All right, guys, today writer going to answer
questions.
Yay!
CLASS: Yay!
The things that you guys have written down
for me about plot we're going to talk over,
and then if I get bored of that we'll do maybe
a short lecture, maybe not.
It depends on how bored of answering your
questions that I get.
I'm just going to go down this list that my
assistant has given me, and I'm going to cherry
pick some questions.
If you have other questions about plot you
want to throw at me if we don't get to yours,
we will do for questions from the audience
today as well.
"How long is too long for introductions?"
Is the first question.
This an interesting question because, like
most writing questions the answer is "it depends"
on a lot of factors.
Novels are not like screenplays where it's
very easy to pinpoint the number of pages
you should spend doing a given thing because
a novel's length is going to vary wildly and
your structure is going to vary wildly, depending
on your own preferences and the genre you're
writing in.
While you can a screenplay format book that's
going to be like, "On page 6 you should have
done this," I can't tell you that for your
novel.
I can tell you this.
You generally want to go a little faster into
it that you are comfortable as a new writer.
The sooner you can introduce the tone of your
story and your character's main conflict,
maybe not the main conflict of the plot, but
how the character is going to relate to it,
the better off you're going to be.
What you want to really do is you want to
sell us on being in this character's head,
and that is your-- if you can do nothing but
sell us on the character's personality in
the first couple of chapters, you can coast
a long way on that in a novel.
This will also depend on your genre.
And, unfortunately, or maybe fortunately,
how famous you are.
Let me explain.
Readers going into a book are going to come
into it willing to give you a certain amount
of leeway.
If they have read previous books by you that
have had excellent payoffs by the end of that
book, then they will give you longer to establish
your introduction because they know that the
payoff will be worth it.
This is the advantage you get when you release
a number of books, and it's why I can get
away with Way of Kings more easily than you
could get away with Way of Kings.
I still would recommend you follow your passion
for telling the type of story you want to
tell, even if it is something like Way of
Kings that is going to have a steeper learning
curve.
Do your thing.
But understand, there's this way I talk about
stories and people picking up stories.
It's like, every reader has a certain number
of, like a threshold of crap they'll let an
author get away with.
Everyone's threshold is different, and the
things they count as crap that they have to
let the author get away with is different
based on the individual.
For instance, some readers might pick up a
book like this and that's immediately, "All
right, I'm skeptical, Sanderson.
I have read big books like this before that
have meandered a ton and then haven't had
a good payoff.
And because that's my experience, that's crap
that is going against your stuff I have to
put up with."
You already have basically a red mark against
you.
Other people pick up that book and go, "Oh,
I've had wonderful experiences with big books.
It is way cheaper on my pocketbook to buy
this with an Audible credit instead of this
with an Audible credit.
Same price.
One gives me 9 hours.
One gives me 55 hours."
If you want to know why Oathbringer was the
single most preordered book in the history
of Audible, 55 hours.
You can see how that reader desire and expectation
plays into giving you a red mark, or maybe
a green mark?
Something like that.
Readers all have different thresholds here.
But generally, you want to have as few red
marks as possible for the story you want to
tell.
The story you want to tell is more important
than getting rid of all red marks.
If you try to get rid of all potential red
marks that anyone could have against your
book, your book will probably turn out to
be bland and uninteresting and nobody will
love it.
So you're going to have to take risks.
You're going to have to do some things that
are going to turn off some readers, but then
are going to become selling points to other
readers.
That's why we have genre sections in bookstores,
because certain people, "That corner of Barnes
& Noble is the danger zone of nerddom and
I will never walk over there," and others
are for sure like, "Okay, where's the sci-fi
section?
Here."
That doesn't mean that we wouldn't enjoy other
types of stories, but we have enjoyed enough
stories in the past of this sort of thing,
that being sci-fi/fantasy immediately gives
us more of this green mark, so to speak.
It gives us more threshold.
We're like more willing to buy in.
This is a long way of saying how long is your
introduction.
Make it as short as possible to achieve your
goals for the type of story you're telling.
Get as soon as possible into the main characters
head, the main characters conflict, and the
proper tone of your story, as soon as is possible
for the type of story you want to tell.
You will rarely ever get feedback that, "Your
book started off too explosively and too interestingly,
and I was too interested in the character."
Never going to get that feedback.
You might get feedback that they're like,
"It progressed so quickly I didn't have time
to get to know the character, and I got whiplash,"
or things like that.
That can totally happen.
"How do you reverse engineer good stories
to rob them for their parts?"
And another question from the next week's
was, "Can you give us a big master list of
all the plot archetypes that are out there?
Pretty please?"
There were a bunch of you that wanted this.
I can't.
Because I haven't been able to find one.
Because I'm not sure how if people-- I know
a lot of people-- I share this story about
Joe Russo because I'm like, okay, I know other
people do this.
I met someone else that does it, that is able
to describe this way.
I'm sure there are lots of people out there
that do this, but I don't think anyone's made
a list.
If you look for "What are the basic stories?"
They will boil it down a little too far, and
you'll end up with rags to riches, that plot
archetype, which is fine.
But rags to riches, they're “Here are the
seven stories.”
I don't want the seven stories.
I want the 200 stories that are very commonly
used that you can adapt and create a framework.
I have not found anyone who has a good list
of that.
But Writing Excuses Elemental Genres season,
which I think is Season 11, we spend all of
that year breaking down Brandon's philosophy
on this story structure thing, and we look
at something like, here's a thriller type
of plot, here's how you build one of these,
and here are some examples.
And that might be your answer in long form.
I don't have just a list of them, I'm afraid.
Start making your own list.
When you go and you watch a movie.
The Marvel movies are actually really good
for this.
Because the Marvel movies are all superhero
movies, but one of the things that they have
done is they've said, "Well, we're going to
make each of them a different genre of film."
For instance, Captain America, The Winter
Soldier is a spy thriller.
It's hits all the beats of what a spy thriller
is, and you can compare that to several of
the Mission Impossibles and to other spy thrillers
and be like, all right, spy thriller type
thing.
Whereas the Ant Man films are comedic heists.
And you can be like, oh here are the heist
beats for a kind of comedic small crew heist,
as opposed to a large crew heist.
You can just kind of look at each of those
and be like, all right, here's Thor.
It's our epic fantasy.
Here is this-- you just start splitting them
up.
But start watching the movies you watch in
a different way.
Start reading the books you read in a different
way.
Say, can I boil this down to some similar
themes and similar plot archetypes of others
and build your own.
Because I don't think there's one out there
that covers all of these types of things the
way that we would want, or at least the way
that I like to talk about them.
Let's see.
"How can I more effectively nest plots?
How do you keep those from feeling like diversions?"
There were a number of questions along the
lines of how do I make sure that my subplots
don't feel like diversions, or that they're
interesting to the reader, and how do I nest
these things properly?
Really good question, because this is something
that is hard to do.
You might notice sometimes that you see a
film and you'll feel like, "This portion is
just a bunch of characters spinning their
wheels and not accomplishing anything, and
I felt bored by that side quest that they
were sent on."
How do you make the side quest relevant to
the main story?
How do you make multiple characters plot lines
relevant?
One thing I'll warn you of is that readers
will generally pick their favorites out of
a cast of characters.
I've found that generally they will gravitate
and pick a least favorite, a most favorite,
and a "I don't care" if there's like three.
But there always seems to be this balance
of "This is my favorite."
And the further you write in your book, the
more that that weight will actually, a lot
of readers will just kind of pick up momentum
on that.
"Oh, this is the character I don't want to
read as much."
It becomes kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It is one of the dangers of large, multi-viewpoint
books.
Of course, the advantage you gets is the variety
is itself a big green checkmark for a lot
of readers, where they would rather read even
some characters they're not as interested
in occasionally to keep the story having a
lot of variety and to have the epic scope,
which is why we often like to write these
big epics.
But I will warn you, sometimes that's going
to happen, and sometimes it's inevitable.
At least, if it's not inevitable, I haven't
yet found the method of making a large cast
dynamic with multiple viewpoints that people
don't start polarizing about their favorites
as they compare them.
Perhaps there is a way to do it that I haven't
figured out yet.
But, how do you make your side plots relevant?
Well, there are a couple of ways to do this.
One of them is to make sure that we are really
invested and engaged by the viewpoint characters
and we understand their motivations.
Not to pile on The Last Jedi, because there
are a lot of good things about that film.
I'm impressed with a lot of what Ryan Johnson
was trying to do in that film.
But one of the things that a lot of people
say is, the plot with Finn and Rose felt very--
it didn't connect with a lot of people in
the same way.
This might have to do with promises and connecting
to the character.
For instance, Finn is introduced in the movie
in a way that, if you haven't seen it, this
is a character who had an interesting relationship
with another character in the first movie,
and then is introduced in the next movie saying,
"I need to get to my friend and I need to
help my friend."
And instead of doing that, the story sends
him on a side quest.
This is very much the same problem I had in
the original draft of Oathbringer, where I
say, here is your promise.
This character's really interested in X, and
all the characters are really interested in
going to X, and then I sent them to Y.
And the initial draft everyone's like, yeah,
but this is the side quest.
I know this is the side quest.
When are we going to get to what you've told
me was the main story?
So Finn coming out and saying, "I need to
get to Rey, my friend, and help her some way,"
but somehow ends up on this wacky adventure
riding horses and things, where all the while
you're been keyed in your head to be like,
"Yeah, but--" Even though after that introduction
they did work to try and establish why this
side quest was important, it just felt like
the character wasn't achieving his motivations,
and we were not invested in what the character
was doing to the extent that we wanted to
be.
We were really invested in the A plot of that
movie, a lot of people were, and then the
B plot of the movie seemed like it was going
to be involved and then wasn't.
It's hard to pick apart why something like
this, a very successful movie is not something
I want to sit and bag on, but I look at that
and think there's a lesson there in making
sure when you are doing these subplots with
your side characters, make sure the reader
is invested and wanting to see more of that
character, or at least that their character
arc is going to be engaging and interesting.
Make sure you're making right promises for
that character, and the showing progress upon
the thing you promised the reader that you
were going to get.
You use all the same sort of tools you use
for the main plot line on this side character.
And then it is usually really handy to start
showing how this is going to combine to the
main story, how it's relevant to the main
story in some way.
Now, this isn't an absolute must.
Particularly in a lot of epic fantasies, you
start with, here are four characters in different
parts of the world, and they're doing their
own thing, and you're not quite sure how they
connect until at the end of the first book
and maybe not even until later volumes, and
in that case you have to treat them each like
their own book, rather than side quests, which
means do all the things that you're doing
with the other characters.
Make sure people are invested, that you have
progress, that you have plotting and these
sorts of things.
If you do your job right, people will be invested
in that character to the point that it won't
feel like a deviation from the main plot.
It will feel like its own secondary plot.
Those are separate from the stories where
all the characters are together, and you want
to start to express subthemes and subcharacters.
This sort of thing just kind of comes down
to making sure you're keeping a good balance.
It's much easier if all your characters are
in the same place.
The reader's going to give you a ton more
leeway if your characters are all together,
at least at the start of the story.
Guardians of the Galaxy, the second Guardians
of the Galaxy movie, is a good example of
giving a lot of subplots to a lot of different
characters, and introducing them all while
they're together, and then some of them split
off a little bit.
But the idea is you're invested in this whole,
and you're invested in the story, and then
because so many of them are together for so
much of it, taking a little bit of time away
to find out why this character's this, or
why this character's that, and then wrapping
up those arcs, can feel very satisfying when
everybody kind of has their own little mini
arc through the course of the story.
You have an advantage over a filmmaker in
that you have way more pages to play with.
You can take a chapter or two now and then
for a side character, and particularly if
they're all on the same place on the same
quest, and you're still like-- What you want
to do is you'll be like, "We're going to see
through Character D's eyes for this chapter.
And this character's perspective on what we're
doing as we go on our quest is going to add
a new and interesting view of this quest,
and we're going to see they have this subplot
where they are in love with this other character,
and they haven't expressed it openly."
And you say, "Oh, that's really cool."
But you also still get the main plot progressing.
Because say they're on a travelogue.
They arrive at this next place.
You're still progressing your main plot while
showing the world through a different character's
eyes.
Way easier in that case than if you split
them up.
But, like I said, if you do your job right,
if you treat them all as when you're in their
eyes, they are the protagonist of their own
story, then you're going to be much-- you're
not going to have problems with this as much
as you might think.
"Sometimes twists can be cliché, because
some writers just write twists for twists'
sake.
How can I avoid that?"
Excellent question.
And this is a relevant thing to be asking
yourself and to be thinking about.
Early in my career, particularly when I was
unpublished but getting really close to being
published, I started to find that I was doing
this, that I'm like, "There aren't enough
twists in this book.
I'm going to put in more."
I had to step back and start asking myself
why.
What emotion is this twist adding?
What is the purpose of it?
There are totally valid purposes for twists.
When, early in a book, when you kill of a
main character in a way that is unexpected,
it can add tension for the rest of the story
and the rest of the series.
Game of Thrones did this and earned a huge
amount of sort of tension-building ability
by giving the idea that main characters were
not safe from being killed, and in fact, it
became the big selling point for the series,
is it's a series where characters are not
protected from the consequences of their actions,
which is why many people were upset later
in the series when it started to seem like
people were being protected from the consequence
of their actions.
It became the selling point.
So that twist, the idea of taking the reader's
expectations and turning them against the
reader, that subversion, serves a real purpose
in that story.
You can ask yourself what does this subversion
mean.
But let me tell you a story I often relate
in this class that I haven't done this year
yet.
This is about, so forgive me if you've heard
this story, I have a friend who released a
first book around the same time that I did.
Mine really took off and this friend's book
series just did not take off on the same level.
One time we were sitting and chatting, and
I had read some of this book but had decided
pretty early on it just wasn't a book for
me.
It was not poorly written.
It was a perfectly acceptable book.
But it just didn't quite work for me.
He was asking, "So why was that?"
I'm like, "Well, it felt like a very kind
of standard quest fantasy, a very Terry Brooks-esque
standard quest fantasy.
I really enjoyed those when I was younger
and read a bunch of them, but I'm, as a reader,
just kind of bored of that story.
I've read it enough times that I just don't
want to read it anymore.
I've heard a lot of feedback from people about
this same idea."
And he said, "But that's the thing.
About the three-quarter mark you realize that
it isn't a standard quest fantasy.
It turns everything on its head.
It inverts all of those tropes, and it undermines
everything you've been thinking.
It does this really cool new direction for
the story."
Now, I didn't get there, so I can't speak
to whether this is true or not.
But it set me thinking a lot about this idea
of subverting expectations and twists as stories
go.
His book seems a perfect example of why simply
subverting expectations is not itself necessarily
a virtue.
This is because if you wanted a classic quest
Terry Brooks fantasy and you read this book,
what is your reaction likely to be?
"Hey, you gave me three quarters of the book
full of promises of a certain style, and I'm
the person that wanted that, and then you
took it away from me at the end."
Now, if you're a person who loves subverted
expectations, and you love the idea of taking
classic tropes and twisting them and mangling
them, what happens to you?
What's your response to this book?
“I don't get to the part that I would enjoy,
because I'm bored by the first three quarters
of it.”
So whether or not the book actually did this,
this is an interesting object lesson, I think,
for you to take, where not fulfilling on your
promises is not a virtue.
Now, if you can do a subversion in a way that
gives the reader more than they expected,
better than they expected, or if you spent
a lot of time convincing them they actually
want something else, then you give them that,
then those subversions all work.
And if you can use a subversion to expand
the reader's desire to see more, if you can
expand on a character-- The classic example
of this is at the end of the second Star Wars
movie, well, the fifth, you know what I mean,
Empire Strikes Back, when we find out that
Darth Vader is Luke's father.
Now, this was not necessarily something we
were wanting.
So you could say, "Well, this wasn't promised,"
though it kind of was because you had foreshadowing
with the cutting off of Vader's head and there's
Luke's face in it during the training.
So there are those little clues.
But you could say, "No, no.
I wasn't getting into this story to have a
huge reveal at the end.
So why does that work when this other he pulled
the rug out from underneath doesn't?"
T
he reason mainly being is this story is about
Luke's quest.
It's about his journey as a character.
This thing at the end lends us huge investment
in his character as it develops.
You knew something was going to go wrong,
because you don't have the main character
ignore Yoda and have it turn out all right.
Like, that is totally set up.
So you knew something.
You were prepped.
You have this dangerous scene where he's training
with Yoda.
He disobeys his master.
He goes off.
Everything's going wrong, and you know that
the other show is going to drop.
You've been promised that.
You're really kind of wanting it, right?
You're wanting, "Oh, Luke better pay for this."
Then he finds out about this whole thing,
and it's earthshaking, and it's incredible,
and it expands your understanding of the character.
It introduced new conflict that's going to
be really interesting into this relationship.
It is not so much a subversion, though it
is slightly, as a really great escalation
of the conflict.
So try to do that if you can.
Escalate instead of completely undermine.
All right.
"Will Spensa and Jorgen ever get ma-a-a-ried?"
with lots of i's.
“Can a story be sort of episodic and still
keep you turning the page?”
Yes, you absolutely can.
A story can be episodic and keep you turning
the page.
Most of the time, the secret to episodic page
turners is to have a good hook at the end
of your episode to promise what the next episode's
going to be and make that really interesting.
One of my personal philosophies is, if you're
going to do this, there are two ways that
you can give a twist hook ending to a chapter
or an episode of something you're doing.
One is to say, she went to the door.
The knock came to the door.
She went to it and opened the door and-- cut.
This is kind of a classic mystery formula
hook at the end.
Then you turn the page to find out who's at
the door.
You can do those.
It's kind of a dirty trick, but we do dirty
tricks in writing all the time.
If you can instead have her open the door
and it is her father that she thought was
dead, and then cut, that is a better hook.
Because that hook only works if you have properly
set up who the character is so the reader
can infer what this twist means.
Those twists at the end of episodes are going
to be just far better, far, far better if
you can come up with them.
The problem with the open-the-door-and, you
have probably read books like this, if you
haven't, you probably actually have and you
didn't notice, a lot of them is they open
the door and-- start the next chapter, it
was the pizza delivery person.
They got pizza.
I'm exaggerating, but a lot of times authors
know to put this sort of hook at the end of
a chapter or the end of an episode, but they
don't actually know how to make the next thing
interesting, so they use the cheap trick to
get you to turn the page, but once you've
read another age you're kind of committed
to another chapter, and so you keep reading.
Avoid those if you can, and instead make them
legitimate moments of crisis or curiosity
to the reader to get them to turn to the next
episode.
That is how you get a page turner out of something
episodic.
Television does this a lot.
This is main television format, is to try
to give you a stinger at the end of an episode
to bring you back next week.
Again, some of those are dirty tricks, and
some of them I don't like, but you can learn
a lot from that method.
So if you are writing something episodic,
looking at great episodic works like some
of the better television shows, will teach
you how to do this.
But yeah, you can have page turners.
Then after that point, once they turn that
page, you're over the big hump.
The big hump is, will this start the next
episode?
Because once they do, you have a chance to
hook them with character, with conflict, and
with your expert storytelling again, and keep
ahold of them.
All right.
Let's see.
Hmm, that's a spoiler.
“Is there always a twist?”
There does not always have to be a twist.
Now, it depends on your definition of a twist.
They're usually, in fact almost all cases,
it should be an escalation.
An escalation does not have to be a twist,
but it usually fills the same role as a twist.
An escalation is when things get worse.
The status quo has changed, but it is changing
in the wrong direction.
This is why most romantic comedies, even though
you know they're going to get together, everyone
knows they're going to get together, has a
breakup scene somewhere around the three-quarter
mark of the story.
You could call this a twist, and it can happen
because of a twist.
But a lot of times it's just the two characters'
personalities.
You've seen the thorns all along.
Remember how I told you about Dave braiding
roses?
You've seen the thorns, and you've started
braiding them, but right near the end two
thorns just jab into each other.
You knew it was possible.
You were kind of waiting for it.
It does, and now, oh, no!
Everything's gotten worse because she knows
the worst thing about him, and he knows the
worst thing about her.
This can be handled very expertly.
It can be handled very poorly.
I'm sure you have seen both.
But the idea is, there is an escalation.
Problems are being introduced, more obstacles.
Things are getting worse.
Like I said, those fill the same function.
A twist should generally fill one of those
same sort of functions.
When the twist happens it should escalate
the problem.
It should make you reassess goals.
It should make you look at the story in a
different way and in hopefully a way that
makes the reader more excited and more interesting.
Discovering that Luke is Darth Vader's father
is a great escalation twist.
Yeah, backwards, yeah.
Eh, you know, it's Lucas.
Who knows?
But yes, Darth Vader is Luke's father, that's
a great escalation because these two characters
are already in conflict.
The story has been introduced that they're
going to be in conflict.
The story is building to a confrontation between
them, which you now know Luke has lost, and
then you are given a twist, which expands
the scope of their conflict to new and unforeseen
dimensions, that also puts Luke in conflict
with his other father, Obi Wan, who now lied
to him.
So suddenly it's a twist that expands the
conflict in beautiful ways.
It is the picture-perfect way to manage a
twist in your story.
Try to make your twists escalate, but you
don't have to have them.
You can just have the problems mount and mount
and mount, and then people overcome them.
Don't, particularly twist endings, get hung
up on twist endings too much.
Being satisfying is generally better than
having a twist.
Generally, if you can have your twist also
be satisfying, it's going to, in general,
be better than either of those two former
options.
But if the twist makes your ending unsatisfying,
then you have to have a very special story
for that to work.
Can work.
It's really hard.
I often bring up Into the Woods and things
like this, which are stories that are about
deconstructing a story and about the reader
having a miserable experience in some ways
and enjoying that miserable experience.
Those sorts of stories can work with a twist
that is not satisfying because there's a kind
of native satisfaction in the "Oh, you got
me.
You got me.
I thought I was going to be happy and now
I'm sad.
And that makes me so happy, but I don't want
to talk about it, because I just want to be
mad at you."
Really tough to pull off, but possible, obviously.
"How can I tell if it's my character or my
plot that needs to change?"
There's a couple different ways for me to
read this.
I don't know if I talked to you guys about
the idea that a lot of times I think this
is building off of the idea that sometimes
I am writing a book, and I tend to discovery
write my characters, and so they grow to be
something that isn't going to fulfill what
the plot of the story would indicate.
At that point, you kind of reach, as a writer,
a crisis moment where you're like, "All right,
I've built this cool plot for the character
to go on."
You discovery writers, you're like, "I don't
do that, so I don't have to worry about this."
But maybe you're writing along and you get
that sense.
The more you write, the more of an instinct
you have when things are working and when
they're not.
This starts to build as you finish multiple
novels, or multiple short stories if you're
a short story writer.
If you haven't finished multiple, you probably
don't have this instinct yet.
You might think that you do oh, but you don't.
Because this comes from a familiarity with
your own process and you trying things that
have worked in the past and then finding out
they're not working this time.
That is different from what is probably happening
if you are a new writer and you haven't finished
multiple books and stories, which is, you
get to the middle, you've never written a
middle before, middles are hard, and you get
writer's block.
That is different from, you finished 8 novels,
you are three-quarters of the way through
your book, and you know it's not working.
You know something is fundamentally broken.
All of the things that you have done in the
past that have worked, you have tried, and
this time it's not working.
Two very different problems.
The latter one you can really only figure
out by instinct.
If you are a newer writer, my recommendation
is that most of the time finish the story.
Don't stop, even if you think something is
fundamentally broken, because the mere act
of finishing the story will start to give
you the tools to fix that story.
The best cure for most writers’ writers
block, in my experience, has been to write
anyway.
Nobody's taking your pen away.
No one's unplugged your laptop.
When we talk about writer's block it usually
means my subconscious feels something is wrong
with this book and I don't know what that
thing is that is wrong.
Or, my subconscious is terrified about the
fact that I don't know where this is going
and I feel like I should, so I'm a fraud,
and so I can't keep going.
As a new writer, those things can be very
paralyzing, and all of their cousins that
work like that, and the answer to both of
them is, remember that your job in writing
right now is not to create a perfect book.
Maybe you will.
Maybe your Pat Rothfuss and you will write
a brilliant first novel.
It happens.
Harry Potter was a first novel.
Thirteen drafts, I think she said, but a first
novel.
It's possible.
But most likely, your job right now in writing
is to turn yourself into a person who can
write great novels, not writing a great novel,
because you just don't have the skill yet
to do that.
And even if you do, you're probably going
to have to revise many, many times, and you
need a finished product to do that.
The best advice for most new writers is, just
keep writing.
Do something.
Have something happen.
Go ask your roommate, your spouse, your kid,
whatever.
Say, hey, what should I do?
Your kid, they're going to be like, they go
play Fortnite.
So your characters go play Fortnite, or whatever.
Have something, just do something.
Even as an established professional who has
written a lot, my go-to when I have this feeling
that something is wrong is to write anyway
and see if it persists across a couple of
chapters, because even still, more often than
not, writing that chapter the wrong way will
put it into my subconscious and across the
next day while I'm thinking about it my brain
will say, ah, now that we have a finished
broken chapter I can fix that.
I have all the tools from studying writing
for so long that I can look at something broken
and say, you had the wrong viewpoint for this
chapter.
That's why it's wrong.
We need to be in this character's head and
make this revelation, which would turn the
plot the way that we want it to be going.
Nine times out of ten, the next day, I set
that chapter aside, I write a new one, and
that one goes in the book, and it works.
Even still, once in a while there's a bigger
problem than that.
This is when I dig out all of the writing
tools that I talk about in class, that my
friends talk about using, that I see in books
on instruction in writing.
I say, all right, let's break this down to
things like, where are my motivations for
my characters?
What are my promises?
What is my plot archetype and my trajectory?
How am I pacing?
How am I doing?
And I start digging apart the story and looking
for where the problem is using all of these
tools.
Almost always I then find the solution.
Sometimes I don't.
I had a book a couple years ago, The Apocalypse
Guard.
I still don't know how to fix it.
I could identify that something was wrong.
My editor agreed.
It wasn't just that I was having an off time.
But the book just didn't click, didn't come
together, and I still don't know what's wrong
with it.
I had the same problem with The Way of Kings
in 2002.
I managed to spend 9 years, no, 8 years, thinking
about that book in the back of my brain, came
to the decision of what I had done wrong fundamentally
in the story, wrote it again.
I guess it was 2009 I wrote it again.
It came out in 2010.
So 7 years of time later I knew what to do
and I started from scratch and the book worked
that time.
That's maybe not what you want to hear, because
it's-- well, take 7 years.
Maybe it'll work out.
All right.
Let's ask for any questions from you guys,
and then I'm going to jump into the next week's
questions.
Anything you guys want me to get to?
All right.
We'll go over here.
Yeah?
Q: How can a really character-driven plot,
like say Name of the Wind was, because when
you do that it feels just kind of like meandering
around.
Right.
Good question.
Q: Probably not [___].
Yeah.
So how can a very character-driven plot work,
using Name of the Wind as an example, because
it is basically, it is a series of vignettes
tied together by a character.
So how can that work?
That actually brings me into, if you guys
will let me deviate for a minute and talk
a little bit about what I want to talk about
today.
Where are our markers?
Right here?
Oh, there we are.
All right let me do a short little lecture
on viewpoint.
Right?
Viewpoint.
Because the answer to this is deeply connected
to viewpoint and what we're doing.
So viewpoint.
There are three standard viewpoints that you
can use, of which two are really the ones
that people use.
We have omniscient.
Om-ni-scient.
I can spell that, right?
We have first person.
And we have second person.
Yes.
Of these you're probably going to use omniscient,
or you're going to use first person.
Second person is used, "You did this.
You did that."
Choose Your Own Adventure novels are usually
in second person or some version of them.
Nora's Broken Earth Trilogy uses second person
quite extensively.
It's usually very literary and very difficult
to use or very pulpy and very Choose Your
Own Adventure.
Second person, generally, I would recommend
don't do unless you want to make it a major
selling point of your story and you know what
you're doing.
So that brings us down to our two main viewpoints.
Now the nice thing about these viewpoints
is, there are a lot of different models you
can choose among these.
Each of them break down to a couple things.
First person has what we call epistolary.
I think I spelled that right.
I don't know.
So epistolary is where all of the story is
being told through ephemera or pieces of writing
that someone has found and collected.
So Diary of a Wimpy Kid is an epistolary story.
It is written in diary form, where the character
is writing it down.
Dracula is a classic example of this.
It is mixing letters and people's journals
together to create a narrative.
There was a really cool one that came out
a number of years ago now, like 5-6 years
ago, called Illuminae, which was told through
redacted documents that an agency had gathered
together that had all the reductions on them
and stuff.
It was text conversations, and letters, and
emails and things constructed into a story.
Epistolary can be very fun.
Another famous example from sci-fi/fantasy
is Sorcery and Cecelia, which I believe, I
could be wrong on this, but I believe the
authors that wrote it were just exchanging
letters as if they were their characters,
and then they published that as a novel.
Which is great, right?
That's just a really cool way to write a book.
"Here's what happened in my life."
"Here's what happened in my life."
And then being professional writers, they
work in these connections.
I think that's where it went.
I might be thinking of a different one.
But these sorts of things can do really fun
things with epistolary.
We have kind of another one.
These are kind of more my terms for them.
You won't find these online necessarily.
But we have the, what'll I call it today?
I call it something different every year.
We call it the flashback.
This is your classic first person.
You're classic first person is your flashbacks
narrative where someone is telling you a story.
The character basically is two characters.
They are the person they were in the story,
and they were the person that they are now.
This is Name of the Wind.
Name of the Wind is the character now telling
you about the story of how they became who
they are.
Classic first-person storytelling method.
This is, in many ways this is actually what
The Hobbit is, though it's actually kind of
a hybrid between this and an omniscient present
narrator.
Because Bilbo pretends he's not writing the
book, even though he is, even though Tolkien--so
Tolkien is pretending to be Bilbo who is pretending
to not be Bilbo writing a book.
Right?
Yes.
But flashback, sci-fi fantasy version of this,
the Farseer books by Robin Hobb are told as
first-person narratives.
They're kind of separated from epistolary,
in that you get the sense that yes, this is
the writer telling the story, the narrator,
the person, but it's not actually necessary
have to be ephemera.
A writer doing a flashback type of story will
include way more detail than someone actually
writing in their journal would.
It reads like a novel, just someone telling
you the story, and that's part of the affectation
of it, is it's someone's going to tell you
their life story, but it comes across like,
Name of the Wind takes like 40 hours to listen
to but they pretend he's telling the story
in one sitting or two sittings or something
like that.
That's actually impossible, but it works.
But that's a flashback story.
The third is the, I'll call it cinematic this
time.
I've used different terms for it.
The definition of this one is, this is the
kind of standard for YA right now, which is,
it’s being told in the first-person but
kind of as if the character were narrating
their life as they're living it right now.
It's not being written down.
It's not actually being told to you.
But you are instead, like you have a little,
like you've embedded an implant into their
brain, and that implant, as they are thinking,
is framing all their thoughts into first person
and they are living their life this way.
There's no expectation that there's going
to be a frame story or any sort of thing telling
you that this is a journal.
There's no epistolary things.
It is just a first-person story told in kind
of an immediate sense.
I often called this immediate first person.
Usually that one is in present tense, while
usually the other two are in past tense.
These each give you something.
They're each tools that you can use.
Omniscient has similar ones.
We have what we call a present narrator.
And when I say we call it, I call it today,
present narrator.
So present narrator, what is this?
Well, this is where there's a storyteller
telling you a story, and it's a hybrid between
first person and omniscient where, while in
the story, you are not in any one characters
head.
The narrator is jumping all around and telling
you things.
Basically you have a first-person frame story
of the person jumping into an omniscient narrator
telling you a story.
Aladdin kind of uses this sort of thing a
little bit, even though it's cinematic so
it's not in anyone's head.
What's some good examples of this?
The Hobbit is a good example of this.
In fact, it's the quintessential example.
The idea is that Bilbo is writing the story
down, but while he's telling the story, he's
jumping into other people's heads and giving
you their thoughts, even though when Bilbo
himself was in that story he didn't know them.
Anytime a writer writes the words, "They didn't
know it at the time but," that's usually some
sort of present narrator.
You see this a lot in comics with the present
narrator where there is like an omniscient
narrator who's telling you the story, stuff
like that.
Then you have true omniscient, which is, you
are going to write an omniscient piece where
there's no necessary narrator, but you have,
as the reader, access to everyone's thoughts
and emotions concurrently.
A given paragraph could be in any viewpoint
at any time and the author will decide this,
but the author is generally not going to withhold
any information from you.
Dune is the classic sci-fi example.
When someone walks on stage that's going to
betray them, you jump in his head and he's
like, "Boy, it's going to suck when I betray
these people."
You as the reader are being given all the
information.
This is why, is it David Lynch who made the
film?
If you watch the original cut of Dune, even
the theatrical cut of Dune, the original movie,
you are often getting the characters thoughts
as voice-overs when they are sitting there,
because the book is in omniscient and they
are trying to find a way to do that cinematically,
and it's really weird.
I don't need to say that about Lynch's work,
but that's taken for granted.
And then you have limited.
Third limited is, of these, I would say the
most common that you are going to do are going
to be this one, this one, and this one.
Ninety-plus percent of all books published
are one of these three.
Limited is, for a given scene, you pick one
character's viewpoint, you see through only
their eyes.
You'll only see and understand their thoughts,
and everyone else, any thoughts they may have,
are the character interpreting them saying,
"It seemed like they might be wanting this,"
or something like that.
You are very soundly rooting someone in someone's
head, but as soon as you change scenes, you
can change to a different head to be in.
When we say third Limited, why it's under
omniscient is because you can be in anyone's
head, but only one at the same time.
The reason this lecture, this thing came out
when you asked about character-driven stories
is these styles tend to involve advantages
and disadvantages.
And one of the big advantages of first-person
is that if that character's voice is interesting,
then you can get away with a ton of stuff
that you can't get away with in, particularly
if they're in limited.
If reading the character's voice, they are
beautiful, poetic, or funny, or sarcastic,
or something like that, it covers a whole
host of sins that otherwise the story would
feel boring because of.
Info dumps in first person are a lot easier,
because since you can put them in the first
person character's perspective and tell a
funny joke or give a really lush and interesting,
poetic paragraph as the description, that
itself become such a selling point that you
kind of want to linger, and you want the info
dump to maybe go a little longer because you're
learning so much about the character and having
so much fun with them.
And that dynamic is a huge part of what makes
Name of the Wind work.
Name of the Wind does the reverse of a lot
of stories, in that a lot of stories will
use the present narrator and kind of have
this frame story and things like that.
The frame story is third limited in Name of
the Wind, and then the first-person narrative
starts up as he's sitting down to tell his
story to the person who's come to collect
his story, which is a really ingenious frame
story.
It works really well.
And because of that you get all these sorts
of things.
You get his voice being a drawing point or
a selling point for the story.
And beyond that you get the sense of a storyteller
telling you a story, kind of like present
narrator, but done in a very strict first-person
flashback sense.
And you are really interested in this character.
And so almost all the plot progression can
be character motivated.
Instead of, "We need to go to the place and
get the thing" being the way your progress
is, you are shifted into thinking, "How is
my character changing as they go to the place
and get the thing?"
Getting the thing doesn't matter, but what
it does to this character really matters,
and it allows you to really focus on them.
You can do that in limited.
In fact, you should be trying to do that in
limited.
But in first person, you can really make that
sort of thing sing.
While you're reading, all of your progress
is character-based.
Who is Kvothe becoming?
And he gives you a promise in that book by
showing you old Kvothe, who's like, what,
he's only a couple of years older, but old
Kvothe, right?
But old Kvothe, who's beaten down, depressed,
and has given up, and young Kvothe, who is
optimistic and excited and going to take on
the world.
Your promise is right there.
How does young Kvothe become old Kvothe?
You have been given right immediately a huge
promise, and your promise is, this is our
progress.
It is a character losing their innocence,
becoming beaten down, and turning into this
person.
Which is why if you think the series is going
to be a comedy and not a tragedy, you may
be wrong, would be my expectation.
So there you go.
That is a large part of your question.
Now, since we did all this, let's talk a little
bit about what each of these can do and what
their advantages are and why you might choose
them.
Let's throw it to you guys.
Let's take epistolary.
What's an advantage or a disadvantage that
you can see of doing an epistolary story?
STUDENT: Mystery.
Mystery, okay.
Mystery.
Epistolary has this innate, built-in mystery
because it's the only real-- I won't say only.
As opposed to flashback, in flashback you
know the character lives.
Unless of course it's one of those stories
where the character dies and is telling you
the story as a ghost, which totally happens
a lot.
So it's not that unique, but it totally can.
But either way, the character is around to
tell you the story.
In epistolary, you don't know.
You're living it moment by moment.
Yeah, what?
Go ahead.
STUDENT: It's extremely immersive.
It is hugely immersive.
You can build in all kinds of interesting
lore and ephemera that you can build into
this.
If you're doing a full-on epistolary you can
be like here is-- like Watchmen does this.
If you're reading Watchmen, it does these
epistolary sections at the end of each comic,
which are, "Here is one of the character's
marketing plan for the action figures that
they are creating," is your epistolary section
at the end of that comic, which is so cool.
It tells you so much about the character.
And the questions are, "Do you think I'll
get my friends to license the rights for this
huge deal that we have coming up?
Make mine buffer."
I don't think he actually writes that, but
you know what I mean.
It can tell you so much about the characters
to have something like that.
So enormously immersive.
What else, advantages or disadvantages of
epistolary?
STUDENT: First a question.
Would you say that, like, on a small scale,
that Mistborn has a little bit of epistolary
in it?
Yes.
The epigraphs of Mistborn are epistolary.
I often use epistolary form in the epigraphs,
the beginnings of chapters.
STUDENT: You can kind of drop hints.
Yeah, you can give up all sorts of cool little
hints and you can-- in this, it is the easiest
of all of these forms of them, in my opinion,
to hide information from the reader and have
them not feel like you're cheating.
Even in flashback they'll feel like you're
cheating if you're hiding information.
In epistolary, it just wasn't in that letter,
right?
It's a lot easier to hide information that
the character may know.
Go ahead.
STUDENT: Asking for another example.
Is Skyward Cinematic?
Because it's written in the past tense.
Yeah, Skyward is cinematic.
Both Skyward and Steelheart are done in this
cinematic, or this immediate, whichever way
you want to call it, which you are there with
the character, in the moment.
But Skyward has third person limited interludes
in between to show other characters' story.
This is actually what The Martian does.
It's an epistolary that when it's not being
epistolary its third limited in order to set
that off and differentiate it.
I think it's third limited in those other
scenes, if I'm right.
A lot of times, switching between one of these
forms is a really great way to kind of help
the reader have some structure when there
wouldn't otherwise be structure.
Like, in Skyward, if you haven't read it,
there's a character I knew I was going to
want her viewpoint for the ending, because
I needed to stay externally to have this great
moment happen.
But I knew if I dropped that viewpoint at
the ending it would feel just out of the blue
and would kick readers out of the story.
So I set them up for it by having a viewpoint
for her at the end of each chapter to give
further ways of just like looking into the
world and into the characters from a different
viewpoint, and I set them in third limited
to be like, this is something different so
that you know we're going to come back to
what you've been experiencing, rather than
just switching to another character's viewpoint
also in first cinematic.
So epistolary, if it has limitations, I'll
just say, big limitation of epistolary is
the form.
This is kind of a rigid structure that can
be difficult to work with. and some place
people may not like it as much.
Did you have another?
STUDENT: I was going to say, when I read epistolatories,
it can stretch my disbelief a little bit more,
especially when they go into great detail.
Yep.
It totally can.
That's one-- I haven't even brought that one
up before, but absolutely.
When you're reading some of these and you're
like, "They really remembered exactly what
this person said and put it in their letter
to this other person verbatim?
Come on."
And if you're doing too much of that, you
may want to move to flashback instead.
So flashback.
Flashback has the big disadvantage of, you
generally know the character lives, which
deflates some of the tension.
Of course, you can use it effectively by saying
the character lives, but the person in the
future that you're saying is a very different
person, so you get to see how they're changing
through the course of time.
Not always do you have a frame story.
This is what Alcatraz vs. The Evil Librarians
is, and it has almost no frame story grounding
you in the modern-day Alcatraz telling the
story about the young Alcatraz.
But it still has two characters, because the
character of Alcatraz is occasionally addressing
you in the present tense, and that is the
one who's telling the story to you, not the
character that modern Alcatraz is telling
a story about.
But flashback.
What are some advantages and disadvantages
to flashback?
STUDENT: I'd say the advantage is 
you really understand the character on an
intimate level.
Yeah, you really do.
In fact, both this and cinematic, the biggest
selling point is character voice and really
getting to understand them.
In some ways flashback gives you more, because
it gives you two time periods to play the
same character and that contrast can be really
fun.
The contrast between modern character and
early character, really interesting, and a
big selling point to this.
It's what you get, in fact, by giving away
that they live.
STUDENT: It makes it really easy to tell your
readers, "Pay attention to this."
Yeah, yeah.
The characters say, "You should pay attention
to this.
It'll be important later."
And it's the only one that doesn't feel like
cheating when you do that.
Even the present narrator feels a little like
cheating.
But when the flashback character says the
thing like, "I didn't know it at the time."
You can frame it in a way that makes the reader
understand, "Ooo, this is important.
I better catch this clue."
Anything else?
Yeah?
STUDENT: Is the only difference between limited
and cinematic that you jump between multiple
heads?
The limited and cinematic, yes, that's the
main thing.
The main difference, but also there's a tone
difference when you're using I.
When someone is telling you their own story,
it feels more personal, and in limited it
feels a little more distant.
And what this does is, limited, for instance,
limited is much harder to have an untrustworthy
narrator, an unreliable narrator.
In both flashback and cinematic, it's a lot
easier to have an untrustworthy or unreliable.
Even though limited is in someone's head and
kind of very much colored by the way they
see the world, if you are actively lying to
the reader in limited, they are going to feel
cheated.
And in fact, in Mistborn where I have Kelsior,
I get around this sometimes.
Kelsior's got a big secret from the rest of
the team.
When I'm in his head, he's like, "I can't
think about that thing.
It's too painful right now."
That is the sort of thing you'd have to do
in limited to keep information, and it is
cheating.
It is absolutely cheating.
It's sometimes a necessary cheat.
But you don't have that problem in these others
because the unreliable narrator can say to
you, "It's still too painful for me to talk
about.
I'll get to it in a minute," and you're just
like, "Yeah, I can understand that.
This is really hard for you."
Because we're running low on time, I'll just
kind of go through the rest of these.
These two are very similar except for whether
you're going to give away the future or not,
but then you lose the ability to play off
of the future.
Their biggest limitation is, the more heads
you're in doing a flashback or cinematic,
which you will find books that'll do two first-person
narrators, or even three, in a cinematic or
a flashback, the more you do, the harder it
is for the reader to track, because they aren't
seeing the character's name be repeated very
often, and because that personal connection
you build with the person writing the story
starts to get-- like, there's interference.
It starts to feel weird to you that you're
feeling this deep personal connection to five
people, and it just stops working.
And the biggest reason to jump to limited
is that, number one, you get that credibility,
that you can say, "What this character is
seeing, they're actually seeing."
The narrator is being straight with you in
limited, even if it's colored perspective.
And this allows you to have tension between
what the character is seeing and how you're
describing it.
This works, for instance, Mat Cauthin in The
Wheel of Time.
He will have direct thoughts where he's like,
"He thinks this," and the description of it
has completely made it clear that's not what
it is, and then you get a contrast between
reality and the way Mat sees the world, which
you can't do very easily in the other thing
because they're all filtered through their
head.
So you have that distance between the character's
actual voice in their head.
Still, when you write limited you want every
description to be colored through the lens
of how that character sees the world.
But there's a trustworthiness to it that you
don't have in the other one.
It is much better for large casts also, because
allowing you to keep track of this large cast
of characters by using their names more often
and by having that little bit of distance
where the reader is kind of understanding
that a storyteller is telling them the story,
and now they're in this head, this head, this
head.
You can have a one-off viewpoint in limited
really easily where you're like, "Everything
else has been in this character.
We're going to jump in this character's head
now."
This is the Tom Clancy method, right?
It's just like, who is this?
But it works because it's third limited.
Omniscient is really hard.
I would recommend studying if you want to
do it.
What it gains you is you have this really
interesting form that not a lot of people
do anymore.
But you have to build your tension based on,
not mysteries, but instead tension based on
expecting and anticipation.
Something terrible is going to happen.
I know what it's going to be.
Let me see how the characters react because
I've already seen the betrayal coming, or
things like that.
Present narrator just kind of does these other,
one of these other two flavors, with adding
a character who can address the reader directly
in the same way the flashback does.
All right, guys.
We will, next week, jump into probably character
for a couple weeks.
So we will see you then.
Take care.
