Frequently Asked Questions on Writing Plot - Brandon Sanderson's Writing Lecture #4.5 (2025)

Welcome to our bonus Q&A on plot web exclusive um you have some excellent questions we touch on digging deeper into plot archetypes and Frameworks we uh touch on video games and writing for video games uh kind of briefly we talk about layering conflicts uh and we dig into why does dune work when Paul trades really never fails at anything he tries so enjoy this uh companion uh Q&A session on plot to my lecture series I hope you enjoy it uh this is our Q&A um on plot with questions from YouTube right here in my hand

um as our our bonus for you thank you for uh including all of these questions for us I've got eight of them here that I'm going to go through and uh we'll see where we are at that point so uh my question is how do you write effectively how do you effectively write a betrayal Arc how do you make it hit hard and resonate with the audience and how do you make the falling out feel realistic without drawing too much attention to it I like my main character to not realize it's happening until it's too

late um so making a betrayal Arc work really well is probably going to involve writing a relationship plot but then having it go wrong and I maybe didn't emphasize this enough in my in my original lectures all of the different sort of plot arcs can go wrong they can turn sour in some way for instance you can have a an arc that is built around an information Arc a mystery where the characters come to the wrong conclusion and then there are problems after the fact um you can have a relationship Arc where people start off

really well match to each other and if it's not a ro romance it's a betrayal Arc uh between two friends you show how these characters work well together uh and then instead of braiding the Roses you have those Roses keep stabbing each other you show how their motivations are diverging right and how um it's um it's turning sour because they keep running a foul of each other instead of helping each other and if it's going to be a character kind of turning on the protagonist you show that they're getting more and more disgruntled you really

want the ear part therefore to show how good they are together like in this sort of Arc you've maybe even skipped some of the getting to know each other so that they are already you're starting the book with these are two friends and you hit hard why they work well together you can Coast a long ways on that if you do it well readers will assume that they're best friends and will even as those cracks start to appear will ignore them because they are such good best friends particularly remember your reader will follow the character's

attention so if the primary character is still thinking about their friend as a very good friend it will cover up the actual actions which are the show that these things are going worse and worse uh until that betrayal happens and then just make sure that your motivations really make sense the reason that someone would turn they would turn against each other that they've got a solid reason that that you're like I should have seen that it work like to basically other twist you're foreshadowing that it's a relationship plot that they're getting along but then behind

the scenes you are actually breaking that so when it happens it's surprising yet inevitable that is my recommendation on that one question how do you balance uh and promise Bittersweet endings um I would recommend that uh if you're shooting for Bittersweet that your story makes it clear early on that these are this is the sort of world where things don't always turn out exactly as you want them to as the reader might um and you do this in a lot of different ways you show that life is pretty hard in this place you show that

friends have died in the past or that there are casualties in the the middle of the book um you make sure that you know you're focused on some accomplishments and some failures that feels very realistic uh when these sorts of sorts of things happen I think that the balance um really comes down to for me often times I'm watching my Beta readers a lot with this I'm watching and saying all right how much of the bitter is coming through how much of the sweet is coming through do I need to change that balance in any

way or am I pleased with how that balance is um I find that as long as the personal accomplishment of the characters have happened like theyve achieved something uh personally U if they've made progress people tend to take those as more sweet than bitter meaning if they fail in the main capital P plot but in the lowercase p they've grown and become a better person uh we tend to be pretty cool with that um the reverse still can work but those tend to feel more bitter than sweet um when the character has accomplished the big

p plot um but it has cost them personally so an example of this Lord of the Rings ending is Bittersweet the capital P plot has been accomplished but froto is basically destroyed as a person um and that really the bitter comes out uh really powerfully in that uh particularly in the films where they Cuts things like the scouring and things like that so you're just left with Frodo can't live a normal life anymore and you'll notice how that feels triumphant but very bitter the reverse in the sort of uh Hollywood thing where it's like I

accomplished my own personal goals but I die achieving the capital P those tend to feel very triumphant um even though the character has died um because they have fulfilled their kind of personal motives and things like that uh their character Arc has come to fruition those feel much more triumphant than bitter uh just in my experience so that might help you with balancing how those work you can of course make uh either of those types of endings have more bitter or more sweet depending can I talk about layering conflict more uh which is say giving

the POV character both internal and external conflict in a scene and blending those conflicts to create something even more Dynamic and satisfying sure uh this is one of my favorite things to do so I'm happy to talk about this one I love it when stories to this I love uh doing it in my own stories uh this comes with a good sign posting right early on making the promises and showing this is what the character is doing and then making sure you're showing that progress along the way and often with a good character Arc you're

going to have some serious failures in there and we'll talk about characters uh in coming weeks but the idea with a good you know character Arc is you need to show why this is legitimately a flaw why it's legitimately something that they need to work on or work around uh why you know they handicap the flaw or um the you know the problems that they're dealing with um and you want to make sure that we understand what is supposed to be triumphant about that um going back to Star Wars which is the the kind of

er example that I use a lot because uh so many people have seen it we do get to see Luke Get Zapped uh by the the thing unable to trust in the force quite yet um before we see him be triumphantly accepting and embracing his Destiny we get to see ob1 say you need to learn the ways of the force just at the beginning as your promise Luke is going to learn the ways of the force and this is relevant to his story um you get to see that Luke isn't enough to face Darth Vader

yet and that ob1 is going to have to die uh in order to protect him because he's not ready for that challenge yet all of these things build to Luke taking that first step to become a Jedi at the end of uh the first movie and what makes that really satisfying is we have already set up in that same scene with your promises that shooting um you know down the tube without the force is really really difficult and oh it didn't go in it didn't work you need that extra boost um I always like to

make sure that I'm doing a little bit of each of these things periodically through my story that I'm not just batching it all and being like here we're doing all the character stuff and then we're done with that we're moving on uh I like to move it through and seat it and one of the nice things you can do with with this is the character flaw the character handicap um the things they're working on the internal conflict uh whether again it's something that they need to change or something they just need to learn to work

with um is causing the conflict through the middle of the story The Challenge in this is you don't want us to we don't want to make us dislike the character and that's I would say your big challenge in this uh sometimes that happens where um you get really frustrated the character because they have this flaw that seems like you're like just deal with it and this comes down to making sure that we understand and like the character and understand why this flaw exists and you relate it to something very human that we all have um

and so that when this character you know is too shy to do what they need to do and that's you know the thing that they're working on or whether whatever it is um when that moment happens uh and there is failure because of it causing further complication and conflict that as a author we are quick to have them acknowledge I need to get over this I can't keep letting this stand in my way um and or at least having the narrative recognize that to to let us know to hang that Lantern on yes this character

is working on this this is really important you should be a little frustrated but do try to be understanding so that when it does kind of come to fruition at the end it's a standup and sharance moment um that said once again you can have them just never get over it uh people will get frustrated with the character but in that case you kind of lean into other reasons that people would like the character because a little frustration can be a good thing uh watch my character lecture that's uh that's coming up very soon we'll

we'll talk about those ideas so um and really try to hit those beats and try to give us a onew punch at the end where your plot structure comes together and often times you kind of want to set it up so the some big problem that the character's flaw caused is going to happen again and it'll be an even bigger problem and this time they get over it Luke not being able to you know block the the lightsaber thing the little bols of the livesaver he gets stung on the ankle but now if he doesn't

trust the force um the entire Rebel faction is going to get blown up uh the stakes are bigger he can't afford to fail this time uh but fortunately he's been learning learning and paying attention and he gets that little push from Obi-Wan and he decides to trust and it's kind of that for Luke it's that step into the darkness being willing to hope that that he will be able to walk forward through darkness and find his way anyway in your lectures on plot you use a lot of good examples but I notice a lot of

them come from movies hey uh my question is what plot elements should we as writers take into account that maybe movies don't what are the Ben benefits of the written word when it comes specifically to plotting yeah what an excellent question uh I do use movies a lot because they um they tend to be people have watched them more uh you know you can you can count on people watching them that they they take two hours instead of 10 to 50 hours um and beyond that they do have to condense all of the stuff so

they tend to hit the beats in more clear ways books have a lot more space but that is to your advantage so a couple of things that books do better than film number one being inside a character's head either through a first person or third person limited or even an omniscient gives you so many advantages you can use it too much you can do what we call Naval gazing where pages and Pages pass of just the character ruminating on things and we're all guilty of this in writing because it is one of the strengths of

writing that you immediately get to see what the character feels and thinks about his situation that immediately helps us connect to the character in ways you know in film they have to Luke has to look wistfully up at the passing the the Sun and think man I wish that you know I could I could go out in those Stars he can't can't hear him think that in Dune you can hear Paul atres thinking about um why you know the dangers of Dune and how he misses his home planet and all of these things he you're

right there in his head and you can see it and that can create an instant sort of connection there um books um we have a lot more space to play with and this allows us to do more of this or to have more scenes reinforcing the same ideas uh in film you have three hours at most most films two hours uh some 90 minutes so you got to hit those beats hard and you got to hit them kind of obviously uh in books you can Slow Burn on some of these things you can have more

failures you can have more steps backward and when you do the one step backward two steps forward sort of things um there is so much that you can do that doesn't have to um relate directly to any these things you can use more time on Side characters if you want so space and Viewpoint are two big ones um that uh that are advantages uh to books um and then I would say an advantage to books is also a disadvantage wrapped up in one that is that there aren't visuals to go along with it and so

you can count on the reader to fill in blanks for you in fact you have to uh that makes the reader participatory in the practice in a way that film they're more of an observer in a book they're more of a participant um and by you can in your stories make use of this by using fine brush Strokes um or sorry broad brush Strokes to paint characters um and say you know give one identifying feature and let the reader fill in the rest if that's the way that you want to tell your stories um you

just have a lot of flexibility in the way you use voice and things like that so we will try to get a lecture on voice but there's uh there's two things um you ask specifically what the benefits are when it comes to plotting specifically it is that you can do more you can have more failures you can have more successes you can Meander more and get there it lets you have more red herrings and it lets you have twists be in some ways more spectacular because there's just so much more going on in a book

how does what is being taught translate to writing for video games what to look out for when watching your lectures what are some good examples of writing that can be found in video games so video games um are such a huge topic it is difficult to talk about uh in reference to plot specifically because plot is one of the places where video games are by necessity putting the player in control um a lot of the the best examples of Storytelling in um in video games are when the player gets to make some big decision that

has huge ramifications on the story um otherwise a lot of the best storytelling in video games it kind of there's like a Continuum right on one side you have uh only doing environmental storytelling right like um like Elden ring likes to do where there the story is only how you piece it together and engage with it as you're getting it through little bits of lore and then all the way over here we have the uh the genres affectionately called Walking simulators where you're walking through a movie that is happening uh the interactive elements are kind

of moved um to the a back seat and really a lot of walking simulators your um your ability to influence the plot is really kind of minimal what you get influen is how quickly you move through it uh and things like that like the the the famous One which isn't walking the famous VR one where the story plays out every time you blink it changes scenes and so you keep your eyes open long enough to experience a scene but then occasionally you blink and that scene ends um you know that's that's something that no other

genre could do but you can see how your control um as a player over that is only in minimal in what how you blink but that becomes the whole mechanic it's really brilliant um so what how does what I'm talking about Translate to video games I would focus on what are your payoffs for your story like what what kind of experience is your payoff in the video game something like in uh Mass Effect where you have this huge payoff in that you're going to make a decision at the end of the story that is going

to have deep ramifications for this team of people that you've come to love that you've built over time is that your big moment where the player valtion has an effect and how can you then earn that that in Mass Effect they earn it by making sure that you love all the side characters so that when you're making big decisions about how their lives might play out then um you care because you like them all um and so um interweaving narrative plot and game mechanics would be my number one recommendation for how you make a video

game plot uh work and interesting um I like how a lot of video games kind of start with with game mechanics and then design storytelling to match the game mechanics this is just something that you would think is not very cool you're not putting the story in the Forefront but I think it actually is really cool for video games an example of this would be where um video games make your death diagetic such as in Borderlands uh right Borderlands they have a a machine that brings people back to life uh and this machine brings you

back to life and charges you money for resurrecting you and it becomes a a a way that jokes are really fun uh the second game which is the strongest has a scene where the bad guy pays you to to to go jump off a cliff um knowing you'll get you'll you'll come back to life but he just wants to see if you'll do it and he makes fun of you the whole way uh you get a quest to jump off a cliff and then he's like I can't believe you did that here's your money um

it's really funny it's really morbid um it plays into the game mechanics uh and things like that and so I like when that happens of course the big problem Borderlands then has is the same problem that Final Fantasy has which is it sometimes likes to kill characters and cut scenes in a world where death has been proven to be um not a a permanent thing and then suddenly it is in this one instance for reasons that are just narrative um and that always bugs me in video games so um there you are there's some rants

on video games and plot if you are going to make a big important cut scene where a character dies permanently um you know come up with a reason why they can't just be resurrected by a phoenix down um that you have 99 of in your you can tell it's only been how many years it's only been 20 plus years uh since that happened I'm like I got 99 of these things this is the character I leveled up the most you are totally ruining my party um yes they got stabbed but I mean I have healing

potions I'm standing right there so yeah uh you've been talking a lot about plot structure and I like what you said about uh tragedies often using a hero's journey where the hero never takes the final step I was also thinking about tragedies but this applies to any story is there a case where you want to use try succeed Cycles instead of try fail Cycles uh so when I say try fail Cycles yeah I think you get I we'll get if so what stories does and what stories does that work for example in Dune especially in

the movie part two Paul succeeds at every attempt he makes to get what he wants somehow the uh plot continues to build um yes um excellent so why does dune work let's an analyze this why does dune work Paul succeeds at every Point except the big one at the beginning uh spoilers for Dune um at the beginning um Paul is incapable of saving his father and gets exiled Out Among the fman um he then has a series of huge successes until he succeeds at the end so there's a couple things going on with Paul and

that you are playing into exactly you've noticed um spoilers Dune is a tragedy not right uh the story of Dune is Paul resist ing becoming like the har Conan in order to bring down the har Conan and he fails right he gets leaves the you know the life that he he thinks that he wants being a good person and he instead Builds an army bent on Vengeance and unleashes them upon the Galaxy in order to get his revenge the story of Dune is the story of of Paul's downfall so on one hand we have plot-wise

he is succeeding but we learn that we don't want to it's that whole giving someone a promising someone a car but giving them an airplane right at the end we realize we didn't want Paul to succeed in all this he's become um a villain through doing this uh and he's more complex than that that's why Dune is so great but you have this huge failure at the beginning you give us what you think you want which is Revenge and then you show us through the the course of the the rest of the story that we

probably shouldn't have wanted that that the freman are overly brutal um and uh unleashing them as you have um is a terrible solution to a terrible problem and maybe there was no better solution but it's still terrible and that's heartbreaking um and so why do I think works is because of that you are slowly coming to realize that you are not watching the hero origin story you're watching a villain's origin story and it's just really subtle uh and brilliantly accomplished um and you know showing him resist uh trying to use the benzar um you know

manipulation of the fman and eventually deciding I am going to be their Prophet even though I know that I'm not actually the prophet I am that this is all made up I am still going to manipulate their religion in order to get what I want um this is it it's it's really a kind of a master class and how to do this specific thing um and it's very dangerous to attempt but uh if you do it well it makes you stand out very well so yes you would say the try succeed cycle in this case

it works because Paul is trying and succeeding but the the kind of hidden plot is you realize that you don't want him to um by the end of it um but let's point out that you can do it in other ways a another common example I would say of a triced cycle um is let's use Dirk pit let's use a book example um Dirk pit the book series uh if you haven't read it there was one movie it was called Sahara it was actually a really good movie but it came out at the wrong time

right around 911 um and so I do recommend you you watch it it has as um the rift tracks people say uh the world's most shirtless man Matthew mccon uh in a very good role um and um it's a it's it's a good adaptation of the Dirk pit novels what are the Dirk pit novels the Dirk pit novels are all about watching competent people be extra competent um we as as readers competence is one of the things that draws us to people and uh you'll see in my lectures coming up on character that there is

a danger in this in that we sometimes bond to villains because they are so competent when the heroes are kind of you know Meandering their way through learning to be competent uh but we really like competence and sometimes some books are built around the idea of a highly competent character facing only external conflicts and largely succeeding on them why does this work well if you make the problem big enough and the threats dangerous enough if at any point failure leads to death and destruction and the stakes are high and tense and the competence is played

very competently Dune does this as as well you won't mind that they're succeeding at every point because the author is making the M stakes and the dangers and the difficulty of what's being accomplished so very dire at all turns that you're on the edge of your seat wondering if this is the time that the person will fall um you know when you're watching traes uh you know the Highwire act they will play it up like because you know they're not going to fall they never fall but you always wonder if they will and that's the

question um for some of for some of these acts and that's that works very well Dirk pit is all about Dirk pit being awesome um he is awesome at every term and he rarely fails in anything and they're very readable um and so it is a good question to ask those are two very good book examples of how you can have something that is try succeed rather than try fail um you will often find in these books that a character will succeed But realize that the scope of what they need to succeed in is that

now gotten great grer I've done this thing froto has gotten the ring to Rivendell but then realizes no I need to go further uh this was only the Prelude and you know froto does succeed in that there's not a failure and there's a bunch of near failures but there's no failures in getting that ring to rivendel but then he realizes it needs to go um much much further and that expansion of scope is another way to help with the kind of try succeed cycle uh what an excellent question um uh really some great analysis on

that one can Brandon talk about plot archetypes he mentioned how Miss born is an interplay of heist Master Apprentice mystery and romance uh how do you use plot archetypes and how to pick original combination uh excellent question so this is only one of the this is only one of the ways you can tell the story um but I would often say that what works best for plot archetypes is to watch or read a bunch of them uh and distill them down to different different types and subtypes and what you like about them um you know

mistborn is a heist but I identified when I was working on Mporn two very different structures of heists um there is the type of heist where the characters are working hard on this big problem pulling off this Heist and they get to the end and then everything gets thrown out the window by a giant disruption uh the Italian job um if you want to watch the new one excellent Heist movie that follows this uh and then the characters use the resources that they've done through the first part of the heist in order to uh solve

the problem um so you none of this middle space is wasted you're just using again but there's another type of heist Oceans 11 is one of these where they plot a really difficult problem and then they execute excellently on their plan at the end even if there's a few little problems in it mostly it's just their complications than what they've planned and they pull it off brilliantly um and in that you just get to watch the plan unfold and how much fun it is you'll notice in Oceans 11 um they make sure to use a

character who's not completely in the not to help create some tension in the climax uh where you think things are going wrong but it was the plan all along um but identifying the different types the different elements what works best for your story and what doesn't is uh one thing that I would do um novels should generally have multiples of these exciting which one relates more to your character arcs which one relates more to your cap what is your capital P um what is the big Stakes of this story um spoilers for mbor um but

mistborn turns from a heist uh into a one of your classic sort of Revolution narratives um by the end uh and the the big thing that makes um it's it's using kind of the structure of uh The Italian Job but when things go wrong it Chang es to a new plot um it expands the scope and says no we're not here to just Rob the world we're here to save the world um and that transition between tropes is uh is also what makes uh knives out so brilliant um where it transitions from who it to

cat and mouse mystery which are two different types of mystery um Knives Out is another excellent example H done it is the mystery where it's like you're trying to figure out who was behind this cat and mouse is where you have a protagonist who is the villain who is trying to stay away from the cat who is chasing them uh and it can be told either way but the fugitive is the classic example of cat and mouse where it is a kind of who done it mystery with a cat and mouse on top of it

where he's trying to figure out who the one arm man is but really the story the capital P plot is can he stay away from Tommy Lee Jones um and knives out does the same thing uh no not giving spoilers um but Midway through you find out who did it and then we shift to their perspective as they try to stay ahead of the detective uh being able to to modulate and switch between these things is what a chef does right knowing that you can take some elements and you can build toward another and you

can layer them uh un underneath each other you can take a relationship plot and that you can twist it into a betrayal plot um as another question asked this is the sort of things that I would like you as students to be practicing and learning and paying attention to um and so how do you find the combinations try them swapping genres helps a lot um mixing and matching and just trying and seeing what works uh you know mistborn is my second attempt at mistborn the one that you have read uh and the F first one

um didn't work so well um and so sometimes you just need to you need to fail a few times you need to have your own trifil Cycles before you can have your succeed Cycles I have a question about the scale of plot almost any story can be expanded on expanded or shrunk massively by removing or adding characters plot lines mini arcs and so on for example without the existence Saron it might be possible to take a few hundred Pages uh less time for the good guys to win um this also especially extends how many PS

you tell in your story so how do you know how much how do I know how much I should ex expand my story or more importantly how much should I shrink it how do I know what scale my story should be for the best end result uh excellent question um so part of this is based on how much space you have are you writing a short story a Nolla or a novel as a newer writer your answer might be I don't know Brandon um well practice will get you there you'll start to learn how long

it will take you to tell a story um usually professional writers myself included can tell from our outline um sometimes as we're writing the book and we get a certain way through the outline or a certain way through the gut instinct if you're writing as a discovery writer we're like no it's going to take me longer um I'm going to have to expand the scope of what I'm doing um here's some rules of thumb for you if you're going over around 120,000 words the reader is going to expect an escalation in scope it's hard to

go over 120,000 words and make it feel like it's still a small scale story that's why most Thrillers most romances um these things they stay sometimes in the 80 to 100,000 word not saying you can't do it um but you'll notice as Harry Potter gets longer and longer the scope expands it's no longer can I can I you know get good enough grades to remain a wizard it is can I save the world and uh long books people tend to expect long scope now that can be scope in saving the world it can instead be

a lot of historical instead make the scope about following an entire family across Generations or an entire life time um that's an you know that's that type of scope of just you know generational or one person's entire life uh but you you want to give that weight uh to some of it if you're going to be going longer than about 120 particularly 150 right uh some rules of thumb like Dune is I think 170 to 180 uh Lord of the Rings Al together is like 300 something so Lord of the Rings uh we just looked

it up around 480 so 150 per book um is giving you kind of that that sort of Epic scope um but on contrast um technically Christmas Carol is a Nolla it's not even a full novel um it's about one person's life hit very quickly just going to depend on what if you can give the weight that people are expecting for that length of a sitdown do understand one of the big shifts that happens here and why uh this happens with people is that um a book in the 80 to 100 range a person can conceivably

read in one day a lot of the faster readers they'll read that in five to eight hours um and the fast readers like they'll sit down and that's one sitting it's why a lot of Thrillers are in that range where it's like you can pull someone through kind of buy their you know their teeth grab them and just yank them through this story to the end that they're like gasping and a lot of romance novels are doing that gasp are just a different variety um and they're just pulling you through this story real fast right

um whereas an epic story people are putting this book down and so it's a they have to digest this book across days or sometimes months uh and you have to build your plot based around the idea that this is going to have break points people are going to sit down they're going to enjoy and immerse them themselves in the world but they're not going to read it in one sitting and that changes how people experience the stories and that experiences how that changes how you should be plotting and pacing um I shoot for big long

chapters in storm life that when they're done you have had a complete sort of story be told um and you feel fine tell putting that book down for a while unless it's at a climactic moment where I'm cutting faster with shorter chapters so that it's pulling you through because short chapters actually pull people through faster than long chapters do so um there's um there's some of that uh excellent questions um very well done um I'm going to do another one of these for you um with character so be preparing your questions watch the the the

upcoming lectures on character and then uh we'll do another web exclusive I hope this was useful to you uh thank you so much let us know in the comments if this format works for you