Brandon Sanderson, epic-level fantasy novelist and all-around good guy, teaches a

fiction writing course at Brigham Young University. Because of the general

niceness, he’s made all the lectures available on Youtube. Because of the epic-
level skill, the lectures are freaking useful.

Since you might not have time to listen to the entire hour-long class, I’m taking
notes for you. They’re not exhaustive, but they get the donkey work out of the way.
Contents
Session 1: Introductory Notes
On Advice
On Word Count
On Sizes
Ideas Are Cheap
(Description of Class) Writing Groups
The Two Types of Writers

Session 2: Brainstorming
Writers Need Multiple Brains
Why Form Matters
Storytelling
Nailing Your Ideas
Example Brainstorming (Broad)
Example Brainstorming (Narrowed)

Session 3: Prose I—Style, Viewpoint, and Infodumps

Prose and Style
Learning Curves
Viewpoints
Tense
Infodumps

Session 4: Plot I—Promises and Progress

Q&A
Plot
Tools to Streamline a Plot
Plotting Methods
The Strange Attractor
Concerning Plot Envy
You Are a Stage Magician
How to Make a Book Guide

Session 5: Character I—Likable, Active, Competent

Q&A: Plot
Character
Likable
Active
Competent
Character-as-Role
Character Considerations

Session 6: Setting I—You Cannot Do Everything

Q&A: Character
Setting
The Basics of Setting
Physical Setting
Cultural Setting
Sanderson’s Laws

Session 7: Prose II—The Grand Skill

Q&A: Prose
Prose
Window Pane Prose
Stained Glass Prose
Hybrids
The Pyramid of Abstraction
Infodumps
Q&A Again

Session 8: Prose III—Shop It

Q&A: Assorted
Prose Workshop

Session 1: Introductory Notes

Largely this is a discussion of the syllabus and the class format, but it contains
some handy starting-off stuff. Blue text jumps to the mentioned section; less
important topics are not linked.

On Advice
Rule 1: This advice is good except when it’s not.
Writers love to give writing advice. Ask any writer, even one who doesn’t write
very often, and s/he can give you loads and loads of advice on what’s worked for
them. This is handy—provided you’re filtering it through the fact that you are not
that writer. Consider Stephen King and Orson Scott Card. King hates outlines
passionately, believing they stifle creativity and suffocate the story. Card says
outlines are great and you should use one.

All writing advice needs to be filtered through that idea. All writing advice is
good—except when it’s not.

On Word Count
You ought to be thinking in word count. Pages are malleable.

On Sizes
Books in different markets vary in sizes.
Middle grade novels: 40k-50k
YAs: 65k-85k
Adult novels: 75k/80k and up

*From 15 minutes in until about 22 minutes in, it’s just syllabus discussion

Ideas Are Cheap

The goal of this class is to turn students into writers who write good books, not
writers who write one good book. There’s a strain of thought that the fundamental
ingredient of a good book is a great idea; Sanderson disagrees.

Jim Butcher, before he was published, was on a forum discussing this very thing and
said something to the effect of, “A great writer will take the worst idea and make
a wonderful story out of it, and a bad writer will take the best idea and screw it
up. It’s not the idea, it’s the skillset.” His opponent challenged him to combine
Pokemon and the Lost Roman Legion—which then became the Codex Alera books, a
bestselling series.

You may be a Mozart of writing, but that’s very very very rare. The vast majority
of writers toil in obscurity for a while, honing their craft. The concept here is
that you’re training to be a writer, not just writing. The focus is on becoming
better and learning how to write well.
Description of Class and Writing Groups
Not relevant to writing novels, but very useful for building a writing group. Goes
until about 56:20. Highlights:
As with everything in the class, writing groups are not necessarily for everyone.
Members have a weekly word count goal, submitted to other members of the group (4–6
people; preferred number is 5).
Other members of the group read these submissions before meeting (should take about
an hour). The group meets for about 1 hour to give feedback on each story, which
works out to around 10 minutes per person.
To the Workshoppers:
This is reader response, not fellow writers brainstorming. Once again, with
feeling: you are a reader. Informed, intelligent, aware of the craft of writing,
but still a reader. You are not turning the story into what you want—you are
helping your peer write the story they want to tell.
Focus on descriptive content, not prescriptive content—that is, say “I was bored”
or “I am confused” or “I hate this character” or “If you kill this character I, as
an invested reader, will STRAIGHT UP KILL YOU BACK” instead of “Ooh! You should
make him find a magic sword!” or “You have to kill the mentor!”
These help curtail the problem of workshop groups hijacking stories (because that
can, and often does, happen).
To the Workshopee:
Resist the urge to defend yourself.
Resist the urge to defend yourself.
Seriously.
Yes, you.
Resist the urge to defend yourself.
This is a focus group: you are using your workshop group to find out how audiences
respond to your story, not to reassure yourself you’re a good writer. Imagine
yourself as a fly on the wall when the others talk about your story—this will be
more useful to you anyway.
Readers might be confused by something that will totally be explained later; don’t
explain it to them. You’ll want to prove to them that you’re a genius, but resist
that instinct too. If you give it away, you rob yourself of their honest feedback
about the big twist at the end.
You are permitted to ask questions, provided you can do it without pre-disposing
your audience.
Appoint a team leader. Find the most Type-A extrovert you have in your group—
someone who will (a) encourage others to talk and (b) encourage folks to stick on
schedule.
Those of you who talk a lot—stop. If you’re talking the whole time, you will
probably steamroll the quieter ones in the group. Don’t do that.
Quiet ones in the group (you know who you are): your insight is valuable. Share it.
When you give feedback, start with good things. It helps the writers to know what
is already working. (This can actually be more valuable than criticism.) Focus on
what’s working for you in the story. Liked a joke? Tell them. Think this character
is the best one since John McClane? Tell them. One particular phrase gave you the
shivers? Tell them.
Move on from there to large scale issues. We’re talking characterization, plot, and
setting. Do not burn this time with grammar issues unless the workshopee has turned
in something written in honest-to-goodness Pidgin English and it’s getting in the
way.
If you have to edit the other folks’ work, print out the pages and mark them in red
and give them to the writer; this will fulfill your duty to the universe to stamp
out typos wherever they may hide, without burning your writing group’s precious
time.

The Two Types of Writers

Many of you are already aware of the idea that writers fall into two breeds:
gardener and architect, or seat-of-pantser and outliner. The gardener throws some
ideas in a bowl and lets them react (think mad-science chemistry). The architect
plans out a story in great detail, deciding what will happen long before writing
the thing out.

Though writers are not perfectly categorized by these two models, they will tend to
lean in one direction or another; ultimately, both styles are just tools.
Hypothetically, any writer could make use of either technique, but if it doesn’t
work for you, why bother? Don’t feel pressured to shove yourself into just one of
these. Use either of them as they’re necessary.

Discovery Writing
Stephen King: “put interesting characters in interesting situations; see what
happens.”
Mary Robinette Kowal: “Yes, But; No, And” method.
Start with a person who has a problem.
Alright, what happens next? Does it work? Yes, but…something else goes wrong.
Does what they try to fix the problem work? No, AND...it gets worse.
Goes on and on in that cycle until the problem is fixed
Note for everyone: the good stories, mostly, are about something that goes wrong.
It all starts with a problem. It can be something small (“My deplorable aunt and
uncle make me live in the cupboard,” “I was having a nice dinner and then it was
ruined by twelve rowdy dwarves…”).
Discovery writers tend to have better characters (first, because the characters’
problems are the writer’s problems, so the writer identifies strongly with the
characters, and so too does the reader; second, because the characters are not
shoehorned into actions they would not reasonably take; and third, because the
discovery writer’s method depends upon interesting characters doing interesting
things).
Discovery writers tend to have less intricate plots and “awful endings” (since they
eventually get to a moment of “and then they solved it,” which isn’t satisfying).
Discovery writers tend to struggle with getting past Chapter Three/the beginning.
They’ll write a few chapters and then suddenly go, “Oh! That’s what this is about!”
and feel a need to reset so they can lay the foreshadowing. Then they get to a new
Chapter Three and say, “Oh, now I know what it’s about” and start all over again.
Tend is the operative word here, because there are always exceptions, and a great
writer will compensate for his/her natural weaknesses. Discovery writers can have
flat, boring characters and intricate plots and mind-blowing endings. This is
merely a statement of tendency, not a universal law.
Outline Writing
Outliner writers tend to have weaker characters because they are prone to ask,
“What does the plot require the characters to do here?”
Outliner writers tend to have solid endings (because they’ve known the plot the
whole time).
Outliner writers tend to hate revising because, fundamentally, they’ve written the
story twice by the time they reach the end.
Points-on-the-Map Writing
Mappers start with a decent idea of their ending and their internal conflict, and
perhaps a few cool scenes that they want to hit in between. So they start with
their idea, Discovery-Write to their first cool scene, Discovery-Write to their
next cool scene, and on and on until they reach the finale.

Session 2: Brainstorming
The really in-depth look at how to midwife your idea into an honest-to-goodness no-
fooling book.

As before, blue text jumps to the mentioned section.

Writers Need Multiple Brains

English classes will occasionally lapse into an overly-artistic side of writing—the
“dance through tulips and talk about your feelings” style of writing. This is fine,
just not for everybody, and it’s tough to sell it for money. Artistic vision is not
super-great at paying the bills.

You are a craftsperson: you are trying to become a person who makes good art (not
just make good art) and you are trying to do that through practice over time.

However, you are also a businessperson, whose job it is to find a way to feed that
craftsperson so they can go on dancing through tulips and waxing eloquent about the
human condition.

The Craftsperson’s job is to produce the best available work; the Businessperson’s
job is to exploit that in every way possible.

Which means that when the manuscript is complete, the Businessperson smashes the
Craftsperson over the head with a blunt object, stuffs their body in a closet, and
runs away with the manuscript with the express intention of making money from it.