Let's get started actually talking about sci-fi/fantasy.
I'm going to start us off this year with plot.
I do it randomly.
Sometimes I start with character.
Sometimes I start with setting.
People often ask me, "Where does a book begin
for you?"
It's really different for every book, and
sometimes, in many ways, it's kind of a chicken
or an egg sort of thing.
I often say that stories are made up of these
three things.
Plot, character, and setting.
But they're glued together by conflict, and
that glue of conflict is the thing that oftentimes,
I'll have a plot idea, or a character idea,
or a setting idea separately from one another.
I often use Mistborn as an example of this.
Where did Mistborn come from?
Well, Mistborn came from, I was reading Harry
Potter, and I thought, "Man, these Dark Lords
never get a break."
It's always some dumb kid comes along and
ruins the plan they've been setting up for
a lifetime.
Same with Lord of the Rings.
So I'm like, what if Frodo got to the end
of Lord of the Rings and Sauron said, "Hey,
my ring!
I've been looking for that.
Thanks.
That must have been a really hard journey.
Thanks for coming all this way."
And then killed him and took over the world.
I thought that was a bit of a downer of a
book to write.
But I filed the idea away in the back of my
head as an idea.
That would be a plot idea.
A plot or maybe a setting.
It's kind of like, what comes first.
Is this a setting idea?
Is this a plot idea?
The idea of the prophesied hero failing is
kind of a plot idea, but the idea that it
turned into, a world where the prophesied
hero failed, was a setting idea.
These things all mix together.
Separately, another time I was watching one
of the Oceans movies, and I was reminded how
much I love the heist genre.
One of my favorite movies of all time is Sneakers,
a fantastic little film.
I've loved it all the way going back, things
like The Sting, Michael Crichton's The Great
Train Robbery, any sort of heist story.
Inception is just a fantastic one.
You can always grab me with a heist story.
I thought, "I don't think I've ever read a
fantasy heist."
I thought, wow, that would be really cool.
You could give every member of the heist team,
the leverage team or whatever, a different
magical power.
So they could each be magical.
You could do this whole thing.
I was thinking of that separately.
And that was another plot idea.
The idea for the mist came as I was driving
to visit my parents in Idaho and I passed
through a fog bank at 75 miles an hour, or
whatever the legal speed limit is, which I
was obviously going, because we're being recorded.
I passed through and I'm like, "This visually
looks really interesting, hitting a fog bank
and going into it."
I
equated that in my head with a visit to the
National Cathedral in D.C., which I had seen
at night.
Normally, I'd been inside of cathedrals and
seen the stained-glass windows from inside
with the light coming in from outside, but
this time they had them lit from the inside
at night, shining out, and I loved that visual
image.
Those became two setting details.
This idea of the mist, of the fog, of this
kind of almost living mist, and this visualization
of cathedrals in the mist shining out light.
Those ideas kind of combined together with
this character I was developing of Kelsior,
all separate.
Feruchemy was designed separately from allomancy.
If you haven't read the books, there are three
magic systems.
Two of them were designed for separate stories,
and when I combined them I liked them better.
And then I designed a third one in my plotting
and world-building sessions.
For me, I write down all these ideas.
They just go in my notebook, or in my file
in my computer that's called Working Ideas
right now.
It's just big lists of ideas.
A book grows out of multiples of these ideas
combining together.
When I have something that feels like the
seed of a novel that's working, I'll often
go back to my book and say, are there any
other ideas in here that mesh really well
with these ideas.
I often describe, ideas are like these little
atoms bouncing around.
When they mash into each other, they create
some core reaction, become something new.
It's not how actual science works, but, you
know, it'll work for the fantasy author.
Suddenly you've got this thing growing of
all these different atoms coming together
and making some cool new thing that is somehow
more than the sum of its parts, more exciting
at least.
That's the story for me.
Then I go and I kind of plug in things.
I'm like, what else have I been thinking about
that might work for this story, and I plug
those in.
Then I build those all in an outline that
I'll talk about during our second plotting
session, kind of how I build my outlines.
At that point, I'll find holes, and I'll just
start plugging things in.
I'll start brainstorming.
I'll start saying, I know I need another idea
here.
Let's put it together.
Most of the time, a book is not one idea.
This is where newer authors sometimes have
problems.
They pick one really good idea and they try
to write a book on it.
You can write a short story on one idea pretty
well.
A book generally needs a mashing together
of multiple ideas.
It doesn't mean you have to have been struck
magically by the idea fairy and have this
brilliant idea that couldn't ever be reproduced.
That's not how ideas work.
You just need different hooks and things to
make you excited and to get the audience excited.
Ideas are actually cheap.
My favorite story about ideas being cheap
comes from Jim Butcher.
I've confirmed this with him, so I know it
actually happened, but I heard it thirdhand
originally.
The story goes that during his days unpublished,
Jim Butcher, who is now famous for writing
The Dresden Files, among many other wonderful
novels, Jim was on a forum of aspiring writers,
and he got in an argument with someone who
said, "Some ideas are just so grand and so
great, that's what makes a writer."
Jim was making the argument, the same one
that I often make, which is ideas do not make
the author.
Authors make the ideas work.
If you give bad ideas to a good writer, you
will generally get a really great book.
If you give good ideas to someone unpracticed,
it's still going to fall apart.
Jim and this other person got in an argument
online.
Finally, Jim said, "Give me your two worst,
or at least most incongruous ideas, and I'm
going to write a really good book using them."
They said, "All right, I want you to take
the lost Roman legion and mash it together
with Pokémon."
Jim wrote an entire epic series called Codex
Alera, which is basically the lost Roman legion
gets Pokémon in a fantasy world.
It's a great series.
I recommend it.
It's an epic fantasy, it's really cool, and
it's actually very distinctive because some
of those ideas are very distinct ideas.
But the skill of a writer is what readers
and editors are looking for.
I don't know if I said this last week, but
oftentimes writers will come and be like,
"Oh, man, editors reject people so quickly."
But they really can reject very quickly.
If I were to bring up here, roll out this
piano, and have two people play on the piano,
one picked up the piano last year, they're
not a complete noob, but they've been working
at it assiduously these last eight months
or whatever, and have gotten decent, and then
we brought someone in who is 20 years practiced
concert pianist and really knows their stuff,
how soon do you think you could tell?
Right away.
An editor or a reader can generally tell after
a few pages that same thing.
Now, readers tend to be a little more forgiving
than editors, in that readers can like the
ideas and themes, even if the writing isn't--
they will notice, but they're like, it doesn't
bug me.
And that's just fine.
But people can tell by instinct which things
are working better than others, even if they
themselves are not experts in that field.
You can, unfortunately, get judged very quickly
based on your writing.
That means that your ideas, however cool they
may be, most of the time people aren't going
to get to your cool ideas if you can't write
a great scene starting off.
That's what we’re really looking for.
We’re looking for the skill of someone who
has practiced their craft and has really learned
to be able to grab an audience quickly and
convince them that the story is worth reading.
Today we're going to focus on doing that with
plot.
It's equally important to character and setting,
though I would actually rank setting the least
important of the three if I had to rank them.
I may tell this story again.
I tend to do that.
But if you think about it, we're all in this
room because we want to do sci-fi/fantasy.
It's a sci-fi/fantasy writing class.
You would think that setting would be the
most important.
Did I say this last week?
That a story that has a great setting, but
terrible characters generally is still a bad
book.
But a story with a cliched and/or not that
great setting but great characters, still
generally a fantastic book.
It could be better.
You wish you would have all three really strong.
But in some ways, setting is the least important
of these three.
We are going to talk about plot today.
Really, before we dig into the nitty gritty
of how do you actually construct a plot, and
things like that, I want to talk about what
we mean by plot, and why plots.
Why some work.
Why some don't.
Why readers get bored sometimes, even if exciting
things are happening.
Why readers can find "boring things" very
exciting if they're written in a certain way.
If you're going to practice something, learning
how to do this, learning how to make things
interesting, to pull a reader page by page,
there are few skills as useful to a writer.
I think the most important one, at least for
a fantasy/sci-fi writer, is the ability to
convey information in an interesting way,
kind of this whole avoiding info dumps, instead
using characterization for info dumps.
But number two would be the ability to understanding
what your promise, progress, and payoff is
when it comes to constructing a story.
Promise, progress, payoff.
Now, we're just going to go down these three
and I'm going to talk at you for a while.
We will start with promises.
Stories all make a promise.
In fact, they usually make several at the
beginning of the story.
Being in control of your promises and what
you're making is a sign of mastery of the
art.
Simply writing your story and seeing where
it goes is fine.
But either during revision, or during planning,
or during outlining, you should be asking
yourself, how am I making the correct promises?
There are several types of promises you're
going to make.
One is what we call a tone promise.
A tone promise is where your introductory
chapter's job is, in part, to indicate the
tone and style of story that you're going
to be telling.
If you're going to have a wacky comedy, don't
start your story with someone dying really
tragically and really making us weep.
That's hard to do in a prologue, but you can.
But don't start with the prologue to Eye of
the World if your story's going to be a wacky
comedy.
If you haven't read Eye of the World, the
beginning is a man finding out that he's gone
crazy, having his sanity restored just long
enough to realize he's murdered his entire
family, running off and committing suicide.
That's the prologue to Eye of the World.
Yeah, he creates a mountain as he commits
suicide, so that's cool.
But if the next chapter, where the wacky hijinks
of a talking donkey and his friend the ogre,
then you would justifiably say this tone premise
was inaccurately presented.
Now that's an extreme example, but this is
something that I notice a lot of writers don't
necessarily have fluency over and control
over, is what kind of promises you're making
at the start of your stories.
This is why, Hollywood does this too, but
this is why the cold open is so popular.
The cold open is where you join a character
in the middle of an adventure that is a microcosm
for the adventure that the entire story is
going to be.
The classic example of this is Indiana Jones
and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.
If you haven't seen that movie, shame on you.
If you haven't seen that movie, it starts
off with this fun, but very kind of solemn
romp about Indiana Jones going into the jungle,
trying to get this idol, being betrayed, and
failing.
That is your setup.
Your setup to Indiana Jones' character is,
he's awesome, but he's kind of an everyday
guy in some ways, because no matter how hard
he tries, he just ends up failing at the end
anyway.
That is kind of your introduction.
What is the story going to be about?
Adventure.
It's going to be about someone who has an
everyman characteristic that is really, really
cool, but you can pretend that it's a normal
person, who's probably going to get kicked
around a lot, dropped into vats of snakes,
and at the end maybe win, maybe not.
That's what the cold open is there to do for
you.
But your promise is, Indiana Jones tries really
hard, you are going to have a good time, and
this is going to be awesome.
They're setting a tone promise for you with
the opening to that story.
One of the reasons why the prologue is so
popular in fantasy, to the point that it's
almost a cliché, is because a lot of fantasy
writers realize having a kid start off on
a farm at the beginning of their story doesn't
convey the right promise of action and adventure,
so they start with something that has a lot
of action and adventure, and then move to
kid on the farm.
Now, I'd like to point out this is not the
only way to make a kid on the farm have this
sort of tonal promise.
But you'll notice that Star Wars, does it
start with Luke on the farm?
No.
It starts with a small ship and a large ship
shooting at it, and then a firefight, a spunky
princess, and goofy droids.
Your cold open tells you everything, and then
it cuts to Luke, and you get the last piece,
where he's looking at the binary sunset and
the Force theme plays.
Then you've got basically your whole story,
the tone, the tone promises.
I visited Pixar once, and they have something
really cool that they showed me, which is
they will try to set the tone of their movies
by the color palette that are used for given
scenes.
They actually have, up on their wall, they
have a several pixel wide sliver of color
that is the average color for a given shot,
a given second of screen, and then they just
put them all together, and you can watch the
colors change.
It's really cool with WALL-E. Gray, gray,
gray, gray, brown, black, black, blue, bright
blue, bright blue, green.
It's a cool way that they try to set the tone
of their stories, just by using the color
palette.
You can't do that, but you can set the tone
of your story with the words you use and the
type of scene you use to introduce your story.
I will warn you that the epic fantasy prologue
has become a little bit of a cliché, and
so you have to work a little harder than you
might once have had to do in this, because
people are used to the story of action hero
beginning, get some information that's important,
dies passing it on to someone, cut to kid
on a farm.
And/or young prince or princess who is inexperienced
and wants to go out and see the world or something.
Those beats are very well played.
Now, anything done really well stops being
a cliché.
The cliched part is when it stops having the
impact on your audience.
If you can do it in a way that still has the
impact you want on your audience, it's not
a cliché anymore.
The reason clichés are bad is because they
have been taken and removed from their original
intent to the point that people no longer
get the original intent from the words.
They instead bring all the baggage that the
cliché has, and it just feels lukewarm to
them.
So promise.
Number one thing you're going to want to look
to in your promise is your tone.
Another thing you're going to want to look
to in your early promises, is you're going
to want to promise us, if possible, your character
arc.
You don't have to promise what the arc is
going to be, but you do want to promise the
thing missing in a character's life that they
cannot have, and the obstacles that lead to
them being unable to have it.
You want to show us your character's desires
and what's preventing them.
Now, sometimes you do this is a reverse way.
Sometimes you show us what we know the character
should want, and show the character not wanting
that.
That's also very common.
This is the Bilbo at the start of the Hobbit
sort of thing.
Where we all want Bilbo to go on an adventure.
We know from the way the writing is written
that he goes on an adventure.
He thinks he doesn't want to go on an adventure.
We're going to then cheer for him to go on
this adventure as he comes to realize he wants
to go on an adventure.
The best part of the Peter Jackson Hobbit
adaptations is that sequence in the movies.
I will just leave that one thing there.
But that part of the Hobbit movies was done
brilliantly, and really even took what was
in the books and took them a step forward,
that realization that Bilbo wants to go on
this adventure.
But showing us a character who has a need,
who has a desire, who has a flaw, has a problem
they're working on in their life, some sort
of promise that tells us who's our main character,
or one of our main characters, and what's
their arc kind of going to look like if at
all possible.
Then the third thing you'll want to do is
indicate what kind of plot you're going to
be giving us.
This can be your actual plot.
This can be-- I divide plot into two different
things in my head.
It's sometimes been hard.
I explain it different times in different
classes.
But there's something I will call the umbrella
plot.
The umbrella plot is, in some ways, your visible
structural plot.
Then you have your core plot, which is what
your actual progress and payoff is going to
be.
Let me explain what I mean by this.
A lot of books and movies are romances.
This is your core plot.
Will they get together?
But a lot of those romances get transposed
to an umbrella plot of, we need to do X, and
while we do X we're going to fall in love,
and that's what you actually care about.
Now, the romance genre tends to not use the
umbrella plot.
But a lot of other genres will be like, well,
it's a fantasy novel.
The core plot, what we really want people
to read about, is these two characters falling
in love.
But our umbrella is, there's an alien invasion
and we're going to run away from the aliens.
These two things can be separate things, and
that's okay.
But a lot of times you want to indicate one
of the two, and often it's the umbrella plot
that you are going to get to, and sometimes
those are the same thing.
You want to give us a promise of what type
of story we're getting into, if you can.
Sometimes this is hard.
Sometimes you're going to be waiting till
the end of Act I to actually really get us
into this.
Because sometimes you are following one of
these classic archetypes, where the main character
doesn't want to leave their comfortable home
and go on an adventure and become a better
person and learn all the things they want
to do.
In those cases, you want to focus on the character
arc, and you want to find a way to promise
that the tone is going to be what you want
it to be going forward.
Let's stop and talk, see if you guys have
questions on this kind of concept.
It'll become more clear as I dig into the
next thing, because progress is where this
kind of starts to click.
But any questions on promises?
Yeah.
Q: You're talking about the first chapter,
correct?
The question is, "We are talking about the
first chapter.
Correct?"
We are not necessarily talking about the first
chapter.
But that's a great question.
We are talking about the introduction to the
book.
This can be one chapter, but it can be a sequence
of chapters.
It really depends on how long we're talking.
If you're writing a short story, this is your
first couple paragraphs.
If you're writing a massive epic fantasy,
really, we don't get all of these things,
tone, arc, and plot, in Stormlight Archive,
until really chapter 11.
That includes two prologues that aren't in
there.
So chapter 13.
If you've read Stormlight Archive, where I'd
say we get all of this connecting together,
where we've finally finished all this part,
is when Kaladin makes the decision to save
Bridge Four and turns back from the thing.
There are earlier promises of what it's going
to be, and I used the tone promises, but this
whole part is kind of finished then.
Q: For Eye of the World, would you consider
that beginning part when he leaves the village,
or [_____].
I would say leave the village.
In fact, Robert Jordan gets almost all of
this stuff by the end of chapter 1.
You've got the prologue, Dragonmount, and
then, if you haven't read it, chapter 1 starts
with kid on farm.
But you only have, like, three paragraphs
on kid on farm until the kid on the farm sees
this shadowy figure chasing him, and they
go to town and everything starts to be odd
and strange, and there are strangers in town.
The immediate promise of that is, you saw
all this action.
Somebody killed himself.
Now we're learning that someone out there
is a dragon reborn and might go crazy.
Plus, we are learning everything's wrong in
this kid's village.
Then by the end of chapter 1 or so, I'm not
exactly sure, but the end of the first little
short sequence, we have the attack, and everything
goes crazy.
It's really fast in Eye of the World.
I would say it's right about there.
But really where this ends is where they decide
to leave.
Then you know what kind of plot you have.
We're going to go on a travelogue.
We know what our arc is going to be.
We've got this whole kind of promise that
our characters are small town people who thought
they wanted big adventure, and big adventure
is way more dangerous and scary than they
think, and that's going to kind of be their
arc.
We have our tone promise of Dragonmount, followed
by village, everything's creepy, something's
wrong, and that covers it.
Go ahead.
Q: What's the difference between the character
arc promise and the plot promise?
Great question.
What's the difference between the character
arc promise and the plot promise?
Character arc promise is how the character
is going to change during the course of the
story.
Your promise for the character arc is a promise
that they're going to change, or at least
their situation is going to change and give
them what they want.
I kind of intertwine these two.
If you look at Luke, part of the promise is
he's going to be able to go up into the stars.
But part of that promise that we don't quite
get there until we get to Obi Wan saying,
"You must learn the ways of the force."
That's the final end of, you're going to have
to stop being this person and become one of
these people who can fight in this big war
that we saw the starship starting.
But those are character promises.
Your plot promise is that is, the Empire is
evil.
We need to get these plans to the people who
can then defeat them, and that's your plot.
Your plot is, get the plans to the rebels,
and then you have a twist.
We'll talk about twists.
You have a twist in that actually we're going
to go destroy the Death Star.
That's a twist ending.
It doesn't sound like one because we've all
seen Star Wars.
But it's actually one of the forms of twists
that I'll talk about later.
Do you see the difference between character
arc and a plot, story arc, I would say?
Yeah.
Q: How do we make sure that we are predictable
enough to have the promises, and not predictable
enough to be predictable?
Right.
Great question.
Wow.
Okay, so the question was, how do we be predictable
enough that we are giving promises, but not
so predictable that we're boring, that we're
predictable.
There are a couple of answers to this.
One of them is, generally, you can be, with
your plot, a little more predictable than
you think, as long as you are giving interesting
setting and characters we care about.
A lot of people talk about how many stories
there actually are.
There's only five stories, or whatever.
You can find those online.
The truth is, almost every plot that has been
done, obviously ever plot that you conceive
has been done.
Most of the ways to buck the trend in those
plots involves doing something so unexpected
that it breaks your promises.
Now that can become a feature of your story.
But most of the time, you want to do subtle
inversions of the promises.
For instance, you give the promise-- I remember
reading Eye of the World, which this shouldn't
have been a big inversion, it just shouldn't
have, but it was, when the Gandalf character
was a woman.
I'm like, oh, I haven't seen that before.
I've read a ton of these fantasy novels, and
there's always Gandalf, or there's Allanon,
or there's Belgarath, or there's always the
wise wizard.
When the wise wizard shows up and it's a woman
who you don't trust, then that's different.
I'm like, I know what role this person is
fulfilling, but they're doing it in a different
way.
I am intrigued.
Why don't I trust her?
Should I trust her?
Is this Gandalf?
Is this not actually Gandalf?
Again, that shouldn't have been a big inversion.
It should have been-- It shouldn't have taken
until that book to have a character who is
not a white dude be the Gandalf character,
but it was for me, as a 15-year-old reading
it.
You can do subtle inversions, or subtle plays
on this quite a bit, to not be so expected.
It comes down to, if you have a mastery over
the form.
If you say-- Mistborn is a heist.
I promise you very early on, Mistborn is a
heist.
It has all the classic characteristics of
a heist.
But the fact that most people had not read
a heist where everyone has a different magical
talent was new.
The fact that we are recruiting someone into
this team and training them in an apprentice
plot, a master-apprentice plot, at the same
time as pulling off a heist, was something
new.
A lot of people talk about, I use Terry Rossio.
He's the screenwriter who wrote Pirates of
the Caribbean, one of the two, with his writing
partner, and Aladdin.
He talks about this idea.
He's calling it the strange attractor.
This is why you hear so often in Hollywood,
"It's this meets this."
The strange attractor idea for a story is
you want to have your story feel familiar
but strange at the same time.
Oftentimes what you do is you take a new spin
on a familiar idea, or you take two familiar
ideas and mash them together in a way that
doesn't feel like it would make sense but
is intriguing.
Mistborn is actually a heist movie in a fantasy
world, mashed up with My Fair Lady.
That's part of why Mistborn works.
That mashup, you know both of those plot archetypes.
You know about the orphan who is taken in
and trained to act all upper crust and things
like that.
You know heist story is.
But both of those things in a fantasy book
you haven't seen before.
What you're going to do, in part, is you're
going to do this in a new way, or you're going
to do it really well.
Harry Potter is a perfect example of this.
I don't think many people were surprised,
who have read a lot of fantasy, by the plot
of Harry Potter 1.
But it was fantastically done, and there is
something magnificent about seeing somebody
really good do something really well that
you want to enjoy.
This is why people read a lot of romance novels,
even though they know these two characters
are going to get together.
Even though the plot is predictable, watching--
Like, I know how Hamlet ends.
I will still go see Hamlet performed by actors.
You don't have to twist everywhere, but I
will talk about how to twist also.
All right, back here.
Do you need a chair, by the way?
I think there are a few seats here.
I could have people raise hands.
If you've got a seat next to you empty, raise
your hand, just in case someone in the back
wants one.
You guys can glance at those.
You can stand back there if you would prefer.
Q: Do all good characters have to have arcs?
For instance, Indiana Jones--
Good question.
Do all good characters have to have an arc?
There is a category of character that I believe
Jim Zub, the comic artist, dubbed.
He called them iconic characters.
These are characters that do not change story
to story, and you can read their stories out
of order, and you enjoy them for a different
reason than seeing a character's arc.
So, no.
For instance, James Bond is the classic example
of this.
James Bond, sometimes, depending on who does
a James Bond story, will have a character
arc in a given movie.
That's generally what they do nowadays.
But classic James Bond, classic Conan, classic
Sherlock Holmes.
Sherlock Holmes did not have arcs in most
of his stories.
Sherlock Holmes is an iconic character.
In Sherlock Holmes, your tone and your plot
promises are way more important than promising
some sort of character arc.
It is not required.
If it going to be a major feature of your
story, then you do want to give a promise
to it.
But if it's not, you instead show them being
iconic and say, this is why you want to read
about this character.
They are just cool to watch, or to read, or
to, you know, experience.
Go ahead.
Q: Why do some promises work to capture readers'
interest and make them want to keep reading,
while other kinds of promises don't work?
Why do some promises work to capture readers'
interest and keep them reading, while other
promises don't work?
Some of this is taste.
This is something you're going to have to,
as writers, become used to, is that different
people have different tastes, and there is
nothing wrong with that.
Okay?
You can make the very best salmon in the world,
and I will hate it.
I do not like fish.
I have a visceral reaction to fish.
I gag if I taste it.
It makes me feel ill to try to eat.
Doesn't matter how good that salmon is.
You're not going to get me to enjoy eating
that meal.
You might get me to appreciate how much work
you did and how well you made that salmon.
In the same way, some of this comes down to
taste.
Taste can be really tricky, in part because
the experience of your reader influences their
taste a great deal.
The more you experience, the more you will
fall into the "I like these things, I don't
like these things," and you may start to develop,
not everyone does, the "I just want something
different."
I've tasted these things so much I want something
new.
You see this in a lot of movie reviewers.
There are some movies, that if you see a hundred
movies in a year, this is your favorite movie,
and if you see one movie a year, it's your
least favorite movie.
Books have this too.
You can call this the Aragon effect.
When Aragon came out, a lot of people read
it and said, "I've read this before.
This is Star Wars or Dragon Riders of Pern."
And yes, it was.
But of course, Star Wars was taking that from
other stories, and so was Dragon Riders of
Pern.
I'm sure there were people who saw Star Wars
and were like, "What?
People like this?
I've been reading John Carter books forever
and it's just kind of that."
They even used the word Sith for the bad guys
in those, I think.
There maybe people who read your book and
be like, "This is just too straight down the
archetype for me."
There may be other people who read it and
are like, "This is a perfect version of this
archetype, and I haven't experienced it very
much."
And so they just really love it.
You shouldn't, as an author, I think, be making
value judgements on those things.
You can definitely decide what you want to
do and what your audience is.
That's part of it.
Why do some promises work also when others
done?
Skill of the author is going to play into
it.
Whether you can start making good on those
promises or not.
I'd say it divides between skill and what
the reader wants.
Okay?
All right.
Let's talk about progress for a little bit.
Because this is the most important of them,
I think.
You would think the payoff is the most important,
and in one element it is.
Payoff is most important sometimes because
it is the feeling you leave the reader with
when they put your book down at the end.
That can very much influence whether they
pick up another one or not.
However, getting them to that end is more
important.
The host of writers who have fantastic progress
sections and weak endings, who are still very
famous and popular authors, should prove to
you that this is the most important of them.
The host of authors who have limp beginnings,
but really spectacular characters and plot
in the middle, followed by "and then it ended,"
who are still very, very popular writers,
should tell you this.
Because progress in the middle is the hardest
of them, and it's where some of the great
writers excel.
Stephen King is the quintessential example
of this.
What do I mean by progress?
We're going to go over here for progress.
I started to figure this out early in my career
when I was reading a book by Larry Niven and
Jerry Pournelle.
Forgive me, those of you who have heard this
story before.
The book is Inferno by Niven and Pournelle.
Not their most famous.
A lot of people have heard of them because
of The Mote in God's Eye.
Or Larry Niven wrote Ringworld, which was
the inspiration for Halo.
These are two fantastic science fiction authors.
Inferno is about a science fiction author
who goes to a party, gets drunk, falls out
a window and dies, and wakes up in The Inferno,
Dante's Inferno.
Inferno is a classic style science fiction
book.
What I mean by that is, a lot of the old school
science fiction books felt very episodic.
This is because the authors were either serializing
them in magazines or were accustomed to doing
so.
Inferno reads like, we have this adventure
with famous dead person.
By the end of the adventure, the mini adventure,
you figure out, "That's probably Billy the
Kid, isn't it?"
Then Billy the Kid is left at one part of
the Inferno, and the main character continues
on to the next part of the Inferno and has
another wacky adventure with some perhaps
famous person, with a lot of imagination showing
off a fantasy writer's take on what it would
be like to travel through hell.
I was reading this book and I was compelled
page by page, and normally I'm not in these
episodic stories.
I can still enjoy them.
But usually I finish a story and I'm like,
eh, I'm done.
But each time I had to turn the page and keep
moving.
I asked myself, why do I read like I'm reading
a thriller, thrillers are a genre that specializes
in always making you turn the next page, when
I'm reading this goofy adventure in hell that's
very episodic.
I realized one thing had made the difference.
There was a map at the front of the book.
Now, we laugh at this because I may have,
maybe, a thing for maps.
It's possible that you may have noticed that
there are a lot of maps in some of my books.
So you're like, "Of course you noticed the
map, Brandon."
But this was not an epic fantasy story.
But it had Dante's Inferno as a circle, where
he started out here at the end and was moving
toward the center.
And the question of, what's at the center
of hell and can he get out, was so compelling
that I had to read each next adventure, because
I could watch as he moved steadily inward.
This is a really powerful sensation in readers,
and it is part of what draws people to books
and why they read.
Every book has this by virtue of the pages
in the book that the reader is watching count
toward an endpoint as they go.
Even if they aren't watching the actual numbers,
watching themselves get through the book.
There is a natural time bomb to reading a
book.
That's progress, that you, as the reader,
being able to sense that you are progressing
through a story, is fundamental and vital
to making stories page turners.
When you say page turner, most people's mind
will go to something like a thriller, where
something is always exploding, someone is
always chasing you, and things like that.
But you can write a page turner about anything.
Does not have to have a single fight in it.
No one has to be running anywhere.
The page turner mentality is about you indicating
to your reader that progress is happening
and giving them a sense that it is building
toward something that they want to see.
This is a sense of progress.
It is an illusion of progress.
Because you have absolute control over this.
If you wanted to, you could pass a thousand
years in one sentence.
"And a thousand years passed."
I would guess that most of you in this room,
if I gave you the challenge, saying you have
to write 20 pages on the time between the
second hand moving from one second to the
next, you could do it.
It'd be boring, probably, but you could do
it, just describing everything in the room
and making everything slow down, and sticking
with this moment, adding three flashbacks.
You could, if you needed to, fill the whole
book and make it take one second.
You have absolute control over this.
One of the big complaints that people who
don't read a lot of fantasy or sci-fi make
about it, is the complaint of, oh, they can
just make anything happen, so there is no
tension.
This is, in one way, true, but it's a much
larger problem in scope than they think, because
you can do that in any genre.
If you are writing a romance, you can say,
"And he got over himself and they got together."
Takes one sentence.
"And then he got over himself.
And they found a whole bunch of money that
her uncle left them that they didn't know.
Suddenly they could pay off the house" and
the evil whatever person who was loan sharking
them and stuff, and the fact that they no
longer had that tension made their relationship
problems go away and they lived happily ever
after.
You can do this in any story.
We'll talk about how to not do this when we
talk about Sanderson's First Law.
But progress is absolutely, 100%, in your
control, and because of that, you want to
create an illusion for the reader that a steady
progress toward an inevitable and exciting
goal is happening in your story.
You usually want to do this by identifying
what your plot is going to be.
What your actual story arc, not necessarily
just your umbrella.
Oftentimes, like I said, your story arc and
your umbrella plot are the same.
But you want to know, you want to ask yourself,
why are people turning the page?
What question do they need answered?
Now, there can be multiples.
The bigger your book, the longer your story,
the more of these you will generally have.
But there will be a few overriding ones, and
you usually, at least I do, you make this
happen by identifying what type of plot you
are doing.
We'll talk about those in a little bit.
We did an entire year on Writing Excuses,
so if you need more, well, go listen to Season
11 is it?
Elemental Genres is what it's called.
All the Writing Excuses people humoring me
as we go through kind of Brandon's philosophy
on plotting.
Just for the sake of discussion, I will use
Star Wars.
Let's use Star Wars as an example.
In Star Wars, we have an umbrella plot of
destroy empire, which you don't really realize
is the whole umbrella plot.
You think it is relegated to get the plans
to the people.
There's your umbrella plot.
Yeah, rescue the princess is on there.
That's all kind of, yeah, get the plans to
the people and rescue princess.
Help me Obi Wan Kenobi.
You're my only hope.
Your character arc, your main character arc,
is Luke becomes a Jedi, or really, Luke trusts
the force.
Luke takes the first step on becoming a Jedi,
is what it actually turned out to be.
But the promise is, Luke's going to use the
force.
It's going to be cool.
You have a secondary character arc of Han
becomes not as much a jerk.
That's what that says.
I'm sorry.
Sometimes my handwriting just kind of turns
into hieroglyphics.
But you've got a secondary character arc of
Han becomes not so much a jerk.
I would say those are our plots.
In this one, your story arc and your umbrella
arc, basically the same thing.
Very simple plot.
Here's your story arc.
Here's your character arc.
Go.
Your sense of progress that you give the reader,
or the viewer in this case, needs to snowball
into these things.
Where writers go wrong, and why their stories
can get boring, even though they're exciting,
is when they give a promise, and then they
go in a different direction for their plot
arc.
Now, sometimes you do this intentionally.
It is a very difficult thing to do, and we
can maybe talk about exceptions later.
But let me give you a real-world example of
this in my own writing.
I was working on Oathbringer, the third Stormlight
book.
I'll try to avoid specific spoilers, for those
of you who haven't read it.
But in Oathbringer, at a certain point, people
end up, a bunch of the characters end up in
the alternate dimension, Shadesmar, which
is kind of like a realm of fairies, maybe?
How would you explain that, people that read?
The fey realm?
They end up in the fey realm.
Something like that.
They end up in an alternate dimension.
Here, a big disaster has happened.
They have narrowly escaped with their lives.
Characters are in serious problems mentally
and emotionally.
They get together.
In the original draft, they talk about what
they need to do, and they say, "If we can
get over to this other thing, this other place,
there's a portal there that takes us back
to the real world, and we can start to put
things back on track."
I, as an author, knew they actually needed
to be down here for the big climax.
So as they went on their way, they got diverted.
They're like, well, we have to go here to
get to this place that'll get a ship, and
nope, it's going-- Oh, no!
We ended up here.
For the big climax.
Who woulda thunk?
That we end up where all the other characters
are going.
I was really looking forward to writing this
sequence.
Going to Shadesmar was something I had been
promising in the books since the first one.
I knew it was going to be very visually interesting.
It was going to have some really interesting
plot things.
Some of the things the characters were going
through were fascinating, to me at least as
a writer.
I wrote the sequence, and during beta reads
it came back as everyone's least favorite
sequence.
They all thought it was boring.
I'm like, "Really?
But-- but it's not boring.
Why do you all think it's boring?"
I realized that I had violated this.
You do it all the time as a writer.
This was a mini promise within a story.
But when I got them together and said, we
are going to have a mini travelogue in the
middle of our story, it's a plot archetype.
See this place over here?
We're going to go there.
And then we went down here.
And everyone, in the back of their mind, even
if they couldn't articulate, was thinking,
"Okay, but this has to be the diversion.
We're on the diversion until we get back to
the real plot, which is to get over here."
They kept waiting for the diversion to end
and got frustrated and bored with the diversion.
If you've ever been in a movie where you're
like, "I'm so bored, even though exciting
things are happening, with these characters.
Can't they just get back to the main plot?"
[Cantobyte.]
It's because we weren't sold on the progress
toward what we wanted to have happen.
We had too many different promises that we
were more interested in, and/or we were going
about the wrong direction about having it
happen.
So I revised the story so that up here in
this discussion, soon after it, they have
a thing where they all get together and say,
"Where are we going?"
All the characters are going, "We need to
go over here," except Kaladin, who is our
primary viewpoint character saying, "I have
had a vision.
If we don't go here, somebody very important
to us dies."
They're all like, dude, you may be a little
off your rocker.
But sold the reader on the idea that this
was the real goal, and we need to get there.
So when we got diverted, everyone who was
reading knew, "I knew we were supposed to
go there originally."
Suddenly, the promise became different, and
the gamma readers loved the sequence, just
as I had been hoping that they would.
This is the power of proper promises and progress
along those promises.
I changed virtually nothing about what was
actually happening.
I changed the promise and the tone at the
beginning.
Instead of "we need to escape," it turned
into "we need to save this person, which means
we need to get there."
Slightly different tone, slightly different
locational goal on our travelogue, and suddenly
all the readers were on board.
Now, I say all the readers.
It's totally possible that some of the people
watching this or listening are like, "I still
hated that part, Brandon."
That's okay.
We talked about tastes earlier.
What I get really worried about when I have
beta reads, is when a large group of readers
that I thought were going to enjoy something
find it boring instead.
That's a problem.
Happened again in Starsight, actually, where
I had to do major revisions on Starsight because
my promises up front were very poorly done
in the original draft, and I could not figure
out why until I had had beta reads, and talked
it over with editors.
This is not an obvious thing sometimes.
You would think, after 25 years of doing this,
I would know, intrinsically, how to just make
a good promise at the beginning.
But there are two cases in my two most recent
books.
Now, Skyward is in the middle, and it didn't
have one of these.
But two of my three most recent books, where
I fundamentally misjudged a promise or a progress
I was making.
In both cases, the solution was to change
the promise, not the progress.
That was because I'd already written the book,
and I didn't want to write another one.
In outlining, if I figure this out, I would
probably go 50:50 on whether I change the
promise or if I change the progress.
The idea with Star Wars is, most of the things
that the character should be doing should
be working on these points.
You should be making steps toward these three
things.
Every scene written in Star Wars, because
it has to be so tight, this is a film.
Books can get away with a little more flabbiness,
but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it.
Every scene either advances the "let's get
the plans," "let's rescue the princess," "let's
learn to trust the force.”
What you do as an author, if you're building
an outline, if you want to outline, is you
look at what your plot is, and you say, what
are small increments I can make along this
path that will be really interesting to the
reader, that will show we're making progress,
or occasionally backsliding.
Backsliding is okay too.
As long as you're very careful about how you
do it, backsliding can be okay now and then.
Particularly if, you know, "We're going to
take the plans to Alderon.
Alderon isn't there anymore.
That's a problem."
We have just back slided, but there's a princess
here, so let's go rescue the princess.
She's rich.
Then you're playing on this one, Identifying
what type of plot you have can be very handy
for this.
We don't have a ton of time left today.
We have less than 15 minutes.
So we may shove some of this to the next plot
discussion, where I talk a lot about the different
plot archetypes.
But the idea is that you want to be thinking
about, if you have a romance or relationship
plot as really the core plot of your story,
make sure you are indicating progress happening.
If your main story is "We need to get to Mount
Doom," then each adventure you have on the
way should generally take you a little bit
closer to Mount Doom.
Q: It seems like in romance the step backs
are more acceptable than other archetypes.
I would say that in all the-- The question
is, it seems like in romance the step backs
are more acceptable than other archetypes.
I would say generally yes.
I think that's a valid observation.
But I would say step backs are expected in
almost every story.
You use the step backs, generally, in your
type of twist you're doing, or how you're
changing the plot.
Q: Because most of the step backs, like with
the Alderon one, it happened very quickly
and then they were off doing-- It wasn't something
they put a lot of time towards.
Right.
Q: It seems like if you do a huge, I guess
is the word for it, and then you step back,
way back.
Yeah.
If you step way back.
Q: Why am I reading all of this?
Exactly.
It requires some sort of fluency.
For those who are watching on YouTube, the
comment is, seems like if you did all this
work to go somewhere and then stepped all
the way back, it would feel really terrible
in most plots.
But most romance stories, readers accept that
you're not stepping back as far as the characters
think they are, and that's a fundamental part
of that.
That, "oh, it's all destroyed," the all is
lost moment happens in almost every story.
Not always.
But you have this moment where, "Oh, no.
Obi Wan is dead.
Ahhhh!
That's bad!
That's worse than a planet being blown up."
In the context of the story, not in real life.
And a lot of stories will have these sort
of things, where for a moment you believe
that you've stepped all the way back to the
beginning, but you haven't really.
That kind of comes into your payoff and your
plot twist.
Let's talk about payoff.
Actually, let's do any more questions about
progress before we end on payoff.
Q: You said something about, when you were
talking about a little anecdote over here,
so promise, progress, and payoff are all four
subplots as well, and you have to do it several
times throughout the story, not just for--
Yeah.
The question is, so this is for subplots,
not just for the main story.
Yes.
Asterisk.
The longer your book, the more subplots you're
going to have, and the more of these you have
to set up.
Like, Oathbringer is, in some ways, a terrible
example, because I plot Stormlight Archive
books, generally, as three novels that I put
together between one cover.
That sequence actually was the beginning of
a new book in my plotting archetype.
But because I do that, it allows me the plot
before, the plot arc before was, we need to
go to this city and save this city, and then
something terrible happened, and we actually
were able to have a major failure in a way
that didn't feel so disastrous.
Because people can completely fail a little
bit more easily in the middle of a story than
at the end of a story.
This is why Empire Strikes Back can work the
way it does.
If Return of the Jedi ended that way, it might
be more of a downer.
Not to say you can't do that.
There are certainly lots of great stories
that do.
I was able to basically make Oathbringer a
trilogy.
But even not doing that, you will have mini
plot arcs and things.
I often talk about, I use this idea of, what
you are doing, really, is you are nesting
plots, like you do in code.
Where it's like you've got open bracket, open
bracket, open bracket.
And these are like your umbrella.
You've got your other arc, if you've got a
separate one.
You've got your character.
Then you're going to close all those three
near the end.
Though you might not close the umbrella until
book 2, or book 3, with another book in between.
This is very common.
In here, though, you might be like, mini plot,
mini plot, mini plot.
Example from Star Wars, since we're using
that.
Alderon was gone and we've been pulled into
the tractor beam.
New mini plot, new side plot.
Turn off the Death Star's tractor beam and
rescue the princess for good.
You already, you kind of foreshadowed the
rescue the princess plot, but really it starts
right there.
We can go rescue her.
Obi Wan goes and does this.
You have mini plots with their own kind of
problems, and things like that.
Then at the middle you close that bracket
and go to the next one.
This sort of visualizing a plot tends to work
really well.
One of the things we're not talking about
today that I need to remember to talk about
next time is, this progress should involve
problems arising and things like that.
But I guess we can talk about that in twists.
All right, let's go on to talking about--
Oh, was there another one that I missed?
Okay.
Let's talk about payoff then.
Payoff.
Payoff is where you make good on all of this.
The trick is you don't always make exactly
good on it.
Now, your classic archetype, which is still
perfectly valid, is to make a promise at the
beginning, work hard through the progress
to show that it's working, then have things
start to fall apart, and start Act III with
the character thinking it's just not going
to work at all.
They've tried and they've failed.
Then at the start of Act III, they find new
inspiration, a new bit of information, or
a new clue, or just the strength to try again,
and then this time it works.
Then it works and you get what you were promised
at the beginning.
That is totally okay.
I call that, my sort of metaphor for that
is, you promise your son you're going to buy
him a toy car.
He waits till Christmas, as he's supposed
to wait.
He opens his box and gets a toy car.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
People often read a lot of books that have
very twisty plots with lots of reversals and
say, "I guess I have to do that," forgetting
that a lot of the best stories out there,
Star Wars is an example, don't have as much
of a twisty plot.
Star Wars has what I call the plot expansion
as a twist.
The plot expansion is, you promise your kid
a toy car, they wait really, really well,
and then you give them a brand-new real car.
This is the Luke Skywalker is promised "You're
going to get to go into the sky and help bring
these plans back," and at the end it's actually,
"You didn't just bring the plans back.
You destroyed the Death Star yourself and
saved the princess."
Plot expansion.
And that is a twist.
Because the promise at the beginning is intentionally
smaller than you know you're going to deliver
on, and you work hard to hook them on this.
This is the twist I use for Mistborn.
Surprise.
Sorry, guys.
But one of the big twists for Mistborn is,
your promise is, you're going to get a heist.
As you experience the story, as our progress
goes through, you see how terrible life is
for people here, and you start to think, "Man,
I do want these cool thieves to pull off their
heist.
But the thing is, if they just enrich themselves
and run, they're going to leave behind all
these other people, and I actually want something
more.
I kind of wish this was Star Wars and they
were going to overthrow the Empire.
Holy crap!
They overthrew the Empire."
I was able to do that, in part, because people
don't expect-- People read that book and expect,
book three they fight the empire, book one
they pull off the heist.
That was the model for epic fantasy, in a
way.
And so by doing the expansion twist, which
is like, nope, we're going to do it all in
one book, you give the reader more than they
expected.
Very rarely do you run into trouble when you're
doing a plot twist, when you give the reader
more than they expected.
You can run into problems when you give them
the substitute.
If you do it really well, it doesn't matter.
In fact, they like it better.
So the substitute plot twist to envision this
is, you promise your son you're going to give
him a toy car.
You then spend several months talking about
how awesome toy planes are, to the point that
your son says, "Man, I wish I was getting
a toy plane."
Then they open their box at the end and it's
a toy plane.
And we're like, "Yay!
Toy plane!"
The classic example, one of the best ever
to do this is While You Were Sleeping.
If you guys haven't seen this movie.
Yeah.
What's that?
Spoilers?
You've never seen it?
It's okay.
It's a fantastic romance story where a woman
sees the perfect man.
She has a terrible life.
She falls in love with him from afar.
Then he goes into a coma, and accidentally,
through hijinks, she maybe says to people
she's his girlfriend.
His whole family is like, "He never tells
us anything.
Come."
And she becomes part of the family.
Then she gets in deeper to where you're like,
"Oh, man, I wish you hadn't promised us those
two would get together."
Because the promise at the beginning is this
perfect man's going to be her love interest.
You're like, "This is getting worse and worse."
In the meantime, she falls in love with his
brother, who is a really cool guy and is a
great match for her.
But the story is, of course she has to end
up with this guy.
But of course, at the end she ends up with
the toy plane instead.
And it is a brilliant substitution plot.
Substitution plot generally depends on you
convincing the reader that you actually want
something else.
I would argue, though this is a really big
outlier, that this is what Into the Woods
is.
People often bring up Into the Woods and say,
"How do you do Into the Woods?"
If you haven't seen Into the Woods, it starts
off as a classic set of fairy tells.
At the midpoint into Act II, all these people's
lives turn into disasters and they all die,
and it's miserable.
But it's fun miserable.
Sondheim, everyone.
Why does this work?
Well, this works, when it does, a lot of people
hate it.
Let's just point this out.
Substitution plots can be dangerous this way.
A lot of people hate it.
A lot of people like it because during the
beginning there's this sense that everything's
too perfect.
Everything's just not-- it's too perfect.
Plus, it's Sondheim.
When does someone get killed and be baked
into a pie?
Then you're like, "Yes!
Everyone's getting killed and baked into pies."
For the second half.
But Into the Woods is a really strange example.
We are out of time on this.
But let me just end by saying, your payoff
should flow naturally from the type of progress
you're doing, with the asterisk of if you're
going to a substitution or change the plot
a little bit, you do want to consider doing
that.
But it should give them, in most cases, everything
they want at the beginning, plus something
else and new.
Your best bet is to give them a toy car and
a plane.
Those are generally the best types of stories.
But just make sure it follows from the progress
that you spend your story on, and you will
be fine.
We'll see you guys all next week.
Thanks.
