what I recommend is finding out the different names for different editors and it changes so I don't even know them all myself find out who they are what writers they have published recently who they need to do and particularly what new writers they have bought and published in the last few years learn their names try to meet them at conventions try to their blogs just learn who they are not so you're stalking them your job is not to you know to to go find them at the conventions and just flood them with with you know with questions for my students but it's you know go to their panels at the cons learn who they are if you find him in the pit and the rooms or the hallway say hey if you what if you had come out recently by a new writer that I can read so I can kind of get a feel for what's selling they'll love telling you about that don't go ask them what are you looking for that's usually a bad question because what they're looking for is something awesome and every time they'll common haunt that question if you ask them what they what they recently bought what they just had come out tell me about your your author's you're really excited about particularly ones that you discovered they will always be excited to tell you about that and that goes for every publisher at every house teen included if you can find the editor and say what have you bought recently what you know what if you had come out that you discovered I want to go read it tell me about it do your research in other words this is how you start networking you get you get a page and your files about the different publishers and you start learning who they are so that's tour very similar to tours bane bane has that same mindset started by Jim Dane with half of his funding came from Tom Doherty as a silent partner because they were you know he couldn't be involved in it because of whatever you call it conflict of interest because he was running a different company he's by the way tour has been she sold in the nineties tour to Macmillan you hear about the big five or the big six that's one of the big six big five now publishers so ban is an independent publisher is the largest independent publisher of science fiction and fantasy it is not part of the big five conglomeration it was started by Jim Bain who wanted to have books that were fun this is kind of dames editorial vision that I see is kind of fun you kind of have to learn what bein books are they do a lot more pulp ish type stuff which means high action high amounts of you know great plotting but they do have some variety in that by the way towards everything so Bane does a lot of military SF it does a lot of kind of fast-paced fantasy it can be epic or not the kind of fast-paced but it also has some people like Eric Flint who do a little slower paced alternate history stuff so Eric Flint is another big one but again you kind of have to learn this is like they want to publish stuff that feels like updated classic science fiction okay you're not gonna go to Bane and find something like down-and-out the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow generally that's not something that meets their interrelation any editor at any publisher can find something they love and convinced everyone else to get behind it and publish it that can't happen but generally Bane is going to be looking for this kind of stuff Larry Correia is a big author of there's David Weber is a big author of there's that sort of stuff Bane is smaller than all the other publishers I will write up on here they have smaller advances they go to heart back less quickly you have to prove yourself but they also are very approachable and in my opinion very well run I like the editorial direction at Bane quite a bit so if you're happy to be writing the style of stuff or have something like it Bane is a good place to be looking the Eric James Stone published with babe all right excuse me all right so moving along we have this stuff under the penguin the random penguin and the random penguin the random penguin it has the most because there are all these little publishers that have gobbled up over time and so random penguin has Bantam ace rock I think it's okay that's a C I think I don't know rock yeah to see mountain ash Rock da I think that is everybody Delray do they have Delray yeah yeah they have done right I need yeah yeah okay so random penguin they got so much stuff going on over there these are still mostly separately have separate editorial groups running them okay so the thing about it is it's a little bit harder like if if ace rejects something it's a little bit harder to sell to the others because they are are under the same umbrella and things like this so a sin RhoC are generally going to be your most approachable they have the same editorial team generally as I understand they are kind of kind of half bane half tor they will publish generally anything if they like it but they have a slightly larger skew toward I should say like market friendly fiction things like they do a lot of Jim Butcher style I don't know if Jim's actually with them but that style of urban fantasy and things like that they do a lot of military science fiction they Jack Campbell books are with them and they're doing very well but they will take basically anything that's awesome and they have the authority to publish it and do it in hardback there my agent loves working with with ace and rock he speaks very highly of his experiences there I've never published with them but he there one of his favorites to sell things to okay da has has a different thing da has this weird relationship where it's kind of half owned by penguin and half not and so da is this publisher they do very few books they like to put a lot behind them and they generally prefer epic fantasy or epic science fiction with strong female protagonist that's what I would say is kind of their general you can go talk to them and see I bet they'd be fit willing to sit they'd say to you we just want any great fantasy but they're more if see publisher they're big authors include Ted Williams and Melanie Ron was with them for many years Pat Rothfuss is a DA author but there are tons of them but they treat them really well they published very few books when I was trying to break in i targeted tor ace and DA those the only three that I said - those were the the publishers that I was most interested in being at writing the style of fiction that I write okay del Rey Bantam are a lot more corporate these days they're kind of more this is where this is what we put we published the big stuff george RR martin is with them and McCaffrey's with them for many years these are like their bestseller lines they do still dry some new stuff for instance that the demon books by Peter Brett those are del Rey books so they still are interested in new authors and things like that but every time I've tried I tried to pitch them and my students have kind of backed this up over the years they're like we'd really prefer you have an agent but you can still find them at the at the con sometimes and talk to them they're just a little bit less grassroots these day these days than they were all right all right so then we have let's see that's random penguin and we have Harper Harper they they tend to do a lot of a lot of urban fantasy also in fact a ton of urban fantasy is in the Harper lines I think they still call it Voyager someone can Google that for me Harper Voyager is one of the big ones I have met their editors I really like them nice people seem like they know their stuff they go to the cons when I was trying to break in Harper was having a bunch of trouble trying to figure out what to do with their science fiction line that was you know like what 15 years ago so they have that that's all in the past every once in a while one of these will have some issues they have like harper prison they had I just figure them out when I was trying to break in these days they look like they're doing pretty good again urban fantasy seems to be their thing but when I asked their editor so you do a lot of urban fantasy is that all you're looking for is just like now I this is the problem I'll take anything that's great any of them will take anything that's great but but Harper seems like it's actively wanting to expand its line so so I'll be watching for them let's see Warner is saga am i right someone wanted Google that for race so we can have it on the record on the camera right saga I believe is Warner or is it yeah Simon Shuster is this a SMS at simon & schuster yeah you're right okay sorry Shuster no Simon Schuster this is new as in last three years or so saga is they are still aggressively buying things I know they've picked up some epic fantasies they seem like they're aggressively hunting epic fantasy I had I you would have to do your research because I haven't been in it long enough or they haven't been around while I've been hunting them and I haven't met them as much and so what they're really looking for is harder for me to pick out but anytime a new press is doing things that's a good sign right someone is launching a new line that's something you can sell to so if you can find the editors for saga a good place to be potentially but I can't vouch for them you'd really want to approach their writers say how's it been publishing with saga what's it looking like alright last one is orbits which is the hash it I think Warner is actually into the random penguin umbrella these days I don't know you can look that up orbit is a shot one of the last in the big five yeah orbit is the the biggest publisher science fiction fantasy outside the US and they've had a bit of a harder time launching here over the years so about six or seven years ago they just kind of came in in force and launched a new line and bought up a bunch of authors and really made it / it was a great time to be selling fantasy right then to them because they had tons of money there's still great publisher but that's like they they passed their initial investment phase and now they're kind of standardizing into a more standard science fiction fantasy publisher they are machette is very corporate I've worked with them they're great they're my UK publishers I love how organized they are and how easy it is to get a hold of people but they also are have less inclination to take someone I dated if you can meet them it's a great place to be they published Bryan McClellan and they publish Daniel Abraham yeah they published so for a while what they were looking for was edgier fantasy slightly edgier grim dark sort of stuff they really wanted to kind of make a strong editorial sort of thing now they'll probably take anything but that's still kind of where they are as they they were doing the they were doing the things that were just more kind of you mix market friendly with grimdark that's what they were hunting for the long at least that's what they were buying for the longest time because they also brought about Brent weeks with his assassin trilogy and things like that so that's that's orbit for you but again in the UK their tour meaning they had they have the true main imprints and publish everything so this they are different publishers but over here they're probably pushing toward the same editorial direction so they do the they do the the expanse right Isaac yeah so the expanse is as epic space opera very fast-paced also so there you go there's your quick thing on publishers so your verdict honestly yes good question okay so there's general types of conventions let's talk about the three types that you run into the first is a comic-con Comic Cons are fun but generally the worst place to find editors okay because there's so many people at a Comic Con and because they're focused on exhibiting to fans too large in large-scale groups the editors generally stay away or if they're there they're not on you because the celebrities are on the panel so hard to find you can sometimes go to a booth at a comic-con if they have one most of the time they don't the publishers do not but once in a while they they will and you can say Harry any of your editors here it's worth a shot the answer is probably no and or if they were we wouldn't tell you but so go to Comic Cons if you like them for fun but not the best place that leaves two types of cons and I separate them by calling them cons and conferences a conference is something like writer for artistry and readers a conference is has a high ticket price to come it get in and it is treated like a workshop and or pitch session if you go to writers for young readers or the LDF storymakers I think they're just calling storymakers these days they will generally bring in an agent or and an editor or something like that part of your your fee to get in is the fact that they are doing this and then you can sign up for pitch sessions it's all very formal and you have your opportunities to talk to these people and things like that and watch programs by them that's basically your best shot in teen is to find the conference's right in teen and yaa a lot of the teen editors do these things they come to Raffy and reader so they're gonna like the Maui Writers Workshop for things like that and you can find them cons are like what I'm doing tomorrow which is do where these grassroots science fiction things all started which are you know fans get together for it's like like the interest and everything conduit in Salt Lake these are fan run not-for-profit nerd extravaganzas they are much smaller they'll have like 500 people at them and if the editors are there they are generally going for the fun of it so these are the best places often to meet the editors but they don't usually travel the editors don't that's not like they're coming to life news reviewers and everything like my agent came one time because I'm not here so you can find them randomly but more often you have to go to the bigger two which are Worldcon or roll fantasy convention and editors generally there'll be a percentage of editors there I work on there's often two or three people from tore the whole Bane crew is usually there they'll be some people from ace there might be someone from da or Delray the orbit people have been coming to those as well I don't know the saga people I met the Voyager or the harper people at at Kevin J Anderson superstars writing and that's a conference rather than the con but you know if you go to world carnal world fantasy you can sometimes find them just at parties you have to be very outgoing to do that but one of the cool things they do is at most world cons they have a what's new from tour where each of the editors that are there get up and pitch to the crowd the new books that they bought plus you can also usually find a panel or two with agents and editors on them talking about being agents and editors and those are gold when I found those at conventions like you you could I can fill my little black book of pump of editor names with like okay this person said this at this thing this person said this oh this is this person's editor like I got so much information from those things but they're still you have to travel like they're expensive there are ways to do this without traveling so again kind of watching which books they publish looking in the forwards of books to see which editors are editing which books is usually the author will acknowledge them looking online at the the agent or an editor blogs the agents stealth it a lot more at these things at the cons at the conferences they're more upfront because they're usually you're doing pitch sessions with them so at Worldcon i would say that it is you got a mix at Worldcon you'll have a bunch of the pros a lot of the pros go to role cons just hang out difference right you will have a bunch of what we call semi-pros or aspiring pros kind of on the gambit of there and so that's like a third and there's also like this third group that is the people actually running the con who are just fandom they love fandom and they're like people like my editor moshe before he became an editor they just love science fiction or fantasy a lot of these people were fans of all of this before the internet and so they threw the cons in order to get together with their friends who had similar interests they're like giant Facebook pages from the 50s and they're still going right now and so there are a lot of aspiring pros don't make yourself annoying if you go and you talk to an editor they're like what you want to do is I would suggest if you if this is the route you want to take which is not the only route I would get together a couple friends go together share a hotel room find out the panels that energy rod go watch them get familiar with who they are ask them after the panel if they have a few minutes to sit down and chat ask them maybe what they're working on and stuff like that or find your own things to talk them about but you know in the past I've mentioned how useful these things were over my career so that it editors well I'll go to world cup like you know 80 more of your students found me like yeah that's what they're doing they're doing their job that's what they're supposed to be doing like all right yes they understand all your students so but it you know it just worked before this is how Bryan McClellan got published was by going and doing these things and he found the people in orbit and just was really good at doing what I just talked about so not the only way by far you can still submit just kind of blindly but even if you submit blindly what you want to be doing is submitting a manuscript that says you know dear instead dear acquisitions editor you want to be able to say you know dear Moshe fader I know that you published by the editor who discovered and publishes Brandon Sanderson I love Brandon's works I have you know read your blog posts about these things he doesn't blog he does on Facebook that I followed you on Facebook for a while I really like how you talk about writing I think we'd be a good match here's my manuscript submitted as tours us manuscript submission guidelines go that's what you want to be doing even if you can't go to the cons instead of just dear acquisitions editor please find my manuscript enclosed by the way Moshe Moshe Moshe motion really slow but so I'll warn you about my editor I love motion to death but since I've been published with him for 15 years I can count the number of authors piece page up on one hand and he still just does only does this part time so Moshe is not a good bet most people at or acquiring way more than Moshe is but I love Moshe yeah page sessions so to do a pitch session I would take your book figure out how to do figure out how to do a one-sentence pitch on it okay you can find out examples of these things online and what not you don't you can't do everything so my one sentence pitch for mist warrant was what if the hero who is supposed to save the world failed and the Dark Lord took over now a group thieves are gonna try and rob him silly bribe his armies away overthrew the Empire and make off with the money you know like it's so it's a mash-up of Ocean's eleven and epic fantasy that's your one sentence pitch does that cover everything no not at all so you want to have that pitch and then they'll probably say so tell me more and then you are ready with kind of the longer summary well there's this thief kelsier who was a gentleman rogue who robbed the rich for his own benefit he got caught thrown in a terrible prison and in the prison discovered he has incredible magic powers that trauma brought them out is now escaped and he wants vengeance on the Dark Lord the man who years ago thousand years ago took over the world has been ruling with an iron fist but al Sears way of getting revenge is to rob somebody that's the only thing he knows how to do so he's getting together his old crew he's going to pull off the heist of the millennia by robbing the Dark Lord Himself problem is he finds out that all their faces are too well known they're all being hunted there are certain things they can't do they need a new recruit so they go and recruit then who's a 16 year old street thief who has been manifesting some of the same powers that Kel Sierra is now mastered it's primarily history in her story she has taken under his wing trained to use the magic and trade to imitate a noblewoman so she can infiltrate noble society for them to help them pull off their heist you go into the longer pitch right kind of hit some of these things but still not hitting plot points have those two pitches ready practice them in front of your roommates practice them in front of people the one sentence which is really usually like two sentences put together with semicolons but you know the one sentence pitch and then the longer this is like two or three paragraphs but you want it to go as fast as I just gave mine and then you want to be able to launch into longer descriptions when the person's intrigued up oh that's cool what's the magic oh the magics really cool it's like this they're like oh that's great what happens at the end cuz they often will want to know that you're like oh it has a great twist ending they're thinking they're doing this and then this thing happens and you you just wanna be able to talk animatedly about your story like that if you do what I just did every one of them is going to ask for your sample chapters and then your stamp three chapters have to be awesome but if your sample chapters are awesome theoretically the last requests the full manuscript and what you've got to remember is any of these places that I say take only on agents or take agent submissions which is you know a lot of these guys if you meet them at a convention they have to write you know they can be like oh yeah send that to me that means you are now you don't have to worry about that whole age of the things right you can submit to them directly I would still if they then call you and say I'm really interested in this I think we want to make an offer who's your agent that's when you say let me get back to you tomorrow and then you give two agents or yeah and there are very few agents in the business we won't take you if you have someone on this board who is who has made an offer I should mention there are publishers who are not on this board that they're still totally legit these are kind of the the press is right below bein in size Tachyon who did the emperor's soul for me it's a very good one that I recommend pyre has had some troubles back and forth but it's Pyrus another one to look at that those guys you can research those are worth being at the problem is if you go to the rung underneath them then you might as well just be self-publishing generally is my experience right here how do you get an agent overnight um well theoretically if you've been doing what I've seen you've been submitting to different agents you at least have a little book of some of the agents who represent the fiction that is like yours that you like and if you send them emails and say you know dear Sharon November I just got an offer from from Ace for my epic fantasy book there look they wanna they want three of them would you be interested in taking a look at it to represent me that's free money right now not every agent will take that would they want to see the manuscript because the agent completely hates the manuscript then they'll probably still pass or something like that but every one of them will say yes and if you have a list of like ten then you can submit to and say I've submitted this to multiple agents if you could get back to me in the next couple of days that would be awesome I need to make a decision pretty soon so we can move forward with this they'll all look at it really fast because he hits free money and someone who else has done the work that they normally do and they like that idea okay so you if you have an offer you will not have trouble getting an agent if you have an agent you can still have trouble getting an offer but it does happen a lot more likely that you will if you get one okay yes like The Dark Knight at the spare moment thank you yep yeah my ears I'm not up enough to 12 yet but I got through for good so how do you know if what you're submitting is just crap yep yeah how do you know if it's complete crap boy so there's a little piece inside of every artist that is whispering at all times you know they're gonna eventually figure out that your dog is crap right that you are not as good as all that and so it Debra goes away be understand that that's just part of being an artist no matter how confident you are there's a party that's like yeah but but they're gonna discover that I'm a hack so understand that's there and you just have to deal with that how do you know it's how did I my confidence was boosted a great deal by having a ring of friends who were reading my fiction and giving me feedback on it what Iowa says I finished a book I printed off a copy I had wrote on the cover page here's the type of feedback I'm looking for if you could write this in the margins while you read and pick a pen color and write your name on this cover page in that pen color then I would give it to someone else and I have 12 people read it and respond to each other's comments and give me all that that feedback I would see what I'm doing good doing well and I would say okay this is working this is not working people are really confused Here I am creating the piece of fiction that I want to create I don't know if it's professional caliber but that's okay I mean you if yeah at the point where you are you are probably creating stuff that is worth reading it may not be professional caliber but you don't write for books and the worst writers I've known and I know some pretty bad ones by about 3 or 4 books there but you know they're good enough right they're good enough that you can enjoy reading the book you may not be good enough to go to the big leagues but they're they're good enough and you might be ready to go to the big leagues so you just have to keep going with this and you have to submit your friends know that you love it you're never gonna know for sure until somebody buys it because you're never gonna be able to say well just my you know it's my friends you're always gonna be able to save the of course they're gonna like it submitting with things like writers in the future if you have some shorts is a good way to kind of get some validation but once you start picking up one of the big things that will happen as you are transitioning from from aspiring to what we call semi-pro someone who's really close to getting publishes you will start getting more personalized rejections this is a really good thing like it when you get a rejection that it's not just dear fill in the blank and they've obviously filled in the blank and their mail merge or whatever unfortunately the story just isn't for us thank you for bringing it to our attention guess best luck with publishing wait instead you get you know we're not publishing a ton of epic fantasy right now our line is pretty full we really liked your magic system your characters didn't grab us it just didn't feel like you're you get up it even it's just one page something like that we're like oh they actually read this that means you have hit semi-pro right you are there at semi-pro if you start getting any of those they are they're taking the time what that means is the others are saying this person I would like to submit to me again and maybe I can see if their next book is good I'll give them some personal attention and or you know every editor in the business who goes into this wants to be like you know Hugo what was the hue of Gernsback who was like the early science fiction editor who nurtured a bunch of writers Campbell was like this to not Joseph Campbell the other Campbell the award named after Campbell and they would like nurture writers and be like hey you're doing a good job but you're you're you're really crap it endings gotta fix your endings try this every editor that's why they're competitors they want to help people become better writers and so if they take the time that means they think you have potential you know like one of the early ones I got that was like someone scrawled they gave me the the cup the form one but they wrote across it show don't tell in handwriting that was like the first personal one that I got and I'm like oh yeah now that's like way steps below personal true personalized but at least they took the moment say hey here's what you're specifically doing wrong start trying hopefully you'll start getting those hopefully you've already gotten something if you haven't hopefully you'll start getting them so when you've got people reading proofread your book you manage got 12:15 that's six people say this part I'm using and six people they say they totally get it what do you feel you read that piece yourself and you are the ultimate decision maker you have to do what is it feels like sometimes you want something to be confusing usually not but once in a while you're like I want this to be confusion if you want to be confusing the easiest thing to do is have one of the characters say wow this is confusing and then that gives the reader permission to be confused they're like oh okay sometimes you're like you know I feel like half of my audience getting confused is too many for this pace it's a really important plot element I'd better make this extra clear sometimes you're like ah this is kind of irrelevant I'll actually kind of shove it more under the rug so it doesn't draw their attention and make them think that this is a major plot point there you go all different directions on those things the more you do this the more experience you'll get and if you really want to get some better feedback you can watch the rewatch lecture on writing groups and try to take some of those suggestions say try to explain your feelings rather than trying to fix the problem just write out you know your feelings here are things like that okay other questions yeah kamistan he's been reading other books versus writing the girl how much time um not as much as I would like to but I think it's pretty important I try to spend like an hour a day I don't always get it right here so are they love TV publishers too small LT we publishers Oh actually I should mention the local public eye the smaller publishers I would rake them around the Bain level or just under so they're legit particularly Shadow Mountain Shadow Mountain is I would say equivalent to Bain in size they could even be a little bit bigger than Bay so yeah Shadow Mountain is totally legit all the people who are not Shadow Mountain they are trying hard I would look very closely at the contracts and what they are able to do for you that you couldn't do yourself but I mean I know some some people like cedar for it's a good example see therefore it's a publisher's trying very hard and I know they have some big names I you know and not equipped to talk about what cedar Ford is able to do for you I'd go talk to their authors I know some people have had good experiences there but they're kind of like that level below Bain where it's good it's legit at the same time you kind of have to ask yourself how jits like how what can they do for me talk to their authors I'm not saying they're not on it's not saying they are I will say that shadow Mountain is and for those watching online they'll probably be some local presses like yourself that'll kind of be on this line as well and you just have to make that call one of the things there's also a distinction some time soon what we call small press in a regional press Shadow Mountain is a regional press in that it mostly distributes in LDS bookstores even the non-lds books that they do they get nationwide by having a partnership with Harper I think it is Simon its Simon yeah it's one of they have a partnership with one of the other things and then the Simon & Schuster whoever it is does their national distribution and they do their local distribution it's kind of the way that it goes so they're what we call a regional press so through their partnership if you get a deal with them or you're both still going out to national yes if you get a deal with Shadow Mountain I believe every book of theirs is available in Barnes & Nobles on the bookshelves but Bane has the same thing and pyre has the same thing they'll get him in in there generally - and so you know they're they're not one of the big five but they can get your books in there they do it primarily by having a good partnership with a big five but yeah no shadow mountains totally legit they they launched Brandon mall they launched James Dashner well cedar fort launched James Dashner they had his first books then he moved to shadow mountain after that but they also J scott savage Lisa Mangum they've done they've done a lot of great writers and again they mostly distribute locally but they do get them in the Barnes and Nobles so you have the chance to go big with that if you are a college student again just one last taker one area study you can keeper sue in order to okay so what I would do is I would pick something I'm very passionate about that I think aligns with my life for me it would be things like Asian history right having served my mission in Korea and things like that I take more Asian history classes and things like that like more history a little less English probably that's what I would do pick something you're passionate about them and then let that inform like what your characters are passionate about do the John Grisham thing he was a lawyer he loved lawyer stuff you wrote lawyer thrillers you could toe take pretty much anything that you're passionate about study it and make your characters some characters passionate about it in the book and it'll be a great book a better book than if it hadn't had that element in it speaking of how what I would do if I were in your shoes because we talked a lot about today and last week about publishing with traditional New York publishing let's take a step to the side and reiterate self-publishing as a viable option so what tends to work in self-publishing and this is changing but you do see shorter books faster paced books Eastern series quickly being the things that really take off self-published the other things that take off self-published are things that are not being produced by the big five that there is a hole in the market for that someone's able to jump on the biggest author in the world arguably right now I may have mentioned this I can't remember is Bella Forrest somebody that you're like who well Bella Forrest publishes a book or two every month of vampire romance novels on Kindle and these books are often number one or number two in the category I think she's like the number two or number one author on Amazon basically everybody wanted more Twilight but they wanted kind of faster paced shorter that they could eat read one every month they basically wanted a Hardy Boys Twilight right and no one was doing that and so this person jumped on it and you know we're not sure if it's one person or many but whoever it is or whoever they are or they're kind of just really hit a hole in the market and are knocking it out of the park sales ycu does does not mean you need to write that what I'm saying is if what you happen to write is something that works kind of in the fifty to seventy thousand word range episodic fast-paced that's a natural fit for self-publishing a lot of urban fantasy does very well self-publishing even some of the fantasy they want someone's really took off are a little bit more Bob Salvatore you know dress Drizzt the that sort of stuff that style of fast paced action oriented fantasy has taken off a little bit better than you know then big epic fantasies that's not to say the big up advances can't and there are some people who are writing them I would say the big one is what's his name it's really cool guy I've only met him once he's really nice the river chronicles he's always on reddit but he what's that no you have a science fiction but you happy like the king of self a published science fiction and fantasy unless you count Bella force but he'll at least and what how he did was he did it's the rear of Revelations Isaac his name is series he he did note like novella lake sections that worked very well on their own released them each for like a buck or two bucks and then released the collection at the end Sullivan yeah Michael Geist Sullivan he's doing epic fantasy and really doing a good job of it self-published so it's totally viable but yeah you how he's another one to watch he kicked off this whole serialized larger book that you pay a couple bucks for each installment and then there's six installments and then a final book and I mean Hugh Howey had a no idea how many copies he sold but it's gotta be over it's got to be in the millions so if I were you right now and I I would base what I did on a couple of factors first how fast do I write am i writing a couple of books a year because I was but you don't have to be me if you're writing one book every three or four years self-publishing is probably a bad match for you okay traditional publishing is going to be a better haven for you if you are writing fast I would say what is your where your interests are they varied do you do can you do these fast pace books where what type of thing you're writing middle grade not really taking off on on ebooks the kids are not you know capable of buying them for themselves that's the big distinction between middle grade and why a middle grade they don't buy the books themselves someone gives them to them why a buy the books themselves so why a yes Bella forest is why a the number one author on Amazon are ye books you can totally take off and ye in but middle grade not so much because the kid in third grade or fourth grade is not going to have access to a credit card at least they shouldn't so the parents have to buy the books for them the parents still kind of want to go to bookstores or things like that that should go probably shift but so looking at me writing two books a year I would try to write one fast-paced a sort of a little more polish and I don't use that derogatory litre arm pulp means fast plot kind of thriller pacing and a very discernable genre right like it's your mysteries your thrillers your like the wax and wane books are our poke books I would write one of those and self publish it and then I would write an epic fantasy and send it to New York then I'd write another one of the short ones and publish it and then work on another epic fantasy to send in New York and what ever started taking off I would do that and if the book goes to New York to all these places and comes back rejected I would self publish it and put it in the line of self-publishing and I would be trying both methods but I know myself I write fast I can write the stuff that will does well self-publishing and I don't mind doing it myself because that's the third thing if you're like I have no desire to find my own cover art and things like this I really really really like the idea of someone else taking care of all that so I can focus only on the writing then self-publishing is not for you if whatever you write regardless of whether it's what I've said it matches or not if you're like I love the idea of only being accountable for myself of making sure to cover something I like of making sure the editing is something I like so publishing is a fantastic match for you the small process can be a little bit better at working with you on things like that as well okay yes you talk about writing stuff you're passionate about yeah especially like your goals it was Stormlight archive so the big start of the storm light the earliest idea was the character dubbed Alan R who was the brother to the king after the King gets assassinated hos nephew who should be king it's a bad King and so what you do if you're put in that position where you love your brother and your nephew it's this whole leadership concept which is fascinating to me right what do you do if you're put in that position do you usurp the throne for the good of the kingdom or do you let a bad king rule and do your best to keep him from screwing things up too much that was the earliest idea for the Stormlight archive the other big passion thing for me was my belief that epic fantasy was not going as far as it needed to go or could go in world building I felt that the addition of magic and not having to follow the laws of physics in consistent ways but you know that sort of thing could lead to really fantastically interesting settings that nobody was writing there was too much medieval Europe or medieval Japan and I don't mind those books I enjoy the kind of foam and evil whatever but nobody was doing bizarre world with different ecologies and things like that and I'm like someone should be doing this and we I should mention that after I made my decision like I had that epiphany of I'm gonna do this I sat down and said I'm gonna write the biggest baddest book ever right I am Tott they're rejecting me they say my books are too long I'm gonna write one longer right I'm gonna write the book that I want to write that no one's ever gonna want to publish and that was the way of Kings I was book number thirteen that was the book where I'm like no one wants this I will make this book that is only for me and is like the most ambitious thing and then after I finished it I got to call the launch result a funny story I then sent away of Kings because my Edit Moshe he's like I love laundress what are you working on now I'm like well it's a four hundred thousand word epic fantasy he's like whoa you're ambitious and he repeated that phrase and has many times to my career he's like well I'll look at it and I sent it to him and he called that terrified it's like can we cut this I'm like well it doesn't really feel like it has a good cutting points like yeah this is I'm having trouble of reppin my riding of mind around this and things he was really scared that I that was what because the thing you got to understand why he was so scared is that the larger the book gets the less the publisher makes off of it because like a a book that let's say it's four hundred thousand words they might charge two dollars more than the book that's two hundred thousand words but the printing cost is double the editorial cost is double everything is double but people don't pay prorated lee in their mind for for entertainment a movie that's three hours long costs us in our heads the same as one that's ninety minutes long that's just how we do it and same thing with books you can inch it up a little bit more but not much and so it's a huge huge thing for a publisher to try to publish a super big book but buy a new author so but I told him I didn't want to do wave things yet and he was so relieved sitting like I'm working on miss porn actually right now wave kings has some problems I want to fix before we publish it so he was very happy to hear I was doing they because then I pitched miss porn to him like the pitch that I just gave you guys he's like wow they were really excited about that alright last question possible but you already had one see with who and who under her did I know okay go ahead okay so both of us in this buzz have been very lucky to get great writing crews if someone's watching at home and they write ok we'll end on this question again if you have once I didn't answer I will be here at the final just sitting around answering questions in shop chatting if you can't get a writing your your local science fiction convention the people who take the panels about how to write who do the workshops are going to be one of your best places if you're not in college College is a great place but these are the things that cons are great at it can take some work to find people who will fit but it can work and I should mention to all of you if they're if you have a writing group that like needs extra members because some of the people were auditing and dropped out or just not interested or if you are somebody who really wants to be in a riding group but you know did it didn't work out or things like that why don't you guys form a email you Isaac and we can kind of keep a list so that we can kind of connect people together who might be interested in keeping writing groups going following the class all right guys this has been your class you have been a great audience [Applause] you are now done and go forth and write and create great fiction and remember me in the Year acknowledgments pages

Channel: zmunk

Views: 2,919

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: brandon sanderson, BYU, creative writing, plot, character, setting, fantasy

Id: wqhOz-dJGk8

Length: 64min 57sec (3897 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2017