Thinking About Brandon Sanderson's "Five Tips for Writing Your First Novel"

Well, I already kinda finished my first novel before I found this video, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to go back in retrospect and see how many of Sanderson's tips I found on my own, and what I thought of his tips in general.

(By the way, you can see his original video here.)

What I discovered is that I basically came up with a few of these tips on my own, but I also found that this particular video by Sanderson was aimed especially at people trying to write a novel very quickly. This was a constraint that I did not put on myself.

Several of the ideas are quite good and helpful, but it wasn't a slam dunk.

Let's jump through them real quick.

1) Borrow structure from a book or genre you know and love

Did I do this? A bit, yes. I created a story structure similar to other rescue stories: start with a hook, do some planning, go through a series of clues and hurdles, story climax, falling action. I also transposed a bit of detective story structure into the book.

2) Begin with a monologue

Did I do this? Not really. I find epigraphs at chapter starts to be kind of haughty, and that clashes with my settings and characters. What I did instead was draw from my earlier writings with these characters and build on them a little bit.

3) What does a character want & need, how are these different, and why can't they have them?

Did I do this? Not really. My book is more plot-centric than character-arc-centric. Think Rex Stout rather than some epic character arc. I'm writing a story about developed and disciplined professionals solving a professional problem. I think too many stories depend on some rare and unlikely character arc.

4) Choose your type of progress

Did I do this? Yes. My book is definitely structured as a set of clues to trace and problems to solve, both long-term and immediate. I have some points where the characters fail or have to backtrack in order to keep things interesting and relatively unpredictable.

5) Prime your mind

Did I do this? Only slightly. I usually primed my mind by looking at my outlines and character descriptions. I tend to focus on what I'm doing, so the advice to think about writing while doing chores or whatever hasn't given me good results yet. I much prefer to focus on the writing before I start and do nothing else while I focus on that, although that feels very lazy sometimes.

Anyway, that's a summary of my thoughts on Sanderson's tips.

If you'd like to see how my book ended up, you can find Pursuit of the Heliotrope at a variety of places...

Amazon: https://a.co/d/h8OymoC

Off-Amazon: https://books2read.com/u/bWaQQM