Has Sanderson Mastered His Craft?

Malcolm Gladwell said it takes 10,000 hours to master a craft. This got me wondering:

Where do I stand? When will I get there?

I estimate I have 256 hours from undergrad creative writing, 100 from my first attempt at epic fantasy, 150 from my first published novel, 10 from various short stories, and 75 from my current project.

I estimate I have at least 9,500 to go if I hope to be anywhere close to considering myself a master of the craft of writing.

As I said in my previous post where I discussed my efforts to start writing again, I write a consistent 1,000 words an hour (give or take a little).

So just as a little thought experiment…

If it takes me an hour to write a thousand words, and let’s say it takes me about an hour to edit a thousand words... For a 75,000 word novel, that’s about 150 hours to count toward my total. That would only be… 26 years of working an hour a day, or 63 novels until I’m a master of my craft. Which sounds like a lot. If each book was an average of 75,000 words, that’d be a little over 4.5 million words.

That’s a Tuesday afternoon for an author who writes as fast as Brandon Sanderson. No, not really.

But how does it match up to the prolific bestseller we all know and love?

Sanderson estimates he writes about 500 words an hour and 2,500 words per day on his Reddit AMA from about ten years ago. Sanderson says:

“I write about 2,500 words a day, writing at around 500 words an hour. My production is more about being consistent than about being fast. I do tend to write around ten hours a day. Don't know if I have any tips other than to perhaps turn off the internet or go outside and write for a while.”

When a sharp-eyed Redditor did some extremely complex mathematics, they pointed out Sanderson’s estimation would yield about 5,000 words per day, so they asked what happens to the other 2,500 words. To which Sanderson replied:

“Ha. I should have been clear. You're absolutely right to point this out.

“I spend a large amount of time each day answering email, working on the wiki for my worlds, planning new books, and revising. Many days, I actually do around 3500 words, but the average tends to be closer to 2500 or even 2000 once editing and everything is factored in.”

So… wait… By Malcolm Gladwell’s definition, is Brandon Sanderson a master of his craft?

Again, I’m going to lean on a Reddit post here for the answer. Which shouldn’t be surprising since in the year 2023, the best way to find a straightforward, accurate answer to any Google search query is by tacking on “Reddit” to the end of your question.

This Redditor posted a total word count of Sanderson’s books as of 2019.

Fine, I’ll save you a click.

A whopping 5,042,000.

Divide that total by Sanderson’s estimated 500 words per hour and you get…

10,084 hours.

And keep in mind, Sanderson estimates only half his daily word count survives. Some of it is lost in the edit, some of it goes into his private worldbuilding Wiki… But that would mean Sanderson actually has a minimum of double the amount of hours. Upwards of 20,000, and that doesn’t include his unpublished works and time spent honing his craft in classes, or time spent thinking about his stories. (Which counts as writing, by the way.)

So Sanderson is a master of his craft twice. The man is a double master. A second-degree black belt in writing.

Here’s a nifty site created by Reddit user N3XT191 that does a great job of showing what Sanderson’s output actually looks like. (Disclaimer, I have not personally verified this is all exactly correct, but it appears roughly accurate based on a few minutes of research.)

Number of words published vs. publication date for selected authors, only counting fiction.

Against the most prolific authors of our time, Sanderson stacks up despite his first work being published the second-to-most-recently. Only before Patrick Rothfuss.

Sanderson’s first work was Elantris, published in 2005.

King’s first work was Carrie, published in 1974.

Sanderson caught up to King on word count in just eighteen years, while King’s entire career started almost fifty years ago. (Just one year before Sanderson was born!) It’s mind-boggling.

This is obviously a phenomenal, awe-inspiring feat, and King is still on top in total word count. But it got me wondering…

Has anyone done more?

And this is very difficult to measure. It seems most online sources are simply opting to decide which authors are most prolific.

Not every author has a good source for their exact word counts, for instance. Many authors have a solid number for the number of works they’ve published, but those can vary from short stories to children’s books, so it’s difficult to compare purely based on the number of published works. After all, Sanderson’s Rhythm of War is almost 456,000 words long. It doesn’t seem fair to compare the length of a work like that with a short story.

On top of all that, many authors also have pseudonyms or pen names they write under, so it’s hard to pin down all of their work. Stephen King wrote a handful of books under the names Richard Bachman and John Swithen. And those are just the ones we know about. Some authors may have pseudonyms we’ll never know about.

Bearing all that in mind, we have a very dubious, vague, borderline useless set of standards for this little experiment. But that’s never stopped me before. Here’s what I’ve found:

• Charles Hamilton - 100 million words (roughly 1,200 books), considered the most prolific author by Guinness World Records. His list of stories is very impressive.

• Barbara Cartland - 720 novels in her career. She holds the Guinness World Record for most novels written in a single year. A healthy 23, or two per month. She primarily wrote romance novels. (The most prolific romance writers have a staggering output.)

• Isaac Asimov - 500 works from sci fi to history books

• Corin Tellado - (pictured right) One of the most impressive of the bunch, she published 4,000 works, primarily romance. Which, assuming she started writing from the moment she was born, means she published an average of 64 works per year over her entire life.

  • (For everyone keeping score, that’s just 1 more than the total number of novels I need to write in my lifetime to fulfill Malcolm Gladwell’s classification of being a master of my craft.)

  • I also wanted to mention because I think it’s hilarious: her Wikipedia lists her gender as “romance novel”. The woman wrote so much, she became the very thing she sought to create. Incredible.

• Stephen King - 60 full-length works and almost 200 stories

• R.L. Stine - 450 published works

• Enid Mary Blyton - 800 published works (a lot of them were children's books)

• Ryoki Inoue - 1075 published works using 13 pseudonyms. His Wikipedia is basically empty, which feels like a crime.

• L. Ron Hubbard - 1084 published works

• Kathleen Mary Lindsay - 904 novels, yet another romance writer

• Agatha Christie - 80 works

There’s no doubt in my mind that Sanderson will find his name amongst these in no time. He’s showing no signs of stopping. How does he write like he’s running out of time?

In an age of video games (which Sanderson admits he loves the Souls games made by FromSoftware) there’s more distractions than ever. So what does Sanderson do with his free time?

In this post about his daily word count, here’s his response to a question about if he ever takes a break:

“I went out to dinner with my wife for our anniversary last night. Does that count? The truth is, I love what I do. So if I have time when I’m not doing something else, I work on books.”

He writes for work, he writes to relax. The man is unstoppable.

I think he’d get along with Ryoki Inoue, one of the prolific authors from above, who said:

“The secret of the creative process is in 98% of sweat, 1% of talent, and 1% of luck.”

Which is a shockingly inaccurate statement for someone at the top of their field.

After crunching some numbers, I’ve discovered it’s actually 10% luck, 20% skill, 15% concentrated power of will, 5% pleasure, 50% pain, and 100% reason to remember the name.

What name, you ask?

Whispers, “Sanderson.”

Here’s your reward for reading. A picture of my dog, Gill-Mo.

Time Magazine has named him the most prolific dog of all time.

(The above statement is completely false and in no way representative of Time Magazine’s opinions on prolific dogs.)