10 Thing Brandon Sanderson Wishes He’d Known Sooner

A year or so ago, my daughter signed up to attend a “Teen Writer’s Boot Camp” at a local university. And then a pandemic happened. So, when the scheduled time came for the boot camp, it was moved to Zoom. As a result, I happened to be walking by my daughter at the dining room table as Brandon Sanderson was delivering his keynote address, so I stopped to listen.

Am I glad I did. First of all, Brandon Sanderson is a phenomenal writer, the kind I aspire to be, when and if I grow up. In addition, he is a very engaging speaker, and his advice, especially on advice, is well worth noting.

So let me share with you ten things Brandon Sanderson wishes he’d known earlier in his life, so long as it involved no time travel where he could go back and give himself advice, because he assured the audience that time travel never ends well.

[Note: I settled on calling the famed author “Brandon” below, but this should in no way be construed to mean the two of us are on a first name basis (I wish…). I was going to refer to him as “Mr. Sanderson,” but that sounded a bit too unctuous to me. For the sake of brevity, I considered using his initials, “B. S.”, but that seemed both too familiar and also prejudicial to the content of the article. So, “Brandon” it shall be.]

1) Advice can be good for some people but bad for others.

“There are as many right ways to write stories as there are writers to write them.” -Brandon Sanderson.

Brandon told a story of when he was first starting out as a writer, looking for all the advice he could lay hands on to help him figure out what to do. He said he came across some advice from Orson Scott Card, which was to plan out everything before you start writing. That way, you know the ending and all the steps along the way, which will keep the story on track and avoid meandering.

Years later, he read some advice from Stephen King, which was to plan nothing. King reasoned that if you planned out every last detail it sucked all the life out of it, because you would be so sick of the story before you started writing. [Ironic, isn’t it, that Stephen King would try to avoid an undead story?]

Which left Brandon with the conundrum of which of them was right. The answer turned out to be that both were, and neither were. Both were accurately describing the process that worked for them, but neither could express what would work for Brandon.

So, look on advice less as a secret to success that must be followed exactly, and more as an approach to try that may or may not work for you.

2) You don’t have to become a professional writer…

"I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate." -Jack London

If you meet someone for the first time, and introduce yourself as a writer, the usual response is, “What’s your book called and when will it be published?” There is an underlying assumption that anyone who calls themselves a writer must be a professional, that is, trading words on a page for a paycheck.

What if we made that assumption about everything? Brandon asked one of the crew off screen what he liked to do, and the response came back that he was fond of golf. “So, how many majors have you won? What’s the next stop on your tour?”

Clearly, not everyone who golfs does it for a living. They simply enjoy playing golf. The same can be said for writing. There is no reason not to write for enjoyment alone, without a goal of earning a living at it.

3) …but it is a viable job choice.

"A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom." -Roald Dahl

On the other side of the issue, it is also a common assumption that only one in a million writers actually make a living at it. This has not been Brandon’s experience. He said that of the 25 people in his writing class in college, he knew that four or five had become successful. That’s way better odds than one in a million.

Also, be aware that there are many writing jobs other than “novelist” that can provide a satisfying career.

4) Nobody will make you become a writer.

"I write for the same reason I breathe; because if I didn't, I would die." -Isaac Asimov

Another way of saying this is that any motivation to write has to come from within yourself. While Brandon was explaining what he meant by this advice, I was thinking of the education principle of “Inspire, not Require.” While you may be required to write an essay in school, no one is going to force you to choose writing as a career or hobby. If you want to be a writer, it’s because something has inspired you to seek that goal.

Maybe you enjoy the creative outlet. Maybe you recognize talent in yourself that you want to nurture. Writing takes effort. It is work. Whatever the reason you want to write, you have to stoke your own fire, or you will run out of steam before you get there.

5) You may not end up writing what you think you will.

"Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day. The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them." -Orson Scott Card

Brandon told the story of a friend of his who set out to write epic fantasy novels. He wrote quite a bit in that genre, but found that he had a hard time being satisfied with the results. One day he found himself having an animated discussion on a different topic, and he realized that he had a passion for an unrelated genre, and has become quite successful there.

Don’t be afraid to explore other areas. Write what you are excited about. If the genre doesn’t already exist, go make it.

6) Tastes vary; and that’s okay.

“Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it.” -Moses Hadas

Writing requires skill, and skill requires practice to acquire. Hence, writing requires effort. Do not take this to mean, however, that once you have acquired enough skill to be good at writing that everyone will like what you write. Brandon still gets bad reviews, and when he does, he often looks up reviews of some of his favorite authors, like Terry Pratchett. Sir Pratchett [no chance of being too obsequious; the man has a knighthood] is an excellent writer, but not everyone likes his stories.

Don’t expect that everyone will love your stories, and don’t accept all feedback as an indication that you need to change your writing. Instead, analyze the critiques to determine if it applies to your writing skill, or is simply a difference in taste. Accept the former and work on improving, but ignore the latter.

7) That said, successful writing is usually created using techniques you should learn.

“I always think it's pathetic when writers resort to phrases like ‘Words cannot describe...’ It's the writer's job, after all, to find words that do describe.” -James P. Hogan

Writing requires skill, and skill requires practice to acquire. Hence, writing requires effort. You may have heard that before somewhere, but it bears repeating. A natural talent of expression can get you a long way, but not as far as you might think.

The work needed to become a good writer is one of the reasons you need to be inspired to write. Without that inner drive, you won’t ever get around to putting in the work.

8) Revision is a different skill from writing, but it is important.

“A successful writer is one who takes a good story they have written and makes it great.” -Brandon Sanderson.

Brandon doesn’t like revising. Instead of revising, early in his writing career, Brandon would take what he had learned and start a new book. He said that was a major reason that it was his seventh book that eventually got published. He still doesn’t like revising, but he has learned that it is a skill that is necessary to acquire right along with writing.

"Books aren't written -- they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it." -Michael Crichton

9) Determination is more important than talent.

"Make black marks on white paper. That little detail of writing is one that is neglected by almost all the aspirants I meet." -Sinclair Lewis

This advice relates to many of the themes already covered. Since it bears repeating, I will remind the reader that writing requires skill, and skill requires practice to acquire. Natural talent may determine your starting point in the level of acquired skill, but the determined writer who continues to gain skill will leave the unmotivated writer in their wake, regardless of their innate talent.

10) It doesn’t have to be fun, but it should be satisfying.

“One day I was speeding along at the typewriter, and my daughter, who was a child at the time, asked me, ‘Daddy, why are you writing so fast?’ And I replied, ‘Because I want to see how the story turns out!’” -Louis L'Amour

Writing is work, and sometimes work is no fun. Just ask Brandon how he feels about revising his stories. Fun isn’t a requirement for writing, though. It’s nice when it works out that way, but don’t quit writing simply because it’s not fun. That feeling of accomplishment you get from sticking it out to the finish line is worth all the trouble.

7 Points To Let your Book Opening Hook Your Reader

 

We’ve all done it. We’ve picked up that book that looked exciting and read the first chapter and put it down, never to finish it. 

Why is that? Why did we put it down? 

As a reader, sometimes we don’t know, or couldn’t say. As a writer, all I can say is what I have heard from many others; first chapters are HARD!!! Personally, I think that is one of the greatest understatements of all time. 

Let’s ask ourselves a couple of questions; what should I put in my first chapter and how do I make it work to hook the reader?

An ideal first chapter should have the following 7 points:

1) Introduce the protagonist.                                                                     

You always want to open your novel with a scene involving the main character. In other media forms, this is not always the case, movies and TV often start with others and move to the MC but they move quickly and the audience can follow the progression.

Usually, we bond closely with the characters we meet first in a book. If characters that we’ve bonded with get killed early in the story, we feel cheated. (Hush now, I never mentioned George R. R. Martin.)

For me, I think one of the most important things to hook the reader here is also the first line of the novel.  It needs to draw the reader in. Preferably a line that tells or infers as much as possible about the protagonist as possible

That first line should try to project the gender and age of the MC. Also if possible the show the social status or position in society, but most of all, that first line needs to project the emotions the character is feeling in the scene. It sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? It is not impossible. Usually most of it will be inferred but it helps set the stage.

 

Here’s how I open Forged By Betrayal:
“I guess now I will finally get to find out why my life has been flipped upside down and I’m headed down to this muddy fringe world instead of starting Marine Leadership Command School.”

I haven’t used any description of the protagonist yet, but we can tell a few things from just this first sentence. The Protagonist is:

·        Coming from another planet.

·        In the Marines.

·        Not happy about the change in her life.

·        Wants answers to why they are here.

We can also identify with the stress of her not knowing why she is on the new planet and feel her frustration. She’s in an unknown situation and we hope to find out her future and see her succeed.

2) Help the readers want to follow your protagonist through their journey. 

This is the important part. The readers have to WANT to see her succeed. What makes the readers care? I don’t think there is any formula that will always work, especially for different genres. You just have to make your MC into someone they care about and create problems they can identify with and tell a good story. Easy, right?

We are always reading and being told that every ‘good’ story needs a “sympathetic” protagonist, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a person you’d like to go to a ballgame with.

Spock is cold to those around him and holds his emotions back from everyone, but he is one of the most influential characters of the last half-century. Dexter Morgan is a sociopathic serial killer. Even Han Solo is a lawless smuggler. It could be argued that some of these were not the protagonists of their stories but they were still characters that drew the audience to follow their story.

Your MC doesn’t have to have such obvious flawed as those characters. But they do need to have weaknesses. My protagonist, Sheli Chowdhury, hates not being in control and finds herself in a completely new environment where she is far outside her comfort zone. This leaves her floundering and sometimes, lost.

There are some readers who prefer aggressive, dominant characters, and others prefer a more laid-back, thoughtful hero. Sometimes it just depends on what genre you are writing in.

What you can’t have is an MC that is pushed by the story instead of being his own hero. He or she needs to make the story happen. The story can’t happen to them. The first chapter needs to show that hero being a hero in some way. It could be a small way this early in the story but they need to start here.

3) Ignite conflict.

I think the next most important thing that we need in the opening chapter is actually one thing that comes in two parts. We need conflict. Without conflict, we have a wonderful ‘day in the life’ memoir, but not an actual story that will pull a reader in. We need conflict not only here in the opening chapter, but we need an overarching tension that will propel your plot throughout the novel.

In our second book Day of Reckoning, the burning question in the opening scene is whether Lieutenant Monica Samuels will survive on having been left on a ship full of mutineers. But the larger conflict is with the orders she was given by Captain Brighton before he was forced off of the ship. Is she just supposed to survive or is she supposed to fight back? When the conflict of the opening scene is resolved, we still keep turning pages because of the underlying tension from a bigger story question—what will she do and how will she survive if she decides to fight back?

Setting conflict does not mean that you have to have an actual battle. It can sometimes just mean a character is having an argument with themselves. The reader just needs to see that the character has a problem that they need to solve and then watch them try to solve it.

The second part of the conflict equation is introducing the antagonist. An antagonist is someone/something that keeps the protagonist from reaching his goal.

I think sometimes the term “antagonist” is hard to understand. I know for me, when I first started, I wanted to use the term ‘antagonist’ and ‘villain’ as meaning the same thing. It is not quite the same. Of course, the villain of your story would be the antagonist but, in some stories, the antagonist can be the whole society, an addiction, a judicial system, or anything that might keep your hero from achieving their goal.

Even if you don’t have a specific villain, you need some kind of antagonist, and you need to introduce them in the first chapter.

4) Tell us about the World.  

This is the first chapter so you don’t have to give a huge amount of description, but there is quite a bit that you can do here. And again, I think there are three pieces to this section. The first is ‘World-building’.

Several years ago, I took a SF novel-writing class and Michael Stackpole was the instructor. He is a great author and I thought he was a greater instructor. One of the first things he had us do was make a list of the six things that the reader needed to know about our world. These things, he said, needed to be in our first chapter. Preferably in our first few paragraphs. Since the novel I was writing for that class was Forged by Betrayal, here is the list that I created for that novel.

·     Limited FTL travel is possible through jump gates and several worlds have been settled outside the Sol system.

·      National and planetary governments have been co-opted by rich Corporate ‘Families’

·      These Families are loosely governed by a Ruling Council formed by representatives from each Family.

·      The Ruling Council controls the Earth Combined Fleet but not each Families’ fleets or militaries.

·      The Fermi Family Governor of the planet Humboldt hasn’t been complying with humanitarian laws.

·      Sheli Chowdhury is a young officer assigned to her first command as a Combined Fleet Marine on Humboldt.

 

Don’t try to show too much in the first chapter. Tell the readers what they need to know and fill in the rest of the details, in pieces, throughout the rest of the novel.

The trick is to tell us enough to give us a picture of the scene that’s taking place, but don’t slow down the movement or action.

The second part of setting up your world is setting the tone of your novel. What do you want the reader to feel?

You don’t want to start out a murder mystery with a light dialogue or open a romance with a serial killer slashing a throat. You want to your reader immersed in the book’s world from your first sentence. You need to use your words to convey that tone because there is no other method available in the novel. Describe the weather, to set the tone. Change the pace of your sentences. Short, quick sentences increase the pace and show danger. Mocking, first-person joking can show a different tone. Or sarcasm can show anger repressed in the MC. Use their voices to set the tone, and do it early.

The last part of building your world is to let the reader know the theme of the story. I have to say, this is not something I do well because I don’t think about it often enough. If you plan to deal with a particular theme in your novel, you don’t have to make a big play in the opening chapter but you can throw out some hints. Foreshadowing is never wasted.

This is the opening paragraph of our book Day of Reckoning:

“Ensign Monica Samuels dispassionately watched Clint Morrison in his engineering enlisted uniform tap the butt of his pistol on the door frame before quickly bringing his prisoner back in its sights. The hatch opened and he eyed the young officer as she passed into her own quarters. The barrier closed again, and the metallic click indicated that it would not open again until someone on the other side came for her.”

You know right away that Ensign Samuels is in trouble, she’s locked up, she’s a prisoner, and she’s alone.

5)  Show the readers the protagonist’s goal: what does he/she want.

The readers need to know what the MC wants immediately, which in the story above, is to get out of her room.

But we also need to know pretty early in the story what your hero really, really needs before the end of the story. Going back to our story Day of Reckoning, her ultimate goal was to take the ship back from the mutineers.

Of course, the MC’s ultimate goal doesn’t need to be outlined in chapter one. But we do need to see something early that will lead the MC to that ultimate goal. Show the readers something in chapter one that will lead them to that goal.

6) The MC needs to have a life-changing event.

Just like closing each chapter with some kind of mini-cliffhanger to pull the reader into the next chapter, you need a big, life-changing event in the MC’s life to kick your story into high gear and pull your readers in. This ‘inciting event’ is what starts your plot moving and it needs to be in the first chapter.

This event is what gets your protagonist off of his couch and moving forward to solve his goals. It should also be what hooks your readers and pulls them into the story and pulls them from chapter one to chapter two.

This event is usually easier to get into the first chapter if you are writing genre stories.  In the new book I’m writing now, it is a murder mystery, I just had to throw a dead body and a serial killer into the first chapter and the story is off and away.  

For other genres it might get tougher but make sure you do it, it will definitely pull the readers along.

7) Let your readers meet the other characters. 

Let’s be careful here. In the first chapter you only want to introduce characters who are going to be major characters in the novel. Don’t confuse the readers with characters who they are never going to see again. You are trying to hook the reader into reading the whole book. Don’t confuse or upset them. They’ll put your book down and find someone else’s.

(One thing I saw in a book I was reading a few years ago was two characters who’s names were very similar. At the beginning of the book, it was hard to tell who was who. Try to avoid doing things that confuse the reader that way.)

These are my opinions on how to hook a reader in your first chapter.

What are your thoughts?

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