Advice from Brandon

So, I finally got around to blogging about last week’s English 318 class with Brandon Sanderson!  Here’s what we talked about…

Brandon started out by saying that you need to know when to ignore people who give you advice.  The deeper you get in the writing and publishing world, the more advice you receive, but the thing about being an artist is that you’re a different, unique kind of person.

As you write, you need to figure out what works and doesn’t work for you so that you can figure out which advice to ignore.  The more you learn about your writing, the more you can improve it.  You should try out new advice, but don’t always keep it–only stick with what works for you.

Brandon then drew out a really interesting chart comparing the two major types of writers.

OTOH, you have “outliners,” or “one drafters,” who spend months (and even years) planning out the book, but write the actually book very quickly, in very few drafts.  Orson Scott Card is a good example of this type of writer.

OTOH, you have “discovery writers,” who start the stories without knowing what’s going to happen or who the characters are, but figure out what to do as they go along.  Stephen King is a good example of this type.

Neither side is better than the other, but they both have disadvantages that they need to learn how to cope with.

Outliners tend to be aflicted with “worldbuilder’s disease,” where they never actually write the story because they’re spending so much time imagining the world.  They also tend to resist editing and rewriting.  On top of all that, they sometimes outline the story so much that they can’t change it if something doesn’t work and needs a little tweaking.

Discover writers tend to rewrite too much.  They’ll write the first chapter twenty or more times, just because they think of so much cool new stuff to add to it.  Those who write the story and don’t figure out the ending until they get to that point need to go back and rewrite the story from the beginning to build up to that ending.  They also have a lot of difficulty finishing what they start, and have a very strong inner editor that makes it hard to spit out a rough draft.

According to Brandon, though, either type of writer can churn out a novel in the same amount of time, so long as they learn the proper way to compensate for these problems.

We then talked a little bit about publishing–about the purpose of genre divisions, who controls the publishers, etc.  The original purpose of genre divisions is to help readers find writers, which is really good for those who fall into a genre well, but can really hurt those who don’t.  Marketing people are in charge of the publishers, but in certain companies that are tightly controlled by a single person or family (like Tor), if the head guy likes it, it’ll get published.

We talked a lot about the fantasy genre in particular, and what sells in that genre.  In both SF and F, there has to be a balance between the familiar and the original–blurb writers have to be able to say something like “the freshest, most original story of the year–yet it feels just like a novel by such and such great writer!” SF readers tend to be more tolerant of original concepts, though, whereas fantasy readers tend to lean towards stories that feel and sound familiar.

30 years ago, the Tolkienesque fantasy was really big, and you had novels by guys like Terry Brooks, where there are all kinds of elves and men and dwarves and stuff.  But readers have generally gotten tired of that stuff, and now are looking for stuff that’s further from that norm.

However, Brandon said that you really shouldn’t try to anticipate the genre and write stuff only because you think it’s going to sell.  You should write what you like and then find out where it fits AFTER you’ve finished it.  But if you have two ideas that you both love and that you both want to work on, take the one that fits easier into the genre.

We also talked a little bit about how mainstream fantasy differs from YA.  Basically, the cool think about YA is that the readership base is constantly being replenished by people who haven’t already been exposed to the clichés a dozen times.

Eragon, for example, is basically Tolkien mixed with Star Wars (and the writing is horrendous), but if the person telling you “this is the best book I’ve ever read!” is twelve years old, that’s ok.  Harry Potter, which has a lot of original ideas, is also built on a lot of ideas that have already been done a hundred times.  That’s one reason why it sells better as a YA series than a mainstream fantasy series.

Well, that covers about half of what we talked about last week, but this is agood stopping point and I really should get some sleep tonight.  So, hope you found all this helpful!