Ten Things I Wish I'd Known as a Teen Author—Brandon Sanderson

i am not my powerpoint will be delivered by my intrepid ta isabel and so uh she'll be coming up and posting it on the board here for people to see we're going we're going old school uh even though we're high tech this year awesome so hi i'm brandon um one of the things i get asked the most often is if you could go back in time and talk to yourself as a young new writer what would you tell yourself i refuse to be tricked because i have read that book and if you go back in time nothing good ever happens of it you either end up as your own grandfather somehow or you make america turn out to be communist because you stepped on a butterfly um i would not do it but i can understand the sentiment so actually today i've come up with 10 things that i wished i'd known perhaps uh with no timeline shenanigans when i was a teen author uh these are going to be pretty rapid fire because i have 10 of them to get through so they're really just me going to be touching on little quick pieces of advice as i have come to understand them and so number one um is i think one of the most important pieces of advice that i can give i give this to my students when i start out my class this is advice can be good for some people but bad for others let me explain when i was a newer author i read all the books on writing i could get my hands on i wanted to learn how to do this and i remember reading a book or an essay by arson scott cart who said um always use an outline outlines are extremely important for writers if you don't have this outline you won't know where you're going and you won't be able to put a story together and i thought that makes a lot of sense makes a whole bunch of sense uh then i read another essay story by stephen king or an uh an article where he said don't use an outline if you use an outline if you spend all this time on an outline what will happen is you will write the life out of your story you will feel like you've already written it um and then when you sit down to write you won't be able to because the magic will be gone for you uh he says just put interesting people in an interesting situation and see what happens these two pieces of advice were polar opposites i'm like how can i be both an outliner and not an outliner what's going on here well what's going on is there as many right ways to write stories as there are authors who write them and unfortunately this can be somewhat liberating but it can also be somewhat paralyzing because we all kind of stumble through figuring out how to be an author every one of us starts off having no idea what we're doing listening to advice and trying it having some of the advice work and having some of the advice be terrible advice i turned out to be an outliner in most cases i need a really solid outline um but i discovered that if i outline too much about my characters that the stories don't work for me so i became this kind of hybrid where i spent a lot of time on my world building and i come up with some good plot structures but then i write my way into a viewpoint to figure out the character so as a teen writer my recommendation to you is listen to the advice try it but understand that even the experts can be wrong all right number two moving on so there's this thing that happens when you tell people that you want to be a writer there's this interesting event um happened to me a lot maybe it'll happen to you the thing that people immediately say will be so when is your book going to be published and how many copies will it sell um which is interesting i mean they just trying to be excited for you in your writing but as a newer writer that sort of thing made me panic i in fact stopped telling people that i was writing stories i hid my stories after i printed them out behind the picture hanging in my room because i didn't want anyone to find out i was a writer i was too embarrassed um and it's kind of unfortunate in our society that we tend to look at art this way uh so number two is you don't have to become a professional writer you may enjoy sports or music in fact i have friends uh who will go out and play sports my my social media director adam here who's running all the the stuff he loves golf adam are you ever going to be a professional golfer no probably probably not maybe maybe something but probably not why would he go golfing if he can't become a professional because he loves it right um we have this thing where we understand that if adam goes golfing he's going golfing because golfing is really enjoyable to him and he really has a good time and it's good for him right good to get out see the open air do a little bit of exercise practice something getting better at it these are all things that are really good for us being a writer is really good for you being a writer will teach you how to explain yourself better it will help you to get these things that are up in your head that you're imagining onto paper it's a little bit like telepathy you can imagine something write it down and then someone you don't even know can read that and imagine the same thing you've beamed an idea right into their head it is amazing i love it but you don't have to be a professional in the future to love that you can have permission from me to just write because you enjoy it and when people ask when you're going to publish that book you can say i don't know maybe i will maybe i won't maybe some of you like to write stories because you enjoy fan fiction maybe some of you like to write stories because you want to write down your family history you've heard your grandmother tell interesting stories you want to be able to record them in a way that's really interesting maybe some of you like to do role-playing campaigns like i did when i was young and you just want to get better at telling stories with your role-playing group these are all perfectly valid reasons to want to be a writer you do not have to be targeted at becoming a professional but number three i'm gonna grab my water here the butt is writing is a viable job choice this is something i wish i had been told because when i was young a lot of people when i'd say i want to be a writer they would say oh so you're going to be unemployed huh um people didn't really understand that writing was a viable career choice now there are some caveats i want to put here um becoming a professional writer people would tell me when i was young and i'm like i'd say i want to be a writer they'd be like that's a one in a million shot um that you know nobody becomes professional writers well my experience has been that it's not a one in a million shots um in fact i took a class at byu uh bremian university where i now teach uh when i was an undergraduate and in that class there were 25 of us and three of us from that class are professionals now full-time writers um or editors and so three out of 25 and another three are what we would call serious hobbyists that earn some money at it but it is not their main income those are way better odds than people said to me one in a million teaching my class i usually have one to two students out of a 15 person workshop at byu who go pro every year uh that's very that's about the average i'd say one and a half person uh half of a person goes pro i don't know if that works but regardless those are way better odds uh than the one in a million beyond that i have a lot of friends who have been able to use their writing talent to become uh writers in other fields uh one of my good friends he became the creative writer for a scrapbooking company he would write their newsletter every month and was really good at it that's a real job i have another uh friend who became the writer on staff at a hearing aid company when they needed things written that sounded good they would have him write them there are a lot of different jobs for writers beyond being a professional novelist but i do have to mention it is a little less likely um than other jobs you may want to indeed have a backup plan which is why we go to number four things i wish i had known thank you isabel you are doing a fantastic job isabel is my ta at my byu class uh and she does a great job every year um so nobody is going to force you to become a writer let me go into story time a little bit for you here uh if you can't tell story time is what i like when i was in college um i had a roommate named tom tom is still a good friend and tom when he went to college he sat down and looked at all of the majors and he said all right i want to pick the one that earns the most money coming out of a bachelor's degree i don't want to have to go get a master's degree a phd i just want what everyone gives me the most money that was his the way he decided his career um and i went to college with this idea of i want to be a writer i'm choosing based on my passion i want to figure out how to be a novelist and he and i have a very interesting contrast in our lives in that i would say tom is just as happy with his job as i am with mine uh he knew he wanted to be in some sort of um some sort of engineering field he picked the one that was the highest earning but he did that because he knew that he was good at this stuff and he picked chemical engineering he now makes microchips right actually i think he cleans the water that they use to make the microchips after the microchips are made it's very chemistry technical sort of stuff he explains to me every year and then i make fun of him uh for being a glorified sewage treatment engineer but regardless he he makes water more watery but when we were in college we had a really interesting dynamic in that he would go to his classes and his professors were very good at outlining this is a difficult career path if you want to do it here are the things you need to do and they would have tests where he would come back from his test and be like i got a 60 now i'm over in the english major right and i hear 60 and i'm like right like um in in english b plus is kind of this thing where you're like oh i got a b plus what did i do wrong oh man am i you know with like we were very very focused on you know different sorts of things um and he's i said that's just horrible he's like no no no 60 i was the third highest grade in the class um great i did i did wonderfully on that and there would be other tests where you get back and you'd be like i got a d but i passed and that's actually about only half the class did so i'm okay with that meanwhile i'm over here horrified but he's doing all these things he was always working uh he had so much homework but then he graduated and what happened with him is he got 10 job offers when he graduated right he had graduated in his class done pretty well um wasn't highest in his his class but had done well enough to get through this difficult program and so everyone's like yeah you got through the difficult program here's a job offer he got to select among these job offers ended up going to work for intel and making microchips um or cleaning up after other people who make microchips um tom if you're listening you're a sewage treatment engineer you can't convince me otherwise um but i was going to my classes and they're like if you want to be a writer go forth and write and i'd be like great how do i do that and they'd be like search out your muse see what occurs to you go walk through a field smell the flowers and describe it and equate that to love and i'm like okay right but how um and we did a lot of reading of uh of writers and we i did get some good advice from some authors i'm making it sound sillier than it was but what they didn't do was sit me down and make me work as hard as tom did the thing i wished i'd known is that if you want to make it as a professional remember two points ago you don't have to this is totally okay but one of my jobs is to kind of give you the tools you might need if you want to be successful with this um if you want to make it as a professional writer you need to work as hard as the people who are trying to become engineers but you need to do it without people giving you the structure this is the single hardest thing that i think separates the very talented writers from the ones who actually uh say separates from among the talented writers those who go pro and those who don't because there are a whole lot of talented writers out there who don't end up going pro so what is this distinction well you might have to build your own homework assignments you might have to say i need to spend this amount of time writing just like if you wanted to learn to play an instrument or get better at a sport you have to do this consistently no one is going to force it upon you in fact you're not going to have very much structure and this is really hard because we are we tend to be artists we tend to have that temperament we like to wander around with our heads in the clouds thinking about how we can equate the smell of flowers to the to the feeling of love right we love that stuff but we also need to have structure you need to be able to build good habits um and you need to make those habits yourself it might take you about 10 years right that's what that's an average that people throw around uh what it takes to become an expert in something and if you're wanting to go pro as a writer you are competing with all the people who are already professional so your writing has to be as good as theirs um which means you're gonna have to take 10 years and one of the issues is if you were in a class in the engineering department and they said of this 25 if you all graduate only three of you will get jobs but it's going to take all this work i think a lot of them would say wait a minute wait a minute what three people going pro out of my class of 25 is still a really great average it's better than you would you would hear but it is still only three people out of 25 who wanted to be professional writers who managed to make it so that all that advice you get about have a backup it is still viable it is still valid you have to be willing to spend a lot of time on this and maybe or may not you maybe or maybe not make money at it that's why i do think number three on this list is really important understanding that writing is good for you and you don't have to go pro i wish that someone had told me as a team though the most important thing you can do right now is build a consistent writing habit that is number one anything else can go out the window right consistently number five uh going a little bit a different direction here this comes from a story as well um i was driving home from writing group with a friend of mine this was now maybe 15 20 years ago i'm old um we were driving home from writing group we were in our late 20s we both wanted to be writers it's my friend dan wells and i and we were chatting about our various books and dan had been writing big long epic fantasies like i like to write and had been they had not really been working for him um he had tried and tried and he just couldn't find stories that really excited him they kept going in weird directions or not quite working out or him not finishing them and we were sitting there driving home and the topic just moved on to something else where he said you know what's really fascinating the mcdonald triad i'm like the mcdonald triad what is this he's like oh yeah that's uh three attributes that almost all serial killers share and i was like what he's like yeah it's really fascinating most of them do this this and this and i'm not gonna mention them on here because some of them are horrifying he's like yeah but it's really strange they don't know each other but they all tend to do these same three things it's really really and then he went on for like 15 minutes about this topic that was like really creepy to me but obviously really fascinating to him and at the end i said dan you really love this stuff why don't you write a story about that he was like you know what i should i should write a story about that and he ended up writing this story called i am not a serial killer about a kid who is fascinated with the mcdonald triad and things like that and it became the book that sold and broke him out um and made him a pro um now this happens in a very interesting way because he thought he was an epic fantasy writer because that is what he had spent the bulk of his time reading not hard to do epic fantasy writers books are huge so even if you read an equal number of them to other people you spend more time on our books it's one of our secrets um but he also had all these other interests and things he was fascinated by and he really likes true crime he really likes the minds of criminals and things like that and it turns out this thing that he had a really great passion in mixing with the writing talent he had built over years practicing turned into a fantastic book so number five is you may not end up writing what you think you will the reason for this is this idea that you probably have broad interests you probably have things that you're really fascinated by that may or may not actually rely relate to your writing you might spend all your time reading stories about dragons but you also might be really really fascinated with law enforcement and it might turn out that the thing that you're really fascinated by mixed with your love of writing could turn into books that match you better than the books you think you have to write because it's the ones that you see on the bookshelves so my recommendation here to you is try a lot of different genres particularly when you're younger try different things try mixing your interests with writing whatever they may be a great story of this is of course john grisham one of the best selling authors in the world an attorney he liked lawyer stuff he ended up writing some books they're like what if people mashed up you know traditional thrillers which are just you know people in trouble being chased by uh by mysterious forces what if i mix that up with a legal drama and boom you have all these books that made him famous because he was an expert in thing all things attorney he didn't sit down and say well everybody else is writing this i guess i should write this he said what where are my talents what are my interests so even if you love a certain genre try a lot of different things and see how it works i as a writer really love epic fantasy i got good advice in this direction early on and i tried a bunch of different things and lo and behold i ended up liking epic fantasy the most and i went that direction anyway but i didn't do that until i tried a comedy a space opera and a cyberpunk as well as an epic fantasy um granted they're all weird science fiction things because that's what i love but i did try a few different things and i would recommend you try a few different things along those lines number six because there are a lot of different things out there that's a good thing there's a lot of variety and types of stories being told this is a strength to all of us i think that there are lots of things being written but what this means is that tastes vary and i wish i'd known when i was younger that two people who both have excellent taste can have widely different opinions on a piece of media the most important person that you should be satisfying with your writing as yourself you should be writing the stories that you wish you could read but nobody has written yet and this means that um you should be focused on what you're passionate about great art is usually divisive in some way you want to have a pick-me-up at some point um in the future go pick your favorite book or you know some great classic and go read the one star reviews of it on amazon there are people out there who just did not like that book uh if you know every time i'm thinking oh man i got some harsh reviews i go read the one star reviews of terry pratchett who's my favorite writer i'm like wow how can people dislike terry pratchett the answer is not they're idiots though that's your first instinct the answer is tastes very and that's okay part of becoming a mature writer and critic and reader is understanding that it's okay to dislike something for taste reasons but it's still acknowledged that it is well done for that audience i wish i'd known okay known that it was okay for people to dislike my writing for reasons that didn't have to do with the writing itself that said number seven that said you shouldn't use this as an excuse um tastes do vary indeed um but successful writing is usually created using techniques that you should learn um and um another story for you here a number of years back um i got to go on tour to um spain i really like going to spain one of my favorite places my wife speaks spanish i really like my publisher in spain excuse me so it's a really fun place for us to visit um we really like the food and all these things so when i get a chance to go to spain i take it and while we were in spain this time there was a traveling exhibit at a museum in one of the cities where we were uh that had the life of picasso all of his art across his life uh different different things that he had done we're like oh let's go see that we knew very little about picasso um this is just you know emily my wife and i just really love impressionist cubism it's not a thing that we've spent a lot of time on and so we're like this will be really enlightening uh for us and indeed it was because we walked in and we were expecting i don't know if you know picasso but he would do these really abstract pieces that you can barely make out a person's face in and things like that right that was one of those things where the eye is right here and the other eye is up here there's like maybe a nose down here or it could be an arm you're not sure maybe a lip um we walked in and the place was filled with these very realistic uh very very precise classical paintings of figures that looked nothing like we were expecting from picasso why is this well picasso learned all of these classic techniques before he developed into his abstract phase and indeed we got to see a bunch of the abstract things later on you could kind of watch through his life so we saw the earlier pieces when we went in first and then as we moved along we got to see him move into different areas and it was kind of start sometimes it's like not a graduate's like here he decided to try this style and boom there's a bunch of paintings that are very different from the next hour it's like boom now he's doing this and it i realized like i said picasso learned how to paint the classic way before he broke all the rules i don't want you to take number six and say well since tastes vary then therefore i can write whatever i want and people should like it i can use the excuse that tastes very so obviously if you dislike this it's just we have a difference in taste learning to distinguish between when someone is not liking something because of taste and not liking it because you're using bad writing techniques is a difficult thing to learn and as a new writer i wish i had understood that before you break rules it generally is a good idea to learn rules um this is why going to a conference like this listening to writers talk about their techniques listening to um you know or reading books by authors listening to lectures by authors and trying these things out is really important because a lot of these techniques are very helpful i mean there are certain ways that you can create very sympathetic protagonists for your stories if that's what you want to do and in general that is what you want to do that doesn't mean that you can't write great stories about people that the auth the reader will hate it's just that i would recommend learning the standard technique learning to make people love your character before then you try to write a book or a story where they're gonna hate the character but read it anyway these are more difficult things to do so successful writing does generally share a lot of attributes which is why something like teen author boot camp can actually be useful to you because everybody writes in different ways but there are generalities that work for a lot of us one of these in my case is number eight uh this is something more of an object lesson from my life of one of these things that i needed to learn because i wanted to kind of show one to you and that is that revision is a different skill from writing but it's important as a writer i um at one point before i got published i was realizing all of my friends who were really great writers um they were better revisers than they were writers and this struck me um dan for instance was a better reviser than he was a writer i got to see the first drafts and the last drafts and i thought this is a skill that i am not learning i haven't been learning because what was happening with me at this time um if you don't know my story i wrote 13 novels before i managed to sell one so i spent all of my 20s in my late teens i started when i was 19 um uh writing novels before then i'd written some short stories so i really started as a writer when i was 16. um but i spent age 19 to 29. um uh writing books now two years of that i was in korea um doing church service so i didn't get a lot of writing during that time but a good solid eight years of that i was writing novels generally around two a year depending on the length of the novel and i kept having this thing where i would write a book and i'd be like wow i learned so much writing that book i'm such a better writer now and i was i learned lots of cool things and my thought process always was hmm i bet i can write an even better book now that i know that so instead of going back and revising the book i had written before i wrote a new one trying not to make those mistakes and that new one would be slightly better and so i kind of had this confirmation to myself that yeah this is the path i should be on but when people ask 13 books brandon that's a lot of books um the real reason is that i did not want to revise i still hate revision it is my least favorite part of the process i did not want to learn this lesson and i bold-headedly ignored it and kept barreling forward this is one of the techniques from number seven that i needed to learn and i wasn't capable of breaking out as an author until i did learn it eventually i realized this thing about my friends and i said maybe i actually need to learn this so i sat down and i started doing revisions i started learning how to take feedback better i started learning how to show my writing to people not get defensive about it really listen to what they were saying and decide which comments i wanted to take meaning that would make my story a better version of what i was trying to write and which ones i should ignore which were taste differences and that was a process that took several years for me to figure out but when i did it i eventually sold book number six which was elantris which was my first published novel because it was the one that i had done a number of drafts on and had learned to revise so the the lesson to take from this is really number seven you will have to learn some things that are difficult but specifically in revision realm um one of the hallmarks of a writer who writes very successful writing is somebody who learns to take good stories they've written and make them great number eight um thanks isabel number eight or no number nine number nine that's why you gave me the weird look you're like number eight is up there brandon [Music] at least you don't have to look at my terrible handwriting on the board yeah yeah everybody's great for that for those who have watched my writing lectures uh i post my my university lectures online the handwriting is is not the best let's just say that my second grade teacher um is somewhere very very angry that i didn't listen to her teach me handwriting because she worked really hard and i'm the one in her class who ended up becoming a famous novelist and i'm the one that can't write so number nine because those last few were a little maybe discouraging that you're gonna have to learn these terrible things that are really hard to do and it may take you ten years to do it um let's talk about something upbeat determination is more important than talent when it comes to most things in life um we can use the an example there's a there's a a scientific term called the relative age event uh you can read about it on wikipedia um i was first introduced to it by my friend um howard taylor but malcolm gladwell talks about it a lot in a book he put out a few years ago um this is this weird phenomenon where you can look at people who are very successful um in something like malcolm gladwell takes soccer players in canada i believe who are like the people who are going pro as like 18 19 year olds going into the professional leagues and say what trait do they share and you would expect certain things but there are other things that you don't expect and one of them is they looked at all these people who are becoming professional soccer players and they found out 40 of them were born in january through march and only 10 of them were born in october through december which is really bizarre why would the month you're born when two of those months are just you know one month apart make any difference in becoming a soccer player and this isn't an outlier though it's in the book outliers um this is um you can find this in almost all professional leagues that start when people are very young because what they discovered is the difference between an um and when you're 19 someone who was born you know eight months before what not it's evened out but when you're eight years old or six-year-old six years old and you start playing soccer and you miss the deadline and so you are then 11 months older and bigger than everyone else when you go in and you know instead of going in december you have to wait a year or whatever because you missed the cutoff then suddenly you are that much better of a player than everyone else because you're a little bit bigger you're a little more mature and what they found is these players get verbal affirmation from the coaches and everybody else from the other players and they get told early on you know you're you're good at this you should you should keep working at this you can do this and they have early successes those are the single most important thing they have early successes and they internalize the idea that yes they can do this so that 12 years later they have a significant advantage over the other people who came in maybe just as talented as them but didn't have early successes now you might say brandon this is kind of depressing right you're telling me my birth month is more important for playing soccer than uh perhaps anything else it's not more important and also we're talking about writing the lesson we can learn from that is anybody who has early successes keeps at it and has determination can overpower raw talent with determination that's what those statistics say to me um they they're saying that something other than raw talent is in many cases more important than the talent now you do need talent uh you you there and there is luck involved like part of my success is built around the fact that i made good friends with that friend dan wells right because we were at a convention together and he met an um an editor and talked to that editor and said huh i bet you'd like the books by my friend brandon and then he introduced me to that editor and then i sent that editor book and he bought that book and then later on i said to that editor hey editor friend um that guy who introduced you to me he just wrote this really cool book about a kid serial killer give it a chance um and the editor read that book and bought it so we got each other published and that was luck right it was pure luck that i had a good friend who was at a con who was willing to think brandon could use this uh this editor um you know because he was looking for epic fantasy at that point and uh so yeah dumb luck certainly dumb luck is part of it but determination is more important than talent if you work at this i guarantee success i do not guarantee publishing publication i do not guarantee you make a living at this but all of my friends who are still writers from that class and there are two of them in my writing group who are not professional writers who are in that class that i took that i mentioned to you um who are really great writers but have found other things they want to do in life and they became like adam playing golf writing is just something they love they don't need the stress of trying to publish they write really good stories and they do them consistently they're great writers who just decided that wasn't their job they didn't want to go that path and i can guarantee one of these people in this writing group he is dyslexic um he when he started could not grammatically put a sentence together but he loves stories 20 years later he's a fantastic writer if he can do it you can do it and that brings us to the last point number 10 this should be fun but it doesn't have to be right not every part of this has to be fun in fact it doesn't have to be fun but it should be satisfying what do i mean by this well a lot of times i talk about how much i enjoy writing and i really do i find it exhilarating i find it really fun to get up each day doing something new and something different it is a fantastic experience but sometimes i say that and writers think man if i am not compelled to write like brandon sanderson if i don't have this like divine mandate saying you love this and things then maybe i shouldn't be a writer well no because everybody is different and the secret is we all hate writing sometimes every one of us who are professionals there are days you get up that you don't feel like doing it and i guarantee that every one of us have parts of the process we like more than others turns out i really like the outlining process and getting into a new story which is when i talk about that kind of euphoria how much i love writing and i'm talking about that i hate revision and if you catch me when i'm on the fourth draft of a thousand page novel and i know there's one more draft after this i'm gonna have to go right into and do if you talk to me in those moments i will tell you how awful writing is how terrible it is and how miserable revision is and how i hate the whole process and want to burn all the books down um sometimes it's not fun but you know what it always is is it's always satisfying this means when you finish that story when it is done when you have taken the blank page and you have said chaos become order and you have created something out of it that you have done that is amazing if there is no feeling in the world as great to me as holding a finished story that i wrote and i read that's why i recommend this to you if you haven't ever done that if you haven't finished something keep at it because knowing that you can do it changes your whole mindset it is extremely extraordinarily wonderfully satisfying and those are my 10 points that i hope will be of help to you uh going forward and that is my keynote thank you guys very much for having me i'm sorry i'm like three minutes over um but we're gonna let the the uh the host take over again um and i will see you around at many book signings in the future i hope thank you guys very much

Channel: Brandon Sanderson

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Length: 38min 30sec (2310 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 15 2020