Let's get started actually talking about sci-fi/fantasy.

I'm going to start us off this year with plot.

I do it randomly.

Sometimes I start with character.

Sometimes I start with setting.

People often ask me, "Where does a book begin

for you?"

It's really different for every book, and

sometimes, in many ways, it's kind of a chicken

or an egg sort of thing.

I often say that stories are made up of these

three things.

Plot, character, and setting.

But they're glued together by conflict, and

that glue of conflict is the thing that oftentimes,

I'll have a plot idea, or a character idea,

or a setting idea separately from one another.

I often use Mistborn as an example of this.

Where did Mistborn come from?

Well, Mistborn came from, I was reading Harry

Potter, and I thought, "Man, these Dark Lords

never get a break."

It's always some dumb kid comes along and

ruins the plan they've been setting up for

a lifetime.

Same with Lord of the Rings.

So I'm like, what if Frodo got to the end

of Lord of the Rings and Sauron said, "Hey,

my ring!

I've been looking for that.

Thanks.

That must have been a really hard journey.

Thanks for coming all this way."

And then killed him and took over the world.

I thought that was a bit of a downer of a
book to write.

But I filed the idea away in the back of my

head as an idea.

That would be a plot idea.

A plot or maybe a setting.

It's kind of like, what comes first.

Is this a setting idea?

Is this a plot idea?

The idea of the prophesied hero failing is

kind of a plot idea, but the idea that it

turned into, a world where the prophesied

hero failed, was a setting idea.

These things all mix together.

Separately, another time I was watching one

of the Oceans movies, and I was reminded how

much I love the heist genre.

One of my favorite movies of all time is Sneakers,

a fantastic little film.

I've loved it all the way going back, things

like The Sting, Michael Crichton's The Great

Train Robbery, any sort of heist story.

Inception is just a fantastic one.

You can always grab me with a heist story.

I thought, "I don't think I've ever read a

fantasy heist."

I thought, wow, that would be really cool.

You could give every member of the heist team,

the leverage team or whatever, a different

magical power.

So they could each be magical.

You could do this whole thing.

I was thinking of that separately.

And that was another plot idea.

The idea for the mist came as I was driving
to visit my parents in Idaho and I passed

through a fog bank at 75 miles an hour, or

whatever the legal speed limit is, which I

was obviously going, because we're being recorded.

I passed through and I'm like, "This visually

looks really interesting, hitting a fog bank

and going into it."

I
equated that in my head with a visit to the

National Cathedral in D.C., which I had seen

at night.

Normally, I'd been inside of cathedrals and

seen the stained-glass windows from inside

with the light coming in from outside, but

this time they had them lit from the inside

at night, shining out, and I loved that visual

image.

Those became two setting details.

This idea of the mist, of the fog, of this

kind of almost living mist, and this visualization

of cathedrals in the mist shining out light.

Those ideas kind of combined together with

this character I was developing of Kelsior,

all separate.

Feruchemy was designed separately from allomancy.

If you haven't read the books, there are three

magic systems.

Two of them were designed for separate stories,

and when I combined them I liked them better.

And then I designed a third one in my plotting

and world-building sessions.

For me, I write down all these ideas.

They just go in my notebook, or in my file

in my computer that's called Working Ideas

right now.
It's just big lists of ideas.

A book grows out of multiples of these ideas

combining together.

When I have something that feels like the

seed of a novel that's working, I'll often

go back to my book and say, are there any

other ideas in here that mesh really well

with these ideas.

I often describe, ideas are like these little

atoms bouncing around.

When they mash into each other, they create

some core reaction, become something new.

It's not how actual science works, but, you

know, it'll work for the fantasy author.

Suddenly you've got this thing growing of

all these different atoms coming together

and making some cool new thing that is somehow

more than the sum of its parts, more exciting

at least.

That's the story for me.

Then I go and I kind of plug in things.

I'm like, what else have I been thinking about

that might work for this story, and I plug

those in.

Then I build those all in an outline that

I'll talk about during our second plotting

session, kind of how I build my outlines.

At that point, I'll find holes, and I'll just

start plugging things in.

I'll start brainstorming.

I'll start saying, I know I need another idea

here.

Let's put it together.

Most of the time, a book is not one idea.

This is where newer authors sometimes have

problems.
They pick one really good idea and they try
to write a book on it.

You can write a short story on one idea pretty

well.

A book generally needs a mashing together

of multiple ideas.

It doesn't mean you have to have been struck

magically by the idea fairy and have this

brilliant idea that couldn't ever be reproduced.

That's not how ideas work.

You just need different hooks and things to

make you excited and to get the audience excited.

Ideas are actually cheap.

My favorite story about ideas being cheap

comes from Jim Butcher.

I've confirmed this with him, so I know it

actually happened, but I heard it thirdhand

originally.

The story goes that during his days unpublished,

Jim Butcher, who is now famous for writing

The Dresden Files, among many other wonderful

novels, Jim was on a forum of aspiring writers,

and he got in an argument with someone who

said, "Some ideas are just so grand and so

great, that's what makes a writer."

Jim was making the argument, the same one

that I often make, which is ideas do not make

the author.

Authors make the ideas work.

If you give bad ideas to a good writer, you

will generally get a really great book.

If you give good ideas to someone unpracticed,

it's still going to fall apart.

Jim and this other person got in an argument

online.

Finally, Jim said, "Give me your two worst,

or at least most incongruous ideas, and I'm
going to write a really good book using them."

They said, "All right, I want you to take

the lost Roman legion and mash it together

with Pokémon."

Jim wrote an entire epic series called Codex

Alera, which is basically the lost Roman legion

gets Pokémon in a fantasy world.

It's a great series.

I recommend it.

It's an epic fantasy, it's really cool, and

it's actually very distinctive because some

of those ideas are very distinct ideas.

But the skill of a writer is what readers

and editors are looking for.

I don't know if I said this last week, but

oftentimes writers will come and be like,

"Oh, man, editors reject people so quickly."

But they really can reject very quickly.

If I were to bring up here, roll out this

piano, and have two people play on the piano,

one picked up the piano last year, they're

not a complete noob, but they've been working

at it assiduously these last eight months

or whatever, and have gotten decent, and then

we brought someone in who is 20 years practiced

concert pianist and really knows their stuff,

how soon do you think you could tell?

Right away.

An editor or a reader can generally tell after

a few pages that same thing.

Now, readers tend to be a little more forgiving

than editors, in that readers can like the

ideas and themes, even if the writing isn't--

they will notice, but they're like, it doesn't

bug me.

And that's just fine.

But people can tell by instinct which things
are working better than others, even if they

themselves are not experts in that field.

You can, unfortunately, get judged very quickly

based on your writing.

That means that your ideas, however cool they

may be, most of the time people aren't going

to get to your cool ideas if you can't write

a great scene starting off.

That's what we’re really looking for.

We’re looking for the skill of someone who

has practiced their craft and has really learned

to be able to grab an audience quickly and

convince them that the story is worth reading.

Today we're going to focus on doing that with

plot.

It's equally important to character and setting,

though I would actually rank setting the least

important of the three if I had to rank them.

I may tell this story again.

I tend to do that.

But if you think about it, we're all in this

room because we want to do sci-fi/fantasy.

It's a sci-fi/fantasy writing class.

You would think that setting would be the

most important.

Did I say this last week?

That a story that has a great setting, but

terrible characters generally is still a bad

book.

But a story with a cliched and/or not that

great setting but great characters, still

generally a fantastic book.

It could be better.

You wish you would have all three really strong.

But in some ways, setting is the least important
of these three.

We are going to talk about plot today.

Really, before we dig into the nitty gritty

of how do you actually construct a plot, and

things like that, I want to talk about what

we mean by plot, and why plots.

Why some work.

Why some don't.

Why readers get bored sometimes, even if exciting

things are happening.

Why readers can find "boring things" very

exciting if they're written in a certain way.

If you're going to practice something, learning

how to do this, learning how to make things

interesting, to pull a reader page by page,

there are few skills as useful to a writer.

I think the most important one, at least for

a fantasy/sci-fi writer, is the ability to

convey information in an interesting way,

kind of this whole avoiding info dumps, instead

using characterization for info dumps.

But number two would be the ability to understanding

what your promise, progress, and payoff is

when it comes to constructing a story.

Promise, progress, payoff.

Now, we're just going to go down these three

and I'm going to talk at you for a while.

We will start with promises.

Stories all make a promise.

In fact, they usually make several at the

beginning of the story.

Being in control of your promises and what

you're making is a sign of mastery of the

art.

Simply writing your story and seeing where

it goes is fine.
But either during revision, or during planning,
or during outlining, you should be asking

yourself, how am I making the correct promises?

There are several types of promises you're

going to make.

One is what we call a tone promise.

A tone promise is where your introductory

chapter's job is, in part, to indicate the

tone and style of story that you're going

to be telling.

If you're going to have a wacky comedy, don't

start your story with someone dying really

tragically and really making us weep.

That's hard to do in a prologue, but you can.

But don't start with the prologue to Eye of

the World if your story's going to be a wacky

comedy.

If you haven't read Eye of the World, the

beginning is a man finding out that he's gone

crazy, having his sanity restored just long

enough to realize he's murdered his entire

family, running off and committing suicide.

That's the prologue to Eye of the World.

Yeah, he creates a mountain as he commits

suicide, so that's cool.

But if the next chapter, where the wacky hijinks

of a talking donkey and his friend the ogre,

then you would justifiably say this tone premise

was inaccurately presented.

Now that's an extreme example, but this is

something that I notice a lot of writers don't

necessarily have fluency over and control

over, is what kind of promises you're making

at the start of your stories.

This is why, Hollywood does this too, but

this is why the cold open is so popular.
The cold open is where you join a character
in the middle of an adventure that is a microcosm

for the adventure that the entire story is

going to be.

The classic example of this is Indiana Jones

and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

If you haven't seen that movie, shame on you.

If you haven't seen that movie, it starts

off with this fun, but very kind of solemn

romp about Indiana Jones going into the jungle,

trying to get this idol, being betrayed, and

failing.

That is your setup.

Your setup to Indiana Jones' character is,

he's awesome, but he's kind of an everyday

guy in some ways, because no matter how hard

he tries, he just ends up failing at the end

anyway.

That is kind of your introduction.

What is the story going to be about?

Adventure.

It's going to be about someone who has an

everyman characteristic that is really, really

cool, but you can pretend that it's a normal

person, who's probably going to get kicked

around a lot, dropped into vats of snakes,

and at the end maybe win, maybe not.

That's what the cold open is there to do for

you.

But your promise is, Indiana Jones tries really

hard, you are going to have a good time, and

this is going to be awesome.

They're setting a tone promise for you with

the opening to that story.

One of the reasons why the prologue is so

popular in fantasy, to the point that it's

almost a cliché, is because a lot of fantasy

writers realize having a kid start off on

a farm at the beginning of their story doesn't

convey the right promise of action and adventure,

so they start with something that has a lot

of action and adventure, and then move to

kid on the farm.

Now, I'd like to point out this is not the

only way to make a kid on the farm have this

sort of tonal promise.

But you'll notice that Star Wars, does it

start with Luke on the farm?

No.

It starts with a small ship and a large ship

shooting at it, and then a firefight, a spunky

princess, and goofy droids.

Your cold open tells you everything, and then

it cuts to Luke, and you get the last piece,

where he's looking at the binary sunset and

the Force theme plays.

Then you've got basically your whole story,

the tone, the tone promises.

I visited Pixar once, and they have something

really cool that they showed me, which is

they will try to set the tone of their movies

by the color palette that are used for given

scenes.

They actually have, up on their wall, they

have a several pixel wide sliver of color

that is the average color for a given shot,

a given second of screen, and then they just

put them all together, and you can watch the

colors change.

It's really cool with WALL-E. Gray, gray,

gray, gray, brown, black, black, blue, bright

blue, bright blue, green.

It's a cool way that they try to set the tone

of their stories, just by using the color
palette.

You can't do that, but you can set the tone

of your story with the words you use and the

type of scene you use to introduce your story.

I will warn you that the epic fantasy prologue

has become a little bit of a cliché, and

so you have to work a little harder than you

might once have had to do in this, because

people are used to the story of action hero

beginning, get some information that's important,

dies passing it on to someone, cut to kid

on a farm.

And/or young prince or princess who is inexperienced

and wants to go out and see the world or something.

Those beats are very well played.

Now, anything done really well stops being

a cliché.

The cliched part is when it stops having the

impact on your audience.

If you can do it in a way that still has the

impact you want on your audience, it's not

a cliché anymore.

The reason clichés are bad is because they

have been taken and removed from their original

intent to the point that people no longer

get the original intent from the words.

They instead bring all the baggage that the

cliché has, and it just feels lukewarm to

them.

So promise.

Number one thing you're going to want to look

to in your promise is your tone.

Another thing you're going to want to look

to in your early promises, is you're going

to want to promise us, if possible, your character

arc.

You don't have to promise what the arc is

going to be, but you do want to promise the
thing missing in a character's life that they
cannot have, and the obstacles that lead to

them being unable to have it.

You want to show us your character's desires

and what's preventing them.

Now, sometimes you do this is a reverse way.

Sometimes you show us what we know the character

should want, and show the character not wanting

that.

That's also very common.

This is the Bilbo at the start of the Hobbit

sort of thing.

Where we all want Bilbo to go on an adventure.

We know from the way the writing is written

that he goes on an adventure.

He thinks he doesn't want to go on an adventure.

We're going to then cheer for him to go on

this adventure as he comes to realize he wants

to go on an adventure.

The best part of the Peter Jackson Hobbit

adaptations is that sequence in the movies.

I will just leave that one thing there.

But that part of the Hobbit movies was done

brilliantly, and really even took what was

in the books and took them a step forward,

that realization that Bilbo wants to go on

this adventure.

But showing us a character who has a need,

who has a desire, who has a flaw, has a problem

they're working on in their life, some sort

of promise that tells us who's our main character,

or one of our main characters, and what's

their arc kind of going to look like if at

all possible.

Then the third thing you'll want to do is

indicate what kind of plot you're going to
be giving us.

This can be your actual plot.

This can be-- I divide plot into two different

things in my head.

It's sometimes been hard.

I explain it different times in different

classes.

But there's something I will call the umbrella

plot.

The umbrella plot is, in some ways, your visible

structural plot.

Then you have your core plot, which is what

your actual progress and payoff is going to

be.

Let me explain what I mean by this.

A lot of books and movies are romances.

This is your core plot.

Will they get together?

But a lot of those romances get transposed

to an umbrella plot of, we need to do X, and

while we do X we're going to fall in love,

and that's what you actually care about.

Now, the romance genre tends to not use the

umbrella plot.

But a lot of other genres will be like, well,

it's a fantasy novel.

The core plot, what we really want people

to read about, is these two characters falling

in love.

But our umbrella is, there's an alien invasion

and we're going to run away from the aliens.

These two things can be separate things, and

that's okay.

But a lot of times you want to indicate one

of the two, and often it's the umbrella plot

that you are going to get to, and sometimes

those are the same thing.

You want to give us a promise of what type

of story we're getting into, if you can.

Sometimes this is hard.

Sometimes you're going to be waiting till

the end of Act I to actually really get us

into this.

Because sometimes you are following one of

these classic archetypes, where the main character

doesn't want to leave their comfortable home

and go on an adventure and become a better

person and learn all the things they want

to do.

In those cases, you want to focus on the character

arc, and you want to find a way to promise

that the tone is going to be what you want

it to be going forward.

Let's stop and talk, see if you guys have

questions on this kind of concept.

It'll become more clear as I dig into the

next thing, because progress is where this

kind of starts to click.

But any questions on promises?

Yeah.

Q: You're talking about the first chapter,

correct?

The question is, "We are talking about the

first chapter.

Correct?"

We are not necessarily talking about the first

chapter.

But that's a great question.

We are talking about the introduction to the

book.

This can be one chapter, but it can be a sequence

of chapters.

It really depends on how long we're talking.

If you're writing a short story, this is your
first couple paragraphs.

If you're writing a massive epic fantasy,

really, we don't get all of these things,

tone, arc, and plot, in Stormlight Archive,

until really chapter 11.

That includes two prologues that aren't in

there.

So chapter 13.

If you've read Stormlight Archive, where I'd

say we get all of this connecting together,

where we've finally finished all this part,

is when Kaladin makes the decision to save

Bridge Four and turns back from the thing.

There are earlier promises of what it's going

to be, and I used the tone promises, but this

whole part is kind of finished then.

Q: For Eye of the World, would you consider

that beginning part when he leaves the village,

or [_____].

I would say leave the village.

In fact, Robert Jordan gets almost all of

this stuff by the end of chapter 1.

You've got the prologue, Dragonmount, and

then, if you haven't read it, chapter 1 starts

with kid on farm.

But you only have, like, three paragraphs

on kid on farm until the kid on the farm sees

this shadowy figure chasing him, and they

go to town and everything starts to be odd

and strange, and there are strangers in town.

The immediate promise of that is, you saw

all this action.

Somebody killed himself.

Now we're learning that someone out there

is a dragon reborn and might go crazy.
Plus, we are learning everything's wrong in
this kid's village.

Then by the end of chapter 1 or so, I'm not

exactly sure, but the end of the first little

short sequence, we have the attack, and everything

goes crazy.

It's really fast in Eye of the World.

I would say it's right about there.

But really where this ends is where they decide

to leave.

Then you know what kind of plot you have.

We're going to go on a travelogue.

We know what our arc is going to be.

We've got this whole kind of promise that

our characters are small town people who thought

they wanted big adventure, and big adventure

is way more dangerous and scary than they

think, and that's going to kind of be their

arc.

We have our tone promise of Dragonmount, followed

by village, everything's creepy, something's

wrong, and that covers it.

Go ahead.

Q: What's the difference between the character

arc promise and the plot promise?

Great question.

What's the difference between the character

arc promise and the plot promise?

Character arc promise is how the character

is going to change during the course of the

story.

Your promise for the character arc is a promise

that they're going to change, or at least

their situation is going to change and give

them what they want.

I kind of intertwine these two.

If you look at Luke, part of the promise is
he's going to be able to go up into the stars.

But part of that promise that we don't quite

get there until we get to Obi Wan saying,

"You must learn the ways of the force."

That's the final end of, you're going to have

to stop being this person and become one of

these people who can fight in this big war

that we saw the starship starting.

But those are character promises.

Your plot promise is that is, the Empire is

evil.

We need to get these plans to the people who

can then defeat them, and that's your plot.

Your plot is, get the plans to the rebels,

and then you have a twist.

We'll talk about twists.

You have a twist in that actually we're going

to go destroy the Death Star.

That's a twist ending.

It doesn't sound like one because we've all

seen Star Wars.

But it's actually one of the forms of twists

that I'll talk about later.

Do you see the difference between character

arc and a plot, story arc, I would say?

Yeah.

Q: How do we make sure that we are predictable

enough to have the promises, and not predictable

enough to be predictable?

Right.

Great question.

Wow.

Okay, so the question was, how do we be predictable

enough that we are giving promises, but not

so predictable that we're boring, that we're

predictable.
There are a couple of answers to this.

One of them is, generally, you can be, with

your plot, a little more predictable than

you think, as long as you are giving interesting

setting and characters we care about.

A lot of people talk about how many stories

there actually are.

There's only five stories, or whatever.

You can find those online.

The truth is, almost every plot that has been

done, obviously ever plot that you conceive

has been done.

Most of the ways to buck the trend in those

plots involves doing something so unexpected

that it breaks your promises.

Now that can become a feature of your story.

But most of the time, you want to do subtle

inversions of the promises.

For instance, you give the promise-- I remember

reading Eye of the World, which this shouldn't

have been a big inversion, it just shouldn't

have, but it was, when the Gandalf character

was a woman.

I'm like, oh, I haven't seen that before.

I've read a ton of these fantasy novels, and

there's always Gandalf, or there's Allanon,

or there's Belgarath, or there's always the

wise wizard.

When the wise wizard shows up and it's a woman

who you don't trust, then that's different.

I'm like, I know what role this person is

fulfilling, but they're doing it in a different

way.

I am intrigued.

Why don't I trust her?

Should I trust her?

Is this Gandalf?

Is this not actually Gandalf?

Again, that shouldn't have been a big inversion.

It should have been-- It shouldn't have taken

until that book to have a character who is

not a white dude be the Gandalf character,

but it was for me, as a 15-year-old reading

it.

You can do subtle inversions, or subtle plays

on this quite a bit, to not be so expected.

It comes down to, if you have a mastery over

the form.

If you say-- Mistborn is a heist.

I promise you very early on, Mistborn is a

heist.

It has all the classic characteristics of

a heist.

But the fact that most people had not read

a heist where everyone has a different magical

talent was new.

The fact that we are recruiting someone into

this team and training them in an apprentice

plot, a master-apprentice plot, at the same

time as pulling off a heist, was something

new.

A lot of people talk about, I use Terry Rossio.

He's the screenwriter who wrote Pirates of

the Caribbean, one of the two, with his writing

partner, and Aladdin.

He talks about this idea.

He's calling it the strange attractor.

This is why you hear so often in Hollywood,

"It's this meets this."

The strange attractor idea for a story is

you want to have your story feel familiar
but strange at the same time.

Oftentimes what you do is you take a new spin

on a familiar idea, or you take two familiar

ideas and mash them together in a way that

doesn't feel like it would make sense but

is intriguing.

Mistborn is actually a heist movie in a fantasy

world, mashed up with My Fair Lady.

That's part of why Mistborn works.

That mashup, you know both of those plot archetypes.

You know about the orphan who is taken in

and trained to act all upper crust and things

like that.

You know heist story is.

But both of those things in a fantasy book

you haven't seen before.

What you're going to do, in part, is you're

going to do this in a new way, or you're going

to do it really well.

Harry Potter is a perfect example of this.

I don't think many people were surprised,

who have read a lot of fantasy, by the plot

of Harry Potter 1.

But it was fantastically done, and there is

something magnificent about seeing somebody

really good do something really well that

you want to enjoy.

This is why people read a lot of romance novels,

even though they know these two characters

are going to get together.

Even though the plot is predictable, watching--

Like, I know how Hamlet ends.

I will still go see Hamlet performed by actors.

You don't have to twist everywhere, but I

will talk about how to twist also.
All right, back here.

Do you need a chair, by the way?

I think there are a few seats here.

I could have people raise hands.

If you've got a seat next to you empty, raise

your hand, just in case someone in the back

wants one.

You guys can glance at those.

You can stand back there if you would prefer.

Q: Do all good characters have to have arcs?

For instance, Indiana Jones--

Good question.

Do all good characters have to have an arc?

There is a category of character that I believe

Jim Zub, the comic artist, dubbed.

He called them iconic characters.

These are characters that do not change story

to story, and you can read their stories out

of order, and you enjoy them for a different

reason than seeing a character's arc.

So, no.

For instance, James Bond is the classic example

of this.

James Bond, sometimes, depending on who does

a James Bond story, will have a character

arc in a given movie.

That's generally what they do nowadays.

But classic James Bond, classic Conan, classic

Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes did not have arcs in most

of his stories.

Sherlock Holmes is an iconic character.

In Sherlock Holmes, your tone and your plot

promises are way more important than promising

some sort of character arc.

It is not required.

If it going to be a major feature of your

story, then you do want to give a promise

to it.

But if it's not, you instead show them being

iconic and say, this is why you want to read

about this character.

They are just cool to watch, or to read, or

to, you know, experience.

Go ahead.

Q: Why do some promises work to capture readers'

interest and make them want to keep reading,

while other kinds of promises don't work?

Why do some promises work to capture readers'

interest and keep them reading, while other

promises don't work?

Some of this is taste.

This is something you're going to have to,

as writers, become used to, is that different

people have different tastes, and there is

nothing wrong with that.

Okay?

You can make the very best salmon in the world,

and I will hate it.

I do not like fish.

I have a visceral reaction to fish.

I gag if I taste it.

It makes me feel ill to try to eat.

Doesn't matter how good that salmon is.

You're not going to get me to enjoy eating

that meal.

You might get me to appreciate how much work

you did and how well you made that salmon.

In the same way, some of this comes down to

taste.
Taste can be really tricky, in part because
the experience of your reader influences their

taste a great deal.

The more you experience, the more you will

fall into the "I like these things, I don't

like these things," and you may start to develop,

not everyone does, the "I just want something

different."

I've tasted these things so much I want something

new.

You see this in a lot of movie reviewers.

There are some movies, that if you see a hundred

movies in a year, this is your favorite movie,

and if you see one movie a year, it's your

least favorite movie.

Books have this too.

You can call this the Aragon effect.

When Aragon came out, a lot of people read

it and said, "I've read this before.

This is Star Wars or Dragon Riders of Pern."

And yes, it was.

But of course, Star Wars was taking that from

other stories, and so was Dragon Riders of

Pern.

I'm sure there were people who saw Star Wars

and were like, "What?

People like this?

I've been reading John Carter books forever

and it's just kind of that."

They even used the word Sith for the bad guys
in those, I think.

There maybe people who read your book and

be like, "This is just too straight down the

archetype for me."

There may be other people who read it and

are like, "This is a perfect version of this
archetype, and I haven't experienced it very
much."

And so they just really love it.

You shouldn't, as an author, I think, be making

value judgements on those things.

You can definitely decide what you want to

do and what your audience is.

That's part of it.

Why do some promises work also when others

done?

Skill of the author is going to play into

it.

Whether you can start making good on those

promises or not.

I'd say it divides between skill and what

the reader wants.

Okay?

All right.

Let's talk about progress for a little bit.

Because this is the most important of them,

I think.

You would think the payoff is the most important,

and in one element it is.

Payoff is most important sometimes because

it is the feeling you leave the reader with

when they put your book down at the end.

That can very much influence whether they

pick up another one or not.

However, getting them to that end is more

important.

The host of writers who have fantastic progress

sections and weak endings, who are still very

famous and popular authors, should prove to

you that this is the most important of them.

The host of authors who have limp beginnings,

but really spectacular characters and plot

in the middle, followed by "and then it ended,"

who are still very, very popular writers,

should tell you this.

Because progress in the middle is the hardest

of them, and it's where some of the great

writers excel.

Stephen King is the quintessential example

of this.

What do I mean by progress?

We're going to go over here for progress.

I started to figure this out early in my career

when I was reading a book by Larry Niven and

Jerry Pournelle.

Forgive me, those of you who have heard this

story before.

The book is Inferno by Niven and Pournelle.

Not their most famous.

A lot of people have heard of them because

of The Mote in God's Eye.

Or Larry Niven wrote Ringworld, which was

the inspiration for Halo.

These are two fantastic science fiction authors.

Inferno is about a science fiction author

who goes to a party, gets drunk, falls out

a window and dies, and wakes up in The Inferno,

Dante's Inferno.

Inferno is a classic style science fiction

book.

What I mean by that is, a lot of the old school

science fiction books felt very episodic.

This is because the authors were either serializing

them in magazines or were accustomed to doing

so.

Inferno reads like, we have this adventure

with famous dead person.

By the end of the adventure, the mini adventure,

you figure out, "That's probably Billy the
Kid, isn't it?"

Then Billy the Kid is left at one part of

the Inferno, and the main character continues

on to the next part of the Inferno and has

another wacky adventure with some perhaps

famous person, with a lot of imagination showing

off a fantasy writer's take on what it would

be like to travel through hell.

I was reading this book and I was compelled

page by page, and normally I'm not in these

episodic stories.

I can still enjoy them.

But usually I finish a story and I'm like,

eh, I'm done.

But each time I had to turn the page and keep

moving.

I asked myself, why do I read like I'm reading

a thriller, thrillers are a genre that specializes

in always making you turn the next page, when

I'm reading this goofy adventure in hell that's

very episodic.

I realized one thing had made the difference.

There was a map at the front of the book.

Now, we laugh at this because I may have,

maybe, a thing for maps.

It's possible that you may have noticed that

there are a lot of maps in some of my books.

So you're like, "Of course you noticed the

map, Brandon."

But this was not an epic fantasy story.

But it had Dante's Inferno as a circle, where

he started out here at the end and was moving

toward the center.

And the question of, what's at the center

of hell and can he get out, was so compelling

that I had to read each next adventure, because

I could watch as he moved steadily inward.
This is a really powerful sensation in readers,
and it is part of what draws people to books

and why they read.

Every book has this by virtue of the pages

in the book that the reader is watching count

toward an endpoint as they go.

Even if they aren't watching the actual numbers,

watching themselves get through the book.

There is a natural time bomb to reading a

book.

That's progress, that you, as the reader,

being able to sense that you are progressing

through a story, is fundamental and vital

to making stories page turners.

When you say page turner, most people's mind

will go to something like a thriller, where

something is always exploding, someone is

always chasing you, and things like that.

But you can write a page turner about anything.

Does not have to have a single fight in it.

No one has to be running anywhere.

The page turner mentality is about you indicating

to your reader that progress is happening

and giving them a sense that it is building

toward something that they want to see.

This is a sense of progress.

It is an illusion of progress.

Because you have absolute control over this.

If you wanted to, you could pass a thousand

years in one sentence.

"And a thousand years passed."

I would guess that most of you in this room,

if I gave you the challenge, saying you have

to write 20 pages on the time between the

second hand moving from one second to the

next, you could do it.

It'd be boring, probably, but you could do
it, just describing everything in the room

and making everything slow down, and sticking

with this moment, adding three flashbacks.

You could, if you needed to, fill the whole

book and make it take one second.

You have absolute control over this.

One of the big complaints that people who

don't read a lot of fantasy or sci-fi make

about it, is the complaint of, oh, they can

just make anything happen, so there is no

tension.

This is, in one way, true, but it's a much

larger problem in scope than they think, because

you can do that in any genre.

If you are writing a romance, you can say,

"And he got over himself and they got together."

Takes one sentence.

"And then he got over himself.

And they found a whole bunch of money that

her uncle left them that they didn't know.

Suddenly they could pay off the house" and

the evil whatever person who was loan sharking

them and stuff, and the fact that they no

longer had that tension made their relationship

problems go away and they lived happily ever

after.

You can do this in any story.

We'll talk about how to not do this when we

talk about Sanderson's First Law.

But progress is absolutely, 100%, in your

control, and because of that, you want to

create an illusion for the reader that a steady

progress toward an inevitable and exciting

goal is happening in your story.

You usually want to do this by identifying

what your plot is going to be.
What your actual story arc, not necessarily
just your umbrella.

Oftentimes, like I said, your story arc and

your umbrella plot are the same.

But you want to know, you want to ask yourself,

why are people turning the page?

What question do they need answered?

Now, there can be multiples.

The bigger your book, the longer your story,

the more of these you will generally have.

But there will be a few overriding ones, and

you usually, at least I do, you make this

happen by identifying what type of plot you

are doing.

We'll talk about those in a little bit.

We did an entire year on Writing Excuses,

so if you need more, well, go listen to Season

11 is it?

Elemental Genres is what it's called.

All the Writing Excuses people humoring me

as we go through kind of Brandon's philosophy

on plotting.

Just for the sake of discussion, I will use

Star Wars.

Let's use Star Wars as an example.

In Star Wars, we have an umbrella plot of

destroy empire, which you don't really realize

is the whole umbrella plot.

You think it is relegated to get the plans

to the people.

There's your umbrella plot.

Yeah, rescue the princess is on there.

That's all kind of, yeah, get the plans to

the people and rescue princess.

Help me Obi Wan Kenobi.

You're my only hope.

Your character arc, your main character arc,

is Luke becomes a Jedi, or really, Luke trusts

the force.

Luke takes the first step on becoming a Jedi,

is what it actually turned out to be.

But the promise is, Luke's going to use the

force.

It's going to be cool.

You have a secondary character arc of Han

becomes not as much a jerk.

That's what that says.

I'm sorry.

Sometimes my handwriting just kind of turns

into hieroglyphics.

But you've got a secondary character arc of

Han becomes not so much a jerk.

I would say those are our plots.

In this one, your story arc and your umbrella

arc, basically the same thing.

Very simple plot.

Here's your story arc.

Here's your character arc.

Go.

Your sense of progress that you give the reader,

or the viewer in this case, needs to snowball

into these things.

Where writers go wrong, and why their stories

can get boring, even though they're exciting,

is when they give a promise, and then they

go in a different direction for their plot

arc.

Now, sometimes you do this intentionally.

It is a very difficult thing to do, and we

can maybe talk about exceptions later.
But let me give you a real-world example of
this in my own writing.

I was working on Oathbringer, the third Stormlight

book.

I'll try to avoid specific spoilers, for those

of you who haven't read it.

But in Oathbringer, at a certain point, people

end up, a bunch of the characters end up in

the alternate dimension, Shadesmar, which

is kind of like a realm of fairies, maybe?

How would you explain that, people that read?

The fey realm?

They end up in the fey realm.

Something like that.

They end up in an alternate dimension.

Here, a big disaster has happened.

They have narrowly escaped with their lives.

Characters are in serious problems mentally

and emotionally.

They get together.

In the original draft, they talk about what

they need to do, and they say, "If we can

get over to this other thing, this other place,

there's a portal there that takes us back

to the real world, and we can start to put

things back on track."

I, as an author, knew they actually needed

to be down here for the big climax.

So as they went on their way, they got diverted.

They're like, well, we have to go here to

get to this place that'll get a ship, and

nope, it's going-- Oh, no!

We ended up here.

For the big climax.

Who woulda thunk?

That we end up where all the other characters
are going.

I was really looking forward to writing this

sequence.

Going to Shadesmar was something I had been

promising in the books since the first one.

I knew it was going to be very visually interesting.

It was going to have some really interesting

plot things.

Some of the things the characters were going

through were fascinating, to me at least as

a writer.

I wrote the sequence, and during beta reads

it came back as everyone's least favorite

sequence.

They all thought it was boring.

I'm like, "Really?

But-- but it's not boring.

Why do you all think it's boring?"

I realized that I had violated this.

You do it all the time as a writer.

This was a mini promise within a story.

But when I got them together and said, we

are going to have a mini travelogue in the

middle of our story, it's a plot archetype.

See this place over here?

We're going to go there.

And then we went down here.

And everyone, in the back of their mind, even

if they couldn't articulate, was thinking,

"Okay, but this has to be the diversion.

We're on the diversion until we get back to

the real plot, which is to get over here."

They kept waiting for the diversion to end

and got frustrated and bored with the diversion.
If you've ever been in a movie where you're
like, "I'm so bored, even though exciting

things are happening, with these characters.

Can't they just get back to the main plot?"

[Cantobyte.]

It's because we weren't sold on the progress

toward what we wanted to have happen.

We had too many different promises that we

were more interested in, and/or we were going

about the wrong direction about having it

happen.

So I revised the story so that up here in

this discussion, soon after it, they have

a thing where they all get together and say,

"Where are we going?"

All the characters are going, "We need to

go over here," except Kaladin, who is our

primary viewpoint character saying, "I have

had a vision.

If we don't go here, somebody very important

to us dies."

They're all like, dude, you may be a little

off your rocker.

But sold the reader on the idea that this

was the real goal, and we need to get there.

So when we got diverted, everyone who was

reading knew, "I knew we were supposed to

go there originally."

Suddenly, the promise became different, and

the gamma readers loved the sequence, just

as I had been hoping that they would.

This is the power of proper promises and progress

along those promises.

I changed virtually nothing about what was

actually happening.

I changed the promise and the tone at the

beginning.
Instead of "we need to escape," it turned
into "we need to save this person, which means

we need to get there."

Slightly different tone, slightly different

locational goal on our travelogue, and suddenly

all the readers were on board.

Now, I say all the readers.

It's totally possible that some of the people

watching this or listening are like, "I still

hated that part, Brandon."

That's okay.

We talked about tastes earlier.

What I get really worried about when I have

beta reads, is when a large group of readers

that I thought were going to enjoy something

find it boring instead.

That's a problem.

Happened again in Starsight, actually, where

I had to do major revisions on Starsight because

my promises up front were very poorly done

in the original draft, and I could not figure

out why until I had had beta reads, and talked

it over with editors.

This is not an obvious thing sometimes.

You would think, after 25 years of doing this,

I would know, intrinsically, how to just make

a good promise at the beginning.

But there are two cases in my two most recent

books.

Now, Skyward is in the middle, and it didn't

have one of these.

But two of my three most recent books, where

I fundamentally misjudged a promise or a progress

I was making.

In both cases, the solution was to change

the promise, not the progress.
That was because I'd already written the book,
and I didn't want to write another one.

In outlining, if I figure this out, I would

probably go 50:50 on whether I change the

promise or if I change the progress.

The idea with Star Wars is, most of the things

that the character should be doing should

be working on these points.

You should be making steps toward these three

things.

Every scene written in Star Wars, because

it has to be so tight, this is a film.

Books can get away with a little more flabbiness,

but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it.

Every scene either advances the "let's get

the plans," "let's rescue the princess," "let's

learn to trust the force.”

What you do as an author, if you're building

an outline, if you want to outline, is you

look at what your plot is, and you say, what

are small increments I can make along this

path that will be really interesting to the

reader, that will show we're making progress,

or occasionally backsliding.

Backsliding is okay too.

As long as you're very careful about how you

do it, backsliding can be okay now and then.

Particularly if, you know, "We're going to

take the plans to Alderon.

Alderon isn't there anymore.

That's a problem."

We have just back slided, but there's a princess

here, so let's go rescue the princess.

She's rich.

Then you're playing on this one, Identifying

what type of plot you have can be very handy

for this.
We don't have a ton of time left today.

We have less than 15 minutes.

So we may shove some of this to the next plot

discussion, where I talk a lot about the different

plot archetypes.

But the idea is that you want to be thinking

about, if you have a romance or relationship

plot as really the core plot of your story,

make sure you are indicating progress happening.

If your main story is "We need to get to Mount

Doom," then each adventure you have on the

way should generally take you a little bit

closer to Mount Doom.

Q: It seems like in romance the step backs

are more acceptable than other archetypes.

I would say that in all the-- The question

is, it seems like in romance the step backs

are more acceptable than other archetypes.

I would say generally yes.

I think that's a valid observation.

But I would say step backs are expected in

almost every story.

You use the step backs, generally, in your

type of twist you're doing, or how you're

changing the plot.

Q: Because most of the step backs, like with

the Alderon one, it happened very quickly

and then they were off doing-- It wasn't something

they put a lot of time towards.

Right.

Q: It seems like if you do a huge, I guess

is the word for it, and then you step back,

way back.

Yeah.

If you step way back.

Q: Why am I reading all of this?

Exactly.

It requires some sort of fluency.

For those who are watching on YouTube, the

comment is, seems like if you did all this

work to go somewhere and then stepped all

the way back, it would feel really terrible

in most plots.

But most romance stories, readers accept that

you're not stepping back as far as the characters

think they are, and that's a fundamental part

of that.

That, "oh, it's all destroyed," the all is

lost moment happens in almost every story.

Not always.

But you have this moment where, "Oh, no.

Obi Wan is dead.

Ahhhh!

That's bad!

That's worse than a planet being blown up."

In the context of the story, not in real life.

And a lot of stories will have these sort

of things, where for a moment you believe

that you've stepped all the way back to the

beginning, but you haven't really.

That kind of comes into your payoff and your

plot twist.

Let's talk about payoff.

Actually, let's do any more questions about

progress before we end on payoff.

Q: You said something about, when you were

talking about a little anecdote over here,

so promise, progress, and payoff are all four

subplots as well, and you have to do it several

times throughout the story, not just for--

Yeah.
The question is, so this is for subplots,
not just for the main story.

Yes.

Asterisk.

The longer your book, the more subplots you're

going to have, and the more of these you have

to set up.

Like, Oathbringer is, in some ways, a terrible

example, because I plot Stormlight Archive

books, generally, as three novels that I put

together between one cover.

That sequence actually was the beginning of

a new book in my plotting archetype.

But because I do that, it allows me the plot

before, the plot arc before was, we need to

go to this city and save this city, and then

something terrible happened, and we actually

were able to have a major failure in a way

that didn't feel so disastrous.

Because people can completely fail a little

bit more easily in the middle of a story than

at the end of a story.

This is why Empire Strikes Back can work the

way it does.

If Return of the Jedi ended that way, it might

be more of a downer.

Not to say you can't do that.

There are certainly lots of great stories

that do.

I was able to basically make Oathbringer a

trilogy.

But even not doing that, you will have mini

plot arcs and things.

I often talk about, I use this idea of, what

you are doing, really, is you are nesting

plots, like you do in code.

Where it's like you've got open bracket, open

bracket, open bracket.

And these are like your umbrella.

You've got your other arc, if you've got a

separate one.

You've got your character.

Then you're going to close all those three

near the end.

Though you might not close the umbrella until

book 2, or book 3, with another book in between.

This is very common.

In here, though, you might be like, mini plot,

mini plot, mini plot.

Example from Star Wars, since we're using

that.

Alderon was gone and we've been pulled into

the tractor beam.

New mini plot, new side plot.

Turn off the Death Star's tractor beam and

rescue the princess for good.

You already, you kind of foreshadowed the

rescue the princess plot, but really it starts

right there.

We can go rescue her.

Obi Wan goes and does this.

You have mini plots with their own kind of

problems, and things like that.

Then at the middle you close that bracket

and go to the next one.

This sort of visualizing a plot tends to work

really well.

One of the things we're not talking about

today that I need to remember to talk about

next time is, this progress should involve

problems arising and things like that.

But I guess we can talk about that in twists.

All right, let's go on to talking about--

Oh, was there another one that I missed?
Okay.

Let's talk about payoff then.

Payoff.

Payoff is where you make good on all of this.

The trick is you don't always make exactly

good on it.

Now, your classic archetype, which is still

perfectly valid, is to make a promise at the

beginning, work hard through the progress

to show that it's working, then have things

start to fall apart, and start Act III with

the character thinking it's just not going

to work at all.

They've tried and they've failed.

Then at the start of Act III, they find new

inspiration, a new bit of information, or

a new clue, or just the strength to try again,

and then this time it works.

Then it works and you get what you were promised

at the beginning.

That is totally okay.

I call that, my sort of metaphor for that

is, you promise your son you're going to buy

him a toy car.

He waits till Christmas, as he's supposed

to wait.

He opens his box and gets a toy car.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

People often read a lot of books that have

very twisty plots with lots of reversals and

say, "I guess I have to do that," forgetting

that a lot of the best stories out there,

Star Wars is an example, don't have as much

of a twisty plot.

Star Wars has what I call the plot expansion

as a twist.
The plot expansion is, you promise your kid
a toy car, they wait really, really well,

and then you give them a brand-new real car.

This is the Luke Skywalker is promised "You're

going to get to go into the sky and help bring

these plans back," and at the end it's actually,

"You didn't just bring the plans back.

You destroyed the Death Star yourself and

saved the princess."

Plot expansion.

And that is a twist.

Because the promise at the beginning is intentionally

smaller than you know you're going to deliver

on, and you work hard to hook them on this.

This is the twist I use for Mistborn.

Surprise.

Sorry, guys.

But one of the big twists for Mistborn is,

your promise is, you're going to get a heist.

As you experience the story, as our progress

goes through, you see how terrible life is

for people here, and you start to think, "Man,

I do want these cool thieves to pull off their

heist.

But the thing is, if they just enrich themselves

and run, they're going to leave behind all

these other people, and I actually want something

more.

I kind of wish this was Star Wars and they

were going to overthrow the Empire.

Holy crap!

They overthrew the Empire."

I was able to do that, in part, because people

don't expect-- People read that book and expect,

book three they fight the empire, book one

they pull off the heist.
That was the model for epic fantasy, in a
way.

And so by doing the expansion twist, which

is like, nope, we're going to do it all in

one book, you give the reader more than they

expected.

Very rarely do you run into trouble when you're

doing a plot twist, when you give the reader

more than they expected.

You can run into problems when you give them

the substitute.

If you do it really well, it doesn't matter.

In fact, they like it better.

So the substitute plot twist to envision this

is, you promise your son you're going to give

him a toy car.

You then spend several months talking about

how awesome toy planes are, to the point that

your son says, "Man, I wish I was getting

a toy plane."

Then they open their box at the end and it's

a toy plane.

And we're like, "Yay!

Toy plane!"

The classic example, one of the best ever

to do this is While You Were Sleeping.

If you guys haven't seen this movie.

Yeah.

What's that?

Spoilers?

You've never seen it?

It's okay.

It's a fantastic romance story where a woman

sees the perfect man.

She has a terrible life.

She falls in love with him from afar.

Then he goes into a coma, and accidentally,

through hijinks, she maybe says to people

she's his girlfriend.

His whole family is like, "He never tells

us anything.

Come."

And she becomes part of the family.

Then she gets in deeper to where you're like,

"Oh, man, I wish you hadn't promised us those

two would get together."

Because the promise at the beginning is this

perfect man's going to be her love interest.

You're like, "This is getting worse and worse."

In the meantime, she falls in love with his

brother, who is a really cool guy and is a

great match for her.

But the story is, of course she has to end

up with this guy.

But of course, at the end she ends up with

the toy plane instead.

And it is a brilliant substitution plot.

Substitution plot generally depends on you

convincing the reader that you actually want

something else.

I would argue, though this is a really big

outlier, that this is what Into the Woods

is.

People often bring up Into the Woods and say,

"How do you do Into the Woods?"

If you haven't seen Into the Woods, it starts

off as a classic set of fairy tells.

At the midpoint into Act II, all these people's

lives turn into disasters and they all die,

and it's miserable.

But it's fun miserable.

Sondheim, everyone.

Why does this work?

Well, this works, when it does, a lot of people

hate it.

Let's just point this out.

Substitution plots can be dangerous this way.

A lot of people hate it.

A lot of people like it because during the

beginning there's this sense that everything's

too perfect.

Everything's just not-- it's too perfect.

Plus, it's Sondheim.

When does someone get killed and be baked

into a pie?

Then you're like, "Yes!

Everyone's getting killed and baked into pies."

For the second half.

But Into the Woods is a really strange example.

We are out of time on this.

But let me just end by saying, your payoff

should flow naturally from the type of progress

you're doing, with the asterisk of if you're

going to a substitution or change the plot

a little bit, you do want to consider doing

that.

But it should give them, in most cases, everything

they want at the beginning, plus something

else and new.

Your best bet is to give them a toy car and

a plane.

Those are generally the best types of stories.

But just make sure it follows from the progress

that you spend your story on, and you will
be fine.

We'll see you guys all next week.

Thanks.