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Playlist of all Brandon Sanderson's 2020 Creative Writing Lectures from Brigham Young University

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  1. trobertson
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    I youtube-dl'd these and binged them over the past few days. I was actually a little bit disappointed with this series compared to his previous few lecture series. Most of that disappointment...

    I youtube-dl'd these and binged them over the past few days. I was actually a little bit disappointed with this series compared to his previous few lecture series. Most of that disappointment comes down to the narrowed scope of topics. This series contains (heavily simplified):

    • 1 Welcome lecture
    • 2+1 Plot lectures (+1 is Q&A and Viewpoint)
    • 2+1 Worldbuilding lectures (+1 is Q&A)
    • 1 Short Stories lecture with guest lecturer
    • 2+1 Character lectures (+1 is Q&A)
    • 2 Publishing lectures

    Which is fantastic, frankly. The lectures are great. But it is a reduced scope compared to the past few series that got put on youtube. This one, posted in 2016, shows just how different the topic scope is: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLH3mK1NZn9QqOSj3ObrP3xL8tEJQ12-vL

    Notably, in the older lecture he didn't spend multiple days on topics. This is a strength in that he could cover a larger diversity of topics, but it does come with the drawback of not being able to go into as much depth in each individual topic.

    I expect that he considers that drawback to be too high a price for topic diversity. I think he's taken it too far in the other direction though. Coming away from this series, it feels like only 4 topics were truly covered across the 13 lectures.

    Whereas in the old series, his 12 lectures very much felt like he was covering 9-10 topics in depth.


    I'm honestly not sure what I'm griping for. His lectures are great and if you have any interest whatsoever in fiction writing, you own it to yourself to watch them. New series and older series are all good. Watch them all - there's probably nearly 20 excellent lectures even if you aren't interested in getting repeat coverage of topics.

    4 votes