Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Skype with Brandon Sanderson

Aloha Young Writers!

Today we had a great time hanging with one of our favorite authors, Brandon Sanderson, who has written several extremely large fantasy novels like Elantris, the Mistborn Trilogy, Warbreaker, Way of Kings, and of course the last three books of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. He's also the author of the hilarious Alcatraz books, one of which we read in preparation for his visit.

For those of you who couldn't be there, Brandon Sanderson started out by giving us the secret of how to become a writer. You want to know what it is? Write. That's it. Practice. Writing is just like playing a sport or a musical instrument. Want to be awesome at it? Then work really hard. Do it every day. Those who keep going are the people who become published authors.

Here's a summary of some of the questions that club members asked, and of our visiting author's wise answers:

Q: Is someone making a movie out of the Mistborn books?
A: Mistborn has been optioned. An option is when someone pays an author NOT sell the movie rights to anyone else while the people who want to make the movie try to get a script, some actors, a movie studio, a heap of money, and all that other stuff put together. It's a pretty good deal for the author, getting paid to do nothing.

Q: How do you come up with good endings?
A: Do this before you start writing. Take your characters, your setting, and your story ideas on a long walk. Put on some epic music and think. Eventually, an amazing idea of how to bring everything together will come into your head. Once you start writing, if some better idea comes to you, go ahead and change your plan.

Q: What do you do about writer's block?
A: Have ninjas attack.

Q: I tend to give my characters terrible problems that they can't solve.
A: Take the most awesome way you can think of for them to solve the problem, then go back and revise your story so they have the tools and the skills to do it.

Q: Are you going to write the fifth Alcatraz book?
A: Yes.

Q: When are you going to write the next Stormlight Archive book?
A: Wrote the first chapter today.

For more brilliant writing advice from Brandon Sanderson, be sure and listen to his award-winning podcast, Writing Excuses.

See you next week!






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