Yeah, yeah, I got it. Brandon, thank you. So if someone is in high school or college, a person in their teens or twenties, and they think they might want to be a writer but they don’t know how to begin or are concerned about the effort, you know, any of the concerns people have, what is your guidance?
Number one, and most important, is just to keep doing it. Make good habits. Set aside a time, at least once a week, where you can spend some time writing and working on your craft. And don’t worry about publishing. In fact, don’t be afraid of being bad at it. A lot of people who begin writing, they assume because they’ve been taught writing, how to write, the actual physical mechanics of it, that storytelling will come to them naturally. And it will over time, but it’s as hard to learn as maybe learning to play the piano or something like this. And most people don’t expect to sit down and play the piano beautifully their first try. And in the same way, most people who sit down to write books aren’t great their first try. So just remember to learn to fall in love with the process. I do have a podcast about writing. It’s called Writing Excuses . You can go there and listen in, I’ve got some advice there. You can find that also linked through my website, brandonsanderson.com .
And Warbreaker , which we talked about, actually I released into the creative commons. When I published the hardcover, I released an electronic copy for free. So you can go to my website and actually download the PDF of Warbreaker completely for free to give a try if you want to try out my work and see what kind of writing I do.
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