I watched 5 Brandon Sanderson lectures on writing (Here are 4 takeaways)

Creative writing is not as simple as writing on a page about make-believe things. It helps to have a mentor to navigate this

Creative writing can be a complex beast. You learn things like world-building, plot, character creation, dialogue, and more. You take the time to learn and hope someone finds your story riveting enough to continue reading past the first page. Some people just have this as a hobby while they work a job in the background, while others want to become full-time authors.

Either way, here are 4 takeaways that you can take on your writing career.

Ideas are easy to come by

Don’t try to come up with some grand idea because someone has probably already done it before you. If you take a great idea for a book but put it in the hands of someone unpracticed, it will fall apart. If someone who is practiced takes it, they will make it shine no matter what idea it is.

If you see an idea for a book, hold on to it and add it to a journal. What you’re going to do is keep adding ideas to this journal that may be good for a story. Once you think you have something going, start erasing some ideas that wouldn’t fit with your story. Keep doing this until you are down to just the few you need.

The key here is to create an amalgamation of ideas that sparks interest in your story. If you are not interested in your own story, neither will other people be interested. For example, maybe you have an idea for a story but you can’t think of a good setting for it. You’re in traffic waiting for the light to change and you see smoke come out of the exhaust from the car in front of you.

Then you think “What kind of world has steam, o yeah, a steampunk world”. Store your ideas do not try to hold on to them.

Discovery writer vs. outline writer

No one ever told me that there are different types of writers, so this is one of the things that stuck out the most. Outline writers outline almost everything they write before they do it. If outline writers have to make characters, they will go over those characters’ back story, motivations, emotions, and personalities before they even start the story.

Outline writers also have more resources to help them because this is the camp that most people fall under. It makes your job as a writer easier, especially if you have other responsibilities in your life. The danger for outline writers is getting stuck planning everything out but never getting the words out. Do not fall into this trap.

Discovery writers, the camp I fall under, are a different breed altogether. We find more excitement in writing the story and just seeing where it goes. All the planning and notes just don’t work. When we have to plan every little detail, we get bored. I never understood why this happened to me until now. Our characters and worlds bring themselves to life and we just watch as it all happens.

Honestly, there is something magical about that, but there is a danger with this as well. You can get overwhelmed by all the pieces that you have to deal with and put the story on hold. I think a way to fix this would be a flowing document spanning one to two pages max. As the story changes, you can go back and add or take away details as you see fit.

It’s more like you are being dropped into a world with your characters and you’re coming back to this world to document what you have experienced.

Characters must be believable

There is nothing wrong with writing an Iconic character. This is a character who is competent at what they do. Sometimes you just want to see a person who you wouldn’t see in real life do things that are just cool. There is something about just watching someone do something at the highest level that we admire. We do it all the time anime, sports, and art, just some examples.

As much as we like these characters, we like to see characters that struggle to gain the same or greater competence. Think of characters like Spider-Man, batman, and Goku. There is a reason we like these characters and we keep coming back to them, even into adulthood.

Don’t be afraid to add flaws to your characters. Put secrets into your character so that they don’t want other people to find out. It’s alright to make an unlikable character but there must be a balance with this. If the character is too unlikeable, people will skip over the entire chapter. Sometimes, they will drop the book entirely. I would know because I did just that.

Magic systems

You can do hard magic systems or soft magic systems. soft magic systems are when you have magic in your world, but there is no explanation of it or how it works. Some people don’t like this because if there is a little explanation about it, the characters can just do anything with it. That largely depends on the author of the story. To avoid this, you can keep magic in the story, but it has little influence.

The other path is you just roll with it and let the magic be what it is. Think of Gandalf for example, we don’t know how his magic works, we just know it works and there are stronger forces in the world that we don’t know of. We accept it for what it is because Gandalf is just using magic willy-nilly. There are limitations. If there were no limitations, why didn’t he just vaporize the ring and go back to smoking his pipe?

Hard magic systems are on the other side of the coin. A magic system with clear rules, consequences, and actions. Think of the magic ring. For example, if you put on the ring, you become invisible. More than invisible, it’s like you step into another part of the world entirely. The consequences are you pretty much turn into golum at least for a hobbit.

It is very possible to have hard and soft magic systems side by side and the lord of the Rings is a good example of how to do it.

Conclusion

There is much more that I learned that will bring something different to my writing. I won’t be able to write everything I want to because this post would be way too long. I recommend you watch all of them for yourself. These are the topics that stand out most to me.