YouSaid · the spoken record

Brandon Sanderson

lines on the record: 270
first: 2025-02-05
most recent: 2025-02-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, so I came back from Korea, sophomore year of college, and I'm like, I'm young, I'm stupid. Now's the time to try to be a writer, right? This is what I really want to do. And I suspect we'll get into later why I really want to do that and things like that. But I changed my major to English because I thought that's what she had to do. Later found out Stephen King and others recommend you major in anything but English, reasoning being that you should study something that you're fascinated by and then use that to inform your writing, which is generally pretty good advice. I do recommend that. The cheat code is if you major in English, you can use your writing as your homework. The assignments you can, you know, you can double use your time a lot. A lot of times you can be practicing your writing, but also turn it in. And so it's a little easier in some ways. Changed my major to English and I took a whole bunch of classes from a whole bunch of professors whom they're dear to me. I love them.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're probably not going to have a career as a professional writer. You might, you might get lucky and write that one book that'll sell millions of copies and make it so you can live off of just that income. Most of us, it takes a lot more effort. And we learned to world build in service of story rather than write stories in service of world building. But everybody gets to do what they want. You scratch your itch how you want to scratch it.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We call it world builders disease, which sometimes you want to give yourself. It's fun. But if you spend 20 years world building every book in today's market.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to have something that is relevant, that works, but I don't want to spend 20 years. And so I usually come up with a few interesting rules that I've come up with through my knowledge of linguists. And I say, follow these rules. Whenever you need a word, go back to these rules and build it. Don't write out the whole language. Don't come out with how you would say every sentence. Each time you need something, go to the rules, build it up from the fundamentals. And it will all eventually then work. But it means I end a book with 50 words and maybe a little bit of grammatical structure, not with an entire language that you could speak.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I said, I don't have 20 years to do that, like Grandpa Tolkien. I'm really a narrative guy. I really focus on what makes a narrative work. I'm going to break it down. People think of me of the world as the world building guy, but I'm not. That's certainly the thing I've used as my branding and marketing. It's the way that I've used to make myself easily recommendable and distinctive. But what I spend most of my time on is narrative. And so when I look at the language, I'm like,”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A cotton leg is a constructed language. Most people know of Klingon and Elvish, and George Martin has one and the Navi you mentioned. These are just invented languages. There's only one that's in wide use or wide quote unquote Esperanto. You could almost say that Korean is a bit one because it was actively designed rather than growing organically, but I think it's hovering in this in-between space. So how do I approach it? look at what Tolkien did and I say, wow, he basically wrote Lord of the Rings because he had these cool languages he was designing and he wanted a place to use them right”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely gives you a false sense of your own skill when you learn it. You're like, wow, I'm reading. And they're like, all right, now the actual language, what these things mean.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The high priesthood. And so Seijong wrote it on a letters and it blew through Korea, and the people picked it up, and it was so divinely inspired that they intrinsically knew how to read Korean. And he frustrated the attempts of the nobles from keeping people to read by giving it to people written on leaves. It's so delightful.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mouth you make, and then King Seyjon loved it so much. He wrote it on Little Leaves. And then spread it out because the upper class did not want people to learn how to read. And they were very against it. They're like, oh, we don't want the commoners to read. That's for us. Passing the tests in Chinese was a big.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Language in a lot of ways. You can see the symbol for person and know it means person, whether you speak Mongolian or whether you speak Thai or whether you speak Japanese or Korean or Chinese. So it makes it a great kind of language for trade, but it also is extremely hard to learn because every concept must have essentially its own letter. And so to be fluent in reading it, you need to learn 2,000 to 3,000 letters. And so it was a really bad system for a common people to learn how to read. And King Seijong was like, my people are illiterate. They can't learn Chinese. We must have our own writing system that you can sound out. You sound out Korean. And he gathered his scholars and the story is they together created the system that would be have no deviations. It read like it sounded and they designed it based on the movements.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is obviously mythologized, right? But King Sejong. So King Seijong, he's the guy on the essentially the $10 bill in Korea. He is their George Washington. And Sejong the Great. And what happens, Chinese is a really fascinating writing system, right? Because it's logographic, which means that anyone can read a Chinese character. It's more of a hieroglyph than it is, you can't sound it out, right? Because anyone can read it, it transcends”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where you are a minority, granted, a privileged minority still, but a minority living and saying that the way that people's language influences the way they think about the world, the way that their social mores impact their relationships with one another and all of these things was extremely formative for me and understanding how to approach writing a fantastical culture just on a fundamental basis getting rid of some of these ideas that the way that I do things is the only way to do things.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'm a member of the Church of Christ, Larry of Saints. A lot of us go on two year missions, can be anywhere, can be local, it can be overseas. I ended up going to Korea. You know, I got the letter saying, hey, this is where we'd like you. And I'm like, where's Korea? But I loved my time there. It was really formative for me in multiple ways, one of which is kind of more amusing. I was at the time a chemistry major in college. And I was so happy to be on another continent from chemistry. I had those two years away to really kind of reassess my life and kind of grow up. And most people, when they grow up, they go away from the artistic pursuits because they don't make a lot of sense. I grew up and came back and said, I'm going to do this, right? I'm going to be a writer. But living in another culture, living”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And we actually used to once upon a time we'd get the books, the full books, and I would sit and sign them. And that's just a massive undertaking. We couldn't do that anymore when it got over around 10,000. I'd actually listen to podcasts and go sit and sign books and sign books and sign books. Now we get the pages, like the front page, and we just give them me in stacks. If anyone wants to see it, my podcast exists so that I can sign the page. It's the reverse, right? I started up because I need to sign these things and I'll just sit and zip through them normally while I'm doing anything else. But today I wanted to give you my undivided attentions. I appreciate it.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we need between 50,000 and 100,000 times my signature signed. The story is usually I'm sitting here and signing pages while I'm doing anything because five to sign my name a hundred thousand times, then”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, everything in our company is built around let Brandon Cook and take away from Brandon anything that he doesn't have to think about or, you know, doesn't strictly need to. I actually think this is kind of a Tim Ferris thing, right? My water bottle. I don't have to worry about refilling it and having ice in the morning. I've set up a system where somebody does that and I just pick it up and go. The more that I can keep out of my brain that I have to track, the better because I am always constructing narrative. I'm always working on the story.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I will forget people's names, and I will, all of that stuff. I joke that I've just got so much RAM and I've filled it all with story ideas. And so everything else kind of just squeezed out the ears.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I don't think I have an unusual memory. I have an unusual one. I don't have an uncommonly good one. How about that? My wife always jokes. I don't forget a story. And that I don't. I don't tend to reread books. I don't tend to rewatch movies because I've seen it. I've read it. Twenty years or so I'll go back and rewatch something. But stories just stick with me. I can tell you about stories that I read when I was still a teenager. But I will forget where my keys are.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I need a thing, but I don't know any poetry. But I do know what Ms. Sukup taught me in kindergarten, which is the state song. And so I just.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So when I was in kindergarten, I was taught the state song. And I have a good friend, Mary Robinette. She worked in stage for a while and we did a podcast together when podcasts were brand new. And she would always sound check by doing the jabberwalk poem, just this beautiful poetry she had learned to memorize a poem so that they could get a soundcheck because people generally don't talk enough for a soundtrack. And so then they come to me and I'd be like, I'm talking, I'm talking, you know, you've seen it, the stuff that people do. And then like, is that enough? Is that enough? They're like, still some more. And you're like, oh, I'm talking. I'm talking. So I thought.”
2025-02-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #794: Brandon Sanderson on Building a Fiction Empire, Creating $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, Unbreakable Habits, The Art of World-Building, and The Science of Magic Systems · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT