How to write like Brandon Sanderson, according to Brandon Sanderson

January is traditionally a month for starting projects, trying new things, and working to break bad habits — particularly anything that gets in the way of self-improvement or productivity. Polygon figured one of the industry’s most prolific writers might have some tips on breaking writer’s block, maintaining focus, and completing projects, so we reached out to ask Sanderson how he keeps his energy up and gets so much done.

“I didn't become an artist so I could work.”

Surprisingly, Sanderson says his number one suggestion for staying productive as a writer and creator is to zoom in on one major project either until he has a completed first draft, or until it’s clear that it isn’t working.

“What it really comes down to is the non-working time where your brain is trying to crack nuts, trying to break open parts of a story that aren't working,” he says. “That's really important time, and you have to not distract from that. I really need that to be on one project at a time.”

That doesn’t prevent him from taking on minor tasks, like checking an editor’s notes on a book headed to print, or doing a light polish on a draft. But when it comes to outlining stories, working through plot problems, or first-draft writing, he has to stick to one book at a time.

“That’s one thing I think people discount, is that getting your subconscious working on making things click together is really important,” he says. “You will find that, with very productive people in the creative space, it's about getting really immersed, and really getting so much of your attention dedicated on making this one thing good — that can feed itself. I have to be careful not to break that among different projects.”

Sanderson identifies the point where he’s 30 to 70 percent through a project as “the real danger zone” where distractions creep in. “Your brain is going to be like, I'm not getting the exact same hits of dopamine that I get when I'm doing something brand new. It’s starting to feel like work, and I didn't become an artist so I could work.”

The music method of steering the creative brain

When that danger zone hits, Sanderson says it’s particularly important to double down on finishing the project instead of letting any promising new ideas tempt him to switch gears.

“I've learned that I need to write those down and be done with them for now,” he says. “You’ve got to be careful when it comes to writers — the beginning and end [of a project] are exciting for a lot of us, and the middle is less so, even if really exciting things are happening. The world and the story aren't fresh anymore. You have to train yourself in these sorts of creative pursuits after that honeymoon period. You've got to train your brain not to squirrel off to the next cool thing that you haven't done. Your artistic inclinations will cause you to want to pursue a lot of different interesting things, and that's one of the differences between becoming a pro and being a hobbyist: The pro sits down and says, No, I'm going to finish the thing I'm on before I can do the next new cool thing.”

But when he does get potentially derailing new project ideas, he sometimes uses music to “cue” his brain into different modes. That means associating his primary project with a type of music he listens to while working on it, then picking different music to associate with the new project. As long as he’s listening to the second type of music, he can allow himself to ideate about the new thing. When it’s time to switch back to the main project, he uses the music associated with it to mentally switch himself back into that mode. That hack uses the brain’s associative pathways to help him switch gears.

“As we write and as we create, we learn a lot about our process,” he says. “Becoming a novelist is more about learning your process than it is about finishing any one book. You learn the realities of the business, and you learn how your brain works. I don't think any of this is completely natural, but we do have natural tendencies that we can apply toward certain parts of the writing to turn them into strengths.”

Getting over the “30 to 70 percent” hump

Sanderson says his early writing years taught him that multitasking on projects consistently interfered with his productivity. “One of the worst things I can do is stop a book somewhere in the 30 to 70 percent range, go do something else, and tell myself I'll come back to it. Coming back to those books is really hard.”

Sometimes, he realizes one of his stories isn’t working, and he’ll abandon it somewhere in that danger-zone period rather than trying to work out the narrative problems. But he says figuring out when a project isn’t salvageable is “more art than science,” and that he recommends that new writers push themselves past that impulse. Over time, he has landed on three distinct points in the process where he might abandon a book altogether.

“Point one is when it's in outline phase, and I've tried a few chapters, and I'm like, You know what? This isn’t done baking yet,” he says. “Point two is that dangerous 30 to 70 percent mark — that's a real dangerous point to abandon a book. For new writers in particular, I’d say don't do it. For your first few books, force yourself to finish. But for me these days, [I abandon a project if] I don't feel like it's advancing my skill or my goals as a writer, or doing anything new. That's where I might walk away.”

The final point where he gives up on a project may surprise newer writers struggling with writer’s block: Sometimes, he shelves a completed book. “Once in a very long while, I'll abandon one that's been finished,” Sanderson says. “This is when I send it out for reads and I get feedback that makes me think the amount of work to get it to the quality I would want is going to be so high that I'm not sure I want to dedicate the time to it yet. This has only happened twice in the last 20 years.”

Sanderson wants writers to be aware that they shouldn’t scuttle a project just because some of their beta readers don’t like it: “Sometimes you send out a book and you get a [negative] response and you're like, You know what? This is the piece of art I made and that I want to release to the world. It's going to be controversial. I'm going to love it more than some of the people who read it are going to love it. That's fine. There's really nothing wrong with that. You'll find every artist releases works that are less popular with their audience than other works. It's inevitable. As long as you're satisfied, This is as far as I can get with this book, and I'm really satisfied with what I learned and what it does, then you release the book anyway.”

Rescuing and rewriting abandoned projects

Occasionally, Sanderson says, he has been able to rescue a scuttled project by writing something related to put him back on track. “Usually when that's happened, it's because a huge deadline has come, and I had to put a side project aside and come back to it,” he says. “One experience was with the second and third books of the Wax & Wayne series, which are the two strongest books in that four-book series.

“If I look at them objectively — I was writing book two, and then I had a Wheel of Time book to write. And you know what? Wax & Wayne goes on the shelf when The Wheel of Time comes knocking. I came back to it like two years later, and I'm like, Wow, I just cannot get into this book. So I went and wrote the sequel, the third book, to get back into the world and characters. Having done that, I knew the setup I needed from the second book for the third book to work, and I’d gotten my momentum back. Those books work really well and are the strongest two in the series, so sometimes that can really work.”

The other method that’s helped him save abandoned book projects is rewriting them from the beginning. “The ones I’ve come back to and finished because I was not quite ready for them, usually those books go in the woodchipper and I start over from scratch,” he says. “Warbreaker was one of those. I abandoned the book that became Warbreaker. It was called Mythwalker. It was my ninth novel — I wrote 13 before I sold one.”

Sanderson says he abandoned Mythwalker when it was “about 30 to 40 percent” written. “It was feeling too much like the book I'd written right before it. I didn't feel like I was growing as a writer. I felt like I'd already done this type of story. So I abandoned it and wrote something else. And then years later, I'm like, Yeah, but some of those ideas are great. And I started over. I added in a new plot structure for a new character and rewrote the book. So ideas go in the woodchipper, and then you build something new out of them. That's the case where it worked really well.”

Be progress-driven and story-driven, not deadline-driven

One of the most surprising things about Sanderson’s 2022 reveal that he’d written four “secret” novels during the COVID quarantine era was that those books weren’t dependent on contracts or an existing publishing schedule — he wrote them in his free time. But he says it’s actually easier for him to write without any deadlines.

“The nice thing is, I am a writer because I genuinely love the artistic pursuit of storytelling,” he says. “It was easier to write those books without deadlines than it is to write some books with deadlines. Because those books, I could abandon if they just weren't working. Not having a deadline, suddenly feeling like you have free time, is super liberating.

"I am not a deadline-motivated person, however: I'm a progress-motivated person. Seeing that I'm making progress on something and feeling that it’s good progress is enormously satisfying to me, and builds a stability in my life that is extremely valuable for my mental health. It has the side effect of being valuable to my productivity as well.”

Brandon Sanderson’s yearly “State of the Sanderson” blog post detailing the status of his many, many current projects is now live on his website.