Brandon Sanderson20 May 2022

Bonus Episode: Originality, Writing and Career Fulfilment with Brandon Sanderson

5Frameworks

16Insights

Frameworks in this episode

Communication6 steps

Insights & moments

The myth-busts, hot takes, explainers, and tools worth keeping.

Myth Buster· 4

Myth Buster06:30

The odds of making it as a writer are one in twenty, not one in a million

Everyone told Sanderson that becoming a writer was nearly impossible and his chances were slim. His actual experience contradicts the folklore: among people who genuinely dedicate themselves to the craft, he estimates roughly one in twenty or thirty go on to have a career, not one in a million. He points out the framing problem — if med school came with a one-in-twenty chance of becoming a doctor, people would rethink it, yet the same odds in writing are treated as hopeless. He isn't dismissing the difficulty; it's still a hard job because it sits in entertainment. His objection is to the exaggeration, which discourages people who would otherwise clear the bar.

“my experience has been that people who really dedicate themselves to the craft and things it's more like one out of 20 or 30”
Brandon Sanderson · 06:30

“it's still a difficult job to get to work because it's in entertainment but it's not as crazy difficult as people pretend it is”
Brandon Sanderson · 07:00

Myth Buster08:00

Nobody asks a weekend golfer when they're going pro

Sanderson uses sport to expose an asymmetry in how creative work is treated. His friends in their forties play basketball regularly because they enjoy it and it's good for them; his publicist golfs without any prospect of the PGA Tour. Nobody asks either group when they plan to go pro. Start writing a book, though, and people immediately ask when you'll publish it and when you'll monetise it. He's explicit that monetising your work is a fine goal — but if what you want is a stable career and reliable earnings, writing isn't the vehicle and that isn't the reason to do it. The point is that a creative pursuit is allowed to be a dedicated hobby and a core part of your self-identity without needing to become a business.

“but nobody asks him when you're going to go pro but if you start writing a book people will ask you when you're going to…”
Brandon Sanderson · 08:00

“understand that if you want a stable career and you want to earn well writing is not the thing to do”
Brandon Sanderson · 08:30

Myth Buster11:00

Not everyone has an all-consuming passion — and that's fine

Asked what to tell people who don't know what they're passionate about, Sanderson admits he was myopic about this in his pre-published years, assuming everyone must have a single all-consuming drive because he did. A college roommate corrected him directly: he had no all-consuming passion, wanted a job he enjoyed, and wanted to come home and play video games — and that's still how he is, decades on, and he's in Sanderson's writing group. Sanderson now rejects the universal-passion premise outright and argues there are a great many genuinely fulfilling jobs. His own all-in bet came with real downside, since his fallback options weren't of the same calibre; an English PhD path required hoops he wasn't jumping through in grad school.

“i do not have an all-consuming passion i want to find a job i want to enjoy it and i want to come home and…”
Brandon Sanderson · 11:30

“which i just don't think is true i think there are a lot of very fulfilling jobs out there”
Brandon Sanderson · 11:30

Myth Buster39:00

The bestseller list measures momentum, not total sales

Ali admits feeling dirty about targeting the New York Times list; Sanderson says it's a reasonable goal for him specifically, because he already has an audience and a nonfiction book tied to his channel — though he'd tell most debut novelists not to target something they can't control. He then demystifies the list. In his era, the bottom of the fiction hardcover list took about 2,000 copies in a week; a successful mid-list book might sell 20,000 in its lifetime, and 10,000 in hardcover meant your publisher would never drop you. A book selling 1,900 copies a week for 50 weeks outsells a list-hitter and never charts, because the list measures front-loading. Bestseller, he concludes, is a marketing term and a stamp of momentum, not of quality.

“list is a measure of momentum not a measure of total sales”
Brandon Sanderson · 40:30

“bestseller is a marketing term and it is used like a marking term it is not a stamp of quality”
Brandon Sanderson · 42:00

Hot Take· 2

Hot Take28:00

Nobody teaches writers how to build a working life

Sanderson pushes back on being called prolific — pulp-era writers paid by the word produced far more — and locates the real problem elsewhere: artists lack the structures for long-term productivity that other industries build deliberately. Places like Google have an entire culture around keeping people productive over years; writers have to self-motivate with no external accountability at all. He contrasts his English degree with his roommate's chemical engineering track, where every class was prescribed and a 65% was a fine grade, against a humanities environment of feelings and Jane Austen where nobody explains how to actually become an author. The result is people bumbling through alone, with an inner-muse mythology in place of habits, and lives that become dysfunctional through no fault of their own.

“and writers have to be self-motivated no one's there um telling you do your work you don't have a lot of external motivation”
Brandon Sanderson · 28:30

“because how do you build habits like this when no one talks about it”
Brandon Sanderson · 30:00

Hot Take32:00

Gatekeeping professions by who can suffer through hell

Sanderson turns his critique on how society structures professional work generally, and medicine specifically. The prevailing message to doctors is that the first ten years will be miserable, with brutal shifts, as though the pain is what earns a higher standard of living afterwards. He calls that a terrible idea, and extends it to law: training people to expect hell before they qualify means the profession selects for whoever is willing to endure it, which is a poor filter for who should hold those jobs. He connects this to a broader complaint about ownership and proportional reward — people generally aren't rewarded in proportion to their work, and are placed on ladders instead.

“we have to make the doctors feel pain to make sure that they deserve than having a higher than standard living wage later on i…”
Brandon Sanderson · 32:30

Explainer· 3

Explainer02:30

Two four-hour writing sessions beat one long one

Sanderson describes his working day: he wakes around 1pm and runs two four-hour writing blocks rather than one extended stretch. His reasoning is about the shape of a work session — roughly an hour of spin-up at the start and a spin-down at the end, with the genuinely effective time in the middle. Push a session too long and one of those edges stretches out instead. Four hours reliably yields about two hours of highly efficient writing, so he structures his life around getting two of those: work until 5pm, shower and spend the evening with family until 10, then write from 10 until 2, with 2 to 4am as free goof-off time. He's been consistent with this since breaking in, and was a night owl long before.

“i've found that two sessions of work are better for me than one long one”
Brandon Sanderson · 02:30

“and i found for me about four hours gives me a good two hours of really efficient riding time in the middle”
Brandon Sanderson · 03:00

Explainer12:00

Find the category of fulfilment, not the job title

Sanderson's alternative to hunting for a passion is to identify what class of activity you find fulfilling, then look for the many careers that hit it. He points at broad human drivers: creativity, serving people, and problem solving. His own evidence is that writing and programming feel nearly identical to him — he took one programming class in college and it made that his hardest writing semester, because coding used the same part of his brain and left him mentally exhausted. In both, you're problem solving toward a desired result; only the output differs. He also found the graveyard hotel shift shockingly fulfilling, because he could just get people what they needed and make their night better without selling anything.

“coding is basically writing it's the same sort of thing”
Brandon Sanderson · 12:00

“you can find these general groupings of things that you happen to find satisfying fulfilling and you can then find a whole bunch of different…”
Brandon Sanderson · 13:30

Explainer25:30

The precious-time paradox: writing got harder when he got more time

Early in his career Sanderson's writing hours were scarce and therefore valuable. With school and homework filling the day, the hours after midnight at the hotel front desk were golden time he genuinely cherished — and before that job, when he couldn't write at work at all, an hour a week was even more precious. Counterintuitively, writing became harder once it turned into a full-time career, because time stopped being a scarce commodity and lost the urgency scarcity had supplied. It's the observation that motivates his whole approach to engineering motivation: the conditions that made him productive as an unpublished writer disappeared exactly when he succeeded, so the system had to be rebuilt deliberately.

“and so at when midnight rolled around at uh work at the hotel and i had that time to write that was precious time to…”
Brandon Sanderson · 25:30

“it became harder to write when i got more time in some ways because suddenly writing time was not a precious commodity in the same…”
Brandon Sanderson · 26:00

Story· 3

Story04:00

Thirteen novels before the sixth one sold

Sanderson came to writing late by novelist standards. He discovered books at 14 through a good teacher, found something in fantasy and science fiction he'd been missing, started seriously considering it professionally around 17, and finished his first novel at 22 — the age he counts as the start, when he moved his major from chemistry to English. For roughly the next six years he wrote about two books a year without selling anything. He wrote thirteen novels in total, and sold his sixth just as he was polishing the thirteenth. That sale came in 2003, the book (Elantris) came out in 2005, and his career officially began right around when he turned 30.

“i finished my first novel the first thing i got done i was 22”
Brandon Sanderson · 05:00

“so right around when i turned 30 is when my career officially began”
Brandon Sanderson · 06:00

Story15:00

He deliberately hunted a graveyard shift to buy writing hours

Sanderson's hotel night-audit job wasn't an accident — he found it on purpose. Knowing a security guard who read all night, and knowing he was a night owl, he went looking for an equivalent and was upfront in interviews that he wanted free time at work to write. Ali recognises the pattern from his own hospital night shifts, where quiet hours and electronic prescribing let him plan YouTube videos between bleeps. Sanderson adds two warnings: larger hotels expect night auditors to do real tasks like folding towels, and many people simply aren't productive at those hours. A friend who took the same job to become a writer spent months failing to adapt to the schedule. Sanderson had been sleeping in two four-hour blocks since high school.

“and i thought i'm a night owl i should find a job like that and i went and tried actively to find one”
Brandon Sanderson · 15:30

“but also a lot of people just aren't productive during those hours”
Brandon Sanderson · 16:00

Story30:30

An artist with the work ethic of an accountant

Ali puts a line from Sanderson's classes to him: that he thinks of himself as an artist with the work ethic of an accountant. Sanderson confirms it and traces the source to his mother, an accountant before she retired, who trained him in a solid work ethic young. He had a paper route at 14 — effectively self-employment — and she set up systems for how he'd run and account for it himself. He describes himself as naturally a head-in-the-clouds person rather than an accountant, which is precisely why the imported discipline mattered so much. He also notes she doesn't understand fantasy novels and reads his books only because they're his, and separately insists that the way she set up her life was itself deeply creative.

“you think of yourself as an artist with the work ethic of an accountant is that fair to say”
Ali Abdaal · 30:30

“and i applied a lot of that to becoming a writer because i am more ahead in the clouds type person”
Brandon Sanderson · 31:00

Tool· 1

Tool42:00

The stack: Microsoft Word, a local wiki, and three separate outline files

Sanderson describes himself as fairly low-tech. He writes in Microsoft Word, old-school, starting at chapter one and writing to the end of each chapter. The one unusual tool is a personal wiki running WikidPad, an open-source program hosted locally rather than on the internet, used only by him and his team to track continuity across the Cosmere books — fans can't access it. He recommends the wiki way of thinking because looking things up is easier than with encyclopedia-style entries. Alongside the manuscript he keeps three separate files: a notes file, an outline file, and what he calls a floating outline covering only the short-term material he's working on immediately next.

“the only tool that i use that a lot of uh people don't use is i do have a wiki it's a personal wiki it's…”
Brandon Sanderson · 42:30

“and then i usually have a notes file that's a separate file and then a an outline file that's a separate file”
Brandon Sanderson · 43:00

Takeaway· 3

Takeaway07:30

Deciding at 99 with a hundred unpublished novels would still be a win

The pivotal moment of Sanderson's career happened before he had one. Writing novels ten through thirteen with nothing sold, he confronted the possibility that he might be one of the nineteen who loves the craft but never matches the market. He decided he had to be okay with that — writing was something he did first and foremost because he loved it and thought it made him a better person. He framed it aspirationally: if he reached 99 having written a hundred unpublished novels, that would still make him a bigger success than giving up on something he truly loved. He was prepared for writing to become a serious hobby alongside a conventional career. He didn't want that outcome, but accepting it was what let him keep going.

“writing was something i did because first and foremost i really loved doing it”
Brandon Sanderson · 07:30

“if i hit age 99 and i have written a hundred novels that have not been published that's okay”
Brandon Sanderson · 08:30

Takeaway26:30

Slow and steady, and be happy now rather than later

Sanderson describes what a good day looks like for him: hitting his word count, a couple of hours of video games, three hours with his kids playing their games, a couple of hours with his wife doing what she wants — and going to bed feeling genuinely fulfilled. He acknowledges other people work differently, including binge writers who need three uninterrupted months per book and spend the other nine gearing up. That isn't him. His model is slow and steady, making every day satisfying rather than postponing happiness to a future milestone. Ali connects it to the mantra he keeps landing on in interviews — journey before destination — and notes Sanderson appears to actually be living it.

“slow and steady make every day satisfying don't put off to be like i'll be happy in the future be happy now by making a…”
Brandon Sanderson · 27:00

“the line that i just land on is journey before destination and i think that's just such a good like mantra for life”
Ali Abdaal · 27:30

Takeaway46:00

Outline backward, write forward, and let no chapter be filler

Asked for quick productivity tips, Sanderson starts with direction: knowing his destination is what gives him momentum, because he's always pushing toward something he expects to be exciting. He outlines backward and writes forward. Then he passes on a mantra from his editorial director — don't write a chapter that couldn't conceivably be someone's favourite. It needn't be everyone's favourite, but every chapter needs something a reader could love, so boring filler has to be made exciting in its own right, even if it's a different kind of exciting. He explicitly generalises the rule beyond books: make everything you're doing interesting to you in some way, even the parts that aren't your favourite.

“i outline backward and i write forward”
Brandon Sanderson · 46:00

“he says don't write a chapter that can't conceivably be someone's favorite it doesn't have to be everyone's favorite”
Brandon Sanderson · 46:30

Frameworks in this episode

Fractal World Building

Motivation Hacking: Making Yourself Do the Things You Want to Have Done

The Chef, Not the Cook: Deconstruct-and-Rebuild Originality

The Thursday Rule: Containing Everything That Isn't the Work

The Two-Basket Ownership Model