How To Worldbuild on Earth? - Brandon Sanderson's Writing Lecture #9 (2025)

Comments · 517

• IO

  @iolair1973 · 1 year ago

  I love the shocked gasps at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIGSFZPTCXA&amp;t=1054">17:34</a> 😂 after &quot;proportion of readers skip epigraphs and skip prologues&quot;.

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• GE

  @geologyjohnson7700 · 1 year ago

  I&apos;m a professional geologist, and fully support writers learning a bit about geology, &nbsp;physical geography, and drawing. I&apos;ve been thinking for a while about doing some videos along the lines of &quot;Basic geology for world builders and writers.&quot;

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• TH

  @TheJordanK · 1 year ago (edited)

  I’m never gonna write a book. But I watch every bit of Brandon’s lectures I can find just so I when I fantasize about writing a book I am more effective at it.

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• JE

  @jens_hens · 5 months ago

  Sitting here, stewing about the thousands of dollars I paid in college tuition to not get a single lecture even CLOSE to this interesting.

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• ES

  @esthers.schmidt4707 · 1 year ago

  Just in case you&apos;re interested: &quot;Show don&apos;t tell&quot; goes back a good 2.000 years! Horace (died in the year 8 BC) wrote in his &quot;Ars Poetica&quot;: &quot;What passes through the ears is less likely to attract attention than what is presented to the more reliable eyes and conveyed by the viewer himself.&quot; (well, of course, he wrote it in Latin :) )

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• JA

  @jabrilyousef · 1 year ago

  Brando Sando nurturing an entire generation of fantasy writers.

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• AR

  @arkadatta6879 · 1 year ago

  Thank you for making these lectures free. You are not only a great author, but also an equally excellent teacher. I actually started writing a novella during the 3rd lecture. I am not a science fiction or fantasy writer, but I was still able to learn a lot from your classes and recognise the shortcomings of my writing. If I am ever able to become a good writer, you will definitely be the primary reason. I can&apos;t thank you enough.

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• TH

  @The_Analist · 1 year ago

  Here are this lecture&apos;s full notes:<br>1) Worldbuilding using the &apos;real world&apos; as a setting:<br> &nbsp;1a. Advantages: You can short-cut things by using real-world terms and phrases that the reader will intrinsically understand without you needing to explain it to them.<br> &nbsp;1b. Disadvantages: Easy to make readers angry if you get things wrong by not researching enough. You can collapse the entire believability of the work by getting small details wrong. When the reader sees you get small details like that wrong, they begin to think you must have gone wrong in other areas of your book too.<br> &nbsp; &nbsp;1ba. You can use &apos;bone-headed&apos; characters to hide your lack of knowledge about a topic by saying it is similar to your character&apos;s level of understanding.<br>2) &apos;Contrast&apos; is a powerful tool for worldbuilding by layering onto what we already have rather than throwing more at a reader. Gives new perspectives.<br>3) Describing things from a character&apos;s POV makes the text unique to them and their personality, and allows for your &apos;world building&apos; to also double as character building, as the reader can tell a lot about a character by how they describe other things and people.<br>4) &quot;In general, readers will scan for the first name in a chapter and assume it&apos;s that person&apos;s POV, so more often then not you should make sure the first person named is the POV character.&quot;<br>5) Even if certain worldbuilding isn&apos;t important to the character, you can use the narrative to focus on it in a way that stresses its importance to the reader, even if the character is oblivious.<br>6) About &apos;Show, Don&apos;t Tell&apos;: Brandon believes showing takes more words and telling takes less.<br>7) &apos;Gorilla in The Phone Booth&apos;: Try not to introduce something &apos;more interesting&apos; than other elements in your story very late in the book that have little to nothing to do with the narrative, as it just distracts readers and splits their interest.<br>8) Sanderson&apos;s 0th Law: Air on the side of what is awesome.<br>9) Books to Improve Your Writing: &apos;On Writing&apos; by Stephen King, &apos;Writing to Sell&apos; by Scoot Meredith, &apos;Save the Cat&apos;<br> &nbsp;9a. Better to learn by writing, or at least in tandem to reading this supplemental material.<br>10) Unrelenting paces work well in books where the reader is expected to finish it in one sitting, but otherwise we need time to slow down in the narrative.<br>11) You can use worldbuilding in your battle scenes by coming up with reasons for why your characters move/act the way they do.<br> &nbsp;11a. For example, if a super huge army is marching for days on end and needs a certain amount of food to do it, you can invent magical food in order to fix this problem and create a more layered world with actual answers for its departures from real-world logic.<br>12) If you name a plot element or something similar the same name that has already been used before, whether or not it will be &quot;accepted&quot; is whether or not the term is in pop culture enough, You couldn&apos;t get away with copying The Force, but you could probably get away with calling your setting The Dead Lands.

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• EM

  @EmilyPaxman · 1 year ago

  Best example of a &quot;Gorilla in the phone booth&quot; I can think of from popular media is starting the 9th Star Wars movie with the line &quot;Somehow, Palpatine has returned&quot; and then just soldiering on with whatever the heck the main plot was, zero explanation for that happened.

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• LI

  @liannsmith7317 · 1 year ago

  This is exactly what I needed, trying my hand at low fantasy and while I love his lectures, Brandon’s advice is a little too high fantasy for the world building I’m trying to achieve.. thank you as always king

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• ST

  @Starsmors314 · 1 year ago

  I just wanted to thank you so much for posting these!! Listening has been life-changing for me. When I started, I had abandoned the craft for a later day, as I have so many other things going on in life right now. That was 29 days ago, and you convinced me to sit down and just start writing something brand new.<br>29 days later I have a completed 1.0 draft of a 121k word fantasy novel I am proud of, and looking forward to revising! Your next lectures can’t come soon enough, and I am so excited to tear this thing apart, and rebuild into something I am ready to seek publishing for.<br>Thank you for reminding us aspiring writers why we right, and for giving us faith in ourselves alongside invaluable wisdom from an incredible novelist.

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• PA

  @pacotaco1246 · 1 year ago

  Brando Sando is my favorite writing youtuber. I should probably read some of his books so i can understand why my friends revere him and look at me funny when i say that he is my favorite writing youtuber

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