Recently, I’ve enjoyed a lot of Brandon Sanderson’s novels. If you don’t know who he is, he’s a popular fantasy author with a wildly optimistic outlook on people, and a knack for world building and magic systems.
He’s also extremely prolific.
Since George R.R. Martin published Dance of Dragons in 2011 (the most recently published book in his Song of Ice and Fire series), Brandon Sanderson has published ten novels. (That’s not including his novellas.) Some of those books are lengthy tomes that take dozens of hours to read.
Not that Sanderson and George R.R. Martin are in a competition, but if they were, Sanderson wins the output competition. And, at this point, I think he’d win the quality competition. Sanderson is becoming a better writer all the time, and I think it’s because he writes constantly. (Quantity breeds quality.)
I thought about this in light of my own creative practice, of course, and wondered how somebody like Brandon Sanderson gets all that writing done. That’s a lot of words. It turns out, Sanderson’s website has a whole section about his process. He has a page about his daily word count and time goals that I found interesting:
I write every day, and I give myself wordcount goals. (Usually, it’s 2k min, or a certain page goal if revising). It varies though. 10 pages is often my goal. I usually hit it, and sometimes do much more… Also, some days I write for four or five hours – some days I write fourteen or sixteen… The truth is, I love what I do. So if I have time when I’m not doing something else, I work on books… Most days, usually, formally, I write from about noon until four, and then I’ll hang out with my family and do other stuff until about ten, and I’ll start writing from about ten until midnight. No from about ten until 4AM.
First, Sanderson writes a lot more than many other authors who have documented their process. Stephen King writes for four hours a day (his process also includes an afternoon nap, which sounds awesome).
Second, Sanderon’s word count is impressive. Two thousand words a day doesn’t sound like a lot, but two thousand words a day about stories and people you’ve conjured out of thin air is no picnic. Two thousand words is double what Stephen King writes in a day. (Again, this isn’t a competition, but it’s interesting to compare two prolific writers. King has written eighteen books since Dance of Dragons. His books are shorter, in case that’s not obvious. Later was an excellent read, in case you wonder if he’s still got it after all these years.)
Put all this aside, though, for just a minute: how do writers like Sanderson and King write this much, all the time? How do you show up every day?
Of course, Brandon Sanderson has something to say about that:
Writer’s block for me is where I’m a few chapters in and the story’s not flowing ‚or I’m in the middle of the book somewhere and a chapter is just not working… I deal with it by writing the next part anyway, and it often doesn’t work, but I can set it aside and try it again the next day. I find that just writing it anyway, writing it poorly, and setting aside what I wrote and trying again fixes the problem almost every single time.
Sanderson writes the hard part anyway, then moves on even though it stinks.
I know it sounds a lot like I’m saying “just do the work to be creative and you’ll get it done,” and that’s not helpful. But stay with me here: there are at least two takeaways from what Sanderson is saying that I think are immensely helpful.
- Set aside a time in your day when you get to do your creative work. Stephen King writes the same four hours every day. On “most days,” Sanderson writes from noon to 4, then 10pm to midnight. Make an appointment on your calendar and keep it.
- In that time period, don’t worry about perfection. Your first “draft” might stink. That’s why pencils have erasers, Adobe Illustrator has so many “Dupe” shortcuts, programmers have the Delete key, and writers have editors.
The hardest thing is point number one. Let’s say you have a 9 – 5, but you take photos in the evening. That sucks. The best light is gone when the sun is down. You have to come up with some creative ways to make a daily practice out of that, but this is a creative process — coming up with creative solutions to hard problems is the work.
Even if your day job is doing creative work — maybe you’re a freelancer like me — it’s still hard to find a consistent time. Trust me, people love meetings, and many clients are more interested in meeting with you than they are in your completion of their work.
But if you can find the time to show up every day, and keep that appointment with yourself, the second problem solves itself. Your first drafts get better. You get blocked less often. The mere act of showing up triggers your brain’s neurological pathways into doing the work.
The hard part is making the time to do your creative work. To do the stuff that matters. Don’t try to find the time. You won’t. You must make it for yourself.