Sanderson Lectures on Fiction. Great Resource. Check Out on Youtube for FREE

Brandon Sanderson, a fantastic and truly gifted fiction writer, has his lecture series free on Youtube.

I went to school for creative writing, and I'll say there were still elements of what he covered that I never got in my classes.

Check out this first lecture video here.

What stands out the most is distinguishing writing as a technical ability from writing as a romanticized activity.

It's absolutely true you can tell a master musician within the first minute of hearing them perform their instrument.

And that's exactly how you should look at writing. It's a technical skill, something that improves through one and only one thing: practice.

Yes, reading fiction helps. Yes, exploring writing in other mediums helps. Sure, you need to research things beforehand and having a political compass certainly doesn't hurt. But primarily, knowledge and mastery of a skill is a result of a single thing: hard work. And fiction is no different.

The truth is that the reason most people aren't masters of whatever it is they want to be, is because they don't want to do the hard work to get there.

There's a Korean saying: in order to be a master, you need a strong butt.

What this means is that you need to sit down for long periods of time and study, or practice.

Sure, the idea of doing things like learning a language or losing that belly fat or writing the book SOUNDS good. And people like to promote their own image of themselves in their head by fantasizing, idealizing about it. But actually DOING it takes activation energy. It takes getting off Steam or Steem or Facebook or whatever is consuming your eyesight, and getting to work.

And sometimes its not fun at all. But you gotta do it.