SAVED BY THE SANDERSON

 It's happened to me again. I'm stuck in my new book. I've been wambling around, finding excuses not to sit at my desk, not to get on with it.

The problem is more or less mechanical; I need a First Contact Team for an alien planet, probably up to a dozen characters, only two of whom will be important to the story, but the others have to be there. And I just don't have them.

There is lots of material out there about creating characters. You can see it in every second-rate writing course, often it even starts with a character sheet, like the ones we used to use for Dungeons and Dragons. Most of these people advise you even to start your whole writing project with this. Define your main character. Then they witter on about a lot of rubbish like height, weight, colour of eyes, colour of hair etc. None of which is the slightest use if you do not have a story.

For me, the story is always the thing, and usually my characters emerge from that. They will be what the story needs them to be, and this generally works really well for me; in fact I can't really think of an instance where it hasn't. But then I don't usually have this big cast of background characters. I've already written a lot of supporting characters among my alien race of people, but those were easier, somehow; their context was a whole society, whereas here I am limited to the members of a First Contact Team of a spacegoing people. And I've been really stuck on it.

And then I remembered Brandon Sanderson. Wonderful Brandon Sanderson, who saved Bloodsucking Bogans, probably my favourite of all my books. I had almost completed the first draft of it, but when I read over it, it was absolute shite. It was so bad that I was facing just ditching the whole project, yet I couldn't bear to, because it was my pet idea that I'd had for years and been so looking forward to writing. 

But help was at hand, for I was taking Sanderson's course at the time. In case you don't know, Brandon Sanderson teaches a graduate course in fiction writing at some university, and because the man is a truly good and generous human being and an absolute mensch, he has the entire course videoed and makes it available, free, on Youtube. And it's amazing what one can learn from it. My big takeaway this time (I was taking the course for the second time, because he updates it every few years) was a big section about how to figure out what is wrong with your draft, and how to fix it. This advice worked so well for me that I was able to finish the book, and publish it without shame, and it remains one of my favourite things that I've done, and in fact has taken a place among my own feel-good reads. Yes, people, sometimes I read my own books.

Anyway, I had a bit of a look, and the wonderful Mr Sanderson has indeed updated the course again since then, and this time, there is apparently a big section about creating characters. So I'm entirely confident that my problem will be solved.

I was tempted to go straight to that section, but having benefited so greatly from this course before, I'm going to take the disciplined route and watch the whole thing from the beginning. One never knows what other gems one will find.