BRANDON: All right, guys, World Building Week
Two.
Woo hoo!
The fun stuff.
We'll be talking about world building this
week and then we will have Mary Robinett here
to do next week, a lecture on short stories.
And at some point I will do the Q&A on worldbuilding,
either maybe next week is half of that lecture,
depending on how much time Mary Robinett takes,
or maybe the week after.
I will get to the questions that you guys
asked last week and we'll ask this week if
they're things you're curious about.
Before we kind of really dig into this lecture,
I wanted to ask you guys to list a few of
your favorite stories in regard to worldbuilding
specifically, film or book or video game.
What are your favorites?
Yeah.
STUDENT: John Wick.
BRANDON: Okay.
John Wick.
All right.
What do we got here?
STUDENT: Avatar the Last Airbender.
CLASS: (cheering)
BRANDON: I think you were priced into saying
that one, right?
All right.
Yeah, go ahead.
STUDENT: Firefly.
BRANDON: Firefly, great.
All right.
Firefly.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
STUDENT: The Expanse.
BRANDON: You like The Expanse.
All right let's get one more.
Sure, we'll go over on this side, because
I haven't--
STUDENT: Dune.
BRANDON: Dune.
All right, great.
OK.
That'll be relevant later.
We're going to use those.
But let me ask you guys a different question.
You are presumably in this class specifically
instead of the other creative writing classes,
which you might also be taking, but you're
here because of worldbuilding.
That's what differentiates this class from
the others being offered.
This is the sci-fi and fantasy themed creative
writing course at the university.
So why?
Why do you want to learn to build worlds?
Why are you building worlds?
What is it to you?
What does it mean to you to have world building
in a story?
STUDENT: It means the world to me.
BRANDON: It means the world to you.
OK.
Great.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
STUDENT: I need a world that can implement
cool designs I have in my head that aren't
physically possible.
BRANDON: OK.
All right.
Let's write a few of these up.
That's one that I noted.
The impossible made plausible, is one of the
purposes of world building, to take that impossibility
and make it-- you're able to suspend disbelief
while you're in there.
STUDENT: Theme.
BRANDON: What's that?
Theme?
So you can play with theme.
All right.
Like that.
How does worldbuilding play with theme?
STUDENT: Like if you're having, for example,
a more serious story, you could have more
serious or grungy setting.
You could do, like, sort of storypunk or something.
BRANDON: OK.
STUDENT: Versus something a lot more fantastical
would be like a fantasy.
BRANDON: Awesome.
What else?
What else have you guys got?
Why do you like worldbuilding
in stories?
Why do you read stories with lots of worldbuilding?
STUDENT: Because my real life is boring.
BRANDON: OK.
Okay.
So can we say maybe sense of wonder and/or
exploration in regard to that?
Or, you know, we could probably also wright
down here shear coolness to encapsulate those
things.
What else?
Go ahead.
STUDENT: I really enjoy seeing like a cultural
butterfly effect.
You change one small thing.
BRANDON: Right.
OK.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I'll write that up.
I love how you put that "cultural butterfly
effect."
Butterfly.
OK.
Great.
Yeah.
STUDENT: The abilities to explore real world
problems in a world that's disconnected from
ours.
BRANDON: Yep.
Yeah.
How can we phrase this?
What's that?
STUDENT: Zootopia.
BRANDON: Zootopia.
I actually had-- what did I write down?
Let me look at my list of notes.
I wrote down something for this.
STUDENT: Inception.
BRANDON: Yeah.
Ability to approach ideas in a fresh way.
How about that?
Approach.
How do you spell approach?
Real world.
I'll just make-- that spells approach.
I totally got it right.
Ideas in a kind of disconnected way, right?
Disconnected.
We'll talk about this.
Your ability-- you can talk about something
without the baggage that it brings to talk
about it in a real-world setting.
And this allows you just kind of to approach
difficult ideas in directions that are maybe
not as immediately--
STUDENT: Polarizing?
BRANDON: Yeah.
Polarizing.
That's a good way to put it.
Immediately polarizing.
Anything else, you guys?
Yeah.
Go ahead.
STUDENT: It's reminiscent of the sins.
BRANDON: What's that?
STUDENT: It's reminiscent of the sins.
BRANDON: Reminiscent of the sins.
OK.
OK.
Play God.
Yeah, absolutely.
Actually, one of my favorite comics on the
whole internet, look it up sometime, is Cave
Man Science Fiction.
And this comic is a bunch of cavemen science
fiction scenarios.
And at the end, the moral is, "I am play gods,"
meaning, "Oh, I've made a mistake.
I pretend to be the gods."
Really funny.
You guys should go read it.
All right, let's talk about this because sci-fi/fantasy
has this weird disconnect that I've noticed,
at least in writing it, which is that the
setting is both the thing that defines us
as sci-fi/fantasy writers or sci-fi/fantasy
works, and is at the same time the least important
part of our stories.
You may laugh about that, but in most cases
I think it is true.
Generally, if you have a story with excellent
worldbuilding but bad characters and story,
or bad characters or bad story, you're going
to have a worse story than one that does an
excellent job of character and story and has
weak worldbuilding.
And so of the three sort of things I talk
about that make up our stories, our setting,
our plot, and our character, your time is
best spent learning how to make engaging and
interesting characters, followed by learning
how to tell a really good plot, with, in third
place, your ability to have a really great
setting.
Now ideally you want to learn to do all three.
However, I think there is a tendency to have
what we sometimes call world builder's disease.
Yes.
This is where you become so enthralled with
building the world of your story that you
never finish worldbuilding and never start
your story.
And if you do start your story, you've spent
so much time on your awesome world building
that you want to fill every nook and cranny
of your story with that world building, and
by so doing, you undermine the story that
you're actually telling.
And so because of this, one of the things
I like to talk about when we get to world
building, because, don't get me wrong, it
is important.
Having a great world will be a bonus to your
story.
I'd like to talk about world building in service
of story.
Ways that we can use, as has been pointed
out on the board, theme, that we can use the
worldbuilding that we're doing to enhance
the specific story we want to tell so that
that worldbuilding becomes a big part of that
story, and an important part of that story,
and not just something that's there like billboards
to watch on the way to actually getting to
your story.
That's what you want to avoid.
Now, as a little aside on this, I want to
talk about info dumps, and about conveying
information in a fantasy world or a science
fiction world.
I often say that I consider the grand skill
of writing science fiction fantasy, the single
most important thing to learn for sci-fi/fantasy,
as opposed to other genres, is learning to
convey information about your world in a way
that is interesting and not boring.
And this is a trick to master writing sci-fi/fantasy.
That's not to say that this will make up for
bad characters or a bad story, but if you
are doing a good job with those, mastering
this, I think, is the single best thing you
can do to get yourself picked up by agents,
to get passed up to editors or to, you know,
make it to that next round of acquisition,
or if you're self-publishing, to make sure
that people when they are reading that first
chapter, say, "I want to read the next one,"
and that is to make sure you are conveying
your world building without boring people.
This can be kind of hard.
So I've got a couple tricks to recommend to
you on doing this.
And the first one is to always think of your
worldbuilding in service of the story you're
telling and in service of making good characters.
And if you can find a way that you can convey
your setting information through the eyes
of your characters in a way that exemplifies
who that character is, so that the point of
the sentence or the paragraph is actually
to give us more information about the character,
but you, as a side effect, tell people about
the world, it's what you want to do.
For a kind of example of this, a metaphor
of this, my wife often has trouble getting
my children to eat vegetables.
This is really super uncommon.
I know it's only my children who won't eat
their vegetables.
But she realized in the mornings they like
to have a smoothie with breakfast, and they
really like, because they're little boys,
we have three little boys, when things look
gross.
And so putting a handful of spinach into a
smoothie and turning it green, they loved.
They're like, "It is so gross.
It looks like snot.
Yum!"
This is just how my children are.
"Oh, it's radioactive goo!
Yum!"
And you do that by throwing in a handful of
spinach.
Well, this is how you want to have your world
building gotten across to your readers.
You want them to be getting the world building
by saying, "Wow, this story and these characters
are so fascinating.
Oh, and by the way, I know a whole bunch about
Hogwarts now."
This is how you want to be conveying your
world building.
And you want to avoid the, number one, the
encyclopedia entry.
A lot of fantasy in its early days, in particular
fantasy, some science fiction, would start
with an encyclopedia entry.
Not very well-disguised either.
Like you'd start up and it's like, here is
the myth of this world.
And then there's basically a whole bunch of
broccoli or spinach thrown at you where you're
like, you're going to have to track who all
these gods are, so we're going to give you
kind of a boring write up of the history and
lore of this world before we start the book.
Or sometimes they were literal encyclopedia
entries put in the front or the back of the
book.
Tolkien.
I love Tolkien.
Lots of encyclopedia entries.
He invented a new subgenre.
We can give him a pass.
And he still did it better than almost anyone
does it.
But, a lot of encyclopedia entries.
Like, "I can't get this all in the story,
so I'm going to give you, you know, an encyclopedia."
You want to avoid that.
Now you can do this in a couple of ways.
One is to start trying to get more of it into
dialogue.
You run into troubles when you're doing this,
however, for some reason we call maid and
butler dialog.
Maid and butler dialog comes from the old
stage plays where they would often start the
stage play by having the maid and the butler
come up onto the stage and be like, "As you
know, the master is away for the weekend."
And the other one's like, "Yes.
And as you know, the lady has been getting
very close with the coachman."
And they're basically explaining to each other
things that they already know.
Avoid maid and butler dialog.
It reads really stilted and is kind of a problem.
We'll talk about more if we're go into dialog
later in the year.
But the idea, stilted dialog is often dialog
that feels like the character is not acting
according to their own sincere motivations,
but according to the author's motivations
in getting out certain information and making
it the plot happen.
So avoid maid and butler, moving things more
to dialog, but also giving us less than you
think we need is generally a good example.
One of the things I learned in my grad program,
and it wasn't from one of the teachers, but
perhaps the most valuable lesson I learned
was from another student, who taught me about
something called the pyramid of abstraction.
And he said, imagine your descriptions as
a pyramid.
The goal of your descriptions are to form
kind of the base of a pyramid, so that you
ground a reader into a story, so that when
you start talking about things that are a
little more high level, or a little more abstract,
or if you're going to go inside the character's
head for a little bit and do what we call
navel gazing, where the is ruminating on,
"Oh, man, I have all these problems, let me
list them off one at a time so that you, the
reader, are aware that I'm aware that I have
all these problems."
Whenever you're doing things like this, that
sort of stuff is pulling the reader out of
the story, because it's diverting the reader
from the setting, and they become more and
more aware of the author doing things.
If you want to have a character ruminate on
the nature of art in a story, then the more
you do that, the more, ironically, it will
pull the reader out and make them start thinking,
this is the author giving me a lesson or a
lecture, instead of the character actually
dealing with this.
And my friend said, and I really believe is
true, the way that you offset that, because
you want to have some of this stuff in stories,
is you let the abstract, be the tip on the
pyramid that you earn by laying your groundwork
with concrete language, so that the reader
is very firmly set in your world in a real
concrete place and time, that then when that
character's walking along and starts having
a discussion about the nature of art with
someone next to them, you are still imagining
them walking down the street in this place
that you have painted very well, so that you
don't have this problem of losing them off
in the ether.
And this works very well for worldbuilding
as well.
By being able to-- you have this character
say, "Well, magic works like this."
You're already kind of going into this abstract.
It's stuff the reader needs.
It's that broccoli, that spinach.
But you want to have grounded them first in
the setting.
And my friend did a really cool thing with
me that helped me kind of understand what
he meant by abstract versus concrete.
And some of you have watched these lectures
before, have talked about this before will
understand, that-- let's just say you've got
at the bottom concrete and the top abstract.
Where would you put, if you're going to talk
about love, if you're going to say someone's
experiences with love, where is that on the
abstract-concrete scale.
What's that?
Yeah.
More on the abstract side.
Right?
Love.
Now you can pull that down by making sure
you're talking about what love means to this
person and the actual emotions.
Where would you put it if you say the character
saw a dog?
Where is that?
Dog is way up here, probably right underneath
love, but maybe above it.
Because everyone in this room, when you say
dog, how many of you imagine the same dog?
Almost none of you.
How many of you imagined love, and are on
the same page?
Hey, my friend's argument, I put it right
underneath.
His argument dog is above love in abstractness.
More of us, if you just say love, are going
to have experienced a similar thing to one
another, than if you just say a dog, because
the picture that pops into your head is going
to be completely abstract from-- it's going
to be completely different from everyone else.
Now if you say it was a mangy little white
dog with one leg that was whimpering on the
side of the street in a puddle, flaked with
mud from the passing carriage, then you're
all imagining a very similar dog.
And so that pulls dog down into the concrete.
Now, there's a lesson to be learned here,
however.
Down is not always better.
We talk about in writing this phrase called
show don't tell.
And it's become a mantra.
It's this thing, it's like, anytime anything's
wrong in a story, people will be like, "Well,
you didn't show enough.
You told too much."
And they're often right.
But show versus tell is not something to hold
up as, like, the absolute gold standard, because
almost always showing more and pulling down
on the pyramid of abstraction requires what?
More words.
And so the more words you spend, the more
concrete you can generally make things.
Now, if you understand this model well, what
you're going to do is you're going to learn
how to use those more words to pull yourself
down rather than just using words that are
meaningless.
And you will find if you actually look at
your writing, you will be using a lot of meaningless
words.
You'll be doing a couple of things.
I do this a lot in my first drafts.
You will be doing what we call a tell then
show.
This is where your paragraph starts with a
line kind of explaining, "He was a really
nervous person."
And then your next line is, "He sat at the
table tapping his pen against it and moving
his foot like this."
That is what we call tell then show.
The show is enough.
You don't need to have a thesis sentence in
your paragraph telling us what you're going
to then show us.
But we do it a lot because as writers we're
trying to organize our thoughts, and then
we go on to the show.
You will find these all the time still in
published books where the author didn't catch
that one and delete it out.
You want to learn to delete those out?
I have a word that comes up that is very controversial
in this, is the word suddenly or abruptly.
A lot of writers will say, just don't use
that, just make it abrupt or sudden, the thing
that's happening.
I still tend to prefer using the suddenly,
because it becomes a marker very well to the
reader.
But this is why we say get rid of the passive
voice.
Get rid of too many adverbs.
Get rid of too many descriptors that don't
actually pull you down on the pyramid of abstraction.
And you'll find you're doing this a lot.
You're using a lot of verys.
You know, "He was very mad," instead of saying,
"He was irate."
Irate is further down than very mad, but very
mad uses more words.
Any time you can go down by using fewer words,
you're almost always wanting to make that
change.
And you want to get rid of these sentences
that'll often just not say anything or will
have lots of just modifier words that don't
mean anything.
"A little bit," and things like that.
"Little bit" is one I use all the time, whereas
I'm going through my revisions, I don't need
to say that he stumbled a little bit.
A stumble is a little fall.
It's already in the word.
I don't need the "a little bit," but I use
it all the time.
You will find all sorts of things like this
that you can cut that will cost you nothing
on moving up or down the pyramid of abstraction,
or things you can cut and replace that will
move you down.
Learn to do these things to start really grounding
your reader in a world that feels very real.
Dan Wells, good friend of mine, has advice
that if you want the reader to believe you
about the big things, that there's this big
problem in the political system, you often
describe one small thing very concretely that
impacts the characters in a way that will
make you really understand this.
Saying that, they the cantina is a hive of
scum and villainy is nowhere near as useful
as having two random people decide to bully
Luke and almost get him killed until a hand
has to get cut off.
So grounding people in these scenes, showing
them the ideas you want, pulling down on the
pyramid of abstraction, good to start grounding
your world building.
And you will find if you start to do this,
then you will have more space in your story
to kind of talk about, now and then, slipping
in worldbuilding details.
This is why it is almost always better to
start with your character in a situation where
they want something, even if not relate to
the main plot.
They can't have it, and we get to see them
working proactively to get the thing they
want.
And we explain only as much world building
as you need for that single instance for that
character, to grab us and ground us in a scene
in a world, before you start to pile on more
world building.
These things work differently for different
stories.
I intentionally in Mistborn, if you haven't
read this book, it starts off kind of working
to ground you in the world.
But the first time that the main character
uses the magic I cut, and you don't see that
scene.
This is Kelsior attacking the manor house
in the early chapters.
Do not show it because there's a whole ton
of world building.
I'd have to drop on you to explain the magic.
And it works so much better if I hold that
off until you are more grounded in the actual
setting and characters and then you get it.
Way of Kings, I throw it all at you in the
prologue, the second prologue.
The one I actually called prologue of the
three, I throw it all right at you.
Why did I do this?
Well, understanding I had already an established
audience who already was looking forward to
reading about an interesting magic system,
knowing I only had to explain one of the many
types of magic I was putting into the story,
and knowing that this story needed to start
off with something dynamic that promised where
one of the character arcs was going to go
later on, I made the decision in that case
instead to lead with a character using the
magic.
But that increases my learning curve, and
that increases the likelihood that someone
is going to put the book down and get bored
early on.
And if you go read reviews of Way of Kings,
people who give it low stars often put it
down early because the learning curve was
so steep, and I wasn't therefore able to hook
them into the characters as quickly because
I was spending so much more time on lore and
world.
That was a risk I was willing to take for
that specific story, but it also has a cost
to it.
Learn to make things more concrete.
Learn to deliver your world building through
the eyes of the characters.
Robert Jordan was a genius at this.
When a character walks in the room and says
there's a cup of water sitting on the table,
the way they describe that cup of water will
tell you a ton about their culture and their
history and who they are.
When you can describe a cup of water in a
way that gives you more worldbuilding about
a person's culture than most people's three
paragraph-long encyclopedia entries, then
you are mastering the grand skill of writing
science fiction and fantasy.
All right?
Questions about these ideas?
Yes.
STUDENT: So in Warbreaker where you did something
similar, to the fact where you show magic
right away in that.
BRANDON: Yep.
STUDENT: So would you say a takeaway for that
is if the excitement matches the level of
the explanation you can pull it off?
BRANDON: Oh, yeah.
It's much easier.
Like if you were able to explain-- oftentimes
in a fantasy book, it is good to lead with
the magic, I would say, if you can do it through
the eyes of a character who is achieving a
goal and what they are doing is intrinsic
to the magic, some of the best ways to start
fantasy books is indeed in that way.
And so "Here is a problem in the magic or
some obstacle I need to overcome.
Here's me using the magic in a simple, easy-to-understand
way that evokes an entire world," that's more--
like, you can use that small instance of a
description of one part of the magic to indicate
there's a much larger world to explore.
But let's make sure you master this one thing
first.
That can be a really great way to start a
fantasy story.
But again, try to keep it grounded in the
character's motivations.
And a lot of times what's working is character
motivation.
Here's a line of worldbuilding.
Character motivation, concrete description.
Here's a line of worldbuilding.
And you're moving this through.
This is why so often you see authors using
Watson characters in fantasy novels, apprentice
characters.
A person who's unfamiliar with the world or
setting getting it explained to them as they're
trying to navigate some sort of issue or problem
in the world, lets you get it out slowly.
But it also lets you have this what we call
hang a lantern on it, where the person can
be like, "I don't understand this."
And the other person saying, "There's no time
to explain.
This is the one thing you need to know right
now."
And then that works really well.
But there's a reason why the apprentice plot
became the go-to plot in the '80s for fantasy
novels.
Almost all of them were apprentice plots,
all the big ones, where someone young is learning
about a fantastical world and then gets introduced
to it step by step by some old master, so
that you, as the reader, can follow that path.
That gets really repetitive if it's done too
much, which is why in the '90s you saw an
explosion of things that didn't do this, like
Game of Thrones or whatnot, where it was like,
no, we're just going to throw you right in.
Boom.
Deal with it.
Here we go.
But then Harry Potter came and portal fantasy
is-- Harry Potter is a hard one to use as
an example, because portal fantasies are always
going to be very popular in middle grade.
They started basically with Alice in Wonderland
and they go all the way through Narnia all
the way up to Harry Potter.
And this is because it gives you an easy way
to make the Watson character, the protagonist,
who also gets to go with you and explore this
fantasy world.
And generally, by genre, as you're your age
group gets older, the more you can count on
a steeper learning curve.
Middle grade needs the shallowest learning
curve in general, YA can get a little steep,
and adult, it can be like this.
It can be Stephen Ericksen, right?
Just like, oh, here's a wall.
Climb up it by your fingernails and then you'll
love this.
That is very hard sell in middle grade.
I don't know that I've read a book that has
had anywhere near that steep learning curve,
even something like Sabriel by Garth Nix,
which is more YA than middle grade anyway,
starts you and then transition's you in, even
though the character is part of the world.
It's very common to do something like this.
Middle grade and YA have different sort of
understandings there.
But even in adult, sometimes you want to come
up with a really shallow learning curve for
various purposes.
Yeah.
STUDENT: What's your advice with including
world building or magic systems with journal
entries without it being too [___]?
BRANDON: Right.
World building or magic systems in journal
entries.
I do it a lot.
I use them as epigraphs at the start of stories,
because that forces me to dole it out slowly
and only used it kind of as flourishes here
and there.
I tend to like it.
I think it works pretty well.
But you have to understand there's a percentage
of your readership who will not read them.
Because of that, anything you're putting in
there, you need to be careful to try and reinforce
the story or make not vital to the A plot
line of what your story is.
You can't always do this, but I often recommend
imagining that people are not going to read
them or remember them because of the way they
are.
The majority of your audience will.
But you can't count on it as much as if it's
in the text.
And this kind of gets into this other idea
of worldbuilding in service of story, like
whether you want to use epigraphs, or you
want to use songs like Grandpa Tolkien did,
or whether you want to have a steep learning
curve or a shallow learning curve, really
comes into the question of, what are you trying
to do with your story and how does your setting
enhance it?
Let's go to our list over here.
Let me ask you this.
For those who love the assassins sort of thing
of the John Wick universe, how does the setting
of the John Wick universe enhance the story
that they're trying to tell?
STUDENT: It sets the rules of the universe
that the characters all have to abide by and
establishes the consequences of breaking them.
BRANDON: Right.
This is a very violent, dangerous world, where
if you transgress a simple rule, it can lead
to massive consequences.
And the world building is there to warn you
that all of these rules, they're very touchy.
They're very touchy.
Anyone else want to talk about John Wick?
Yeah, go ahead.
STUDENT: This is like an entire world of assassins,
and John Wick's supposed to be the awesomest
guy.
BRANDON: Yeah.
STUDENT: With the entire society of assassins,
it makes him even cooler to be the top of
this world.
BRANDON: It's an entire world of assassins.
I'm going to repeat it for the microphone
here.
And if John Wick is the best of them all,
by showing how cool everyone else is, you
then establish how cool he is, just through
natural sort of consequences of the world
building.
Star Trek did this sort of thing with Worf
all the time.
There's actually a TV Tropes page on it, where
if they wanted to establish how awesome a
bad guy was, they had them beat up Worf, because
you know how cool Worf was.
And if Worf gets beat up, then this person
must be cool.
They did it enough that Worf, if you actually
look at what happens in the things, is actually
not that tough, because people are beating
him up all the time.
But this is the same sort of idea by establishing
this world.
I really like this idea.
It happens a lot in in espionage stories,
that your kind of like-- My wife and I say,
all right, we're in spy world now.
In spy world you can accept that everybody
has a minimum level of spy training.
And every character you meet, like they're
just certain tropes that if you're watching
Alias, or if you're watching even a James
Bond movie, that you just be like, you know
what, this is spy world.
There's going to be tons of double crosses
because no one trusts each other because they
live in spy world and they've just all been
betrayed 100 times.
And using the setting to enhance that idea,
so that you're on board for the fact that
the main character is going to be not willing
to trust.
You're using your world building to enhance
your story.
Let's ask about Last Airbender, a popular
choice.
We'll go to you first and then we'll ask others.
How does Last Airbender, how does Avatar,
use its worldbuilding specifically in service
of the story they want to tell?
STUDENT: They set up a lot in the prologue
and have Katara go through that.
But it's not an infodump as much, because
it personally relates to her and Sokka, I
feel like.
BRANDON: Right.
STUDENT: And then the next instant is Sokka
and Katara hunting, and that's how they introduce
bending, this mutual goal that they--
BRANDON: They introduce water bending by having
them on a hunt.
They've got a situation they're trying to
accomplish, and the water bending helps them
accomplish that.
How else does the overall worldbuilding of
Avatar enhancing its story?
STUDENT: Well, the entire A plot of the story
is part of the world.
BRANDON:
STUDENT: I mean, the bending, Aang as the
Avatar.
BRANDON: Right.
STUDENT: It's [___] character arc and the
whole thing with Sozin's Comet.
That was the big event that the story is leading
up to that is just inherently part of the
world.
BRANDON: Yeah.
And I would say that you mentioned Aang with
all these things.
I would mention that one of the best things
they do is they establish factions that are
at war and then they give you a person whose
job is kind of to unite the elements.
Hey, theme!
This is about uniting the factions and making
peace by having one person who represents
the unification of all of these things.
And so, therefore, worldbuilding becomes theme
in that way.
Go ahead.
STUDENT: It gives an excuse for why the fate
of the universe is in a 12-year-old's hands.
BRANDON: Yes.
Excuse for why the fate of the universe is
in a 12-year-old's hands, and a very silly
12-year-old as well.
Go ahead.
STUDENT: They show us all of these amazing
powers, like the phenomenal, literal earth-bending
abilities of this magic system, and then they
put it on that 12-year-old kid to save the
world, and a huge part of his character and
the plot is him learning to deal with the
fact that he, like, all these phenomenal powers
that he has to learn and overcome.
It becomes the world building, but it adds
so much to his personal character arc and
the burdens he has.
BRANDON: Right.
I would say you nailed it right there.
The fact that there are all these four factions
and all of them are so powerful, and then
putting all of these wishes, these desires,
this responsibility on Aang, it's a story
about him accepting his responsibility.
And the world building enhances that by showing
how tough it is to master all the different
magics, which is a metaphor for him learning
to master all of the responsibilities that
have been placed on him.
Excellent.
Yeah, go ahead.
STUDENT: It makes it easy to break it down
into three seasons.
BRANDON: Makes it easy to break it down in
seasons.
There is a reason why Mistborn has three magic
systems, as I told you in the previous week,
and we dig into one in each book.
Very nice structure.
Go ahead.
STUDENT: It's based on real world religion
and philosophies that are familiar enough
that it doesn't need too much explanation.
BRANDON: Yeah, it's familiar.
What he said is that it's based on real world
philosophies and religions, which allows us
to not have to explain as much by using the
four Aristotelian elements and kind of using
like-- before Avatar came out, I remember
talking to some people and being like, "I'm
so tired of water, earth, fire, air as your
magic system."
And yet in this story, they did it fantastically
well and kind of proved that anything that
has become a cliché, done well, stops being
a cliché real fast and starts being an advantage
instead of like-- what do they say in programing?
It's a feature, not a bug.
The fact that these bendings are established,
that you can kind of kind of imagine what
would a fire bender do, that you can make
that leap by yourself, and then they can show
this person and then expand on it in their
world, can be very handy.
Now, the danger with some of these things
is, some things that have become used so often,
such as the vampire, what is a vampire, that
you also pull a lot of baggage.
The Aristotelian elements, not as much.
But you do have to watch for this.
You're like, if I'm going to use a vampire
to cut corners, but then my vampires are very
different from vampires in other stories,
you're losing some of that worldbuilding learning
curve stuff that you've got, and you're going
to end up replacing it with info dumps that
you're going to have to constantly remind
the reader that my vampires aren't like these
other vampires, which in some ways is as much
or more work than it is to just come up with
your own thing.
So that's a push and pull you have to kind
of come up with on your own.
STUDENT: Avatar has one of the best maps to
plot stories.
BRANDON: Yes.
STUDENT: Because they're constantly moving
everywhere, and every place they move to has
a big impact on the story.
BRANDON: Right.
Using the map, the actual, like we talked
about, in the travelogue, that having a map
with places you can go opens up a lot of mystery,
but also opens up you can follow the characters
along.
And Avatar, of course, has the map split up
by kind of factions, which really enhances
the sort of we're having an argument together.
All right.
And there's a lot of conflict going on.
How about that?
We have to move on.
Otherwise, we'll spend all our time on this.
Firefly.
Anyone want to talk about how the worldbuilding
of Firefly enhances the storytelling of Firefly?
OK.
Go ahead.
STUDENT: It's really easy to feel the desperation
and the difficulty that the characters are
in when you understand how just kind of uncaring
the universe around them is, on one hand,
and then on the other hand.
If they get noticed by the Federation or whatever
the government group is called, they're just
going to squash like a bug.
They don't really care at all.
BRANDON: Right.
Establishing an uncaring universe where you
can get squashed like a bug, and also this
kind of oppressive group.
And then I would add to it, using the sort
of Wild West metaphor to reinforce that they
are in a place where they can get away with
some things.
They're outside the law, allows them to have
some flexibility within the system.
STUDENT: We learn a lot about Malcolm and
Zoe's characters by the fact that they were
in a rebellion that lost.
BRANDON: Right.
STUDENT: So you automatically learn a lot
about the history of their characters, as
well as learning about how the Federation
is now.
BRANDON: Putting them in a rebellion that
lost is an excellent way to talk about there
being this evil empire.
To talk about their characterization is that
I fought, I lost, I've stopped caring.
No, I really haven't.
But I pretend I have.
Like, that gives excellent worldbuilding that
relates the story.
Absolutely.
Go ahead.
STUDENT: I think the introduction of the Reavers
was extremely well done, because it wasn't--
I mean, it was, like, they were meeting the
readers.
And then she says something super scary, which
tells you just how bad it is.
And you're also in a super tense situation,
which sets up for pretty much everything else
that comes later.
BRANDON: Yeah.
Introduction of the Reavers.
It's called Reavers, right?
Reavers, she says, was done very well.
And, yeah, I agree.
And in fact, part of this whole uncaring universe
enhances the danger.
Like in a lot of science fiction, something
like the Reavers, which are just like space
pirates who've gone crazy, would not be that
dangerous.
But in this universe, they're super dangerous,
because it's an uncaring universe and it's
not full of force users and things like that.
Yeah.
STUDENT: I think a big thing is over the course
of the series, you become so familiar with
Serenity that it almost becomes a character
unto itself.
BRANDON: Right.
STUDENT: It becomes a place that you want
to be.
I think that's something that a lot of visual
types of media have in common.
BRANDON: Yeah.
STUDENT: Like with Avatar, the aesthetic pulls
you in.
BRANDON: The aesthetic pulls you in.
Serenity, the ship becomes a character.
I would say that that's a good rule of thumb,
regardless of what you're doing, that you
want your setting to become a character unto
itself, and treat it much as the way you would
treat a character, and apply some of the lessons
that we're going to talk about in the character
weeks to your setting, making it have interesting
quirks.
It maybe won't have motivations, but it can
be consistent in what it presents to the characters.
All right.
Let's quickly just do one on The Expanse and
one on Dune.
The Expanse.
Who wants to handle The Expanse?
We'll go over here.
STUDENT: The nice thing about The Expanse
is that it makes everything really dangerous
immediately.
You're in space all the time.
You're always dealing with really physical
problems and it forces the captain and his
crew to make the captain and his crew to make
difficult decisions all the time.
BRANDON: Forces the captain and the crew to
make difficult decisions all time, and it's
another kind of uncaring universe, dangerous.
And I would say some the world building in
The Expanse, like, a lot of the tension in
The Expanse is either political tensions,
or it is something is broken, and we need
to fix it, is kind of how things go.
And so they do a very good job of showing,
you need to understand the physics of this
world if you're going to fly around space
because you need to fix things that are broken.
And if you don't, you're going to get squished.
Dune.
We cannot cover Dune by one person, but let's
see if somebody wants to handle Dune.
By the way, Dune is my favorite worldbuilding
sci-fi/fantasy world, probably of all time.
So go ahead.
Why does Dune's worldbuilding enhance its
story?
STUDENT: Well, you're dropped in a setting
where computers are immediately illegalized
right at the start of the book, so you understand
why there's not such a high technological
place there.
But at the same time, you're brought in to
understand why there's this space war going
on with the trading of spice.
It just gives that sense of tension throughout
the entire story, is when you're dealing with
it.
BRANDON: Yeah.
Gives tension to the story and things like
this.
I would say one of the elements that makes
it work is the spice.
By having your fantastical resource be what
the universe needs to function, but also be
central to the mythology and lore of the people
living on this planet, and immediately important
to the political control of the main character
who's been put in charge of it, it becomes
the lynchpin piece that makes it all work.
And that making a fantastical resource work
that way really enhances the fact that this
is going to be about factions fighting over
it and the religion and how it intersects
with some people wanting it for money, some
people wanting it for trade, other people
wanting for religious purposes, all just enhances
this idea.
We could talk about Dune for an entire three-hour
session, I'm willing to bet.
But let's go ahead and move on to this idea
of how you actually do this.
This is all great.
A lot of what we've been talking about here
is kind of the abstract stuff.
So how do you, Brandon Sanderson, sit down
and build a system where this all works, where
you're worldbuilding is done in service of
your story.
How do you begin?
And I usually divide my worldbuilding into
two general categories.
I have what I call the physical setting and
the cultural setting.
This just helps me have a division point in
my mind of the different types of things that
I'm going to try to world build.
Now, physical setting, for me, is all the
stuff that would exist whether or not there
were sentient beings on the planet doing things.
If you remove them all from the planet, this
stuff would all exist.
So this is things like the weather patterns.
Or, the tectonic activity.
Why don't you start throwing some more at
me and we'll put them up on here?
What else can you do for physical worldbuilding?
STUDENT: The map.
BRANDON: OK.
The map.
Yeah.
What else?
STUDENT: Wildlife.
BRANDON: Flora and fauna.
OK.
What else?
STUDENT: Some magic.
BRANDON: Magic.
I think you could say that the law of the
magic would exist without-- this is the physics,
the cosmology of the universe.
What else we got?
STUDENT: The color of the sky.
BRANDON: Yeah, yeah.
The visuals.
Yeah.
STUDENT: The cosmology.
BRANDON: What's that?
The cosmology.
Right.
Yep.
STUDENT: Climate and terrain.
BRANDON: Climate and terrain.
Terrain and climate.
Are you guys going to make me spell climate?
STUDENT: C-l-i-m-a-t-e.
BRANDON: L-i-m-a-t-e.
Yeah.
STUDENT: What kind of people the people are.
BRANDON: Yeah.
Races.
We'll go ahead and stop there.
We could go on for a little bit longer.
But this one starts to get-- you run through
them pretty quickly, what these things would
be.
Let's go over to cultural setting.
Let's start talking about all the different
things you can world build with cultural setting.
Start throwing them at me.
STUDENTS: (shouting out answers)
BRANDON: Religion.
Government.
Economics.
Economics.
Gender roles.
Borders.
Fashion.
Food lore.
History.
History, which is too big.
But there's lots of things underneath it.
Rites of passage.
That's actually r-i-t-e-s of passage.
Hierarchy.
Oh, that's another one that's hard to spell.
Social ladders.
That's one of the words that my computer has
automatically, because I type it wrong every
time, to just change for me in autocorrect.
You know what else I can't spell?
I can't spell villain.
I always put the I in the wrong place.
What else you say?
Accents.
Yeah.
Languages.
Taboos/mores.
Military.
Yeah.
Military tradition.
Greetings.
Swear words.
Yeah.
Oh, boy.
We could go on for a long time, couldn't we?
One lesson of this is there's a ton of things
that human beings do that are really interesting
and really fascinating, and you could probably
spend the rest of your life building a world
where you took everything that we wrote on
the board, let's say we took an hour, wrote
everything we think of on the board, and then
you could spend 80 years building a world
where you consider every one of these things.
Remember what we talked about last week with
the iceberg?
Yeah.
If you realistically want to have a career
in sci-fi/fantasy, you are going to need to
be able to produce, I would say, a book every
two years at minimum.
Now it depends on your subgenre and depends
on how popular your first book is.
If your first book's pretty popular, that
moves to once every 10 years.
No names mentioned.
If you want to have a career in this, you
need to assume that you're going to, once
you go full time on it, want to be able to
produce a book a year.
All right?
If you are producing a novel every year, they
can all be in the same series, if it takes
off, though, as a little aside, if you're
trying to break in, you have a decision point
to make, which is how much you write in the
same series and how much do you not.
When I was breaking in, I realized if I sent
off a book and someone rejected it that I
couldn't send them book two.
And so if I wrote 10 books and they were all
in the same series, and then the first book
got rejected by all six major publishers back
then, there's only five now, but got rejected
by all six back in the days before self-publishing
was really viable, then those 10 books could
not be sold, until maybe later if I broke
in.
So that is why, of the novels I wrote before
I broke in, there were 13 of them, only one
of them was a sequel, and it was a sequel
to my first book where, this will happen with
your first book sometimes, you just get halfway
done with what you wanted to do and you realize
it's too long and you're like, all right,
this is the end.
And then you just write the other half.
That happens a lot when you're a newer writer
because you don't know how to estimate how
long a story will take you.
But basically I wrote 12, 11 if you count
some of the things I did separate different
things when I was trying to break in.
That served me very well because I was able
to always have a bunch of things on submission.
Now there's somebody who did the very, very
different way for me, and that's Naomi Novick,
who broke out around the same time I did.
She had already written several books in her
Temeraire, His Majesty's Dragon series.
And it turns out that the first one was really
good, and it got picked up and then she was
able to say them, "Yeah, I've got two or three."
I can never remember how many more she had
done, but she's like, "I got two more done."
And they're like, "Wow."
And this is the first instance of me seeing
what eventually became a very strong strategy
for self-publishing.
And that was they published one a month for
three months.
It was May, June, July, I think something
like that.
First one came out.
Boom.
Second one came out; third one came out.
Stephen King quote on the first, Anne McCaffrey
quote on the second, Terry Brooks quote on
the third, I think.
And they did them straight to paperback, which
earns a lot less money, but generally is easier
to get someone to try out a new author.
And they flooded the bookstores with these,
and everyone was reading them, and they were
fantastic.
And it just basically gave a huge jumpstart
to her entire career.
And then the next one started coming out in
hardcover.
And all of a sudden it was, like, overnight
Naomi was one of the best-selling authors
in the genre, selling what other people had
taken 10 years to build up to because of how
well they had done that sort of marketing
blitz at the beginning.
That's what she gained by writing everything
in the same series.
This is very common, by the way, and self-publishing
these days, in indie publishing, where you
write a bunch of books in a series.
Usually for indie publishing, you want them
to be short, you want them to be episodic,
and you want them to be fast paced.
So you're looking at something either romance
focused, something action adventure focused,
something mystery focused, where each one
is its own story and then you get all those
ready.
You've written like 12, and then you're like,
"I'm releasing one every two weeks or every
week for this huge blitz, and I'm going to
pay for all of my marketing money, and all
of my book bubbing, and all of my Amazon ads
during this three-month blitz where I'm releasing
all these things to try to jump start a series.
I have never done this.
So you would have to ask some indie authors
who have how it's worked for them, but I have
seen it be very successful with various people.
Regardless, you're going to have this decision
point of, do you write all in the same world
or not?
There is a halfway point, and this is where
they're all in the same world, but different
characters.
They're like the fake sequels to each other,
kind of like Anne McCaffrey did.
You see this a lot in romance where it's like,
here is a cast of characters, and here's the
first one's romance, and the next one you're
going to get this character's romance, and
then this character's romance.
And you could theoretically rejigger it so
you could sell any of those first if you needed
to, depending on how you write it.
Regardless, that was a little aside.
If you're going to want to do this, you're
going to have to be good at worldbuilding
effectively, which generally is a synonym
for quickly, but not necessarily.
This means you're not going to do all of this
for every book.
In fact, you're going to highlight a few of
these things in a given story.
Generally, I pick one from this side.
A very big surprise for anyone who's read
my books.
From this side, hey, we're going to have a
really strange weather pattern in this world,
and we're going to then let that very strange
weather pattern let us spiral into a few of
these other things.
But they're all coming off of the interesting
weather pattern.
And then I will pick a couple of these and
I will really focus on them.
Elantris, I focused a lot more on the linguistics.
Why?
Because the linguistics was the same as the
magic, and so I spent more time understanding
what different languages people would speak.
In Mistborn, no time on linguistics, almost
none at all.
All of the linguistics in Mistborn were like,
they speak galactic standard.
They all speak the same language.
There's been an emperor in charge for a thousand
years.
I'm not going to worry about the history.
I'm not going to worry about the linguistics,
because we're focused on the now.
And I'm going to spend my time on the political
situation right now and also have a more complex
magic system with all of those sort of-- imagine
you like have worldbuilding points.
Like if you guys play, like, Warhammer or
whatever, and they're like, you have 100 points
to build your army, you have 100 points to
build your setting.
And after you get above that threshold, you
start to lose your audience because you're
stuffing too much in there.
And the number of points you get is depending
on your subgenre that you're writing.
Epic fantasy, more points.
Urban fantasy, far fewer points.
So you want to then target those points on
the things that are going to enhance your
story in a way that's going to be interesting,
exciting for the reader, but not feel like
you're leaving stuff out, just feel like you're
focusing really well.
This is kind of Sanderson's Third Law talked
about in this way.
Let's just do a little experiment here.
Let's write up, I'm going to write up four
general genres of story.
You have an action adventure.
You have a mystery.
You have a romance.
And give me one more.
STUDENT: Horror.
BRANDON: Horror.
You've got a horror.
All right so let's pick one of these on this
side, and let's come up with a different take
on it for each of these four things to build
a setting that would enhance our story.
Raise your hand, somebody.
We'll have you pick one of these things we've
written up here.
Go ahead.
Anyone want to pick one?
Go ahead.
STUDENT: Climate.
Super cold everywhere.
BRANDON: OK, climate.
The climate's going be different for each
one.
We're just going to deal with the climate.
So let's say you wanted to build a climate
that was going to work really interestingly
to enhance your action adventure story.
How would you do that?
STUDENT: Everything's on fire.
BRANDON: Everything's on fire.
I like that.
CLASS: (laughing)
BRANDON: I don't know if that's actually a
climate.
I don't know if Australia this summer is a
climate but give me another one.
Let me ask you this.
How would that enhance an action-adventure?
Shyanne, was it you, the one that said that?
Yeah.
How does having everything on fire enhance
an action adventure?
STUDENT: It's volcanic.
They're learning to live on a volcanic planet.
BRANDON: They're learning to live.
How does that enhance an action adventure
story?
STUDENT: They have to avoid not falling in
the lava.
BRANDON: OK, so you're going to have an action
adventure story, which often will have moving
from place to place and exploring exciting
locations.
You have a dangerous, it’s not really a
climate, but we'll go ahead.
We've got a dangerous biome that is really
dangerous to explore.
But the characters are going to have to do
it anyway.
That enhances an action adventure.
What else do we got on action adventure?
Someone else suggest one.
Go ahead.
STUDENT: Super mild climate and then all of
a sudden turns hard and everything breaks
down.
BRANDON: Yeah.
Out of nowhere, the climate goes crazy.
In fact, I think there are action adventure
movies based around the idea of suddenly climate
change hits us tomorrow.
And now we have an action adventure story.
You can see that they've done that, though.
Sudden change in status quo is fantastic for
an action adventure story.
This is basically how you kick off an action
adventure story, is a sudden change in status
quo.
Whether that change in status quo is climate
change happen tomorrow, for some reason, or
it's, your father was investigating the lost
ark of the Covenant and he's missing.
Sudden change in status quo kicks off an action
adventure is a great way to start.
Yeah, go ahead.
STUDENT: Regular fog banks reducing visibility
to three feet.
BRANDON: Regular fog bags reducing visibility
three feet.
How does this enhance an action adventure
story?
STUDENT: Enemies are all around you and you
have no idea.
BRANDON: Enemies are all around and you have
no idea.
Great.
All right let's move on to a mystery.
Let's use-- shall we use climate, or do you
guys want to move to a different one?
Different one.
All right.
Pick something.
STUDENTS: (answering indistinctly)
BRANDON: Oh, wait.
We'll do these ones in-- oh, fashion.
We'll go ahead and do one of these.
Why not?
Someone said fashion.
So we're going to talk about how fashion can
enhance a mystery story.
How could you use some worldbuilding with
your fashion in a way that will make your
mystery more interesting?
STUDENT: Many pockets.
BRANDON: Many pockets.
All right.
Hey, someone said masks over here.
A society that wears masks is going to be
great for mystery because it will enhance
the theme of your story, which is who is it?
Who done it?
They all wear masks.
Go ahead.
STUDENT: People change every single 20 minutes
of the day.
BRANDON: They change every 20 minutes?
Maybe a little extreme, but maybe everybody
changes for each meal.
How would that enhance a mystery?
STUDENT: Well, say you have a detective.
He has no idea.
He knows what someone looks like, but they're
constantly changing.
BRANDON: Oh, you mean change their features
as well?
STUDENT: No.
Just [___]
BRANDON: Okay.
Yeah.
All right.
Go ahead.
STUDENT: Or if they're living in a world that
destroys their clothes from living around
there constantly, they go put on another pair
of clothes because the atmosphere disintegrates
them.
BRANDON: Atmosphere disintegrating your clothes.
Are you sure that's not for the romance?
CLASS: (laughing)
BRANDON: All right.
Let's go over here.
Go ahead.
STUDENT: [___]
BRANDON: Oh, cool.
Look, listen to this.
This is a great idea.
Let's quiet down.
Cool idea.
STUDENT: The murder happened at Comicon, and
it was Naruto day.
BRANDON: Yeah.
That's actually genius, right?
There was a Naruto cosplayer who committed
the murder, but there's 50 of them at the
con and we have to try to find them all.
That's using fashion perfectly in your story's
world building.
I love that one.
Go ahead.
STUDENT: Everyone's wearing the same clothes,
or the person [___] camouflage.
BRANDON: OK.
Yeah.
You've got a society where people look very
similar to one another.
You could even go a step further and say,
this is a society of clones.
Everybody looks the same.
But now you got to figure out which one of
these killed someone, if there's specific
motivation to one of the clones.
Yeah, go ahead.
Did you have one?
STUDENT: Maybe everybody, or different families
have, like, different embroidery they put
on their clothes.
STUDENT: Oh, like kilts, the tartans.
STUDENT: You can trace where some article
of clothing is from, and maybe they traded
them.
BRANDON: Right.
So what she's saying is there's maybe special
embroidery that certain families have or things
like the tartan.
Is it called tartan?
Yes.
And things like this.
Like, you could imagine a detective who is
a fashion expert and solves crimes based on
the fashion.
Which, there's got to be someone has done
this.
But I don't know.
I'm sure.
What's that?
STUDENT: Legally Blonde.
BRANDON: Legally Blonde is actually a really
great mystery.
It's paced very, very well.
But something like that, you could totally
use.
Perfect idea.
All right.
Let's go to our romance.
What are we going to use from around here
for our romance?
STUDENTS: (calling out ideas)
BRANDON: All right.
All right.
All right.
We'll go with military structure.
How can you have an interesting military tradition
or structure and tell a great romance story
in it?
STUDENT: Lovers have to be star crossed.
BRANDON: Lovers have to be star crossed.
So--?
STUDENT: The military star crosses them.
BRANDON: I mean, are you saying that an enlisted
man falls in love with an officer or something
like that?
STUDENT: Like, whatever military hierarchy.
BRANDON: Yeah.
You're breaking the military hierarchy.
Or, I mean, the easy go-tos are she's on one
side of the war and he's on the other.
But what can you do that is a different military
tradition or thing from our world that does
not exist in our world that would be distinctive
for a fantasy world that would let you tell
an interesting romance?
All right.
Go ahead.
STUDENT: Maybe there are different factions
of the military and they each have honed their
craft in their families.
And they come from different paths [___].
But which--
BRANDON: Right.
Right.
STUDENT: Like what culture would you stay
in.
Would you stay in [___]?
BRANDON: Right.
The assassins are a certain hierarchy in the
military, and they all intermarry.
But suddenly an assassin falls in love with,
you know, a dragon rider.
Right.
OK.
OK.
Let's go back to you.
I haven't had anyone back there.
Go ahead.
STUDENT: A Jedi can't date ambassadors.
BRANDON: Jedi can't date ambassadors.
CLASS: (groans and laughs)
BRANDON: I don't like sand.
CLASS: (laughs)
BRANDON: All right.
All right.
All right.
Have you done one yet?
You haven't.
Right.
STUDENT: No.
BRANDON: Yeah, go ahead.
STUDENT: I was going to say, instead of having
trial by combat, what if you had romance by
combat.
BRANDON: Romance by combat.
Actually, I've seen good romance stories on
this, where it's like-- yeah.
Star Trek.
But also there's some classic stories about,
if you want to marry my daughter, you have
to defeat my champion.
But then the daughter is the champion.
Right.
That's Brave.
But there's also, there's a Greek story that's
that, I want to say.
Yeah, an old Greek story.
But, yeah.
Go ahead.
STUDENT: Or like the Parshendi war couples.
BRANDON: Yeah.
STUDENT: In order to be in the military, you
have to be married and fight with your spouse.
But it's a BYU freshman and he can't find
his wife.
BRANDON: That's actually a really great idea
for a story.
It's kind of this thing where you've got like
the Pacific Rim where you need a team for
some reason to work this military.
You could have some Big Mac, where it's like
this, and you need to be a pair.
I mean, it works very interestingly in Dragonriders
of Pern, where if your dragons hook up, it's
kind of almost impossible for you to not hook
up with the person that is the other dragon
because of the way that the bond between human
and dragon works, which is also kind of the
same but different sort of idea.
There's so many things you could do there.
So.
Yeah.
Great, wonderful idea.
You should write that story.
That'd be a great story.
Yes.
All right.
Let's do a horror.
Who wants to pick the horror one?
STUDENT: Economics.
STUDENT: Tectonics.
BRANDON: Economics.
Economics.
I love it.
All right.
Oh, someone's really excited.
STUDENT: The corona virus destroys China,
and so the economy is in chaos.
BRANDON: OK.
OK.
The corona virus, it destroys China.
So the economy is in chaos?
How else could you use economy to enhance
a horror story.
We're going to go in the back over here.
STUDENT: A certain monster is chasing you,
and if you have the money, you can buy the
solution to whatever the monster.
You can buy a gun.
BRANDON: OK.
Monster is chasing you.
You can use money to make the monster not
chase you in some way.
Maybe you can buy off the people who have
sent the monster against you, and it goes
to someone else.
Maybe you have to be on the that the monster
is going to kill.
But you can put a whole bunch of people by
paying it on the list before you.
And if you can fill the list with enough people
for it to kill, that will never get to you,
then you're in good shape.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Oh, yeah.
Go ahead.
STUDENT: How about you have some races infiltrated
and they took over all of the major stock
markets, and then it turned out that they
came to the planet and took over.
BRANDON: Right.
Alien invasion via stock market first.
Like this.
Over here in the red hat.
STUDENT: Adam Smith's invisible hand that
controls the economy actually is a real hand.
BRANDON: (laughing) Gold star.
Gold star.
OK, people who haven't done one yet.
People who haven't done one yet.
Go ahead.
STUDENT: Like in The Monkey's Paw, there was
an economic pressure that made them make terrible
decisions.
BRANDON: Yeah.
Yeah.
Monkey's Paw.
Economic pressure making people make terrible
decisions is a mainstay of horror.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Back here.
STUDENT: It's April 16th, the day after tax
day.
And you wake up and they're not done.
CLASS: (laughing)
BRANDON: Yeah.
Yeah.
OK.
Isaac's got one.
Isaac, what you got?
STUDENT: It's a world where people have horrible,
debilitating nightmares.
But you can get out of it if you get into
a higher tax bracket.
BRANDON: (laughing) That's a little more dystopian
than it is horror.
But yeah.
OK.
All right.
We'll do a couple more.
Go ahead.
STUDENT: Everyone's a contract killer.
BRANDON: Everyone's a contract killer.
Hey, way to bring it back around to John Wick.
Yeah.
CLASS: (laughing)
STUDENT: Hiring your neighbor to kill the
person across the street.
BRANDON: Yeah.
I mean, the purge is basically an economic,
or political, social hierarchy driven horror
series.
And that kind of plays along those sorts of
same ideas.
Go ahead.
STUDENT: Super rich people can buy you so
they can hunt you down.
BRANDON: Yeah.
Yeah.
Dangerous Game.
Super rich people have a way that they can
hunt you down.
Let's go ahead.
Well, we'll wrap these up.
We could go on and on and on, I'm sure.
So why do I do this exercise?
Well, the point of this exercise is to point
out we could take one of these things and
we can riff on it to the point that that one
thing, changed in an interesting way, can
make your whole fantasy story.
Because of that, you don't need all of this.
It is good to be aware of the different options
that are available to you.
But it's also really important to pick a narrow
focus for most of your stories.
OK?
And the sub-genre you're in, again, will let
you determine how many of these things you
do.
But remember Rule Number Three.
One of these done really well is almost always
better than trying to do 5% of all of them.
Now, a lot of times, what I will do is I will
pick, for instance, weather, the high storms
in Roshar.
I'm like, all right, I'm writing epic fantasy.
I've got a lot of worldbuilding points.
This is my focus and physical setting.
There's a magical hurricane that hits the
world every couple of days.
Now, what I want to do is I want to interconnect
it.
And if there's one thing I want you to take
from this particular lesson, it is that picking
an idea and then interconnecting it into the
rest is a lot of times the best way to create
an epic fantasy or epic science fiction.
If you say, okay, weather is our focus, that,
of course, is going to influence our climate,
obviously.
How can I have the weather then influence
my flora and fauna?
Because what happens then is you're spending
your world building time on the storm and
how society reacts to this storm.
Then when you mentioned some little thing,
oh, yeah, these animals have a lifecycle that
uses the storm, the reader says, "Wow, that's
so expansive."
Because their imagination then takes that
and runs with it all along the directions
you want them to.
By showing one small thing, one small effect,
done really well, about how the worldbuilding
works, your reader will add so much more to
you.
And then when you say, all right, I'm going
to make sure the weather is tied into the
magic somehow, because this is our major worldbuilding
theme, that's where Stormlight comes from.
If you haven't read the books, the storm deposit's
magical energy, which you can use to fuel
your magic.
No storms, no magic.
Therefore, whether or not you're able to use
the magic as much as you want is based on
how often the storms are coming through and
your ability to tap into that.
And so suddenly we start reaching and saying,
all right, how does this affect our religion?
How does this affect our government?
How does this affect our economics?
Not all of it interconnects.
Once in a while, I'll pick a few things and
say, OK, gender roles in this world are really
wonky compared to, you know, what your average
American's gender roles would look like.
Women can read.
Men are forbidden.
What does that do?
And then I start to look at say, all right,
how does this affect this?
How does this affect this?
How does this go here?
Why do women wear one of their sleeves covering
one of their hands?
Well--
STUDENT: Why?
BRANDON: Why do they.
Well, the actual answer is, I think taboos
are really interesting, and when I was in
Korea, you didn't show the bottom of your
foot to people.
It was considered very taboo, which was just
bizarre to me.
And I thought human beings have really weird
and interesting taboos.
There are certain tribes in South America
that walk about naked as we would see it,
but they don't consider it naked because they
have their gourd on that is covering a certain
part of their male anatomy, just a bit of
it, but enough that it's not considered naked.
And we look at them like they're just naked.
They're like, no, I'm not.
I'm perfectly well clothed.
Taboos are really fascinating to me.
And so I wanted a fantastical taboo.
That's why it happened.
Now, my explanation in world was that there
was a really influential piece of writing
a long time ago where a philosopher said,
"Well, all the true feminine arts are one
handed," and refined women can paint and do
music and do art and all these things, but
all masculine skills require two hands and
they're like smashing swords against each
other and things like that.
And so refined society began to take this
less as one philosopher's random thing that
she came up with, which is actually not all
that accurate, and then started imposing social
mores to reinforce behavior as what happens.
And then Shardblades and Shardplate got abandoned
in large numbers.
And when you're in Shardplate, it doesn't
matter if you're male or female.
Because if a man has an average strength of
nine and a woman has an average strength of
seven and a Shardplate adds 50, then it doesn't
really matter anymore who's in that Shardplate
in relative strength.
And so certain factions started using this
as the social structure, an excuse to keep
women and basically eliminate 50 percent of
the competition for their Shardplate.
But this doesn't matter so much as doing something
that feels like it works in the society that
I'm writing.
Your explanations are not as important necessarily
as making it feel real.
Remind me next week if I have time.
One thing I missed from this lecture we didn't
get to is internal logic versus external logic.
And we will talk about that another week.
For now, go forth, build some worlds.
CLASS: (applause)
