This is a website dedicated to the craft and arcanum of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing. If you’ve always dreamed of being able to create fantastic worlds and write compelling stories about such things as magical cats, then this is your place.
It is also the home of the video lectures of Brandon Sanderson, fantasy author extraordinaire, filmed during his 2012 creative writing class at Brigham Young University. He’s awesome.
On a more personal note, my name is Scott Ashton, a former student of Brandon’s, and when I took his class I was struck by the strong feeling that the rest of the world needed to be able to access the vast quantities of pure gold that issued forth from Brandon’s lips every time he opened his mouth. And so the concept for this website was born. For a couple of legal purposes, the website is actually run under the auspices of the business entity Mandrake Educational Media, so you might see references to that sometimes in the site.
I’m currently filming Brandon’s lectures this year also (2013) and will begin releasing the lectures June 1 (or thereabouts)! There will be a critique circle and hopefully some other cool stuff so be sure to sign up.
Get started here
Scott, nice work! I found a typo: “I have finished filming the classes out this point.” I think “out” should be “at.” Maybe not.
Thanks Tyler! My techie brother actually wrote that little bit. Sheesh, those technologists and their prose…
(I like to give him a hard time). Thanks again man
Hi there, do you have any idea when lectures four and five might be up? I see that they were anticipated for today but i know how this time of year is for a college student.
For those here who didn’t see it under Miscellanea. He said that Lecture 4 will be up by Sunday.
I know you’re busy with schoolwork; no worries. Just wanted to let you know that there are, indeed, those of us out here that are anticipating
Wanted to make sure you knew that you weren’t just firing these videos off into the nether.
This is just perfect! I have wanted to take a class like this but I am a stay at home mom with two young children, one of whom has special needs, and our schedule pretty much makes a real class impossible. I am a fan of Sanderson’s work so this is an especially outstanding opportunity for me. Thanks for putting this together!
I agree, this is pure gold. Thanks for doing this! I’m really enjoying watching this and I’m spreading the word to my more writing inclined friends!
I swear, I learned more from the first lecture than I learned from my entire creative writing class last term. These really are appreciated and I like many others am eagerly awaiting the next few to be released.
Just gold! Amazing how much more things make sense when I hear Brandon talk about them. Can’t wait for Lecture 4!
Excellent work to all those involved.
Very very awesome =D Anticipating indeed!
Thank you so much for doing this. Awesome!
This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen in a long time. Thanks so much for your time and effort. I’m linking from my blog.
One quick request, if you get a minute. It would be cool to see the titles of all the lectures here on the first page, so we can easily skip around if we want. Thanks again!
Thank you thank you! These are so awesome, im insanely jealous of all you people who get to learn straight from Brandon
i live in Australia and dont have many chances to take writing courses here so this has been such a great inspiration and help to my writing! You sir deserve an award!
Did you know that you got a mention from Fantasy Book Review? They at least posted a link to here on Facebook. Congrats!
I saw you mentioned on Scribophile.com – that’s what brought me here
Thanks so much for putting all this up, and I just wanted to ask where you got the image you’re using as a header, it looks AWESOME and I want to steal it for a wallpaper 
Isn’t it sweet? It’s a picture licensed under a similar license to the one used on this site and you can find a link to the Flickr page where I found it on the “License” tab of this website where I explain the licensing and give due credit to those who deserve it.
This is fantastic! Waiting in anticipation for the next lecture! Thanks so much for taking the time to put it together!
Thanks so much for putting these videos online Scott. Very, very appreciated.
Hello Scott! Thank you so much for posting these. It gives me the organic feeling of being in class and benefiting from “long distance learning.” I’m a long time Sanderson fan and having the chance to learn from him is priceless.
Thanks again for all your hard work and efforts!
Thank you for taking the time to put these lectures up. As someone who will never be able to take Brandon’s class in person, I greatly appreciate it.
I wanna give you a big hug for putting all this together! =) Thanks for your time and effort, I really appreciate you making this available to those of us who don’t have the ability to take classes like this in person.
/bighug!
Thank you so much for pulling these together! I attended Brandon’s classes for two years and never get bored – honestly, he’s brilliant and is a great resource for all up-and-coming writers. Is this website still active/i.e. are the writing groups still going? I’d be really interested in working in an online writing group/feedback process – maybe alongside Brandon’s next set of lectures starting in January? Thank you again for your work!
Glad you find it useful Sierra! As per the writing groups and the upcoming class this January – I am planning on setting up a new round of writing groups and such (along with a considerable face change for the site) this coming January. I’ll let you know
Thank you, thank you, thank you! I’m a creative writing major and a huge fan of Sanderson’s Mistborn series. I was so excited when I finally decided to be a creative writing major my junior year and I had just transferred colleges. To my IMMENSE disappointment my creative writing major was a STUDENT at my college who was getting her masters degree in creative writing, and as a part of her program she had to teach a class. I learned absolutely nothing this semester because, big surprise, she had no idea how to teach. I’m still angry about this! (needless to say) Finding these videos is making up for lost time for me. I feel like I hit internet lottery by being able to listen to Sanderson’s brilliant words of wisdom. You are very lucky to have been able to take this class and very kind to share it to those less fortunate!
That’s supposed to read: To my IMMENSE disappointment my creative writing teacher was a STUDENT at my college. Typo, my bad!
Hello, my name is Justin Hill and I am just curious about some of the equipment you use to film the lecture and what, if any video editing programs you used to put it all together.
I enjoyed the lectures very much, by the way, and am grateful you put them up. The information is quite useful.
Thanks Justin. As per editing, I just used some pretty vanilla recording equipment checked out from my university, and I simply edited it in Adobe Premiere. Most of the sound was recorded via an external mic which I then synced with the videos.
Thanks for putting this website and the Youtube videos together!
I’m so excited about this summer!
Hey there Scott, I recently discovered this website after a sudden urge to try my hand at writing. I’m almost up to the fifth lecture and you are absolutely right – this is pure gold. I don’t think I could pay for this kind of creative writing education in my area. The fact that I can get it for free, at home, is utterly remarkable.
I just wanted to take the time to write this comment to say a huge, heartfelt thank you.
I’m curious and wanted to inquire about the “2013 Summer Class”.
What, precisely, is involved in this class? You mention some interactive writing feedback, etc., but I was wondering if you could elaborate on what this would look like. I wanted to see if this was something I felt I could reasonably commit to or not before I signed up.
I like what you’ve done here, even if I haven’t had anything resembling enough free time to catch all these videos. (It’s that shortage of free time that is at the heart of why I’m inquiring for details.)
Sorry to take forever to get back to you Stephen but the class is essentially going to look like a more user friendly version of any typical college class with a weekly lecture and the “assignment” to write, submit 1000 words, and critique at least 2000 words of other people’s writing. But with that said, it should be pretty fluid if you want to treat it that way, since the only thing you’d be missing out on would be the ale-slogging comaraderie of going through the class at the same time as everyone else. So I would say probably just sign up and do whatever you want with it, whether a little or a lot.
Just signed up… I am so excited about this! Thank you for making this available!
I just signed up as well. I have never had my work critiqued (you know, other than a couple family members and they never do much but give praise) and it will be interesting to have someone else read it. Thank you for doing this.
Hey there! Was just reading the updated page for how the class is going to go (looks awesome by the way) and I had a question: You say we’re meant to post 1k words per week, but after 4 months (approx 4 weeks each), we’re meant to have 30k words. Does that mean we’re only meant to post the first 16k or so during the course of the class?
Thanks for organizing this!
Right. That’s the way Brandon did it in his class, so that we wrote more than got critiqued. But I suppose with the virtual format you could get all the words critiqued if you so desired. You’d just need to make sure that you critiqued a sufficient number of OTHER people’s work.
Absolutely.
I tend to enjoy critiquing other peoples work when it’s in < 2.5 snippets or so. Something to pull up and read when you have a little free time. I also find that critiquing has (I think) drastically improved my own writing, so it's like a two-fer!
Thanks for the response. I am fairly busy, and will continue to be in June, so I doubt I'll manage to post much above the suggest 1000/wk, but it's nice to know just in case.
Cheers