In order to improve your writing, you first need to know what kind of writer you are. What makes you tick. So. Let’s start there. As you might know, Sanderson calls himself a natural outline writer.
What does that mean?
It means that he’s the type of writer who likes to plan an outline for his stories before he starts writing. The opposite to an outline writer would be a discovery writer, which is a story teller who kind of makes it up as he goes along (Read: Me).
Now, that’s not to say there aren’t hybrids. In fact, most writers are somewhere on this writing ‘spectrum’.
Some of us are heavily into world building, which leads to the world building disease, for which Tolkien is the poster boy or (patient zero), and some are the complete opposite, just letting the story take them wherever and fleshing everything out as we go along.
And most? Well, I think most writers are somewhere in the middle.
Branderson himself says he’s an outline writer when it comes to plot and setting, but that he prefers the discovery style of writing when it comes to his characters, saying that too much outlining on characters leads to wooden protagonists, which is something we would like to avoid.
So how does Branderson himself start?
As you can hear about in the question section of the #7 class somewhere on character around the 50-minute mark (thanks to CameraPanda: here), he says he starts by building his world.
The setting, if you will. Branderson spends time in this world, guided by the thought of ‘what would be cool’? After that, he starts outlining the major plot points and events of the story.
Then, when his natural outliner instincts have been sated, he moves on to discovery writing, choosing to start by writing several chapters through the point of view of his characters and taking it from there.
This style of writing often leads to later revisions of his outline when he finds out something about the character while writing. The PROMS (Past, Relationship, Obligations, Motivations and Sensibilities) come to the fore and give Sanderson new ideas on where to take to story and how to flesh it out. Sanderson then goes back to his outline and does revisions where necessary.
In this way, he’s literally creating the story through exploring his characters.
Thank you for this insight, Branderson, you mean writing machine.