Writing Advice

[JakeEkiss]

I could never take writing advice from him seriously because of how tremendously fucking boring and stupid I found his books to be when I was finally swayed to look at them. So I guess my writing advice from a non-published type of writer is to look for advice from people whose work you respect and whose advice seems real world actionable rather than 'well, if you are already rich and don't need to have a full time job or do any work other than write... here's my advice.'

I've read a single short story by him and it was... fine?

I've never read any of his larger works because every time someone tries to sell me on them the only thing they talk about is how good his "magic systems" are. And like... those folks have wildly misunderstood what I look for in fiction. And even when I tell them this exact thing and wait for "oh, ok, so here's a cool character/scene/plotline" nothing. I can't tell if they simply don't understand what I'm asking for or if there legitimately isn't anything else to sell the work.

 

[Damien]

I can't tell if they simply don't understand what I'm asking for or if there legitimately isn't anything else to sell the work.

There isn't. His entire claim to fame was putting an insane amount of thought into how everything works (NOT to be misunderstood with all of his thoughts actually making sense) to excruciating detail and then having the abject privilege to sit around doing nothing but writing so he can crank out finished work very quickly.
I've read 2/3 of two different books and I couldn't even tell you a single character name or important character moment in any of them. The only thing that stands out in my head is the STUPIDEST 'war' scene I've ever read in my life where a bunch of slave soldiers.. .or something.. are carrying giant ladder-bridges to get across a series of ravines. It's just.. bad in every way. It was way too long. Incredibly boring but written with this sense that you KNOW he thought this was the peak of excitement and danger so it's also very up its own ass the whole time you're being bored by it. The stakes were non-existent because I didn't know or care about any of these characters yet. And, moreover, it just made no fucking sense at all.

That's from the first book of the main series he writes and, my dude, that book opens with like this entire dumbass thing about some ancient god warrior things that happened I don't know.. a trillion years ago or 10 years ago or who fucking cares. The point is it takes FOREVER for that prologue to even matter to the story. Imagine if the LotR film trilogy opened with that Galadriel-narrated Prologue, but then nothing in the Prologue was even relevant until halfway through Return of the King. That's what this was. By the time it even came up, I had literally forgotten the prologue even happened.

And all of his fighting/battle stuff is just bad. It's like 'I'm a bit of a fighting writer myself' kind of arrogant dumbassery written by someone that is very sure he knows what he's talking about while absolutely not knowing what he's talking about. Probably because he's a fucking Mormon and being confidently stupid as shit comes naturally.

Goddamn. I can't get over how fucking shit his writing was for how incredibly popular and well-respected he is. Of all the stuff I've read in my entire life, Sanderson's stuff was some of the absolute worst both in how just overall stupid it was, and how boring it managed to be WHILE being stupid.

But I fear I've taken this thread off the rails and I apologize.