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Brandon Sanderson / What can writers learn from Mistborn? *Spoilers*
« on: October 28, 2008, 05:41:59 PM »
I'm a writer and am interested in discussing the Mistborn trilogy from a writer's perspective. That is, what can writers learn from Mistborn about writing good books?
I really don't know where to begin--there are so many examples of why these books work--so will try keep it simple a first.
One of the things that stands out most to me is that it's the high-level view that makes the book most pleasing. The Mistborn books are great, but I don't know that it's the writing that makes them great. The style is transparent, designed simply to convey the story, not to make you think, "Hmm, that was good writing. Very clever." I imagine Brandon can write that kind of stuff, but simply didn't choose to do that with these books.
Rather, what I repeatedly found myself thinking was, "Wow, that was smart. The way those pieces fit together was very clever." To me, it speaks of great world building and superb character building. Most things were internally consistent. For smaller stories, that's not such a hard thing to accomplish, but for three long books, with so many details, it says a lot about the planning and/or editing and revising.
I don't know if Brandon is a genius or an extremely hard worker. It might be both. I heard him say recently that he writes about 2000 words a day. My guess is that those 2000 words themselves make up only a small part of his writing work each day. You can whip out 2000 words in a few hours. If you're on a roll, maybe even an hour. But there's got to be a lot more to it. There's planning. There's double checking. There's going back to the different sections and tweaking this or that. There's probably a lot of thought about the characters and world.
Writing, as it turns out, is about a lot more than how the writer strings words together. It's a necessary skill. But, lots of people who can do that write bland, uninteresting stories are bland.
Now that I think about it, this should probably be filed under the "duh" category. But it's easy for me to forget stuff like this as I'm plowing through to get my words in for the day.
Anyway, I suppose there's a start for a discussion, if anyone is interested.
I really don't know where to begin--there are so many examples of why these books work--so will try keep it simple a first.
One of the things that stands out most to me is that it's the high-level view that makes the book most pleasing. The Mistborn books are great, but I don't know that it's the writing that makes them great. The style is transparent, designed simply to convey the story, not to make you think, "Hmm, that was good writing. Very clever." I imagine Brandon can write that kind of stuff, but simply didn't choose to do that with these books.
Rather, what I repeatedly found myself thinking was, "Wow, that was smart. The way those pieces fit together was very clever." To me, it speaks of great world building and superb character building. Most things were internally consistent. For smaller stories, that's not such a hard thing to accomplish, but for three long books, with so many details, it says a lot about the planning and/or editing and revising.
I don't know if Brandon is a genius or an extremely hard worker. It might be both. I heard him say recently that he writes about 2000 words a day. My guess is that those 2000 words themselves make up only a small part of his writing work each day. You can whip out 2000 words in a few hours. If you're on a roll, maybe even an hour. But there's got to be a lot more to it. There's planning. There's double checking. There's going back to the different sections and tweaking this or that. There's probably a lot of thought about the characters and world.
Writing, as it turns out, is about a lot more than how the writer strings words together. It's a necessary skill. But, lots of people who can do that write bland, uninteresting stories are bland.
Now that I think about it, this should probably be filed under the "duh" category. But it's easy for me to forget stuff like this as I'm plowing through to get my words in for the day.
Anyway, I suppose there's a start for a discussion, if anyone is interested.