Lecture #9: Characters — Brandon Sanderson on Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy

BRANDON: All right, guys. Hey! Woo hoo. It's time for class, woo hoo! Today we're going to talk about characters. CLASS: Yay! BRANDON: Yay! It's kind of interesting, because a lot of times when I do this class I start with character. But I just kind of play it by ear each time. We're going to do two weeks on character. We're going to start today with me kind of talking about what the purpose of characters are-- is. Which kind of sounds a little silly. We all know what the purpose of characters is. They're the people who do

the stuff in the stories. But characters fulfill different roles, and the way that you use your main characters, in particular, is going to form a lot of the shape of your story and your plot. Today we're going to kind of just talk about this idea of characters as elements in your story, and how do you do things like make your reader care about them. When I was an undergraduate studying creative writing, this is one of those things that I kept asking and never got answers on in a lot of my classes. A lot of my

classes, I'd say, all right, that's great, telling me about searching for my soul in my writing. Wonderful. Want to do that. How do I make people like my characters? How do I make people care about reading my story? Because a lot of the stories I'm reading by myself and the other students, I don't care. How do we make people care? As I've thought about this and how to kind of talk about it, I've divided it into kind of three ideas of how we make people care about our characters. This kind of gets down to the

core reason you're using a main character in the first place. Like, you theoretically could tell a story without characters. There are some writers, who I will not name, who seem like they would much prefer to be able to write like that. I'm not naming names. We're not naming names. The first thing that I think a character does for you, and one of the ways you make people care, is you establish empathy. If you want the reader to care about your story, one of the ways you do it is this. Now, this is really, really important,

because I think that a lot of people who write science fiction and fantasy come to it from a world building background, and you spend a lot of time on your world building. You think about how cool it would be if X, Y, or Z happened. You come up with a creative and innovative magic system and all of these things. But a magic system is only as interesting as the people using it. An action sequence is generally going to be meaningless if you don't care who lives and who dies. Not always. There are some that the

spectacle of the action scene itself is what propels you through it. But in general in a story, if you don't care who lives and dies, that action sequence loses a lot of its power for you. The setting is generally only as interesting in that it causes problems or an interesting place for your characters to travel. Creating characters that we care about, so that all of these other pieces mean something, is really important, and one of the most important things that you want to learn how to do in your writing. Now, character is one of these

things that for me, I had a lot more trouble talking about character when I started teaching. And even still, the pieces of what makes a character work are a little more ephemeral for me. I, as a writer, I've told you before, I generally outline my setting and my plot ahead of time, and my characters I cast, meaning I say, all right, I'm going to try writing a character in this world. I'm going to see where this person goes, what their passions, and dreams, and hopes, and fears are as I write them, and if that works,

great. I'm going to keep going with that, and that becomes my character. If that doesn't I put that aside and I try something very different. Over the year, I've gotten so that I do this less and less. But I still, like for instance, my two big series, Mistborn and Stormlight, both basically started with me trying different characters, and then putting them aside and trying new characters, until I arrived upon the ones that worked. We'll talk a little bit later about what made me decide they worked, as opposed to other ones. But in your story, as

you're starting off, one of the first things you want to try to do is establish empathy. This kind of gets into the things I'll talk about a little later. You might have heard me talk about them in previous years, where I have these sliding scales, where I talk about what makes readers interested in a character. One of them, of these sliding scales, that correlates to establish empathy, is likeability. We establish empathy for a character through a couple of different methods, one of which is, we show that they are like us in some way. Showing that

a character is relatable immediately establishes empathy. Another way that we do it is we make them nice. Now your definition of nice may vary, but we're kind of talking about this idea of, there's a famous screenwriting book called Save the Cat. The title of Save the Cat, where it comes from, is this old idea in Hollywood that if you want someone to like a hero, you have them save a cat, and if you want someone to hate a villain, you have them kick a dog. The idea being that if someone is likeable, if they have

normal human sympathies and things like this, then it will establish empathy. This is why so often when a writer makes a villain, and they're very villainous, but you want to humanize them a little bit, you will show them doing something like us, show them being-- they are this monstrous tyrant who wants to destroy half of the universe. But they still love their family in their own twisted way. That is like us. That's a normal, relatable, human sort of thing, or giant purple monster sort of thing. Let's see. There's one more I have in here. Another

thing that you can do to establish empathy is show people liking them. This is really handy. We will instantly like someone who is liked by other people. This is how it works. This is showing a character having a family, or showing a character having friends. We immediately say, well, somebody likes them, maybe I will as well. So establish empathy. I want to make it clear as I go through these things, you do not have to do each of these things for every character. These are just ways to get us emotionally invested in your story using

character. Number one, establish empathy. Number two is-- let me get this wording right, establish rooting interest. What I mean by establishing rooting interest is that you are going to show that what the character wants is interesting to us. This is basically giving the character a motivation. You're going to show us what the character wants. Characters who want things are naturally more interesting to us than characters who don't. This is why Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is so interesting, because it has a protagonist who doesn't want anything, really, other than maybe a nice cup of tea.

What's that? STUDENT: British. BRANDON: Yeah, British. But the story is doing that intentionally to be a farce by showing here is a protagonist who refuses to protag. Establish your rooting interesting. You want to have a character want something, even if it is just a cup of tea. You want a character who wants something out of life that they generally can't have. That's another thing is, what do they want? Why can't they have it? This is going to kind of spiral into their flaws, or their handicaps, or their limitations. Why can't the character have this thing

that they want? You also can generally establish, in rooting interest, you can establish the personal connection to the plot. Luke doesn't really want to become a Jedi. He doesn't really hate the Empire, till they kill his parent figures, and suddenly it's personal. That phrase, "suddenly it's personal," there's a reason why that is become a cliché of storytelling, because one of the things that you do in establishing rooting interest is you make sure that there is a reason that your protagonist is connected to the plot. Number three up here is progress. This is relating back to

the plot stuff we said. Establish the progress, the sense of progress that you're going to have with the character. In other words, how are they going to change. You do this by showing a flaw that they have, or you establish some sort of journey they're going to go on. This is dovetailing into all the stuff we talked about with plotting. The goal for this one is, oftentimes this will be driven by a sense of mystery or a question. Will they be able to become the thing that we know inside they can become? Will they be

able to-- Will Spiderman become a superhero? What's his journey? What's our arc? How are you going to signpost this character changing? What is supposed to change? Boy, I wrote that one bad. That says, "going to change." We'll fix it in post. We actually won't. So these are your primary tools in creating a character that we want to read about. You are either going to make us like them, or you're going to give them a motivation that sounds really interesting, or you're going to show them on a journey where they themselves are changing and we want

to see what happens. You can do all three. You can do one of the three very well. If I'm relating these, a few years ago I came up with this idea that I could really describe a lot of characters on a sliding scale with three different toggles, three different sliding scales. I wrote one over there, but I'm going to do it on this board. The first one's likeability, the second one was proactivity, and the third one was competence. And that characters tended to fall somewhere on a scale of these three ideas. I relate these three

ideas to these three goals of making you want to read about a character. Now, these things intermix, and they are not distinct from one another. Your proactivity and your competence are generally going to go hand in hand, for instance. But the idea is that your likeability is how much empathy you establish for the character in your story. Your proactivity relates to their motivation and what they're doing to achieve that motivation. And their competence has to do with where they are on that kind of progress scale of getting better at whatever they want to do. Do

you understand that when I say competence, I'm not necessarily just meaning how good they are at swordplay? A person's-- if you were writing a story about someone that was very shy, that the arc of the character was that they were going to become very outgoing and then run for the presidency. Well, the core competence for the character is that shyness versus introvert/extrovert thing, where they are learning how to stand up and talk in front of people, which is still a competence slider. Yes, they're not learning how to wield a sword or use the one power,

but they are still growing in competence in some area that specifically involves the plot. What I realized is, I could have characters moving on any one of these actual scales to create a sense of motion and progress for the story. For instance, a character who is growing less and less likeable through the course of the story can be a really interesting story. It's a different story, however, than a character who is growing increasingly in likeability through the course of a story. In the same way, a lot of characters start off inactive and become proactive, and

that is the way that they are moving. A lot of characters start off with no competence and move up in competence. You don't usually move down in competence, but there are a few really interesting movies about someone losing their competence. The idea is that your motion here is part of how you're telling your story. Now I want to stop here and mention something that a friend of mine, Howard Taylor, calls an iconic hero. This is a phrase I think he got from Jim Zub. The idea behind an iconic hero is a hero who does not

change on any of these three, or if they do change, they change very slightly on one of these three through the course of a given story. These are your-- James Bond is usually the classic example of the iconic hero, though with various reboots they will move him down in competence and then slowly move him back up again. So it really kind of depends on which story you're talking about. Same thing with a lot of the superheroes. A lot of the superheroes, it's like, we know where they are on this line, and we're going to have

an adventure with them experiencing this. An iconic hero generally is going to have one or all three of these ramped to the top so that they cannot move anywhere else because they are already as competent and capable as they can be. These can be fun to read about. You don't have to have progress on these scales in order to have a story. But I have found the majority of stories I really like are involving a lot of motion on these scales by different characters. For instance, we have Star Wars, one of my favorite movies, the

original, where we have lots of movement here. At the beginning of the story, where would you say Han Solo is on these three things? Likeability, where's Han on likeability? We kind of like him, but we're like, yeah, right. Where is Han in proactivity? Depends on which of these things you're talking. But yeah, Han has to kind of pushed into things. He does shoot first. But where it comes to you need to give him a lot of money, he's just sitting there. Where is Han in competence? Han thinks he's up here, but he's actually down here.

Right? That's the fun of Han, is he probably knows where he is on the other ones, but he's not-- And through the course of the story, we are going to boost his likeability. We're going to boost his proactivity a ton by making him come back and not having to get paid to save everybody. And his competence basically stays the same, but, you know, that's Han. Where is Luke? He's pretty high in likeability, I'd say, from the get-go. That’s Luke’s job is you come into the story; you see him looking at the twin sunset. You have

him fixing things for his parents and wishing he could be whatever. The whole point of Luke is to establish empathy. His goal is-- we go, Luke is supposed to be up there. Whether you actually like him or not, this is what his role is supposed to be. But where is he in proactivity. He thinks he want-- he might actually be a little bit-- no, he's probably down here. He thinks he wants to go off and be a fighter pilot. Has he actually done it? No. He has to get booted out of things just like Han

does. Where is Luke's competence? Yeah, yeah. He's a good pilot. He doesn't have to learn that. It's kind of like Luke has two. He's up here and down there. You'll see this in a lot of things, where a character's really good in one area, but really lacking in another. The main place he has to learn, though, is in the Force. His growth arc is for him being in the Force from here to, like, here. Then the next one goes here, back down to here, and then the next one it's like here. Well, he's already there.

Then he's up here. This is the idea with Luke's character. Where is Leia on likeability? Yes. Leia's pretty darn high on likeability. We start out as little ship being chased by big ship, and things like that. Where is Leia in proactivity? CLASS: High. BRANDON: Very high. Yeah. Leia's the only one who does anything in the movie. Everybody else has to be shoved into it, even Obi Wan Kenobi, by Leia. Like, Leia and R2 are basically the only people who do anything in the movie. And where is Leia in competence? CLASS: Yeah, in her realm, she's

probably pretty high. Leia's pretty iconic, wouldn't you say? The story is not necessarily about Leia changing. It's about the growth in these other things. I find it a lot of fun just kind of thinking about where do various characters fall on this, what characters are horribly unlikeable, but hugely proactive and competent, so we read about them anyway. People like a lot of villains, like say, Joker. Generally it's like, we've got someone who's hugely proactive, middle competence, but makes up for it in proactivity, and generally not very likeable. But we want to read about them because

that proactivity just grabs ahold of us. They have really interesting motivations. Usually when someone is high on the proactivity scale and they are not going to be changing on that, you establish a really stellar motivation. What is Leia's motivation in Star Wars? Save the galaxy, right? She has huge motivation that only gets higher through the course of that story, in that she's basically the only one trying to save the galaxy, the only one left after everybody else gets killed. But Luke, what is his motivation? He wants to go off and-- he wants to look at

the twin sunset and get out there. Instead of establishing this really strong motivation at the beginning of the story, we have to lean back on empathy for Luke. Han's motivation? Get money. So we lean a lot on Han's competence at the beginning. He's the person that can shoot the other guy before the other guy can shoot him. He's the guy who can get this ship to run past the enemy blockade, or whatever, that's trying to stop them. He is the guy who can get them where they need to go. We like Han because he's competent,

and that competence makes him cool. Now we find out that he maybe has an overinflated opinion of how good he is at some of these things, just by his actions, like chasing an entire group of Storm Troopers by himself. But the idea is that we're going to have each of these characters doing a different thing for us in the movie, and we start off strongly with each of them kind of in a different realm. This is a great way to do your storytelling. This is why so often you have the young hero who kind of

needs to be forced out, but has a hidden competence and is really likeable, and then you also have this old, wise mentor, who is highly competent, but maybe is not necessarily as likeable, as relatable. Not a lot of people relate to Gandalf. They do kind of, because Tolkien does a decent job, and Jackson does an even better job, of making him likeable. But this idea of, I'm more like the guy in the shire than I am like the powerful wizard, is generally the way that stories work. There's a reason, I often say, why Spiderman tends

to be a lot of people's favorite superhero. It's because he starts off very establish empathy likeable. Rather than starting the story with him having all these powers, it hits empathy, empathy, empathy. He reads comic books and plays video games, target audience. He gets bullied at school, target audience. He's a nice guy who's in love with the girl next door but is too shy to go talk to her, target audience. Then what is his journey? Competence skyrocketing through the roof. Extremely likeable at the start, and we're just going to show him becoming awesome. He starts as

Frodo. He ends as Aragorn. That journey, getting to see Frodo become Aragorn, is a really powerful story to tell. Why do I hit on this? Why do I talk about this? What is the point? The point is to start you thinking about your characters and the story you want to tell, and their role in that story. Stories work by a sense of progress. Plots move because we see things changing. And you're going to want to decide with your characters if how much them changing is a part of what you want to make people turn your

page, or if instead you are just going to have your story be competence overload and watching really cool people do really cool things. Oceans 11, really cool people doing really cool things. Is there a journey in that? Not really. We are just going to be awesome and wisecracking, and we're going to accomplish cool things. Different types of stories then, for instance, Spiderman, where almost always there is an overlap of a change in character motivations over time, signified by a change in proactivity. What does he do at the start? Let's the villain get away. How does

that change his motivations? It makes it personal. Suddenly he needs to be more motivated. And usually you will often interweave a change on proactivity with a change in competence overlapping one another, to the point that by the end the character's motivation has shifted. We call this in storytelling, screenwriters talk about this a lot. At the beginning of a story, you often show a difference between what the character wants and what they need. Spiderman wants to be famous and cool; he thinks. What does he need? He needs-- what he needs is to understand that with great

power comes great responsibility. He needs to understand that the things he wants should be used for good instead of evil, and he needs to have a motivation shift. You see this very, very commonly in this type of story also, where what the character says they want in the beginning is not actually what they need. That contrast can create interesting character conflict. Now the last thing I want to talk about this before we move on to another topic is this idea of flaws, limitations, and handicaps. I think that Sanderson's Laws, the humbly named Sanderson's Laws, have

a lot of application to characterization. If we're going to look at Sanderson's First Law as this law of foreshadowing, I would say that if you apply it to characters, we are looking at motivation. A lot of times when characters go wrong, when I'm reading works by new writers, or when one of my books has gone wrong and I'm getting beta reader feedback that confuses me, it is because I have not properly established character motivation at the start of the story, so that when they later make a decision or accomplish something, it feels in line with

who they have become and according to their motivation. A lot of times if dialog feels stilted, if your readers are like, something's wrong with this dialog, it's not a one-to-one, but a lot of times what's happened is you have established a character as one type of character. Their motivations are a certain set of motivations. But when you get to this conversation you realize, "I need an argument here. It'll make the conversation more interesting." So you have an argument between them and someone else and the reader's like, "This feels stilted. This feels cardboard." What they really

mean in that instance is you are having a character act contrary to their motivations in order to move the plot in some way. Sometimes this means you need to revise that scene so they work according to their motivations, and you will have a better scene. Sometimes it just means you need to back up and establish motivation. One of the things that's fascinating about characters, about human beings in general, is that we tend to wear a lot of hats, and we often have conflicting motivations that are driving us in different directions. You probably have these as

well. You have a, perhaps, duty to your fam and what your fam wants of you, and your own sort of duty to your own inner desire to become a novelist instead of a doctor. Brandon going to college had both of these motivations working on him. At home they're like, "You're going to be a doctor, right?" And he was saying, "Yes, I'm a biochemistry major. That's kind of the point." But inside I was screaming, "No!" You have a lot of these. Often times, the intersection between our family life, our social life, our religious life, and all

of these things create conflicts. If you can properly show this out of the character, readers will not feel that the character is acting against their motivations. Readers will accept this. In fact, sometimes it is dangerous to give a character only one, single motivation. My example of this is a-- worked much better 10 years ago when I taught this class in the early years. Any of you watch Lost? STUDENT: Yes. BRANDON: OK, there's, like, three of you. So in Lost-- oh, nice. In Lost there is a character named Michael, I got his name right, right? Who

has an extremely strong establishment of empathy, in that he is a father who has kind of been a bad, deadbeat father and has decided to be a good father now. He loves his son. He's got a lot of empathy, and he's got an established motivation. This man loves his son and wants to be a good father. You would think that would be a recipe for a really strong character. He is everyone's least favorite character. The Lost guy is nodding his head. Everyone hates Michael. Maybe not everybody, but almost everyone. And this is really strange. It's

a great case study for you to study, because in the show, Michael's son gets captures and kidnapped by an evil, mysterious group. And you would think, all right, we've got a father who's trying to be better. We see him moving up in likeability. He's got an established motivation. He loves his son and his son's been kidnapped. This is a really powerful story, and everyone hated it. Because Michael became one note. The characters would get together to plan what they needed to do for the next step of whatever they were trying to accomplish, and it would

be like, character one talks about this, character two talks about this, Michael, "My son!" and then the next character. And then they go to another situation and they'd all be doing something else, and he'd yell, "What about my son?" They're like, "What do you want for lunch, Michael? We have sandwiches or--" "My son! Where's my son?" Right? It became so one note that everybody hated it. Now this is-- I point to two problems with this. The first one being one-note character. A one-note character whose emotional state does not change or vary will get very tiring,

unless you do something else to make sure that there is a lot of progress going on, and that's the bigger problem. We never really saw any progress that he was making or that anyone could make toward saving his son, and so because of it, it felt like every time he yelled, "My son! But my son!" was just reminding us that we hadn't made any progress, that nothing was happening, that all it was is, yeah, Michael's going to yell about his son. And it got very distracting and annoying because all sorts of exciting other things were

happening. And we thought, we're like, "I should care about this guy's son. I really should. But he's boring, so I don't want to hear about his son." And this is a kind of flaw in approaching how that story was written. Now Lost, particularly Season 1, is fantastic. I would hold up a lot of that writing against a lot of other television show writing and things like this. But it did have this one kind of glaring flaw. Was that Season 1 with Michael? Yeah. Right off the bat. You kind of contrast that to a character who

should not be very likeable to us. He is a drug addict who is doing almost everything he can to get more drugs. He's played by a Hobbit, which does help, I'll admit. But you shouldn't-- he should be kind of low on likeability and things like this. But he often ranks as people's favorite character in the whole season. This is Charlie. Did I get his name right? Charlie was my favorite character. In a lot of ways, he shouldn't have been nearly as likeable as he was. But he was proactive, and he was trying, and we saw

his progress through the course of the season, where at the end of the season he turned down the drugs. They found a big stash of drugs and Charlie, like, he had some mistakes in the middle, but then they sent him on another one in Season 2. He relaxed. But at least in Season 1 there's this really great arc, and we saw progress, motion, and proactivity. So the character that on paper you'd be like, "Who do you like? The drug addict who's hiding his drug addiction from everyone else, or the man who loves his son and

has lost his son?" On paper you would like this guy. Charlie was way, way better a character and everyone loved him. Study situations like that. When you see a movie and you know you're supposed to like someone and you don't, ask yourself why. When you read a book and you're really interested in the antagonist plot line and you're bored by the protagonist plot line, ask yourself why, and how does it fit into the ideas of empathy, rooting interest, and progress in that character. But regardless, establish motivation, Sanderson's First Law. Second Law, flaws, limitations, handicaps. Now,

we talk a lot in building characters about character quirks. On one hand, I like this idea, that we talk about character quirks, stretching ourselves to do something a little more interesting and a little more different. But sometimes it is too easy to mistake a quirk for a personality. The way that you, at least I divide between the two, is I make sure, when I'm coming up with flaws, limitations, handicaps, these sorts of things, that they are going hand in hand with something on this board. When I add interesting quirks to a character, I want to

make sure that those quirks of character are somehow fitting into this. Now a lot of times you can do this in a simple way. For instance, if you're going to have the quirk, the character is a stamp collector. This is an action adventure story. The character is probably not going to-- stamp collecting does not play a lot into the actual main plot. But what you can do is you can establish this character being proactive in a very small sphere when they can't be proactive in a large sphere. If you start off the story and show

the great lengths they will go to to get this stamp that they really want, and then you show they collect the stamps because they don't get to travel because they don't have the funds for it, or maybe they're too sick for it, and they dream of traveling, and they open their book, and they put the stamps in of the places that they would have gone if they didn't have this handicap. Then suddenly you have a character who has an interesting quirk, and you have established a huge amount of empathy, and you have started to establish

motivation. When they get invited on an adventure and have to go on it despite their handicaps or limitations, you know this character is like, "Wait a minute. We have to go to Morocco?" And you've seen they don't have Morocco yet in their stamp book. And even though they don't think they can do it and they're mostly not proactive, and they're a character who's mostly been sitting in their house, you will be like, "You know what? I can believe this character will take this jump to go to Morocco on this crazy quest with whoever," Nicholas Cage,

let's say. Because that's what Nic Cage does. He shows up and takes you to Morocco. Or . . . or to the Cthulhu mythos, so stay away. But regardless, you can make that leap. And if you've got a quirk that can somehow connect all of these things, you are going to have a much stronger character. Rather than, oh, so random, this character is a taxidermist, and it doesn't really matter. It doesn't spiral in. They just like taxidermy. Yes, that could be interesting. But if you can connect it, it's going to be better. I think the

same way about flaws, handicaps, limitations. Now, I do divide in my head what these three things are as different things. You do not have to use my definitions. But kind of as a reminder, a flaw is something that the narrator is indicating that is wrong with the character that they should have fixed by now. Something that they were capable of fixing before, hadn't quite managed to do it, and through the course of the story you are indicating that flaw, they are either going to learn to fix this thing, or it's going to be their downfall.

Their great hubris, if you're in a Greek play, is kind of classic for this. But it's a thing that they have control over. A handicap I put as something that must be overcome, absolutely must be overcome, but is something that is not the character's fault and they have no power over whether this thing can be changed. Now some handicaps through the course of the story will be evaporated by the story. But the point is, the character up to this point, you don't blame a character for being born blind. This is a handicap, and you frame

the story a very different way. A limitation, for me, is a thing that is not to change, not to even overcome. It is a constraint you work within that you don't necessarily want the character to overcome. The fact that Peter Parker loves Aunt May and doesn't want her to come in danger is a limitation of your story, and that should generally not change through the course of the story. But it is something the character would have power over. You just don't want him to change it, right? That is kind of how I divide these three

things in my head. When you're building your character, I would recommend that you think about limitations, flaws, handicaps, and ask yourself how does that create motivation for the character, and how does that create story? Just like with magic systems, most of your stories are going to hit the character in a place where they have a flaw, a handicap, or a limitation. Most of your conflict is going to arise out of the face that they have flaws, handicaps, limitations. Let's stop and ask for questions. That was a big old firehose of stuff. So let's see what

you guys want to talk about and let me ask. Go ahead. STUDENT: How do you deal with this when you're with multiple character point of view/ BRANDON: Excellent question. How do you work with multiple character point of views in this? One of the first things I will decide is how much viewpoint time I'm going to give to each of these characters, and the more viewpoint time you have, the most nuanced you can be in a lot of these things. I'll get to you in just a sec. One of the best ways to make a character

feel real is to not be writing them to a role. This is something I learned early in my career. I often share this story, so I'm sorry if you've heard it before. But early in my career, I had a big problem writing female characters in my books. This was before I got published. I would get feedback back. They'd be like, "This is a really exciting adventure. All the women feel like cardboard cutouts that you have set into your story that people barely interact with, that are part of the set dressing." And this bothered me a

lot. That's half my characters. Well, that's 10% of my characters, because I was a young man writing books who hadn't realized that yet. But it should have been 50% of the characters. I thought about it a lot. I worked on it. And it was not, like, one revelation that made me get better at it. But one of the big things that changed for me was I started to realize I was writing characters to roles. I would say, this is the hero. Therefore they have this. This is the love interest. That is her role. I am

going to write her as the love interest. This is the goofy sidekick. I am writing the goofy sidekick to a specific role. This was really limiting my ability to make the characters feel real. When I started to kind of embrace this idea that every character is the hero in their own story. Every character, they're the protagonist, I should say, in their own story. They may not be the hero, but they are the protagonist. Every character sees themselves as the main character. Every character has passions, desires, dreams, hopes, all of these things, that would have continued

on existing if the main plot hadn't run into them like a freight train. And it became very important to me to start establishing who all these characters were and who they might have become if the plot hadn't taken over their lives. Now, that's all a big preamble to the less time you have with a character, the more difficult it is to write them to anything but a role. This is kind of going to be a give and take, a push and pull, that you have with your characters. If a character's only going to be "onscreen"

for one chapter, they aren't going to have a viewpoint in that chapter, what can you do? Well, in that case, you generally-- your best bet is to give them one identifying characteristic that does not seem to dovetail into their role. It can force yourself to kind of write them to a personality rather than just to, this is the person who comes on stage, gives the hero their sword, and then walks off stage. But, right, how do you do this for multiple characters? When I am building a story, I'm always kind of looking for friction points

between the setting and different parts of the setting, between the setting and the main plot I'm coming up with. And I'm saying, what if I put a character at that friction point. And I'm trying to make sure that each of my main characters has multiple motivations that make sense and is going to be moving somewhere on these sliding scales, is trying to accomplish things. And I ask myself what are they trying to accomplish before the plot happens, and how do they work into what the plot is doing, and how can I make sure that they

have a personal connection to the plot. This is much easier if you have multiple viewpoints. If you don't, you can still do it. Takes a lot of practice. All right? Go ahead. STUDENT: Why would characters have motivations and not goals? Why use motivations over the word goals? BRANDON: Right. A couple reasons for this. Goals can be accomplished and then your story is done. Motivations continue. Motivations are much easier as you as an author to kind of get in your head who this character is. A goals would be something like win the championship. The motivation is

why do they want to win the championship. Giving them a goal is OK. Giving them a motivation, letting the reader understand why they want to live the championship is actually where most of your story is going to lie, because it can then intertwine with things like the character's sense of progress and stuff like that. You don't always have time for this. For instance, if we go back to Star Wars, which I use a lot, we don't really know in the movie why Han Solo-- well, we do. He wants to pay off Jabba the Hutt, so

he won't die. Right? That's motivation. That's not as strong as why did he become a smuggler? Why did he do this? And all of that sort of stuff, they just couldn't get into. But they gave him a goal. I need to get money. Why? To pay off Jabba the Hutt. His goal then changes. My friends are more important than paying off Jabba the Hutt. Gee, I hope this doesn't come back to bite me. So goals can shift. Motivations kind of become a core of who the character is. And I just think it's better overall to

be asking yourself those why questions. You don't always have to establish them, like I said. But asking yourself why does Luke want to get off world? Why does Princess Leia want to save the universe? That one doesn't work as well because, basically, destroying all life in the universe, bad idea. But there we go. Other questions? We'll go back here. STUDENT: How can you use your story to teach your character the lessons they need, instead of having the character learn the lessons they need and making the story go around that. BRANDON: Right. STUDENT: Say you've got

a character that you couldn't control. They controlled themselves. How could you write a story that would help them learn? BRANDON: All right. Repeated for the internet audience, how can you make the story get the characters to become who they need to be? And there was a second part of this. If your characters don't want to do what you want them to do, how do you make them do what you want to do? This is-- let's do that second question first. People often ask me what do I do if my characters just don't want to do

what I want them to? Which is an interesting question to answer, because it's a very discovery writer question for a very outline writer author, even someone who kind of discovery writes their characters. I generally don't think in terms of my characters doing things I don't want them to. But I understand the mindset. What you're meaning is, generally you're writing along, and you're like, "This character's developing to be someone that wouldn't do what I have planned for them to do." Or "They're going in a really interesting direction, and I really like this interesting direction, and I

kind of feel like I want to keep writing on it. But it's going to go way off topic from what everyone else is doing." Or things like this. And I get that sense. I understand that. When I get into that situation, what I do is, I back up and I say, "All right. Let's take a hard look at this story. Do I need to rebuild my story to fit who this character's becoming? Is the story a stronger version, is it a stronger story, if this character continues on this path? Or is this character going to

completely take over the story, and it's going to turn it into something completely different?" I will either pull out the character, set them aside, and rewrite a character from scratch, or I will rebuild my outline completely to match where this character is going. I do the second more often than the first. Because if I'm really interested in a character, personally, I am really good with plot and setting. I know I can rebuild that plot and that setting. If I've captured something in a character that's really working, I generally want to see where that character goes,

and I rebuild my plot for them. That's a different question than the first one, which is how do I arrange the situations so that they will teach the characters the thing I want them to teach. I would say, you need to hit those characters in the places it will hurt. If what you need is a character to stop being selfish, you need their selfishness on screen at some point to cause that character a lot of pain, or the people around them a lot of pain. If you want a character to make a difficult decision later

on, show them failing to make that decision early on and show the consequences. Hit your characters hard in their flaws if you want the story to encourage them to change. Right here. STUDENT: How do you flesh out and make non-viewpoint characters interesting if your main characters either don't know their motivations or are misunderstanding them? BRANDON: All right. If your main character, your viewpoint character, doesn't understand a side character's motivation or misunderstands them, how do you make sure that that character, that side character still works? Well, the epic fantasy author's answer is add a viewpoint. That

is usually bad advice for most genres. In this case, do as I say, not as I do. Because I will write a 400,000-word book and just add some viewpoints in. Even in my 100,000-word books, I'll sometimes just add viewpoints in. Mary Robinette hates that, by the way. She'll read a story by me and be like, "Why is there this random viewpoint. It does not make--" I'm like, "Uh, um, yeah. Shush, shush." But how do you do it without adding that viewpoint in? I would take one of a couple of things. Hanging a lantern on it

is that stage play term that lets you make a thing that you think might be a bug into a feature. Hang a lantern on the setting piece that doesn't look as good as the rest of them, indicating to the audience that you will someday make use of that as a plot point. In this case, having a character who is not the main character and not the side character say, "You really don't get them, do you?" And then the main character say, "Yeah, I totally get them. Such and such and such and such." And the other

character being like, "Oh, man. Oh, man. Someday you are going to be super embarrassed that you just said that." That sort of thing can be really handy. What you don't want, why this can be bad is if the reader-- I've told you guys about gorillas in a phone booth, right? I haven't. OK. I've told the little class about it. Gorillas in a phone booth is a thing I learned. This will relate, I promise. A thing I learned in college from one of the people in college with me in my master's degree. And it stuck with

me. He was reading a story of mine, and he said, "This part feels like a gorilla in a phone booth." I'm like, "What?" He's like, "Imagine you are watching a movie, and a character is having a conversation with his girlfriend, and they are kind of arguing over finances. And then he walks by, looks up, and there's a gorilla in the phone booth. People don't have phone booths anymore but pretend we're like 20 years ago when these were a thing. There's a gorilla in the phone booth, and then he keeps on walking and going. What the

gorilla in the phone booth does is it draws the reader's attention to the point that their mind keeps coming back to it and makes them unable to focus at the task at hand. Once you've seen the gorilla in the phone booth, it is so irreconcilable with the story you thought you were seeing that your mind keeps going back and you suffer an extreme detachment from the main story in a way that is very bothersome. This often happens with readers if they think you as a writer haven't noticed something or have made a big mistake. And

it starts to be this little thing that pushes them further and further out of the story, even if it's a small thing, where they're like, "But X! But, but how can you not notice this?" Other times it happens because you mention something that's really interesting as a tease, but then don't give enough information about it, to the point that readers keep worrying about it. I've read, to kind of paraphrase, some student works where a person gets stabbed in the hand, and then has a conversation with another person about something completely unrelated. I'm like, "They are

bleeding all over the floor. I cannot pay attention to this other conversation, no matter how important it is, because they're bleeding to death!" You want to avoid letting your side characters do that to your story. Hanging a lantern on it is one of the good ways where you are basically saying to the reader, "This isn't a flaw in the story. I know. I am going to deal with it eventually." What that does is the reader then is like, "Oh, thank goodness." They file in the back of their head that "this is a plot point. I

noticed it. I'm smart. It's going to be relevant later on. Thumbs up. Let me focus on what the story is on right now." It can be very handy with these sorts of things. This gets very complicated when you have an untrustworthy narrator, which is kind of what you're going with here, right? This happens all the time in The Wheel of Time with Mat Cauthon, where Mat assesses a situation and it is completely wrong, humorously so. And you as the reader are supposed to understand this. Dramatic irony, the reader understands things that the characters don't. This

can get very tricky. It can be very hard to write this sort of thing. But if you get it right the readers are going to love it. There's a couple hints on that. All right. Go ahead. STUDENT: What's the most of this that you've done in post? BRANDON: What's the most of this I've done in post? Good question. I will often, I would say half of the time, throw away the first through third chapters of a book. And part of the reason for this-- I did this in Skyward. Skyward, when I was starting off, in

fact I keep meaning to post these. Adam, we'll get these up, right? The alternate beginnings. Skyward has three different beginnings, and they were all about me trying to get likeability, proactivity, and competence down for the main character Spensa at the beginning, also in tone and all these promises. A lot of times, by the middle of the book I understand what someone's arc is pretty strongly, and I know where I'm going, but the beginning has been really rough and doesn't match who that character has become. I just consider it-- like, I know I'm generally going to

throw away the first few chapters. In that case, it wasn't the prologue. It was chapter 1 and 2. But we'll get them up. You guys can read them. We did get the outline up, right? Did we post that up here? ADAM: It's on the brandonsanderson slash-- BRANDON: Right. But we were going to write it on the board. OK. Yes. Adam's going to write, on the board, where you find the outline for Skyward. I promised you I'd get that up, and we keep forgetting to put it on the board. So those internet people who've been asking,

you'll be able to find it here. We'll try to get the other beginning chapters of that up. Though basically the idea is here that I'm totally OK rewriting my beginning if my ending is working. One place that I've changed it dramatically, I think I've talked about Mistborn 3, where there was a character who was not proactive at all. This is a character who was going through a depressive-- deep into depression because of things that happened in the middle book, and their plot was excruciating to read, because they were just depressed the whole time. I realized

a sense of progress, even downward, is way better than nothing at all. I ripped out all of those character scenes. I wrote them all from scratch, and in this one the character had an action they were doing that each thing they discovered in this action brought them further down. There was, like, a countdown of, he's read 200 of these books and found no answers. He's getting more depressed. And that slide worked way better. That's one of the biggest ones I've done. The other, of course, big one I talked about in class is when I ripped

out half of Dalinar's chapters from The Way of Kings and I replaced them with Adolin chapters, because the character was feeling schizophrenic, because he was both confident that he was right, that the visions he was seeing was leading him toward something important, and totally frightened he was insane. And these did not jive at all. What it turned into was he had a huge problem with all three of these things. He was less likeable because he was wishy washy. And he was less proactive because every action he took was undercut by him worrying he was insane.

Moving that out to two characters so that the external voice was saying, "I really think you're insane, Dad," made Adolin way more sympathetic, because we've all had family members and loved ones who've gone through an illness and we're really worried that this illness is hurting them and changing them, and what do we do? It made Dalinar more empathetic, because we've all been the person that people haven't believed when we've had something that is a major thing. We're like, "I can go be a writer. I'm not crazy. I'm a prophet." Well, maybe we haven't had that

one. But that idea, splitting those out, added the likeability to both of them, and it let them both be proactive rather than back and forth. Those are probably the two biggest changes I've made in any of my books. Yeah, go ahead. STUDENT: How do you separate your characters' voices? BRANDON: How do I separate my characters' voices? What a fantastic question. This goes into what I think I've told you guys before, the grand skill of telling science fiction and fantasy, of writing, which is the ability to world build through the eyes of characters. Your go-to here

should be letting the character's background, their motivations, and their personality influence their descriptions and their diction. Now, the kind of-- you can go way too far on this. But an example of this, Robert Jordan has a character who is very high. She is the Amyrlin Seat. She is leader of the magic users in this world, basically the highest position you can be. She came from a bunch of fishermen. Her parents were fishers. So she still uses metaphors about getting fish and about things like this, which makes her a delight to read, because this character that

you expect to be regal and queenly is talking about getting fish because that's her background. That's a good example of using the contrast there to get someone across. But letting someone's background influence the metaphors they use. It should be more than-- for instance, the cliched way to do this is the character who has a scientific mind doesn't use contractions. You've all probably read this or seen this. The very smart person says cannot instead of can't. Totally valid. You can totally do that. But it should go further than that. You should be saying this character has

a training in the academy. They have a PhD. They're going to speak differently. They're going to be rhetorically grounded. They're going to use-- they're going to arrange their arguments in such a way to use rhetoric. This character does not. This character comes from living on the streets and going with their gut. Their argument is going to be, "You're wrong. I know you're wrong because I've stabbed three people like you. And they all died, and I lived. You're wrong." This person's going to be like, "You're wrong because of this and this and this. Can't you see

how great my logical arguments are?" That is way stronger than this character uses no contractions and this character uses slang. You should still have this character use slang and this character's diction reflect the academy, but the way that they argue, the way that they see the world-- A character who grew up like I did with an upper middle class background is going to have a very different perspective on how likely they are to achieve their dreams and goals than a person who has a lower, low class upbringing. These things should reflect in your characters. Try

to get this across. In fact, one of the best things you can do to learn how to write stronger writing is learn how to make your dialog work without dialog tags and without any descriptions around it. Now, you rarely will put this in a book, but if you can write a scene where three or four different characters are having an argument, and we can track who is who with no dialog tags, then you're starting to get there. If we're like, "Oh, look at this. This person's paragraphs are always huge and well thought out, and this

person's paragraphs are always short sentences with lots of exclamation points. And this character always stutters and pauses and has lots of ellipses. And wow, I can follow them all because of the diction, and of course, they're arguing for different things from different directions. And this one just used a metaphor about iron working, where this metaphor talked about burning pages." When you can do that and let your dialog be that strong, you are getting there. One of the things that I see, and I do this too much too, in a lot of writing, is being sloppy

by letting your-- the things you put around the dialog do the heavy lifting. "I'm not very happy with you," he said angrily. Rather than, "How dare you!" One is stronger than the other. Your natural instincts, most likely, will be to write, "I'm not happy with you," he said angrily. This is one of the reasons why a lot of writing textbooks and things will say get rid of the adverbs, that you should not be using adverbs. I do not go that strong on it. But they also say, don't use sad bookisms. Don't use things like he

exclaimed, or he shouted, or things like that. Again, I don't go that far. You'll have to decide where you want to be. J. K. Rowling loves both of those, and she's the best-selling author of our time. So take all this with a grain of salt. But if you can move that "angrily," if you can cut that and make sure the diction sounds angry, your writing goes up a notch in strength. If you can show in even your descriptions that somebody really hates this other person by the way they describe how fiddly they are with their

hair and how, of course, their perfect shoes are polished, and things like that, rather than saying, "She really hated Amy, because she was a prep." If you could never have those lines in your writing and everyone gets it, it's going to be way, way stronger writing. This is a continual, life-long quest for most writers that we always are trying to get better at, and very few actually get where it's really, really good, and particularly not in first drafts. But that's how you do it. And if you can do that, if you can do the things

I'm just talking about here, then you are going to sell books fast. Because if you're opening chapters are full of almost no information dumps, full of character dialog that snaps off the page and tells you who they are by the way that they talk and gets across and evokes setting and character just through these sort of contextual clues, then you are doing better than 99% of the people who are submitting books or self-publishing their books and trying to make it. If you can practice one skill, do that one. All right? OK, time for a few

more. Go ahead. STUDENT: I'm wondering, how do you craft good villain motivation? BRANDON: How do you craft good villain motivation? This depends on the type of villain you want. Different stories use different types of villains. And really it's going to depend on how far up or down on the likeability scale is your villain. A villain who's very low on the likeability scale, but very high on the other two will be different than one that you characterize a little bit in the middle. An iconic villain such as Sauron is very different from a character who is

struggling and changing like Gollum. Gollum is a character who's changing in likeability and proactivity through the course of the story in various different modes, and Sauron doesn't. Sauron is a giant, burning red eye that's going to destroy the world. That is it. Yes, I know the extent-- blah, blah, blah, Silmarillion. In the actual story, it's a giant eye that's going to destroy the world. Those fulfill two different roles and they're both perfectly valid. But if you want a villain with motivations that make sense, you're going to have to work harder than you worked with someone

like Sauron. Gollum's a great example. It can be a fantastical thing. He just really wants this ring. He doesn't even really know why. He's been corrupted by it, but he really, really wants the ring, and we can see that he wants it. He has an established motivation. The fact that he's changing and wavering back and forth is what makes him work. I think I told you guys, right? I made my Mom go to Lord of the Rings films when they were coming out 20 years ago. And she had never read a fantasy book before. This

was before I published any, so she hadn't read any of mine. And I took her, and she had two takeaways from those films. The one was, "Boy, I sure hope Aragorn ends up with that nice elf girl. I like her." And number two, "Little Smeagol, please be good." And she would say that after, like, the second movie. She's like, "Smeagol’s going to turn out to be good, right?" She was hooked by him. I know. It was kind of heartbreaking. Yeah, he gets to have his ring. So those characters do different things. Different adaptations of Joker

do different things. You're going to ask yourself, you do basically the same sorts of things, and you do want to-- you can distinguish in your head between villain and antagonist. It's sometimes helpful to split those two apart. Antagonist is someone that is working against the goals of the main character. Villain is someone who is doing expressly evil things. Those are my definitions. You don't have to use them. But, for instance, the principle in Ferris Bueller's Day Off starts off mostly as antagonist, slightly villainous, and then gets more and more villainous through the way the story

progresses. But you can imagine Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive. Tommy Lee Jones is the antagonist of that show, but he is not the villain. The villain is someone else. But most of the time with that is Tommy Lee Jones. So you've got to be kind of separating those two out. If you want your villain to work, make sure their motivations, if you want a villain whose motivations-- someone we empathize with, just give them realistic motivations just like the hero or protagonist, then put them at cross purposes with the protagonist for some reason, and it'll

rip our hearts out. Yeah, go ahead. STUDENT: How do you have an antagonist who's not inherently evil, but is very competent and proactive, but you don't want the readers to like? BRANDON: How do you make a character who's not evil but is very proactive and competent that you don't want the readers to like? Well, you can show someone not being evil, but also not being good. This is generally the realm. They're not kicking puppies. But they also are Javert, classic example. Javert wants to catch Jean Valjean. But he has no mercy. He's not kicking puppies,

but he is not merciful at all. We do not like Javert until we start to see him humanize, and then he no longer can exist in this system because he has fallen out of his role, so he has to jump off a bridge. But Javert is a classic example. The Fugitive, Tommy Lee Jones is another example, though we like him because of this. So you can do this. Anyone cross purpose, if you do this right for your protagonist, and you put the antagonist cross purpose of them, even if it's understandable, then we will not want

them to succeed. Even sometimes if your hero is the antagonist, as the heroes are in Infinity War, you will want the protagonist, who is the villain, to be successful because of the way they are protaging, and the way their motivations are established. And so you will watch a movie where the heroes fail and the villain wins, spoiler, where the protagonist wins, and the antagonists lose, but the positions are reversed. All right. Let's do one more. Go ahead. STUDENT: How do you write a character who doesn't understand their own motivations or is lying to themselves? BRANDON:

Right. How do you write a character who doesn't understand their own motivations or who is lying to themselves? This is where, number one, small successes at the beginning are really handy for establishing this. Having the character be proactive about something that isn't involved in the larger scope, and showing us they can be, and showing us what they actually need through that, and then having them verbally say, "No, that's not what I need. It's what I never needed," is a really good way. First impressions are really important. If you impress upon us that this character is

really proactive in their small sphere, but they don't think they're competent enough to out into the wide world, we will believe what you showed us, not what they say. So make sure your shows are on point. The other way to do this is to have a character that we do trust, who is a trustworthy narrator, tell that character the truth, and make sure that we see that and empathize with that, so that we are knowing this character's going to learn and change. All right? All right, guys, we'll do Character 2 next week. Write down any

questions I didn't get to, and we'll do it in two weeks.