Brandon Sanderson’s 7 tips for aspiring writers to master the writing mindset and write their first book

Brando Sando 2025 Lecture Series: The Philosophy of Professional Writing

Starting your first book as a new writer often feels like staring at a blank canvas, with a world of stories inside you, but no clear path to bring them to life.

It’s a daunting process filled with self-doubt, endless questions, and the overwhelming pressure to get it just right. But fear not, for even seasoned authors like Brandon Sanderson faced the same struggles. In fact, Brandon struggled for 10 years to sell his first book. In this article, we'll explore 7 actionable tips from Brandon's first lecture in his 2025 lecture series.

This lecture is designed to help you cultivate the writer's mindset and navigate the intimidating journey from blank page to finished manuscript.

Tip #1: You are a chef, not a cook.

Brandon created a handy analogy to help new writers understand writing advice: writers are chefs, not cooks.

A cook follows a recipe without fully understanding why they are performing each step. A chef reads recipes to learn how other people did it. When it comes to execution, the chef intuitively combines different ingredients and cooking methods with intuition and curiosity to achieve their desired result.

Writing advice are the recipes in this analog.

All of this is to say, you should ignore most writing advice.

As the chef, you need to experiment to find what produces the results you like most. Blindly following advice without understanding how it works will make it impossible to grow as a writer. Each writer's journey is unique, based on their particular skills and interests.

Keep only what works for you and throw away the rest.

Tip #2: Your first book will teach you how to write books.

What's the point of working so hard on my first book if I can't sell it?

I have been thinking about this a lot lately. Brandon recommends going into your first book without the intention of selling it. The purpose of your first book should be to teach you how to write books.

If you are writing part-time, or plan to write full-time, you will need to learn how to make writing books second-nature. Because life is a balancing act between writing and everything else. Brandon recommends new writers to aggressively invest time into their writing routine so they can develop their process.

Here Brandon offers an analogy of playing the piano. If you listened to someone who had been playing the piano for 6 months vs someone who has been a professional concert pianist for 20 years, do you think you could tell the difference? Of course you could.

That's why editors can reject a book after reading the first page. The skill of a writer is self-evident in every sentence. It's a useful analogy because piano is an obviously difficult skill. While everyone knows how to write, not everyone can write well. It can be a difficult fact to accept for new writers. It takes time and practice to reach the level of a professional writer.

By thinking of your first book as a training ground for developing your process, you can eliminate perfectionism. This mindset shift has been immensely helpful in overcoming my own blocks to keep moving forward.

I used to entertain fantasies of selling my first novel, but now I just want to get it done.

Tip #3: Use this simple formula to write your first book.

In the spirit of getting your first book done, Brandon has a number of practical tips to help unblock you.

He recommends picking a premise and committing to it. Resist the temptation to keep changing your premise and rewriting your opening, because you can't finish books that way. Instead, he recommends using a prompt generator. Or if you already have an idea for a setting, character, or plot then run with it.

Now take that idea and combine it with a movie plot from a different genre.

That's it.

It can be that simple if you allow it to be. The key to avoiding overthinking is accepting whatever you have as good enough and keep pushing forward. I have a separate article where I talk about plot archetypes and how to extract them from movies. I will also be covering the plot lectures once they're released.

Once you've written your first book, put it aside and start your second book. You can go back to your first book later to revise it based on everything you've learned.

Tip #4: Write a 5 part series in the same universe.

This advice is specifically for the author of Science Fiction and Fantasy.

When you are constructing a high concept epic fantasy novel, you will invest a lot of energy into creating a wiki of worldbuilding details for your world. It's impractical to throw away that effort. Brandon has a specific piece of advice.

Write a 5 part series in the same fictive universe.

He goes on to recommend using the same strategy he uses in many of his series. Create an ensemble of characters in the first book and then each character in the ensemble gets their own book as a sequel. This technique has the added benefit of creating a web of interconnection to lead readers from one book to the next.

I found this to be a very actionable tip for writers looking to write their first series.

Tip # 5: Survivorship bias obscures the randomness of success.

Survivorship bias is perhaps the most useful concept for understanding success in any industry.

It might be difficult to hear, but success is almost completely random. They're many skilled writers who are not making a living wage with their books despite consistently producing high quality books.

Survivorship bias is the tendency for people to mistake their process as being the cause for their success (see: Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb). Brandon warns against online self-styled gurus who claim to have the answers.

It goes back to the chef and the cook analogy. There's no point in trying to copy what a successful author did. The advice here is simple, no one has the answers. Everyone's journey will look different.

Trust in your process!

Tip #6: Persistence is the key to success.

Many agree, it takes 10 years to be successful in a given field.

It might seem discouraging, 10 years is a long time after all, but I find it inspirational. To be successful you simply have to keep going.

For example, it took Brandon 10 years to sell his first book.

He wrote around 13 books before selling his first book to a traditional publisher. He was working the night shift at a hotel. A job that allowed him to write during his downtime. Think of the sacrifices he had to make. Working at night means he had no social life and the job was not building towards any kind of career.

When he was ready to sell his first book, George R.R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice was reaching dizzying new heights of success. Publishers wanted books in the same style, often called grim dark, only shorter. Because shorter books are cheaper to produce and have a better profit margin.

Brandon's style is long epic fantasy novels with a tone of hope and optimism, very much not grim dark. Despite receiving so many rejections, he refused to give up. Now, he is one of the most successful authors in the world, in any genre.

Based on the small group writing workshop he teaches at BYU, he puts the odds of making it as a full-time writer as 1 in 20. He goes on to say, if you exclude the people who give up, the odds improve by a lot. This is a very important point.

The reality is most people give up. When they encounter rejection and discomfort, they decide to do something else. When you tap into the intrinsic motivation for writing as it own reward, writing for 10 years becomes easy.

I looked at this and I thought: "Am I going to stop writing?" And looking seriously and honestly at my heart, I said no. Whatever I end up doing, I'm not going to stop writing. This is who I am. I'm going to keep writing and if I'm at age 90 and I never sell a book and my books are only for my family and my friends then I'm a success, that's the success I can control.

— Brandon Sanderson

Tip #7: Being a nonprofessional writer is a wonderful thing.

Capitalism has conditioned us that things must have monetary value to be valuable.

While money is useful as a neutral indicator of value, and you probably should use it as a feedback mechanism, it's not everything. Writing is good for you. It will make you a better person, I truly believe that.

You are your art. The writing you produce is a reflection of who you are. As you improve your art, something funny happens, you end up improving yourself. A life spent in pursuit of writing is a life of learning, empathy, and introspection. There is no better way to embody the values of contemplation, silence, and curiosity.

Being a published author is unlikely to change your life in any material way. But I guarantee a daily writing habit will change your life forever.