Creating Proactive, Relatable, and Capable Characters: Brandon Sanderson's Writing Lecture #5 (2025)

BRANDON: Hello. Welcome to Brandon Sanderson's Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy lecture series. This is lecture number five. We're going to talk about character today, how to make your characters interesting, a question that most of my classes in college never answered. I want to answer it to you. And I think that we do that by having characters that are proactive, characters that are relatable, and characters that are capable. And we will talk about that now. Hey! Here we are for the writing lecture for character, Brandon's writing lecture series. You might notice that we are in a

different location, for those who are watching the YouTube version of this after the fact. Well, Utah has had a snowpocalypse. The first big snow of the year. All right. Someone from Canada over here is like, "R-r-r-r, not as big." But first big snow of the year. I was worried as I came to work this morning, which for me is like 1:00 PM, that I didn't want my students to have to go through it to get to school today. We can do this outline. We have the technology. We have the power. So we are at Dragonsteel

HQ. The students are watching this, theoretically on YouTube. How many do we have so far? ASSISTANT: About 96. BRANDON: Ninety-six. Half of the students are watching this on YouTube. We hope the other half will get there. If you have friends who are supposed to be here, text them and say, "You still need to take your quiz." So yeah. Some of them might have decided this is their skip week because too much snow. But we decided to do this here and make things easier on everyone. So we are going to talk character. If you missed the

news, if you're watching this after the fact, we had some technical difficulties with the guest lecture last week. So we're going to have to let my special extra Q&A fill in for that. But we will figure those out. Hopefully, that won't happen again. And we'll figure out what we're going to do, if I'm going to lecture twice on character or what. But today we're just going to jump in to my first character lecture as if we hadn't had a substitute. And so we are going to talk about what makes a compelling character. And those of

you who are watching, not after the fact, but live right now, which is the students, please save up some questions. I'll ask you for some questions. Rachel Lynn is here ready to read your comments, and I will get to your questions and things like that. We have a small peanut gallery of employees who sometimes listen to me wax poetic about these things, and so you might still hear some people in here, and they might throw questions at me as well. Let's start with a story. All right? I decided that I wanted to be really professional

and give this a go, as I believe I told you all, like, right after I got back from my mission in Korea. I'm like, "I'm a sophomore. I used to be a chemistry major. It's not for me. I'm going to jump whole hog into becoming a novelist, and I'm going to start writing. And I'm going to change my major to English. And I'm going to take every writing class they'll let me, because I need to learn how to do this. I need to be a writer." So changing my major to English, not necessarily something you

have to do. In fact, some authors recommend that you don't do it. Because having a great and interesting thing that you're studying, that you're excited about, giving you information and background for telling stories can be really, really a big advantage. In fact, as my first tangent of the night, I would recommend whatever you're passionate about, start thinking about how that could inform a character, or an arc, or a worldbuilding element, or something like that. A lot of the very best books come out of places of passion that you may not think relate to what you're

doing. Case in point. Dan Wells and I are driving home from writing group one day many years ago, and he started going off on serial killers and how cool they are, because Dan's a weirdo, and I know some of you are as well. Just like how interesting it is that there's like these three things that most serial killers all share. And it's like--I'm not going to mention them here because some of them are horrific. But there's, like, three attributes that as children they all shared. And he was just going off, and I'm like, "Dan, you're

so interested in this, why haven't you written about this ever?" At the time he was writing epic fantasy, unpublished. And he's like, "I really should." And he sat down and wrote the first John Cleaver novel, which is the first novel that he sold, and his strongest novel that he'd written in all those years. And you see this happening time and time again. Whatever people are passionate about, whatever hobby they have, whatever their life experience is, can translate. When people say, "Write what you know," it's an old adage, they aren't necessarily meaning that strictly, you know,

write your own life experience. If you could only write what you know, then none of us could write about dragons. Right? Though the idea of taking what you are passionate about and constructing narrative around it, that is really, really handy. And if we're going to be talking about character, giving like--as you become more and more of a writer, you will notice that there's some quirk that you have, or that a family member of yours has, or an odd passion they have, that you will have a lightbulb where you're like, "Why have I never used that?

I thought I'd plumbed everything. I'm going to use that next time." And then build a character around it. Regardless, I went to college thinking, "All right, they're going to teach me how to write." And I started taking creative writing classes. Rachel Lynn, how often in creative writing classes do they talk about how to create a compelling character? RACHEL LYNN: Never! BRANDON: Never! That is correct. I went to these classes and university courses on writing, like, the number one thing that I would think that I would want to learn from them is how do you write

a character that's compelling. No professors ever talked about that until I took Dave's class. They never touched on it. And it's still, to this day, baffling to me that, like, one of the core ideas of what makes people want to read is not even touched on in the majority of courses that you would take at the university. They can do some really good things for you. They will talk a lot about different styles of prose, and you will end up trying a lot of different styles of prose and settling in to the ones that you

like. They will talk about how to adapt your life experience. They're pretty good at that. They will give you opportunities for networking and feedback on your work. In fact, most of upper level, so after your 200s, like your 300 level and up courses are all going to be workshops that are going to focus on feedback and workshopping and, you know, that can be very handy, teach you to take the feedback. But I thought I would get lectures on how to create a compelling character, and I never got one until my last year when I took

Dave's class and thank goodness I did. Because, you know, he talked about those things. So that's what we're going to talk about today. How do you--what makes a character compelling? How do you write a compelling and interesting character? And over the years I've thought about how to present this a great deal. What are my methods and how do I view it? Oh, I'm getting--ooh, how fancy we are. We used to have a pillow boundarying me to tell me to not go before that. Otherwise it will get out of focus. Now we have a piece of

tape, like they do in the movies. So I'm going to keep looking down and walking to my mark. It's very professional when in movies you see someone look down and walk and then stop and then look up. They love that when you walk to your mark. OK, so we're going to talk about this. And I've found a lot of different ways to present this. My favorite is around these ideas of three key, core attributes that make a character compelling. And there are many ways to write this, many ways to talk about this. But this is

my framework. I believe that characters that are compelling and interesting to read about are interesting because a mixture of three key elements. They are proactive. They are relatable. And they are capable. Right? And I made them so they kind of rhyme. That's how you can tell that I'm a professional, is when my little lessons, you know, all come together, they have some sort of alliteration. So we're going to go through these and kind of talk about them in turn. They key thing to understand is most characters do not have all three. Once in a while

they do, and we'll talk about characters that do. Most of the time, compelling characters, as a rule of thumb, the type of rule of thumb that is never followed one to one, but you can kind of think of it as, in one of these they're very high, in one of these they're moderately low, and in one of these they're growing and learning. And just your easy rule of thumb is picking where they need to learn, where they are already strong, and where they're going to remain--where they are not very good and it's going to remain

one of the things that just characterizes them over time. So, proactivity. We'll talk about proactivity for a minute and then we'll go to questions from you guys. This is probably the single thing that makes a character readable in a story. When we go into stories, we want to see progress. I talked about that, right? That's not the only thing we want to see. We want to see a lot of different stuff. And there are great stories that make very slow progress and still work really, really well. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is not about progress

in the same way that The Bourne Identity is about progress. All right? Keep in mind that different stories try to do different things. But in general--I'm going to grab my notes here--one of the main things, in fact the number one thing you can do to make a character interesting to read about is to make them proactive in such a way that they move the plot forward so that you are able to--you will naturally bond to them because they're making the story happen. You like the story. You want the story to happen. You get frustrated by

the characters who are obstacles to the story happening. You get annoyed when someone slows and stalls what you think should be the progress of the story. And you get excited by people who advance it. So classic proactive hero is somebody who an external conflict happens to, and they are the person who jumps up and starts solving the problems. And we bond to that proactivity. And it's a kind of a little bit of a hack for starting a story if you instantly want someone to be relatable--well, relatability is one of these. You just want someone who's

readable. Right at the beginning, the person who starts taking action. Lost is an excellent example of this. The RV show Lost, which is quite good, has some hiccups in the second season, but actually the later seasons are pretty good. They get a bad rap. Fantastic first season, just knocks it out of the park. And a really excellent first half of a second season, and then there was a writers' strike and some things happened second season to third season. But they recovered and did a really good job. So in Lost there's a character named Jack. He

is a doctor. They wrote the initial pilot for it to have him die at the end of the pilot. They actually were casting Burt Reynolds, a big star, to be their Jack. Right? And they got their screenplays done. They started workshopping them, and they realized what happens. In the beginning of Lost there's a plane crash. People are getting pulled out of the ocean. Everything's chaos. One person stands up and takes charge. He is the healer. He gets people healed. He gets people away from the damage. He makes a camp. He is in charge. And they

realized nobody cares about anybody else but Jack because he is proactive. He's not super relatable. If you watch, like, the whole entirety of Lost, Jack is one of the least relatable characters in the entire show. Right? He might be the least relatable lead. But he's proactive and we'll get to capability. He knows what to do. One of Jack's flaws is he doesn't know as well as he thinks he does. He's actually in the middle of this one, he's working on this one, and he's really good at this one. He will solve a problem even if

he solves it the wrong way. We bond to that. And they all got together, and you can listen to them talk about this in commentaries. And they're like, "We can't kill Jack. We can't cast Burt Reynolds," or whoever it was. I think it was Burt Reynolds. It might have been someone else. We can't--. Oh, no, it was Tom Selleck, I think. Anyway, they were going to cast somebody big. Bigger for the time. This was the early 2000s. I don't know who it was, somebody big. They were like, "We can't cast someone that we have to

pay every episode to be in every episode. We need--this is our center because he is so proactive." STUDENT: Michael Keaton? BRANDON: It was Michael Keaton? OK. It was Michael Keaton. Even better, right? Yeah. Paying for Michael Keaton at that point, big deal. Right? And so they recast. And I don't even know if they'd gone to Michael Keaton. Right? This was all in kind of the early brainstorming stages. But you sometimes write a role to somebody. They had planned a big star who would then die, so they could have, you know, this big star open their

story. And they rebuilt the whole thing. It's all because of this one. There is also the problem with proactivity, what we call the villain problem. In a lot of stories, the villain is proactive, and the hero is reactive, or the protagonist. This is especially true of, like, origin stories where a villain is out doing something awesome and a potential hero is futzing around like, you know, being afraid of bats and having, you know, daddy issues. And meanwhile you got this person who is absolutely reprehensible. Right? You know, no moral code whatsoever. Though I would argue

a lot of them, they have a few hallmarks of relatability. There's just the moral code one, which goes under this, not. They don't even have to be that good at what they're doing. Sometimes they are. Joker obviously was very good. The opening scene to Dark Knight's job is to show you how capable he is. But also how proactive he is. And you end up with these stories where the villains are more interesting because the villains are doing stuff. They move the story. They get stuff done. And because of that, people bond to the villains because

they're proactive. You know, they're trying. They're out there doing their best to destroy the world. And, you know, the hero is like, "Oh, I don't know. The call to adventure. Oh, but my pillow is so soft." You know? Like, so we bond. So that's what we call the villain problem. So how do you overcome this? Well, you might be saying, "Brandon, proactivity seems the one that most characters are going to work on." Right? Because we talked about the hero's journey and other things A lot of times at the beginning of the story a character has

to be forced to be proactive. Right? Luke Skywalker wants to go up in the clouds and in the stars, but really his family has a problem even really getting him to go get the droids. Right? He is a dumb teenager who doesn't want to do anything. He wants to dream about having done stuff. You know, this is a lot of characters. Or it's the villain problem. My protagonist is a good person, which means they want to hang out with their family and, you know, read books while their cat purrs. That's what they want to do

with their life. And so the villain has to be the proactive one. Well, there's a few counters to this. If you don't want proactivity to be the thing the character's working on, which sometimes you do, but a lot of times you don't. Usually you want the character working--in your classic sense they're working on something down here. They're getting better at this. Or they're working on some sort of personal flaw that they have. Sometimes you want them to work on being proactive. Sometimes that's your Act I thing that by the end they have learned to be

proactive. A lot of times it's like your Midpoint. Your character moves from inactive to proactive. But you can do a lot of things to move them up. I imagine these as like three sliding scales. We'll put these around Syl here. Thank you, Steve Argyle, who came and played Magic with us and drew a picture of Syl. So if you've got your P and your R and that's, OK, C. I was going to say, if that's a K then we just spelled out North Korea. Right? PRK? Peoples Republic of North Korea. Isn't that what it is?

PRC doesn't spell anything that's going to embarrass me on the internet, does it? STUDENT: Republic of China. BRANDON: Oh, it's China. I was thinking China. It is PRC. It is PRC. P-C-R, there. Now watch that spell something even more embarrassing. STUDENT: CPR. BRANDON: CPR! Right. Yeah, we like CPR. All right. Yeah. There we are. Yeah. Yeah. No one can accuse me--C-P-R. C-P-R. CPR. We like CPR. All right. So I imagine these as sliding scales where a character kind of is at the beginning of the story at one point on all three of these and is

at a different point in at least one of them at the end. The real truth is, and we'll get this later, is there's like, particularly for relatability and for capability, you usually have multiple. In fact, even for proactivity. Right? My wife, if a lesson needs to be taught--she was a teacher--if somebody needs to be trained, she will step up and be proactive and create the lesson plan and get it done. But if you got in a room and said, "Someone needs to beat Super Mario to save the world," she does not volunteer. I guess that's

a capability. But you know, there are certain areas where we're proactive. Right? She'll be very proactive in organizing things for her family group or for her business. But in other areas she will not be proactive. So we all are like that. But here's some tips to move someone up on the proactive scale a little bit. Kurt Vonnegut says that one of the keys to making an interesting story is to make your character want something at the start, even if it's just a cup of coffee. Whatever it is, make them want something. I am convinced--no one's

seen this movie. It's better than its reputation. But it's not amazing. It's like one of these movies that's in between bad and good, so in places it's so bad it's good, and other places it's just good good, and that's Hudson Hawk. Never even--. Do you like it? STUDENT: It's awesome! BRANDON: OK. It is awesome. Movies that are so bad they're good in some places, and then legitimately good in other places, are just awesome. Equilibrium's the same way. Right? Yeah. Come on. When the face gets cut off that's so bad it's good. STUDENT: Oh. BRANDON: That

is not just legit good. That's so bad it's good. STUDENT: Yeah. BRANDON: Right? STUDENT: Yeah. BRANDON: Hudson Hawk is the same way. Not enough people--in that, I'm convinced they heard this because Bruce Willis wants a cup of coffee. STUDENT: Yes. BRANDON: And every time he picks one up it gets shot. STUDENT: Yes. BRANDON: Or something disastrous happens. All he wants is a cup of coffee. That whole movie, just let poor Bruce Willis get a cup of coffee, and he doesn't get his cup of coffee until the end. Yep. Spoilers. But I've always been convinced that

they heard this Kurt Vonnegut quote and they're like, "Ooh, that's a good idea. That's what he wants is a cup of coffee." Admit to me, in Hudson Hawk, the woman doing an imitation of a dolphin is so bad it's good. STUDENT: You mean Andie MacDowell? BRANDON: Yes. Andie MacDowell imitating a dolphin. STUDENT: I mean, it's not easy to make those noises. BRANDON: It's not easy to make those noises. But anyway, awesome movie. I don't know if it's a good movie, but it is awesome. It's in that special category. Make people want something. Normally it's not

a cup of coffee. Normally it's going to relate in some way to what makes them relatable, or to their capability in some way. But normally it's just like what are their motivations? We don't talk enough about character motivations, I think, in discussions of narrative. Because the difference between a wooden character and a well-rounded, fleshed out character in the reader's mind is almost always motivation issues. It's not actually that their dialogue is as stilted as you think it is. It's not always that, you know--. When a character is off to a reader--not to a professional, they'll

look at these different ways--but when a person reads a character and they're like, "It just didn't work for me," I would say, six times out of 10, it's a motivation problem, meaning you have not accurately indicated what the character wants, and shown us how their actions are born out of the things they want. In fact, most characters should want multiple things, some of them self-contradictory, because we're human beings and that's how we are. And as they want those things, their desires should inform their actions, which we should be able to figure out, so that as

they change, and their desires change, and their actions change, it makes sense to us. A lot of times if you're like, "This character just doesn't feel alive," well, you've established one motivation and then they're doing something else. Sorry to harp on The Last Jedi, but Finn really wants to go help his friend Rae. This movie wants him to go save horses from a casino. And the movie does not establish enough that we want him to swap to saving horses instead of--like they had, you know. And part of this is the problem with movie one. They

had good chemistry, not necessarily even romantic, but as friends, great chemistry. We liked seeing those two characters on screen together. We make a promise at the beginning he's going to be back and we're going to have some of those more fun times, and the motivations just never work for him to the point that at the end of the movie he tries to ram his ship into something that we're just like, "I no longer understand Finn. But I guess, OK, heroic sacrifice. Oh, no, you weren't--." Anyway, we won't get into The Last Jedi. Oh, that movie.

CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Oh, that movie. Anyway. Making your characters proactive, making them want something, explaining their motivations. And remember that in narrative, particularly at the beginning when you're making your promises, small things evoke the larger things. Right? A character does not have to want to save the world at the beginning. But if they love their family, and you've really established that, then you will establish that when they make the decision to go out and save the world that it makes sense. Showing that Mulan has a special relationship with her father, who is wise and seems

to get her when no one else does, leads exactly to her going out on a big adventure. She doesn't want a big adventure. But she doesn't want her dad to have to go to war. So you can see little things. Establishing a relationship between mother and father leads to "Now I'm going to save the kingdom because, you know, I'm Mulan, and I'm good at saving kingdoms, apparently." Right? Little things evoke the larger. If your character is going to be not very proactive, they're going to resist the call in some ways, that's fine. But if you

can show them proactive in their own life in certain ways--. Mulan's another good example. She has to feed the chickens. What does she do? She comes up with a cool plan and she feeds the chickens in a cool way. We're like, "You are solving problems, Mulan. We want to watch you solve more problems." And lo and behold, through the whole film, she is solving problems with her wits in interesting ways that make us excited to watch. Do things like that with your character, even if they aren't in a position to save the world at the

beginning. They don't have to be the Jack that at the beginning there's a giant plane crash, takes charge and saves everyone. If that's not your character, that's fine. But if you zoom in on one character helping another person get to shore and, you know, making that decision, particularly if you can show them turning around, seeing someone else in danger, going back and getting them, that's enough proactivity for the beginning of the story to give you a seed and to make you start to build this one. OK? Let's do questions on proactivity before we get to

relatability and capacity. So do we got anything over here, or do we got anything from peanut gallery? RACHEL LYNN: I have a couple from the chat. BRANDON: Couple from the chat. RACHEL LYNN: And I will try to speak loud so people can hear me. BRANDON: I'll repeat the question. RACHEL LYNN: OK. "How do you create proactivity in a situation that limits the character's ability to take actions?" BRANDON: Yeah. How do you create proactivity in a situation where a character's limited to take action? Let's take a classic example. Person is in prison. They are very, very

limited. Anyone read Count of Monte Cristo? Is he proactive, being in prison? STUDENT: No. BRANDON: He cannot be proactive. So you either start showing some of these other things, or you ease into it. Over time he meets someone. He makes a plan. He realizes that he can get out. Right? Someone who is limited, you can at least show they're like, "I'm going to try something." A lot of these things will start with a character like, "I am locked up. I can't do anything. I'm going to at least try something." They try some situation where they're

like, "I'm going to get out of my situation by playing sick." Well, the guards are onto that. They're too smart for that. But you tried. Right? Your character, if it's external keeping them from being proactive, you can do all kinds of things. They can think about what are they going to do? What are they going to do when they get out? What are their plans? They can even go so--you can be like, "I'm in this terrible situation. Can I talk the guards into giving me extra bread?" Right? You can do all kinds of things from

a person in a situation. What's more difficult is when the internal limitations are making it hard for them to be proactive. I've often said that the most difficult character to write--and that might be hyperbole. There's a whole bunch of things that can be difficult to write. But I've often said the most difficult, or at least one of the most difficult, is somebody whose mental health makes it very difficult for them to be proactive or care about anything. These are difficult stories to write. They just are. I've talked before about Mistborn 3. Spoilers for Mistborn 3,

minor spoilers. But I've talked before about--I think even in this class, about Sazed. Some events at the end of Mistborn 2 drive one of the main character protagonists into a deep depression, and I wrote the entire book with him just in this deep depression. And it was written really authentically. I did all my research. And people had so much trouble getting through those chapters. Now that may be what you want. Right? These are all things, if you want to make a character a certain way, here's how you do it. It doesn't mean that that's the

only way to write a character. But looking at it, I realized, "Oh, man. I need people to like these scenes for reasons that are very important to the ending of Mistborn 3. And so I went back, and I rewrote them all so that he was sliding into depression. Sliding into depression. And what he was doing was he'd had a crisis of faith. He was searching for the true religion. And in the initial draft there wasn't that search happening. He'd already determined that, you know, he'd lived a lie and nothing, you know, there was no truth

out there. In the story, I rewrote it so he's like, "I'm going point by point for all these religions that I've memorized, and I'm determining if this might possibly be the right one," which gives progress. He is this much of the way through, and he's sinking further in depression. And like, you feel him getting worse and worse. Motion is good, even if it's downward motion. Staticness is what's hard to write. And the scenes worked way better. They're still sometimes hard to get through, but there's motion, and it's downward motion, and it's soul crushing, but the

motion works. And it was one of the big, important revisions. So if you want to do this, there's a couple things. You may just want to admit proactivity's not a thing they can do. Then you focus on these two. Right? If you still want them to be proactive, find a way that they are forced by something to be proactive, or something they can control. Someone who's bedridden because of a physical health problem can still be very proactive in saying, "I'm going to keep my family together by being positive when they're around," or things like this.

And maybe that's bad. Maybe it's good. But they can make that plan and execute it. You can have people be proactive in their small sphere of influence. The big dangerous one is that mental health, as realistic as it is, it is just a challenge to write in a book and make it work. Other question? RACHEL LYNN: Well, you answered a few. BRANDON: Mm hmm. RACHEL LYNN: Let's see. BRANDON: Yes. DONALD: I am curious. When looking at proactivity and a character is, say Act I, blocked by the hard challenge. BRANDON: Mm hmm. DONALD: How do you

restart proactivity within a character? BRANDON: OK. They've lost their proactivity because they hit a hard challenge. Character is therefore kind of forced into inactivity because they're second guessing themselves, and how do you restart that? Boy, you know, Donald, I think that there are, like, a dozen ways you could do this, and it would be individual to the story. What I see a lot of times happening in those situations is we usually cut to someone else being the proactive one for a little while, even if they're in the same group, and then someone has to pull

them out of it, or they have to pull out of it. And this works really well when you have a large cast. And you can have one person go--this happened in Oathbringer. Right? We have one person go through something just enormously traumatic, and someone else, we jump to their viewpoint, and we pull them along through it while they are dealing with it. But there's all sorts of things that could do this. Like, a lot of times you'll see this at the end of Act II, beginning of Act III. The character's gone through their darkest moment,

and they just--they've given up. This is a really great time to have the last bit of character growth they need in some way where something they've learned along the way comes back to them, and they decide to make one final push. And that happens really well--that works really well as well. Anything else over here? RACHEL LYNN: "What about characters who deliberately do the opposite, like see someone drowning and let them drown? Is that still proactive?" BRANDON: Yes. What if they do the opposite? They see someone drowning and they let them drown. That counts as proactive

unless they are frozen in fear. Right? They can't act. They're not saving them because of a flaw related to their own proactivity. But if it's like, "Ah, we'll let them drown. I need to take care of myself." Well, that's going to pull them down on relatability. It's not really going to influence their proactivity, in my experience. Yeah. STUDENT: Is it confusing to write two characters that have competing proactivity where they're competing to--? BRANDON: Is it confusing to write two characters that have competing proactivities? No, that's awesome. It works really well. In fact, this is why

The Fugitive works. The Fugitive is an excellent example of what we call--I just talked about it in the Q&A for last week--what we call a cat and mouse mystery. Oftentimes mysteries fall into a lot of different formats. Cat and mouse is where two people are striving for either opposing or similar goals, and one is trying to catch the other one before, you know, before the first one can achieve their goals. And so you'll watch--The Fugitive is an excellent example of character A, Harrison Ford, is trying to catch the one-armed man, while character B, Tommy Lee

Jones, is trying to catch character A. Both are proactive. Both are brilliant. They both make really smart moves. And you get to watch them having opposing--one needs to stay free to find the killer. The other needs to catch him because he thinks he is the killer. And they both get to be super proactive. They both get to be super capable. Though the scary thing is, Tommy Lee Jones is more capable, but we know that Harrison Ford is right. And so the dramatic tension becomes Tommy Lee Jones is so good at this, can Harrison Ford stay

ahead of him long enough to solve the problem, because Tommy Lee Jones will catch him eventually, because he is more capable. And that's the fun of that story. It puts a time bomb on it, but a kind of a loose time bomb that works. We good here? Are we going to move on? Yeah. OK. Let me check the time. I can go all the way over to this chair. I don't know if you guys can see the chair, but that's my boundary. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Wow, that was 40 minutes? I don't have a clock in

here that I can watch. All right. We'll keep a lock. Relatability. This is the most obvious one. When people talk about how do you write a compelling character or things like that, they've often talking about how do you make a character likeable. This is pretty important. Right? Depending on the story you're telling, you want your character generally to have some aspect of relatability. It helps us put him--it helps us get into their shoes and, you know, go on this, particularly if it's a sci-fi/fantasy story, this fantastical adventure, or this thriller where they're being chased. You

want to like the character because if you don't like them then the stakes tend to go down for them because their death is not something that's going to bother you. So in a life and death situation, it's important to have somebody be relatable. How do we make someone relatable? Well, there's a couple of things that we do. The number one, the reason that the book Save the Cat is called Save the Cat is because showing someone show kindness and use their proactivity or capacity in the betterment, or for good morals, to help others, is instantly--it

makes them relatable. We generally, I'm assuming most people watching this, want to help others and be nice. Right? We want to make people's lives better. Seeing somebody who does that and makes use of, you know--. Maybe they aren't the most capable. Maybe they aren't the most proactive. But they can help somebody, instantly makes us like them. And the term "Save the Cat" means, you know, if you want to show who the protagonist is, you have them save a cat. If you want to show who the villain is, you have them kick a dog. Right? It's

just the very simple old adage, which now you'll laugh every time you see a movie where someone saves a cat, literally, or where they kick a dog, literally. Like, I still--. What's that? STUDENT: John Wick. BRANDON: Yeah. John Wick. John Wick, kind of the inverse of that. I remember, yeah, in--. My example is Tad Williams. Old school. But there's, like, this book series, Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, that I loved reading when I was younger. Still very good. Tad Williams is a great author. And in Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, like, at one point the young kid

who's like a--it's an '80s fantasy novel, so he's like a peasant of some sort. He's like the guy who takes care of, like, the fireplace. Right? He's like, you know, little kid in a castle whose job is to be the servant. He finds--there's like puppies, and he finds one that's disabled. And he's like, "Oh, I'm going to take care of this puppy." And then one of the princes walks by and he goes, crunch, and steps on it, because he's like, "Well, that one should be killed. It's not as strong as the others." And you're like,

"Oh, I know who the bad guy is." And lo and behold, that's the bad guy. And oh, hey. Thank you. I got a little clock set up here for me. So save the cat, kick the dog. Sometimes literally. One of the things that's underappreciated, I think, by writers, because they all know about Save the Cat. You've probably all heard about that. One of the things that will make someone relatable is if you can see them through the eyes of someone else who highlights their good attributes. Seeing this through your own eyes, it sometimes will make

the character sound a little arrogant, and it could be off putting. Seeing it through someone else's eyes can be really handy for helping us just really see how interesting and relatable the character is. We like people that other people like. It's just a natural instinct in us. Particularly if, you know, you don't go over the top on it. This is why deliberately I did not show--and I think I talked about this in class--I didn't show Chapter 1 of Way of Kings from Kaladin's viewpoint. I wanted you to see Kaladin from the eyes of someone who

was not Kaladin himself, partially because Kaladin tends to be hard on himself. And beyond that, seeing this kind of just larger than life heroic figure through the eyes of someone else, and then time jump--spoiler--like Chapter 2, months have passed, and Kaladin is now a slave, and he's lost all of that. I felt like that was the way to show off, you know, how good a person Kaladin is, and to kind of make that work. So liked by others. But there's other things here. Self-awareness is a big one for us. The character who is not proactive

but understands that their lack of proactivity is a problem and is working on it and acknowledging it, we give them a pass. We're like, "Oh, you poor person." As long as, again, you're not over the top with this. You've got to be careful in these things. But as long as you're not over the top with it, you're like, "You know what? They're working on it. They're working on things." The person who's a jerk but knows it and is working on it and tries to be better--like, we fall in love with Mr. Darcy in part because

he kind of knows it, and he tries mediocrely to do better. Right? And then he shows, he uses his proactivity, and his capability, in this case enormous wealth, in service of the protagonist at the point in the story where you're supposed to turn on Darcy. I mean turn toward him. Because you realize Darcy, you know, he's a curmudgeon, even though he's not old enough to be one yet, but he's trying. That can go a great distance in relatability for us. Obviously, indicating some just normal, basic things that most people do or like. Right? Why does

Garfield hate Mondays? He's a cat. Every day is the same to Garfield. Why does he hate Mondays? Because his audience theoretically hates Mondays because they have to leave the weekend and go to work. So Garfield hates Mondays to make him relatable because it's a normal thing that people have. He likes lasagna because we all want to eat good food in large portions and it's not good for us. Like, he's a cat. He shouldn't like lasagna. But Garfield represents, like, there's a few key things that make Garfield Garfield, and they are designed to make him relatable.

Working with these sorts of things can be relatable. You do have to be aware that some of these things will make them unrelatable to a certain percentage of the audience. For instance, if you have a kid who struggles with math, that is relatable to most people in my experience. Some people are like, "No, I don't struggle." But if you can make the general sort of, you know, "I struggle to get my projects done on time and math is the hardest for me," well, that's relatable. Right? We all sometimes wait a little too long to get

the things done that we need to do. And then the last one would be morality. A moral compass that aligns with the general moral compass of those reading the book is going to make someone relatable, particularly if they're, again, self-aware about some of their own flaws, or how they might take it too far, or things like that. You know, it's like swimming back to get the person. Right? Swimming back to get the person makes someone relatable because it shows a basic moral decency. In general, if we're talking about our sliding scales--I lost--oh, it's in my

back pocket. You will end up having, you know, your villains be very high in proactivity and very low in relatability, and often pretty high in capability. Like, that's your classic villain, your classic sort of superhero villain. Right? But you can have a lot of villains. Like, if you move them up just a little bit in relatability, those end up tending to be the strongest villains. Right? This is Magneto. Is it relatable that Magneto wants to kill all the humans? Say no! CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Is it relatable that he is afraid that if he doesn't, because

of his history, being taken and thrown into a concentration camp, that the things that make him different and the people he loves different, be destroyed if he doesn't destroy them first? Kind of relatable. Right? Suddenly, OK, this is relatable. Right? This is probably why we got stupid sexy Sauron in Rings of Power. Right? CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Jury's out for me if that worked. But that's probably what they were trying to do there is, you know, "Maybe Sauron's better if he's stupid sexy Sauron." But you can be aware. Relatability in some villain stories start someone, like,

here, and they're on a downward trajectory. Yes. Well, yeah, spoilers. But yeah. But, you know, there's a lot of stories. Right? Like, you can say Spider-Man, like the Sam Raimi Spider-Man, like almost every Spider-Man villain is this. They start here. Their tragic flaw causes them to take a step no one else would take and we know is against moral code. And then their relatability crashes as they become Green Goblin, Dr. Octopus, The Lizard, Sandman. All of them, this is kind of the Spider-Man thing. Right? Is, you know, Sandman a little bit less. You were looking

at me on Sandman. Sandman's pretty high on relatability. I agree. He is. He is. He gets--it happens to him, rather than him taking the serum or, you know, yeah. Right? Like, he's less crazy scientist than the rest of them. He's a poor guy who is in the wrong place but then gets superpowers. Regardless, that's kind of what's going on there. Any questions on relatability? This is the most obvious one. STUDENT: I have one. BRANDON: Yes. STUDENT: How do you write a good antihero? BRANDON: So, antihero. Let's make clear there are two definitions of antihero. So

in the classical literary sense, an antihero--Madame Bovary is often held up as an antihero, in that she is not proactive at all, and it's a story happening around her, and she refuses to act. And she is an antihero in that she refuses to fulfill the role of protagonist. And it's supposed to make you annoyed. The entire book is about making you annoyed that Madame Bovary won't do anything. This is a classic literary antihero. In modern pop culture, an antihero is a villain who does heroic things. And those are two different things. Normally, like, this one,

go study literature if you want to have a classical antihero. Modern antihero, it's actually pretty easy. You make them highly proactive and capable and low on relatability. But then you just have them fight people who are lower on this one. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Right? There's a famous adage. Right? Driving on the road, anyone who passes you, you're like, "They're going so fast! They're crazy!" Anyone you have to pass, you're like, "How dare you impede traffic. You're so slow. You're crazy." Right? And this kind of applies in all areas of life. I've noticed it with religion.

However religious you are, the people who are a little more religious than you, you're like, "Look at those zealots." And the people a little less religious than you, you're like, "You know, they might need Jesus." CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: So with antiheroes, right? You just make sure that they are worse. Like, you know, is John Wick a hero? He's a protagonist for sure. And dividing in your mind hero and protagonist, a hero, I would say, is someone who does virtuous things. A protagonist is someone who we want to succeed and we're following. And Hiro Protagonist is

the main character of Snow Crash. DONALD: (laughing) BRANDON: Actually that's his name. So you guys should read Snow Crash. It's great. So what do you do? You just--you make sure that there's some even worse people out there to turn loose on. There's a part of us that really loves the villain problem. Right? We love the villains because it just is so cool to watch them, you know, go crazy. It's so cool to watch John Wick. Right? John Wick, it should not be cool to watch John Wick murder everyone. Right? It shouldn't. But-- DONALD: They're all

bad guys. BRANDON: They're all bad guys. And yes, he was a bad guy. He was an assassin. He tried to be good. Right? He starts down here, but he tries to be good. He gets inched up. He gets a puppy. DONALD: And then they kicked his dog. BRANDON: The puppy doesn't survive. Yeah. Sorry. But then you're on board because you're like, "You didn't just kick the dog. You made a mistake." And this is the coolest assassin ever. And it's kind of like you get to throw away your own morals for a little while. It's OK

in literature. This is why we have literature, so that you get to experience things that you would never do yourself. And you get to watch John Wick go crazy on these guys. Right? And John Wick, I don't know that I would call him an antihero because to really get to antihero stage you're also doing some villainous things along the way. It's just you're doing some really bad damage to people even more villainous, so you're kind of like it's OK. You know. That's what makes a classic antihero. But it depends. Like, most of the people that

are antiheroes in popular fiction, right? Venom? He's just a hero at this point. Punisher? He's just a hero at this point. Right? It's an antihero means you dress in black. Right? DONALD: Do bad things for good reasons. BRANDON: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You maybe still have a few pouches from the Rob Liefeld days of comic books strapped to you in random places, and you wear black. STUDENT: Deadpool wears red. BRANDON: What's that? Yeah. Deadpool wears red. But, like, the Deadpool movies. He is not an antihero. He is a straight up hero. Right? Like, is there

anything antihero in, like, Deadpool 2? No. He just is--I mean, OK, there's a normal person he recruits into his team. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: With no superpowers, and that might be a little antihero. DONALD: But then he also saves that normal person by telling them to get out. BRANDON: Spoiler. He does save that person. But yeah. So anyway, there you go. Good question. Antihero, just make them slightly more relatable than the people that they are going against, and you'll probably be fine. If you want to be a true antihero, you should delve into the moral complexities

of some of the terrible things they've done. Grimdark really leans into this. And the best grimdark stories are "Yes, he's the protagonist. Yes, he's an antihero in that I want him to succeed. But he really should deal with the fact that he did X, Y, and Z, and it doesn't look like he's really going to." And that leaves you, like, complicated feelings about these characters. I mean, we talked about at the Q&A also, Paul Atreides. Right? Paul Atreides is a protagonist who is very arguably a villain as well. And you don't see it because he's

protaging so much in fulfilling the classical hero's journey that by the end when he's a villain you're like, "Oh, maybe I shouldn't have been rooting for the entire galaxy to be thrown into a holy war. But they asked for it. They killed my dad, who was the only good person around. So deal with it." Any other questions? Yeah. DONALD: When it comes to character tropes and relatability. BRANDON: Mm hmm. DONALD: Is the goal to build up the foundation of character tropes so that your characters can be relatable once you have given them their unique quirks?

BRANDON: Good question. Tropes. And I didn't get into the quirkiness, which is another one in the relatability. So you're mostly--you say tropes. We used to say archetypes. Tropes are used as archetypes now, and things like that. Letting the reader put someone quickly in a--pigeonhole them and then show how they don't quite git that hole is a really valid way. Paul Atreides is an excellent example. Right? He's the young nobleman. You've read this story before. Something terrible happens. We're going to watch him restore right to the universe. And so the fact that he's a villain can

sneak up on you. And that is using the tropes against the reader in cool ways. A lot of times you will want to kind of--the readers will put your character in a box automatically. And so how you've decided to fight against that is up to you. You can completely upend it by pulling reversals on them. Or you can just be expanding that box as they go and showing more facets to them over time. And this is where we get into the quirks. We do like people who don't fit their role. It's a really natural thing.

Same reason we're attracted to people who are proactive, and we're attracted to people who have capacity. We are interested in people that don't fit their role for whatever reason, because every one of us don't fit our role for some reason that society has said, because roles are BS, and it's just how human brains have to try to process the overwhelming amount of information we have. So that's where your quirks come in. "I am like this, but this." And when you can have your quirks expand someone's role rather than just be something wacky, usually for most

stories that's better. Right? Your quirk is not--I'll use an example from Rachel's writing. Your quirk is, you know, her character has this sort of need to prove herself. Right? She's not the classic apprentice. The classic apprentice learns her lesson in the opening scene. There's usually--you've seen this scene a hundred times. Apprentice is trying something. They get a little big for their britches. It's Mickey in Fantasia. He tries. He fails. The wizard comes back and is like, "You did wrong. Learn your lesson." And Mickey's like, "OK, I'll learn my lesson." Her character says, "Nope. Not going

to learn that lesson. I was right." She's in a box. You expect you know how her character is going to play out. And then she breaks out of that box a little bit and shows off her flaw. And we're going to get to flaws. We'll probably push that off because we only have 15 minutes. Sanderson's Second Law, we'll talk a whole bunch about flaws. So we'll save it for that lecture. But the idea that a character--strong characters that really work generally have expertise and flaws in equal measure. And I've decided for this lecture series I'm

going to call them--flaws, restrictions, and limitations. A flaw being--and we'll get to this again in Sanderson's Second Law. A flaw being something they need to overcome. Highlighting "I have this flaw." This character has this flaw. Their arc is going to be about overcoming it. A restriction is some sort of story or self-imposed thing that they could get over, but you don't want them to, the classic being Superman's moral code. Right? Superman has a restriction because he has a moral code. It makes things harder for him. We do not want him to overcome his moral code.

CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Some stories may explore what happens if you do. And then limitations, by my definition, are imposed upon you against your will, and often are physical limitations. And the story is not about fixing it but overcoming it. If your character, for instance, the example I always use is like, it's the one-armed person who wants to play football. Right? The story is not about how they should have two arms. The story's about "You have this unfair limitation. Well, you're going to have to work with it and work around it." And you treat those three

things differently. Showing that someone has a flaw actually makes them relatable. Harping on it too much and having it impede progress too long will pull them down. So it starts, a flaw, as an advantage in relatability, and over time it becomes more and more a liability the longer they go without overcoming it. If Luke Skywalker, after Obi-wan has said, you know, he says, "You must learn the ways of the Force." And Luke's like, "No! I have to go power converter," and he runs back, and his family is dead. And Obi-wan's like, "We now need to

go save the princess." And he's like, "No! I don't want to." The more he does the "No, I don't want to" at that point, the more we're going to dislike him. Early on, loving his family and feeling like he's not good enough is relatable. Continuing will drive us up the wall. I referenced Lost. Maybe I should talk about the Michael problem at this point. Yeah. So the Michael problem. In Lost there was a character named Michael, and he was my least favorite character. He should have been super likeable, because he had a really cool flaw,

and a really cool capability. His capability was he loved his son. His flaw was that he'd been a bad dad in the past. And his character arc was, "I'm going to learn to be a good dad now." That should have been a slam dunk. Like, compared to Jack who is like, "I am Superman. I will save you all. Do not question." Super unrelatable, super proactive. You've got Michael who's just like, "I just want to be a good dad." His son gets kidnapped. This is Season 2, I believe. You know. His son gets kidnapped, and his

whole character becomes about getting his son back. Great. He's got motivation. Everything should be working. The problem is things become a character's only attribute, and it goes too far. It starts to annoy us. And you would get to these scenes where they'd be like, "All right, we need something for lunch. What do you guys want?" And Kate's like, "I want a sandwich." Sawyer's like, "Ah, you know what? Give me some whiskey. I'm Sawyer." "Michael, what do you want?" And he's like, "I want my son." And they're like, "OK, yes, we understand that. What do you

want for lunch?" "My son isn't having lunch. He's kidnapped by the others." And they're like, "OK. Michael, we get it. Just lunch." He's like, "My son!" And to the point that they went too far in writing this character's, you know, very relatable motivation became the only thing to the point that everyone was so tired of Michael. Nobody liked Michael. Which is bizarre, considering. Right? All right. Let's talk about capability. Well, we'll do that. So capability, another easy one. Pretty obvious. We like competent people doing things competently. We will read entire books about competent people doing

things competently. Last week I referenced Dirk Pitt. Right? Dirk Pitt is so good at his job of being--he's just a marine biologist guy with a military background who wants to go study, you know, the ocean. But bad guys keep trying to destroy the ocean, and he happens to be the only one there 27 times in a row who can stop a terrorist organization from detonating nukes that will irradiate the entire ocean, or whatever. Right? Just happens. He's like James Bond if James Bond, instead of being a womanizer alcoholic, was a Boy Scout. Right? With, like,

degrees in puppy petting and how to use assault rifles. And in Dirk Pitt--I'm exaggerating a little bit, but he is just so good at things. I remember reading one of these books, and I loved this story, like it's one of the mid later books, and I might be exaggerating this. It's been a while. But I remember reading, it's from the viewpoint of Dirk Pitt's accountant. Dirk Pitt isn't there. Dirk Pitt is off stopping something. It's a little side story. The accountant is trapped without a way off on an island with bad guys. And the accountant

wants to hide in a cave. But then he thinks, "What would Dirk do?" And so instead he kills the bad guys, steals a helicopter, and escapes. Because Dirk Pitt is so awesome, by aura of awesomeness, his accountant becomes a Navy Seal. Right? Like, that's how cool Dirk Pitt is. We like reading about this. Now, most stories are not going to lean on this nearly as much as a Dirk Pitt or a James Bond story does. And in fact, one of the things they did to make the new James Bond more relatable was they pulled back

on how good he was at things and showed him failing or nearly failing a lot more often. In Casino Royale he became vulnerable again, rather than the guy that can solve all the problems. Too much capability will pull down relatability. But in a story about someone being proactive and super good at stuff, we don't care. That's what the story's about. Right? And that's totally fine. Normally what you're going to do is you're going to have someone be really good at one or two things, and really weak in other things. And you're going to show how

the things they're good at initially help move the plot along, but the things they're bad at become weaknesses that are exploited. Their flaws, their limitations, their--oh, man, what was the other word? Their restrictions. Their restrictions. I never can remember that one. STUDENT: It's a flaw. BRANDON: It's a flaw. Yeah. It's one of my flaws as a teacher. And you see how their flaws balance them out. So before I get to this question, be aware that being good at something doesn't mean you need to be good at firing assault rifles. Samwise Gamgee is largely considered people's

favorite character in Lord of the Rings. He has one superpower, other than making good food. Sam is loyal. Sam is so incredibly loyal that nothing can budge his loyalty to Mr. Frodo, to the point that his superpower is what saves the world. Him being loyal to Frodo, and being willing to go on this trek, and refusing to leave when Frodo told him to leave, leads to him carrying Frodo up the mountain. And if you haven't done that, everyone's dead. Right? Though fun tangent. The Lord of the Rings memes subreddit is awesome. My favorite one recently

is where Aragorn at the end of the third movie just like looks back at everyone and says, "For Frodo!" and starts running. And then it cuts to a scene of all the normal guards and it's like, "Who's Frodo?" CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Because they don't know. It makes you think, "Oh, yeah. He yells for Frodo, and there's like three guys there who even know who Frodo is." Fortunately, they're the guys that could--they really--they're the only other three guys they need. By the way, your mama's so fat when Legolas killed her, Gimli counted it as two. CLASS:

(laughing) BRANDON: What was your question? That was--I stole that from the memes. Isn't that good? TAYLOR: I'll give you five. BRANDON: You'll give me five? Oh, you raised your hand? I'm like, "Oh, Taylor has a question. He hasn't had one yet." No, he's giving me the five-minute warning. So, all right. This is easy. I will talk about arcs because we only have four minutes left. An arc is where somebody is moving up on one of these or down on one of these. It makes it very easy to visualize. Usually, it's someone moving up on relatability

because they're working on their flaw. And that mere fact that they're working on it, like I said, moves them up. But when they overcome it, we cheer. The other most common is capability. Somebody is an apprentice. They don't know how to use the Force, but they need to "use the Force, Luke." This is a problem. Over time they learn to "use the Force, Luke," and they get to blow up the "that's no moon." And moving up or down on one of these is just a really great way to think about giving a character arc to

your character. Now there are other kinds of arcs. Right? There are working on external problems. There's relationship arcs. And all these tie into characters. But purely internal arcs usually relate to moving up or down on one of these three. Last questions for three minutes. Yeah? We're good? We'll be in person next week. I'm still not sure if it's going to be Q&A on character, or if I'm just going to do another character lecture. We'll talk about it next week in class. Until then, drive safely, all of my students. And I hope the rest of you

enjoyed this. And start saving up your questions for the outline Q&A. I just recorded the one for plot so it should be up by the time you see this. So thank you much.