His ability to make a living with words, while not being able to spell many of them, makes me think eye can dewit two.

Someone explain to me why I can’t pay attention in my university lectures and now am using free time to watch university lecture

I could listen to Brandon talk about writing fantasy all day.

1:38 - “What flaws do you (Sanderson) have, that make you a better writer?” 4:54 - “How do you create a magic that doesn’t seem like magic?” 6:11 - Internal vs. external consistency/logic 10:30 - Goes back to explain how internal vs. external logic plays into creating a magic system, that doesn’t seem like magic. 11:56 - “How do we give enough exposition to make the reader understand the world, but maintain mystery and twists?” 17:28 - “Do you change or modify rules based on the age of the intended reader?” + “Do you, while you’re writing, ever change your rules?” (Tbc. at 24:26, after the question below) 23:13 - “Do you ever have publishers or editors try to have you put more graphic content in?” 26:02 - Follow-up question from one of the students: “My central character is eight years old. What is the danger with that? Why don’t we see more adult books with child protagonists?” 29:05 - “This is back to the internal/external logic. What do you do if there’s a case where they may conflict? How do you choose which one is better?” 32:56 - “Is there a way to see hard magic disguised as soft magic in a book?” 35:37 - “How do you prevent world building from feeling like a chore?” 40:38 - “What’s my (Sanderson’s) opinion on fanfiction?” 41:34 - “How do you know if your magic system works?” 45:54 - “I’d love to screen write for animation. Any tips?” 48:02 - “Is editing fantasy/sci-fi a good backup plan?” 52:39 - “How can you make limits or weaknesses appear natural and not contrived?” 56:58 - “What does Brandon think of The Mandalorian?” 58:52 - “Are Sanderson’s Laws absolute?” 59:45 - “How do you decide that you need to add some new magic, and how do you add it smoothly without turning it into a deus ex machina/making it feel out of nowhere?” 1:04:47 - About revision

I really appreciate that Brandon doesn't have the attitude of "Lord of the Rings is outdated". I see it a lot and it really is frustrating. Thank you Brandon! I love your books!

I totally agree with Sanderson when he says that if you violate a readers external logic then you will have to work a lot harder to get them to suspend their disbelief and accept it. When writing one of my books I found that my brother got very angry with me because I was writing a necromancer in a totally different light than one would typically expect. I tried explaining the logic behind my decision, and everything made sense that way, but he still could not accept it. I found however, that if I just didn't call the character a necromancer that my brother was perfectly fine with the character because it no longer came with that excess baggage.

"Everything in a book is contrived" THANK YOU! I have been saying this for years

I've started seeing your class in the BYU since the quarantine begun. I'm from Spain and these weeks my writing motivation fell off pretty quickly. Even if this message gets lost on the comment section, I'm so thankful for your classes, the way you try to explain us your experience through the years. It gave me hope and the words you've said at the first video made me feel like I was in your class. Thank you PD: Sorry for my English, it's not my main language

46:18 One of the most selfless, mature pieces of advice I've gotten from him. For someone as highly accomplished and renowned in sci-fi/fantasy as him to state openly that he is not the one to be giving advice on how to break in in the current climate just shows how true and honest he is. It's completely the correct call too, I mean think about how exponentially fast our world changes now. We literally didn't have iPhones when he broke in, let that sink in ... let alone all the other software/hardware/devices we have now that's made eBook sales fly off the charts. Even KZfaq was barely a year old, nothing like it is now. So not only is he completely right in this assessment, but it makes me trust all of his other advice 100%. Brandon Sanderson must be protected at all costs. At least until he's 72 ... iykyk 📚📚📚

1:06:38 It's time for Deep Thoughts with Heinlein. -You must write. -You must finish what you write. -You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order. -You must put the work on the market. -You must keep the work on the market until it is sold. That concludes our Deep Thoughts with Heinlein.

32:00 - I think Jim Butcher's got a shining example of handing "not completely standard" vampires in *The Dresden Files*. He has three separate types of vampires (three vampire Courts), and they're brilliantly differentiated. One is the standard vampire (Black Court). Then the Red Court is quite similar, but with somewhat different rules. Finally the White Court doesn't feed on blood at all - they feed on emotional energy. Anyway, however it's done, Jim did it, and did it super-well.

The last 10 minutes about revision from 1:04:47 is gold. Thank you. So enjoy these lectures. This is the third series of them I’ve watched.

These lectures are amazing. I have made more progress with my writing in the past couple weeks after starting these than the past couple years before finding these. A big thank you to B Sanderson and the KZfaq algorithm

I can't believe this was just put out for free, I feel like I owe someone money after watching this whole series of lectures.

Realistic magic and fantastical science would be a good name for a book on that lesson

57:50 "we're gonna make some star wars shi- uh.. star wars show" 1:13:45 He was absolutely going to say "I'm gonna try to kill every character who is meant to die."

I'm constantly amazed he can come up with concrete examples at the drop of a hat. An amazing lecturer. Tireless and energetic. Also, my favorite author by a wide margin.

“That’s a great question!” -Brandon Sanderson

Thank you Sanderson for these lectures. You have the gratitude of thousands of aspiring writers.

Your story about not talking about the sprens on the emotion scenes is amazing. They are the driving element of the advance of the characters and the world state and you managed to add their "common" presence only in a revision. That is a great revision work right there.

It took me 8 of these lectures to realize my science fiction story absolutely has a magic system in it. I then immediately decided to expand on that magic system and add a second one. I just thought that was amusing. :D

This man is brilliant, but I'm also struck by just what an amazing teacher he is. He's the best blend of humor, humility, and imagination.

Thank goodness, I love that Sanderson knows he's not an expert in breaking into the current publishing industry. So glad he doesn't give an equivalent of "Just go up to the publishing manager and give them a firm handshake and you'll get published that day!" It's so incredibly refreshing to get advice from someone who knows what he knows and knows what he doesn't know.

BYU students in comments are saying this must have been recorded beforehand. Just saying before another person takes the time to ask

I like how Brandon discusses the difference between MG & YA. But as with everything, there are exceptions... As a teacher, I wish there were more writers who wrote more complex works but for younger students content-wise. This is because there are plenty of middle grade students who can read at very high levels, but they can’t find a lot except for classics that are appropriate for their age. Likewise, there are plenty of high schoolers that read below their grade level (the majority in fact), so having YA books content-wise but are easier to read would also be welcome :)

I've been looking forward to watching more of these! Thanks for being willing to post them.

I love the bit about the revision process. Brandon is almost approaching an agile methodology! Really cool!

Thank you SOOOO much for posting these videos! I love the humility you show and how you always point out that you can only teach what you know works for you and may work for some others, but that there are many other ways that may work better for some people. And frankly I love that you are the kind of person some people would consider a nerd like me, who is not afraid to show his flaws and admit his mistakes!

Great class - especially the bits on your revision process. Thanks, Brandon.

Every year or so I come back to Brandon's videos, and I get a new, deeper understanding of how to implement his advice in my writing. I wish I had rewatched this a couple of months ago - it would have saved me a lot of headaches in revision.

At 57:50, was one of the quickest censorings I've heard yet. Had me cracking up! Nice save! 😆👍👍

One thing I get out of all of these lectures is it is usually better to flesh out your main character(s) than anything else. A simple plot with fantastic characters will not confuse the reader and give them a strong viewpoint from which to explore. As the character explores, the reader explores and the character, like most of us, rarely have long conversations with anyone about how the world works around us unless we have a mentor. That perspective seems very helpful to keep my writing closer to what would the character think and less about what I might want to put in their head.

This is so much fun to watch. So many golden nuggets.

Hello Brandon, I live in Prague and I stumbled upon these lectures as I first tried to find out what writing is about and whether that would be for me. So, thank you for the recordings and please continue as the semester progresses if it is possible with current covid situation. Cheers.

I really appreciate that last point about revision and edition. I use fictionary system, it's really great for a second revision and gave me so much information for edition, anyway, think I'm going to put more attention in that in the video, I really need it. Thanks for all this videos, Mr Sanderson.

'Remember the bucket.' Great advice. I like the sculpture analogy. I also heard that on The Creative Penn podcast

Love these Brandon they help a Lot thank you very much

Hey Brandon thank you for helping to finish the wheel of time series.

So nobody else has wondered what Brandon wrote during this session? I neeeed to know. Also, thanks for providing this online. Here I am watching it 2 years later and learning so much. Really inspiring. I wrote my first piece of flash fiction, and my first writing in years… seriously, thanks.

That’s the best description of revision I’ve ever heard.

Thank you for sharing your lectures. As someone who is trying to become better at what I love to do your insight has been very helpful to know where to start and that i didnt infact do everything backwards.

I love your books and really appreciate you sharing your knowledge ^^

I've been bingeing this series, but I finally have to comment because FINALLY someone agrees with me about the Mandalorian. All the important story and character was in the beginning and the end. Feels like it could've just been a movie, but still so good.

I watch these classes to help improve my writing methods. I watch them so much that they now interfere with my actual writing. No regrets

I knew everyone is probably worried about this, because I was, this is MOST LIKELY a pre recording. He states that he will two weeks on the business side, and the livestream was about the business side of writing (ie, publishing, agents, etc.). He usually does only 2 weeks on each "subject" on writing (given his previous lecture from 2016 posted by CameraPanda). It is logical to think that this was before the livestream. Also, he/Isaac states somewhere that they have finished six weeks left of a thirteen week semester, and this is numbered as EIGHT, and there are seven lectures published online *before* the livestream. So : Total weeks (13) - Weeks left, not counting the week this was recorded on (6) = 7 (weeks done), which lines up with the number of currently posted lectures (not counted livestream). Hope I quell your anxiety/concerns. :)

best advice ever. (also that t-shirt is amazing)

The bit at the end regarding revision was pure gold.

Brandon, I hope you read through your youtube comments sometimes. I've never seen a more overwhelmingly positive review of a youtube video than I do here (I'm a big youtube comment reader). Deservedly so, these are incredibly valuable videos that make this giant process in the modern age seem so doable, achievable and worth it. I wish we could see how many authors moved to publishing just because of these videos

At 34:18 when Sanderson referenced the plot in Fred Saberhagen's Book of Swords, i remembered Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light. Great book.

Your writing process is really interesting. Great video

Thanks for this :) Always valuable content, I love it.

Really enjoying these lectures :) going through it a second time, making notes now that I have a draft for my world. Comming from an angle of writing shorter stories for fun (fiction) and having done non-fiction/technical writing professionally, but my goal for 2024 is to write a longer fiction. The things I'm most unfamiliar with is a longer plot with subplots, and having tension. So I really hope the tips on outlines will give me a workable first attempt :)

Really helped me on so many levels with my creative writing thanks so much.

The best example of writing that has no internal consistency but works brilliantly is Douglas Adams. He even changed the story on purpose so the radio plays wouldnt be exactly the same as the books but still ended up in the same place.

Thanks so much for posting this lecture series Brandon. It is helping me so much. Are you going to post your lecture on Character, number 9/10? I could do with some help on how to make my characters more charcterful. Thank you

Ok, if i a 14 yr old can watch a college lecture cause it’s informative yet enjoyable means your doing something right

The best advice I ever got about designing something for a young audience: You make it for the intelligence of an adult, but with no worldly experience. Kids understand emotional complexity, they just often don't have the vocabulary for it.

I love this channel

Everything in life is coincidence? No sir. First time is a mistake. Second time is coincidence. Third time is enemy action.

Am watching this from Australia 3 years later. Thanks for reminding me why I wanted to write😊

I learned the word deus ex machina from this video & it’s probably the coolest word I’ve ever heard

In regards to the mention of editing, there's a huge indie writing market, and many if them hire editors. Usually freelance editors. And anyone can call themselves a freelance editor and meet any degree of success.

First I thought, I should recommend Worm by wildbow to everyone. Then I realized the (slim) chance of Brandon reading it because of this comment and got worried for his beautiful characters, in case he got influenced. But I love both writers equally. Both very high on my favorites list

"Brandon absorbed stormlight from a nearby fluorescent lamp and the coronavirus sprens flew out of class"

I love you mr Sanderson.

Another master class

This man is the Goat.

The genre conventions can do a lot for fanfiction as well. You get genre conventions, canon references, and fanon conventions which let you evoke a lot of information in very few words. It's not an infodump if it's literally a single 12-word sentence.

Glad to see the notofication😁

I'm an engineer and have 0 plans or aspirations to become an author, and yet I find these lectures interesting.

To his credit, Michael Sullivan did not do any of that with his elves in "Riyria Chronicles". He still added a twist that was very interesting in regards to the way they interacted with the world. It was fun, but it touched on nostalgia in a very interesting way. How should a writer approach nostalgia towards similar circumstances?

It would be so great, if Brandon Sanderson wrote the book about writing! It would be the best present for people who admire him as the teacher of writing classes

Loving this lecture series. I would have definitely done this if my university offered it. We had some play writing nonsense instead

17:20 This is exactly how Roger Zelazny explained the Amber universe in the first book of his Chronicles of Amber - SPOILER ALERT - Corwin wakes up in a sanitarium with amnesia, he has no idea why he is tougher and stronger than normal human beings, he discovers that he has to walk the Pattern to get his memories back, which includes an explanation of how magic works in that universe. Even on second and third readings, this device works really well for explaining how things work and why Amberites (Amberlings?) are different than normal everyday people.

I know it's minor but it's actually quite incredible that he says "let's talk for 10 minutes about revisions" EXACTLY 10 minutes before the video ends

I genuinely wished I had this class when I was in college

I find it hard to get into revision but once I'm in... Oh boy I can tweak and change stuff so much.

If ever my scribblings find their way onto the printed page, I will be sure to include Mr Sanderson in my acknowledgments. Not because I love his books (while they're quite good, IMO, and consistently so, they are not my favorites), but because this series of videos puts my university-level creative writing education to shame.

"As an artist, when you are creating a piece of art and a piece of writing, your focus should be on, what do i want this piece of art to achieve? What is my goal with it? I'm going to measure your success in creating that art based on how well you were able to do the thing you were trying to." Love this cause I always hated when people pushed the idea that -you can't judge somebodies art, its subjective-. If that is true how come some things get wildly popular and others are hated or ignored? This standard of judging art is spot on. Sanderson for the win again.

This is interesting regarding writing kids/teens in the adult genres, in literary fiction and memoirs there are TONS of examples of this. TS Spivet is a recent one. Or Oscar Wao. There some great examples in literary fiction but you're right, there aren't any in adult genre fiction. Perhaps the market just doesn't want it??

Hi Brandon! I have a question to ask about writing but I don't know the best place to ask it! Would your website be a good place?

Interesting to see this viedeo 3 years later. I personally feel that New Adult has definetly become a thing in the book industry nowadays.

Can't wait for the character week.

Man, I wish I was able to take this class. I would blow up Q&A time. :)

Spelling consistency inconsistently. An alternate answer to the first question.

Thank you for this.

Do you reread your work after the 1.0 draft to make the revision guide?

Thank you soooo much!!

I feel like this advice on how he does revision guides is pretty useful... Like, I have difficulties just writing without revising (a 'bleeder' basically I think is the term) so it takes me a long while to write... And I WILL do sorts of these 'revision guides', but I think an issue is that I don't finish the story first before going through them... And then I find more things I want to revise and so I do that and it takes awhile while my story's plot is just kinda waiting wherever it is at for me to eventually get back around to it... I think I really just need to try and hold off more...

i am 13 and struggle in school and here I am listening to university lectures and understanding everything

Awesome lecture, that bit @ the end about Revision was astounding 😃 "On to the next one" - Jay Z 🙏🏽

Something I would love to know...do you right your novels in one document or do you segment your chapters in different ones then combine them? Do you that for the Interludes in TSA?

Thank you!

41:35 - ' How do you know your magic system works?" A: If you spell the magic words and stuff happens - it works

Time turners use (or used, since Cursed Child) close loop time travel. Meaning they cannot really change the past. For example, the first time Harry was attacked by the dementors he saw his future self saving him. Therefore when eventually he travel to the past, he didnt change anything. What he did, had already happen.

I'm curious if you meant William Gibson instead of Neal Stephenson when talking about the father of the cyberpunk genre? I've always heard that he was the father of cyberpunk. Other than Stephenson's Snow Crash I'm unsure if he wrote any cyberpunkish novels. Idk, just a listener's curiosity if you read the video's comments.

I am missing my chemistry class for this and i have to become a doctor so its not good for me to miss any of the science classes.(writing is my passion and i work on it all the time and i want to be a writer and and doctor as doctor is work whereas writing is passion) and i am watching this to become a better ya fantasy medieval politics game of thrones type novel!😊

Hearing Brandon say "Sazed" broke my brain. Two syllables?! AAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!

54:00 "A wizard did it!!!"

Fun example of a magicless magic system that suffered from not following rule 1 was the tattoos in prison break. The ability of the tattoos to have a solution to every possible problem was constantly extended in a way that broke the show’s internal logic