Brandon Sanderson is the most productive working novelist alive right now, by a wide margin. In the last five years he's published a thousand-page Stormlight Archive installment, four secret novels he wrote during the pandemic and then ran the largest Kickstarter in history to release, a handful of Mistborn novels, several Wax and Wayne books, and enough tie-in fiction to keep a small publisher afloat. The output is so extreme that most writers dismiss it as a quirk of temperament. His routine is actually learnable. He built it on purpose, starting from nothing, and he's described it in enough detail on his website and in his BYU lectures that anyone who wants to can copy the structure.
The routine is worth studying because it solves a problem most writing advice ignores. Everyone knows a writer is supposed to write every day. Almost nobody tells you what to do when your actual life has a family, a day job, kids, and a finite amount of attention. Sanderson's schedule is engineered specifically for that problem, and the engineering is copyable.
The Routine at a Glance
- Wake Time
- Around noon or one in the afternoon. He's a confirmed night writer and has structured his entire life around that fact, including his family's schedule.
- Writing Location
- A dedicated home office in his house outside Salt Lake City, Utah. He's described the setup on his FAQ at faq.brandonsanderson.com, including the two monitors, the background music, and the treadmill desk he uses for a portion of the day.
- Daily Output
- A minimum of two thousand words, with a typical day landing closer to twenty-five hundred to three thousand. On his best days during a book he pushes past five thousand, though he's said in interviews that isn't sustainable.
- Tools
- Microsoft Word, a treadmill desk for the afternoon block, and a regular office setup for the late-night block. He keeps a plain-text progress bar on his website that his fans can watch update in real time.
- Famous Ritual
- Two separate writing blocks in a single day. The first runs roughly one in the afternoon until five. Family time follows. The second block runs from about ten at night until two in the morning.
- Books Written This Way
- The Stormlight Archive series, the full Mistborn trilogy and its sequels, the Wax and Wayne books, the four "secret novels" from the pandemic, the Skyward series, and the completion of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time.
The Hotel Front Desk
Sanderson's origin story is unusually specific for a novelist. While studying at Brigham Young University, unable to get published through his early manuscripts, he took a graveyard-shift job at a hotel front desk. The hours ran roughly eleven at night until seven in the morning. On a slow night, which most nights were, there was nothing to do for long stretches after the late check-ins stopped arriving. He brought a laptop to work and wrote novels on the clock. By his own account he drafted most of his first six or seven unpublished books during those shifts, learning how to produce a sustained narrative while being interrupted every half hour by a guest needing a toothbrush or a key card.
This detail is more important than it first looks. The habit of writing in a room where the writing is not the main thing you're getting paid to do, where anyone could walk in at any moment and ask you a question, teaches you a specific skill that writers who only write in ideal conditions never develop. You learn to drop in and out of the flow state fast. You learn not to be precious about context or environment. You stop waiting for silence, because silence isn't coming. Sanderson carried that adaptability into his full-time career, and it's probably the thing that still lets him hit two thousand words on days when his daughter has the flu or the plumber is in the kitchen.
When young writers ask him for advice, he tends to come back to this period. His point is that the hotel shifts weren't ideal conditions for writing. They were simply conditions, and he wrote anyway. The finished books he produced during that stretch were all bad, and none of them sold, but by the time he finished the sixth one he was a working novelist in every way that mattered except the contract. The contract showed up when Elantris found an editor in 2003. He was already ready for it because he'd been writing in a glass box in a Holiday Inn for four years.
Two Blocks a Day
The two-block schedule is the single most useful piece of Sanderson's practice for working writers to copy. Most productivity advice assumes you'll write either in the morning or in the evening, treating the writing session as one bucket of time. Sanderson splits it in half. The first block, roughly one o'clock until five, is his clean, alert block. That's when he works on whatever project requires the most brainpower: the complex sequence, the new chapter, the architecturally difficult scene. Dinner and family time come next. Then the second block runs from about ten at night until two in the morning, and this is when he does the pages that need less strategic thought but more pure production.
Splitting the day this way solves a problem every working writer eventually runs into. If you do all your writing in a single four-hour stretch, the last ninety minutes of that stretch are almost always worse than the first ninety. Your attention degrades. The prose gets mushier. You either push through and write material you'll have to cut, or you stop early and feel guilty. By splitting the session in half, with a long gap in the middle, Sanderson gets two fresh starts. Each block begins with the same quality of attention. The total usable output of eight hours split into two blocks is higher than eight hours in a row, even though the clock time is the same.
The other thing the split does is make the writing life compatible with a household. Most novelists with children run into an unwinnable tradeoff. You can either write when the family is awake and feel like a bad parent, or write when they're asleep and feel exhausted. Sanderson's afternoon block overlaps with school hours, so the writing happens during time the family is already occupied. The late block happens after the kids are in bed. Almost none of his writing time competes directly with his wife and children, which is why the schedule has survived for more than a decade without blowing up the marriage.
The 2,000-Word Floor
The daily minimum is two thousand words. Not a goal, not a target, a floor. Sanderson has been clear in interviews that on a bad day he sometimes writes exactly two thousand and stops, and on a good day he writes four or five thousand, but he does not go below two thousand except in the most serious circumstances. The number is chosen carefully. It's high enough that hitting it feels like meaningful progress. It's low enough that he can hit it on a day when he feels sick, distracted, or uninspired. He's landed on roughly the same number Stephen King uses, and for roughly the same reasons, which is probably not an accident.