I was hugely excited to learn that Brandon Sanderson had promised to write live on air for five hours as a thank you to fans and supporters of the Worldbuilders project for helping the organisation meet their goal of $100,000.
The reason I got – and still am – so excited about this is because a writer’s writing process and the conditions they write in have always seemed somewhat mystical and mysterious to me… I’ve always wondered how fast a writer writes, how stressed they get, how much they delete and edit as they go along, and this event seems to offer a number of answers to those questions.
For those interested in ‘attending’, Brandon explains:
The short of it is this: I’m going to stream myself writing [on Friday, January 17th, from 2:00 p.m. Mountain time until 7:00 p.m], and will take your suggestions on what to do. We’ll write a story together, and I’ll also answer questions about whatever.
Brandon will be using a service known as Justin.tv and a channel called The Waygate Foundation to stream the event. If you’d like to join in you will have to make a new account (unless you have one already, of course!).
Before launching the project, Brandon promised (and still maintains) that:
I’ll look at doing this for five hours or so: an hour of brainstorming followed by four hours of writing. If we don’t finish the story (which is likely, as I envision four hours getting us somewhere around 2,000–3,000 words) I’ll try to wrap up what I’m doing in some interesting (but open-ended) way, then release the story into the Creative Commons as something like an extended writing prompt. The challenge to all of you will to be to finish it according to your preference.
It all sounds exciting and pretty assured, right? Well, that was a few weeks ago; today it looks as though the pressure of the event was getting to Brandon a little as he added to his blog:
I’m uncertain how this is going to go. I think it will be fun, but I don’t know if what we devise for a story will be any good at all. We’ll see. This is all for charity anyway, and I do intend to try to raise some more money for Worldbuilders as we go. Really, the only way this can be a bad experience is if nobody shows up.
We can’t blame him for that though! Imagine being the centre of attention, the man responsible from bringing together the ideas of so many whilst the World watches!
Of course, as huge Sanderson fans we’ve no doubt that it’ll be epic and we would like to ask all of Fantasy-Faction’s fans to head along and support Brandon and Worldbuilders in this excellent project.
For more information please visit: http://brandonsanderson.com/category/blog/
See you there, People! 🙂
Will someone record it please? It’ll start at 11 pm here so I won’t see the full length. 🙁
Here you go, it was recorded 🙂
http://www.justin.tv/waygatefoundation/b/495997922
The full Brandon Sanderson Write-a-thon is available on YouTube. You can watch it here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRhup20Ns1c&feature=youtu.be