Lecture #3: Plot Part 2 — Brandon Sanderson on Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy

All right, guys, let's do class. Yay! Oh, boy, class! The way I'm going to format the class year is, we will do our second week on plot this week, and then next week I'm going to dedicate to going through your questions that you've written on your little slips about plot or whatever it is. I'll do last week's and this week's. If there are things that I don't answer about plot, or things that are confusing or whatnot, or you want me to dig in deeper to, put them on your sheets, and those will come to me

next week and we'll do a Q&A episode. The week after that, I believe, Isaac can confirm, will be the week that Mary Robinette will be here. Isaac: The week of the 18th. The week of the 18th? Whatever the week of the 18th is, the week that Mary Robinette will be here, and she is going to talk to you about short stories, I think is what we decided, something she's much better at than I am. Let's talk more about plot. Last week we dug into this kind of my philosophy about promises, progress, and payoffs. It was

kind of high-level conceptual stuff. Today I want to dig into a little bit more of the nitty gritty. How do you actually construct a plot? What are the pieces that go together to make a plot work? How do you make an outline? Now, the caveat to this is, not everybody uses an outline. An outline is not necessary to write a story, even a very complex one. Generally, as we talked about the first week, people do kind of fall in this spectrum between how much upfront work they want to do, and how much back end work

they want to do. That's really the discussion you're having when you're deciding if you're more of a discovery writer or more of an outline writer, how much up-front work, how much back-end work. Both have to do some up-front work, and both have to do some back-end work. A discovery writer is generally offloading a lot of stuff that the outline writer does to the end, to do more revisions, to try and fix things that are broken, whereas the outline writer tends to front load it and get a cleaner first draft. If you are a discovery writer

by nature and you think, why are we-- can I go to sleep for this entire thing? Well, I was a student, so yes, if you need to go to sleep, go ahead. These are comfy chairs, much more comfy than most classrooms. But most of the time, most of the discovery writers I know, they like knowing this stuff, because this is the sort of thing you do in drafting, is you look for what is the structure of my plot? What are my promises? What are my payoffs? How am I making this work? In fact, a lot

of my friends who are discovery writers, it's like their first draft is kind of like a really good outline. Their second draft, then, becomes the equivalent of the outline writer's first draft. In fact, I have a good friend who writes every book twice from scratch. Writes the book all the way through, puts it aside. Now that's her outline, and she starts on page one and writes every word again, using that as an outline. I think that would be miserable. That's why it's good that there are different writers and there is no one way to do

this. Because for me, doing up front work and creating an outline helps me a great deal. Why do I like this? Well, I've talked to you guys a little bit about how, as a writer, as you progress as a writer, you learn to do some things by instinct, and you then can focus on other things in your actual writing, hour by hour, day by day, and get better at those things. An outline works a little bit like that for me, in that I can offload some of the work that I would have to be doing

while I'm sitting and writing to a planning session before I start the book. Which means that when I sit down to write the chapter, there are fewer things I have to keep in my brain, because the chapter outline has provided some of the high-level stuff that I need to accomplish, and I can just focus on making this chapter exciting, making it interesting, making sure it's active rather than passive, making sure that instead of info dumps we're focusing on what the characters motivations are and how I see the world. I do this. We're going to talk

about my method of outlining right now first. This is just one that works very well for me. When I was in high school or junior high or whatever, they talked about outlines. They talked about an outline having a number 1, and then an A, and then i, and then ii, and that was what your outline looked like. When I got into writing, I assumed that's what an outline was. An outline is not necessarily that. In fact, if an editor asks you to send them an outline for your story, that is just shorthand for about a

three-page document telling them your story. It does not indicate, they do not want heading 1, subheading B. If they say, "Send me three sample chapters and an outline," it can be longer than three pages. Three to five pages is what I would recommend, nothing longer than 10. Ten is getting into, like, if you are writing an epic fantasy, and you are working with the editor, and they've already bought the book and they want the outline, then they can get longer. But they upfront are just asking, what they want is a summary. Outline means summary to

editors. Now, for me, that's not what my outline looks like either. It is not a summary. In writing my books, and if we get on the ball, we will post for you guys one of my outlines, because I can give you the one for Steelheart or for Skyward. Because those ones are a little bit easier to understand than Stormlight outlines. This is in part because so many things in the Stormlight outline are actually referencing to my Wiki, my internal Wiki, which is all my world building, and things like that. Most of my outlines will look

like this. They will start with a heading for character. Then they will have a heading for setting. And then they will have a heading for plot. These will each be, I will use Microsoft Word's document map, and I'll make these top level of an outline. In this case it is building an outline. So I can easily get through the document and click to things that I want. Then underneath character there will be the names of each of the characters. So, you know, Kaladin, Shalon, Dalinar, Szeth, for the main characters. Let me erase underneath and just

kind of go a little bit more. I will give each main character their own heading, and then I will have a separate heading for side characters underneath it, and then there'll be some bullet points under there that are a different outline level. The character one is, I start out saying what is the character's arc? Under each of these characters, like if you went to the Kaladin one-- By the way, I'm explaining it to look way prettier than it actually does in the original Way of Kings outline. In Skyward it looks like you might be able

to understand, so I'll try to get you that one or Steelheart. But it'll say, under this I'll have a paragraph that explains who they are. Then I'll have another one that's just kind of like, this is intro, and this is arc. That'll be like arc 1, arc 2, and things like that. This will be for every character. It'll be like, this is where they're starting, this is where they're going. I'll get into how I build those arcs in a minute. All right? I'm just giving you what it looks like. The side characters might only have

one little paragraph about each of them. Under setting I will have large headings that will talk about things like the magic or the tech, the world building, like the physical setting, and the cultural setting. Don't stress too much about this, because we will have two entire weeks talking about setting, and we'll have two entire weeks talking about character. I'm just giving you the format of what this looks like for me. Under there, that's going to read more like an encyclopedia entry. This is me defining terms for each of these. There'll be subheadings if it's getting

very long. I usually do split between physical setting and cultural setting, and we'll do a day on each of those during world building. We'll talk about the differences and why I group them that way. But ignoring all of that for now, let's look at plot, because today is our plot day. When I am building my plot in an outline for a book, I am looking for a couple of things. One of the main things I'm looking for are my promises, my progress, and my payoff. The most important thing, generally, for me to determine is the

progress part. Because once I understand the progress part in my outline, I can figure out the correct promises and how to make good on that. When I'm doing that, I'm usually looking for some sort of plot archetype that I can use. By my definitions today, a plot archetype is different from a plot structure. Plot structure, which we'll talk about a little bit later is something like three act format or the Hero’s Journey. A plot archetype is a style of plot, what we're trying to achieve. To explain this, I'll talk about, I'll use Mistborn. When I

was building Mistborn, there were a couple of things that made me excited to write the book. The first was that it was going to be a heist. This was one of my primary plot archetypes. A heist is a type of story. It is a story that you can go find other heist-type stories and learn what they did. You can research them, you can figure them out, and you can start using them. I also knew, in my outlining, that there was going to be a master-apprentice plot, that there was going to be the story about Vin

learning to because a Mistborn. This is the My Fair Lady side of it. Vin trains under Kelsior to learn to move among the nobility and also to learn how to use allomancy. Then I also knew there was going to be what I'll call an information plot. This is a plot, it's a mystery. There are certain things we don't know about the Lord Ruler that are going to be teased as clues. I look at these three things and I say, how do I build a story around these ideas. Oh, there's also one more. There is the

relationship. There's a relationship, a Vin and Elend romance subplot. I think I got all the main ones, looking at that. Someone asked, when I was scanning the questions, which we'll start digging into next week, they said, "Do you use only one sort of progress and one sort of payoff for a book, or do you use more?" Which is an excellent question. There's your answer. Mistborn has four major ones that I was juggling. This is appropriate for an epic fantasy novel. The thing is, one does kind of have to be more important than the others, and

as I worked on this book, I really kind of moved the heist kind of almost being secondary, and it was the master-apprentice plot that became the actual main, like if you're reading the book, most of the sense of progress you're getting is Vin becoming Mistborn, and that is the core. Most of the time you're spending with her is her going to the balls, fighting the people, learning the magics, all of these things. So it's actually really a master-apprentice story that has a B plot or a sub mode that is a heist, that also has these

kind of minor other secondary plots. Now, building one of these, I'm going to focus a little bit on the heist, because I want to talk to you about what I did to build the heist, even though I just told you it became the secondary plot. What I find very useful is to see what other people have done. You can create something whole cloth. Well, some people will say you can't. But you don't have to use one of these plot structures or even these plot archetypes. But man, it can be handy to look and see what

other people have done, to try and become a chef in the way that I told you in the first week. Instead of just following a recipe, I want you to start looking at recipes and things people have created and try to pull out what works. What I did is I went to a bunch of my favorite heist stories. I'm going to use films as examples because they are a little easier to break down the structure, because they tend to be more focused than a novel does by the nature of their medium. I'm going to use,

I watched a bunch of heists, I read a bunch of heists, I mentioned a bunch of those in a previous week, and I settled on there being two main archetypes for a heist. I realized there was what I'm going to call the Oceans 11, and what I'm going to call The Italian Job. Both of these have had very prominent remakes around the time when I was working on these books. What happened with these, I looked at them and I'm like, what makes them interesting? Why do they work? Well, the Oceans 11 type plot goes like

this. You gather a team. You usually have one newbie to explain things to. So you gather a team, you grab your newbie. You then have an explain the problem. In Oceans 11, the remake, they have this thing where, it's Brad Pitt that's there, they're saying, "We have to do this," and he's like, "Which we can't ever do." It might be George Clooney saying it. But it's basically they present the problem with the cool cinematic methodology to them. It's like here is the casino we're going to rob. They have this thing that we'll have to beat,

which we can't beat because it's impossible. And they have this thing we have to beat, which we can't beat because it's impossible. And we have this thing. And they lay out basically here's the big problem of what we're going to do. Then they start talking about breaking it to little pieces. And you follow the newbie, usually, along going to get all the little parts that are going to come together for your big solution. But one of the key attributes of this heist was, at the end there's a piece missing that the newbie often is like,

"But what about this?" And they're like, "Oh, we'll figure that out. You don't have to worry about that." There's a big piece missing. You get to follow along in these little pieces as you see how they're going to solve each of the problems that they had in the explain the problem plot. But you've still got this lingering what's going to happen with the piece that's missing? Everything's going to go wrong. It creates this sense of doom and dread and inevitability. Until you get to the end and the twist is they all knew how they were

going to solve that problem anyway. They just didn't tell the newbie so they could surprise us. At the ending you think everything went wrong, but then they take off their masks, and lo and behold they were the S.W.A.T. team all along, or something like that, and boom, we actually all went according to plan. You just didn't know it. This is different from The Italian Job plot, which has kind of some similar attributes, the gather a team, explain problem. But this style of heist did something really interesting that I found. They introduced problem A, problem B,

problems A, B, C, and D. They said, "We are going to solve them with solutions 1, 2, 3, and 4. You follow the plot kind of the same way. Except at the end, they get to the ending and they find out that instead of problems A, B, C, and D, they have problems E, F, G, and H. You've probably seen heists like this. They do all the planning. They do all their preparation. They're ready to go, and then they move the target. It goes to another country, or something like that. Suddenly all this preparation is

out the window. We talked about this a little bit last week in the pull the rug out from underneath-- No, it wasn't to you guys. It was to someone else. Never mind. I told someone, they asked me what do I do if I want to pull the rug out from underneath people. This is a great way to do that, because the way that they solve this, do you guys know? Have you guys seen this movie? What do they do? They don't. Exactly. They take solution one and they say, "Wow. If we jury-rig this thing, we

can solve problem F with that. And number 4, the person that we've recruited specifically to crack the safe can actually break into this car that we can use. And suddenly we'll use 2 for E and 3 for H." What happens is you get a jumbling up of all the preparations solving the problems in different and unexpected ways. Why this works so well is, oftentimes if you want to have a cool twist in your story and you pull the rug out from underneath people, it's a little bit like I said last week, promising someone a car

and giving them something else completely different that they're not expecting. In addition, in your storytelling, your reader will invest time in the middle, in your progress. They'll spend most of the time in the book focusing on the things the characters are doing to progress the story. So if you built a heist where you made 1, 2, 3, and 4 completely irrelevant now, that is 80% of the reader's experience in the story getting thrown out the window, and they will feel annoyed at you. They will be frustrated because you promised them something. You were also probably

promising them a twist if you're doing a heist, because heists architect kind of about twists. But you have also upended them. How do you solve this? You make sure that the time they spent on 1, 2, 3, and 4 is still very relevant by applying it on the fly to solve new problems, which suddenly becomes very satisfying because you both get a twist, plus you feel like your expertise, the amount of time you as a reader spent experiencing the story, came together at the ending. Breaking this down, let me ask you guys. Thinking about as

a chef, why is a heist satisfying? Why do people want to watch a heist? Why do they enjoy a heist? It doesn't have to even do with the things I mentioned up here, because there are pieces I haven't even mentioned that are relevant. What to you? What makes it work? Yeah? Student: The thrill of getting away with it. The thrill of getting away with it. Exactly. For a lot of great heists, even a heist where the good guys, the heroes are actually on the side of law, there's a sense of, we actually got away with

it. We robbed Hitler, or something like that. Yeah, there's definitely a sense of that. Yeah? Student: Hypercompetent characters. Hypercompetent characters. We will speak in the character week about how competence is something really attractive to readers. Student: The puzzle of figuring out how to do it. Yeah, the puzzle. Both of these leave you with a puzzle. One of them leaves you with the "we have to improvise," which tends to work better if you have a lot of viewpoint characters in charge, because you don't have to hide things from them. You can cheat and hide things from

people. Because I used more of an Oceans 11 style for Mistborn, if you were following these things. I put a little bit of an Italian Job twist at the end, but mostly it was Kelsior is hiding things from everybody, and he's a viewpoint character. You have to cheat a little bit to do that. Go head. Student: The feeling of rebellion. They're a little bit rebellious or sneaky. They're sticking it to the man. Exactly. You're getting away with something. You're doing something cool that's outside the rules. Even, again, if the protagonists are heroes, it's like the

Mission Impossible team. No one else could do this because these people can break the rules and go outside what everyone else expects and pull off something incredible. Student: We also love to see people succeed at something impossible. We do. We really do. This is why there's that scene with George Clooney and Brad Pitt being like, "We have to do this, which is impossible, and this, which we'll never be able to do," because it sets this expectation, this promise to you. And that is, this is going to be cool to see them pull this off, because

it's going to be hard but they're going to do it. That scene is a promise. It's a really cool promise. Yeah? Student: Because stealing something from the dragon, I guess, is ontologically very, or at least we get the same feelings from that as we-- our lives are part heist movies. Our lives are like, everything, this whole plot line is about how we have to confront problems in the real world with the tools that we have available. We don't know how we're going to make it out and we're going to the unknown. It's just something that's

very meaningful and important because it's real. Right. So my recommendation to you is, when you're doing this, when you're breaking down a plot, one of the things I would recommend you do is ask yourself these questions. Why do people love this? Why do I love this? Why do I really like taking one of these plots and watching them or playing with them? What are the elements I have to make sure I don't get rid of? Hyper competence. You could make a heist without hyper competence. It would be a different type of story. But if what

you love about them is that hyper competence, lean into that and make sure you're making use of that in order to tell your story. One of the cool things about starting to look at plots like this is also you can strip a plot down to its archetype, and you can apply the genre trappings to it. It's really interesting. I've done all this, and then I had a chance to talk with Joe Russo, who is one of the filmmakers, one of the directors who made Infinity War. I asked him, I said, "Joe, how did you build

the plot of Infinity War?" He said, "Oh, it's really cool. Not a lot of people understand what it is, but we just took a heist." For them it was a bash and grab, which is actually a third archetype I didn't even put up on here. "And we said, we're going to do a superhero movie that's a heist, and we're going to plot it like this and apply it to superhero sci-fi. And people will love it because they love a heist, but they also won't look at it and see a heist because they'll see a superhero

story." I'm like, "That's really interesting. Tell me more about how you did that because it looked really like what I'd like to do." And indeed it is, I don't think, that uncommon for storytellers to say let's take what works really well in this genre and let's apply other trappings to it so that I have a familiar framework. I've talked a lot about the underdog sports story as an archetype. Because the underdog sports story is a fun one to point out that Hoosiers, Ender's Game, and The Way of Kings all use the underdog sports story plot

archetype as a major section of their story. But these are three really different stories, aren't they? Remember the Titans versus Ender's Game, you'd be like, oh, completely different genres but they have the same plot archetype, which is the underdog sports story. Being able to look at these and strip them down also helps you understand your progress. This is where you can go wrong sometimes. If you're writing a fantasy novel, and you're like, well, fantasy novels are travelogues. Let's say you've only read some quest fantasies that you really like. You're like, it has to be a

travelogue. So I'm going to make my sense of progress going from city to city to city. But really what you want to tell is a romance between two characters, and that's the bulk of the time you're going to spend on your pages focusing on this relationship, and the relationship is not making any progress, it doesn't matter where you're going. The reader's going to feel bored. They're going to feel like nothing's happening, because the bulk of what you're giving them is a relationship plot without progress. What you want to be able to identify is what are

your steps. Now, a heist is kind of interesting in this way, because your steps are generally, you have the explain the problem, it actually gives the reader an outline. Like, here is the outline of what our story is going to be. We have these 12 problems and we're going to attack them one at a time. Then your sense of progress is as you go to piece by piece by piece and see them accomplishing or failing and having to go do something new because one of their pieces didn't work. It has a pretty easy, straightforward structure

of, if you're checking things off that list and coming closer and closer to be able to pull off the heist, the reader's anticipation for that heist will grow. They will know something's got to go wrong, because it always does. You'll probably put seeds in by saying, "Well, there's this one thing we haven't figured out yet," or by saying, "Everything's great. We're ready to go tomorrow. Oh, no, they moved the target." You will be able to build this tension through progress, progress, progress, progress. Once you identify that, it makes your promise scene much easier to write.

Your promise scene in a heist is this one right here. You do not have to do it exactly as they did it. In fact, I recommend that you don't. But you'll see how that promise works really well, and then your payoff at the end is them pulling off the heist despite the problems that came along the way. Very simple, very straightforward. It is harder to do than say. Let's look at some other styles of plots and some of the progress we can have in those, and how those payoffs can match their promises in the beginning.

Let's start with a mystery. We've got a classic detective mystery, who-done-it murder mystery. Why do we enjoy murder mysteries? Anyone who does? Go ahead. Student: They're clever. They're clever. Okay. There's an implicit promise that the detective is going to be smarter than the villain. That's what we're looking at. Yeah? Student: The puzzle aspect again. We want to figure out what happened. We want to know what happened. We want to know how they did it. Unless the reversal is they show you how they did it, and then you're going to see-- like was that Columbo, where

they reversed, they inverted the trope? Yeah. Student: Sometimes it's a puzzle for you, the challenge of, can I figure this out before Sherlock Holmes does? Yep. That, I think, is a major draw of mysteries. Can I figure it out? Let me highlight that one for a minute, because mysteries, if you cheat, and the reader couldn't have figured it out, a lot of times it will feel very unsatisfying for this reason. People are not understanding, writers are not understanding that part of the promise of a mystery is you will be able to figure this out. If

you are laying the clues, it's not going to be so out there. If you've read or watched a mystery that was really unsatisfying to you at the ending, it might have been because they promised, ooo, with these clues of information you could solve this crime, and then there was no way for you to come anywhere close. You feel cheated at the end. Student: I like the possibility of having very witty characters with really great dialogue to bounce off each other as the investigator tries to decipher [___]. Right. That tends to be a hallmark of the

detective-driven murder mystery, is you're going to like the detective. It might be because they're witty. It might just be because they're folksy, and they're more Agatha Christy. You're just going to enjoy-- Not Agatha Christy, Angela Lansbury. They're going to be Angela Lansbury. You're just going to enjoy watching her solve a mystery because she's just so likeable that there's going to be a connection to the detective. In Agatha Christy, it often was about how clever the detective was. Go ahead. Yeah. Student: I think one of the things I like about mysteries is the misdirection. You can

still figure it out. Right. You don't go from point A all the way to, okay, okay, I think this is where it's going. Instead it'll be like, I didn't see that, but now I can see where that's coming from. Right. A mystery implies that there is going to be some difficulty to this, and there are going to be new revelations. I identify a mystery as an information plot. A mystery is, characters don't have all the information, and the progress is watching the characters get that information as you try to put together what that information means.

Spoiler, in Mistborn it is the true history of the Lord Ruler. I won't say what it is. But the true history of the Lord Ruler, the book lies to you at the beginning, and then indicates that the story is a lie that you've been told, gives you clues along the way, and then the mystery comes together at the end of understanding it. Now, what is really fun to do is, in Mistborn the missing piece is not something Kelsior knows 100%. It is the information plot. If we can put together the information plot, we can solve

the missing piece of the heist that Kelsior is confident he can do but doesn't quite have all the pieces yet. I was able to slot that information plot into this big problem in the plan as presented. But relationships, why do we like--? By the way, usually a buddy cop movie and a Jane Austen novel follow about the same plot archetype. Just with some different trappings and subplots. A lot of classic romances and classic buddy cop movies are just relationship plots. Whether it's a bromance or a romance, it tends to follow the same plot beat. What's

exciting for us about a romance? Why are we reading a romance? Why do writers put them in almost every story? Student: It gives poor guys like me hope. Wish fulfillment. Yes. Wish fulfillment. Do not discount the power of wish fulfillment, in all kinds of plots. What else? Student: It's very humanly relatable. We can't relate to superheroes to the degree that we can relate to someone who's in love. Right. Absolutely. I think you nailed it. It is one of these plots that you can put into the most fantastical and strange of stories to give it a

really powerful human element. Student: I think it shares something with mysteries in that you know the mystery is going to be solved. You know the two people are going to get together, because you figure it out before it happens. Right. They are generally going to get together, but how? The how is really exciting and interesting to us. We have two romance writers right over here. Do you guys have anything to add? Student: I was going to say for old people it's nice to remember how it used to feel. Nice to remember how it used to

feel. That is also pretty awesome. We're going to have these two ladies talk to us one of the weeks about indie publishing, because both of them have indie published a number of books. So look forward to that on how we're going to do that. I don't want to spend a ton of time on this. Sometimes we get up on the board and we start breaking these all down and we spend a long time on it. I think I did it in a previous lecture series, so you can watch that on YouTube. But I think you

guys get the idea. Identifying the why, why we like this, and then figuring out how you can quantify that, how you can break it down into small steps, is how you build a lot of outlines. Not the only way, but how it works really well. This is where we get to how does Brandon make an outline. My outline looks like this. It starts with, at the top, what I want to have happen. Relationship. Character A and B are a couple at the end. I will define what that is based on the story. That might just

be they have gotten over their issues of hating each other and are now willing to work together. Whatever it is, I've identified what I want to happen. I outline backward. I start with my goal. Because once I've identified what makes something satisfying, I come up with-- what progress makes it satisfying? I'm like what is the best ending for this story with that plot archetype? What is going to work? What is going to be exciting? Then I'm going to add underneath this bullet points of all the steps that will take them from the beginning of that

to the end. Generally, there'll be a paragraph at the top with the relationship. It's like, here's what I want to achieve. These two characters start here. They get here. Here are all the things I need to include to make sure that happens. It would generally be, depending on the plot that I'm doing, like bullet point 1 would be "Scene showing how character 1 is really competent in one area and is living the life, but has a need, has something that they are missing." Then character 2, we'll show how they are capable in their life in

some areas, but they are missing something different. The astute reader will notice, hey, what this person is good at is where this person's hole is, and where this person's hole is, this person has some strength. Then you will want to introduce why they don't just immediately propose to one another the first time they meet. What is going to be the conflict that is pulling them apart? Well, one's a Montague and one's a-- Class: Capulet. Yeah, that. What is going to be pulling them apart? Then I'm going to create-- I'm not going to actually create the

scene. I'm going to say, "Scene where they are working together." Dave, when he taught this class, talked about relationship plots as braiding roses. Because everybody has thorns. At the start of the story your thorns just smash into each other. Your relationship plot could go with, the first time they meet it's a disaster for this reason. Second time they meet, it's a disaster for this reason. But then you have a scene where you realize that what character A does character B needs, and another scene where character B realizes, "Wow. What character A is doing here is

something that I admire." You slowly, as Dave put it, you braid those roses, so that by the end of the story instead of the thorns pointing at each other, they are pointing outward toward anyone who could come in and try to destroy the relationship, which is a really great metaphor, which is why it stuck with me for 20 years. Braid those roses. You would come up with all of these things, and they are just bullet points. They are not scenes yet. They are, character A sees character B with his little sister and realizes that there's

a deep caring for other people that he doesn't often express because of whatever. You're like, wow, that's an admirable attribute about him. I am interested. I don't know what that interaction with the sister is going to be. I just know the sister is relevant. I have all of these bullet points. Then I jump over to the next one. It's like, now we're going to do our my-- I'm going to say, all right, underneath here-- I guess I didn't circle it before. I put, like, underneath here I'm like discover X, and explain why discovering X is

going to be awesome. I want that end scene to be really, really cool. When Raoden puts together why the magic is broken, X happens, which is a very dramatic and powerful scene, because Raoden's plot is half mystery in Elantris, and that's kind of the plot structure I was using. Though I didn't know how to do all of this back then. I just kind of went with my gut. Discover X, and this is the scene that's going to happen. This is how I do it. And then, how do I earn that scene. Well, here, instead of

all the other things, these are going to be clues that are going to be discovered, that are going to interlock with the other clues, or sometimes be red herrings that you later on discover weren't doing what you thought they would do. This is how I develop my sense of progress, bullet point to bullet point to bullet point, slow and steady quantified. I'll do this for every plot cycle in the book, and generally for every kind of character arc, once I've determined the character arcs, what they're going to be. My outline is generally, at this point,

not in order. It is an order by section. Then, as I start writing, I start grabbing bullet points from different headings and saying, chapter 1 is going to be this bullet point and this bullet point. Chapter 2 is from a different plot archetype bullet point and this one. And I start organizing those bullet points. This is where, when we give you the Skyward outline, you'll be like, you'll go to the end and you'll probably see that a lot of these bullet points have been moved into order, into a whole sequence of arcs and plots. That

I am doing while I'm writing. I am changing this. I've got the bullet points all done. I usually start writing, and then I'm building a full outline of the bullet points in order chronologically, not just by plot archetype, but together, and I'm building scenes out of them as I imagine where they're going to be. But at the beginning of the day when I sit down to write, oftentimes it's like, you need to write a scene that achieves A, B, and C, which is way easier for me than trying to keep a whole plot in my

head and try to write so that that plot works. Instead I can be like, oh, today I just have to do this. Today I have to write a Navani scene where she does X, Y, and then encounters Z. I can do that. Now let's focus on making that scene active, interesting, it's taking place in an interesting setting, having some good, dynamic conflict to the scene. I can use those bullet points to launch me into a great chapter. This works for me because, again, it lets me offload a bunch of stuff to the beginning. Any questions

about that? Go ahead. Student: Do you necessarily have to have multiple plot archetypes so they're intertwining with one another? Or is that mostly just for epic fantasy [___]? Excellent question. Do you have to have multiple plot archetypes that you're intertwining together, or is that just something for epic fantasy? The answer is, the shorter the piece you're writing, the fewer of these you're usually going to have, and the longer the piece you're writing, the more of them you're going to have. It is not a 1:1 correlation. There are some very long stories that are plotted more

as a series of explosions that the character is dealing with, and the book ends just when there's not another explosion. Nothing goes wrong this time. It feels more discovery written that way. It works really well. We'll talk about it under discovery plotting. But most of the time, for a novel, you're generally going to want at least one plot archetype, at least one character arc, and at least one sort of subplot archetype, either a relationship or a master-apprentice or something like that. I would say that's what you're looking at most of the time. For Skyward, which

is much less complex, for Skyward I was using the boy-finds-a-dragon-egg plot archetype. I don't know if you could find that one in books on plots, but it's one I noticed. I read a lot of great books. I'm like, I'm going to use a boy and his dragon egg, except it's going to be a girl finds a spaceship. The archetype is kid finds some cool thing, keeps it secret, works on it. That was the main plot that I was doing. But I had a secondary relationship plot going on, and I had a tertiary. I had a

character arc for her. If you haven't read the book, Spensa's got this kind of, these ideals of what a hero should be, and then actually goes to war and has to deal with her idealized picture of heroism not meshing very well with how it is to actually be fighting, and that's her character arc. Those are the three ones. There's a couple minor things, but I would say that's the three. There is a relationship with the ship she finds, but that's kind of built into the kid and the dragon egg story. You can see that one

is simpler than Way of Kings, which has a ton of these things. Like, the Way of Kings plots don't fit in a file because I have all this world building and things. They are crazy. One thing I do like to do with Way of Kings, though, is make sure that every book has one very relatable plot archetype, because the other plots are generally not following one. This is why Kaladin having the underdog sports story is so important to the Way of Kings, because it could feel like a jumble of a whole bunch of things going

on. Because Dalinar's plot is not as simple and as clear-cut an archetypal plot. Shalon's is a little bit more. But there's so much going on that if you don't have that one sturdy central plot to hold on to, then it makes the book feel-- it would make it feel just crazy. That's where Way of Kings, the first version I wrote in 2002, went wrong, is it didn't have this. It had one section of a bunch of different plots, but it didn't finish any of them. Anyway, there was a question back here. Yeah, go ahead. Student:

Yeah, so quick question. How do you keep this fresh? Especially like, I know that good writing will make anything interesting. Right. Student: But maybe when you're pitching it to someone? How do you make this fresh, adding the caveat that you know that good writing will make anything interesting, but how to you keep it fresh when you're pitching it? This is where the strange attractor I talked about comes in really handy. When you can pitch-- when you can say, "It's the story of a boy and his dragon, except it's a girl and a spaceship." Suddenly it

adds-- you're telling people what the new fresh take on it is. That's actually a very small part of what makes Skyward work. What makes Skyward work, I hope, is a really great execution of this plot, with a character arc that feels really personal and poignant. That's what's going to make any book work. But what hooks people is saying, "Oh yeah, the hero who was prophesied to save the world failed, and now a bunch of people are going to rob it." They're like, "Ooo, tell me more!" This is where pitching becomes an art of its own.

Because really, the pitch is a way to get people to read the book and see that it works and is good, but it has to, you usually want to pitch with one idea. We'll talk more about pitching as the semester progresses. But, yeah. Focus on one really distinctive thing in your pitching, and that's like simply doing another heist but adding on an interesting magic you've come up with and a character who's interesting, generally going to be great. I often say, plot and character, it's a little harder to be really different. Because-- actually, it's really easy

to be really different. It's just unsatisfying. There's a reason that certain plots are done. There's a reason that certain characters are done. That is, you can look at the modernist literary movement and antiheroes, like in the classical sense, like Madame Bovary, and things like this, and trying to write these antiheroes that are just miserable to read about. But there's a reason why popular fiction in particular tends to go back to the same sorts of stories, because they work real well. It's the distinctive flair you put on it that's going to make it work. Setting is

where you can go just crazy, as long as your character is relatable, and it doesn't matter. You see that in modern animation. Like, if you think about it, trying to tell stories about, what is that famous Pixar thing? They're like, we're going to start and writer going to make it like bugs have feelings. And then we're going to make toys have feelings. And now feelings have feelings. Right? But because you can make relatable characters, you can have a story take place inside a tween girl's mind, with personifications of her emotional states, and have it work.

Because setting is way easier to go crazy on than plot and character. Oh, wait, there was a-- Yeah, go ahead. Student: You talk about mixing archetypes in one story, having more than one. But what if you have the same one, but duplicate it? Can you do the same plot duplicated in the same story? Yes, you can. I would have them play out in slightly different ways. Like, you can have two relationships and have the way that one is going sour as a contrast to the way that one is going well. Pride and Prejudice, folks. And

do the reversal, where you think the one that is going well turns very terribly, and they think the one that's going poorly turns out really well. That is the reversal that makes Pride and Prejudice so cool. It's the same two plots, just an A plot and a B plot. Student: I guess I ask in terms of, like, you say that in conflict you've got to have length, you need to have more of these plot lines, and so you could have more of the same ones. You could have more of the same ones to make a

story longer. If you want to make a story longer, more steps is also a way. If you wanted to make a heist longer, what you'd do is you'd be like, writer going to have to break this up into three mini heists, which is very common for these, and this whole section is on stealing this one thing that will let us later on steal this other thing. And you do three mini heists, followed by a big heist at the end, using the pieces that you've stolen. You just make sure each of those mini heists has a

different flare, a different feeling. This is kind of, you see this a big like in Inception, which is doing mini heists leading to a big heist at the end that goes crazy. Other questions? Yes. Student: You talk about balancing these three or four or more different things. If you're trying to balance different things, how do you keep them going so that one doesn't just drop out for the whole novel? All right. If you're doing a whole bunch of different things, how do you make sure one doesn't just drop out and vanish, and when you come

back to it they're no longer interested in it or have forgotten about it. This gets more and more difficult the longer your story is, and the more of these you're juggling. You're going to have to come to your own decisions on what you want to do here. There is the, what I'll fondly call the Robert Jordan. The Robert Jordan method is to basically break your plot into sections, and then you will get, you'll be like, all right, there's kind of a mini climax here. We're going to do these parts of the relationship, and then writer

going to skip a book, and then you'll come back to it. I'm going to try to get you to a part where this is satisfying enough for now. Or, if it's a big cliffhanger, you only have to remember one thing, because we're going to jump a big time gap before we get back to it. This is where epic fantasy often has to go. But there is also the method of do them one at a time. Be like, all right, opening part of this big, long book, we are going to focus on the relationship. But then

the characters are going to be split apart and pining for each other for the next part where they are split apart, because they've only just had their relationship start to work, and now they get ripped apart. Then that, you only have to keep in your mind one thing. If you are-- most of the time I have found that you can interweave these and not have to do this too much. A lot of what I do in the Stormlight is kind of a hybrid of these two. Way of Kings is a good example. I take Shalon's

plot to a stopping point, and then I skip a part and we do Dalinar's plot for a while, and then I skip back. I try to make sure you're getting conclusions to both of them in the same book, and that Kaladin in that first book acts as a through line. I make sure they're, Dalinar and Shalon's plots are short enough that you can do them in half of a book instead of a whole book. And then I try to weave them together like that. It is a real difficulty. It takes practice. This is why doing

a little work ahead of time and realizing, oh, man, I'm going to have this huge gap where the characters aren't together. Maybe I should have the big moment in their relationship happen up here where they break up, because they're going to be apart from one another, rather than having it be in the middle of their story. All right. We'll do one last one and then we'll move on. Yeah? Student: What does your plot brainstorming session look like? Do you just look for things you like and write them all down? The question is, what does my

plot brainstorming look like? Do I just look for a lot of things and then write them all down? Kind of. Like, a lot of times these are simmering for a long time. I'm going to the gym, I'm working out, and I'm imagining what that last scene is. Like, the last scenes of a given plot are what is going through my head many times before I can sit down to make this thing. But, when I'm making this thing, I am generally just saying, all right, here is the plot archetype that I'm using. Here are important elements

to it. Which of those do I want to use? That's an important thing that'll segue us into the next thing I want to talk about is some of these plot structures. Now, I'm only going to pick a couple of them and talk about how you would apply them. Because there are a ton of these helps out there, and they all can be really helpful, or they can just be useless to you. It depends on if they work for you. But you can buy books. You can buy Save the Cat, which is a screenwriting book that's

talking a lot about establishing reading interest and how to plot a story. You can read many different books. There's a nine-point story structure. There's a seven-point story structure. Dan really likes one of those two. I can't remember which one it is. But he's got a great YouTube video on it. Is it seven? It's seven, isn't it? Yeah, he has a great YouTube video on seven-point story structure. Dan Wells, writer. Everybody uses different things. There are a couple of classics, and one of them is, in science fiction and fantasy, the Hero’s Journey. We'll go through it

very shortly. You guys probably all know this. If you don't, a brief history of it is that a guy named James Campbell was a researcher, an ethnographer, and a folklorist, and was researching different stories that different people told themselves. He wasn't the first to come up with this, but he kind of popularized the idea that a lot of different cultures across cultural barriers, language barriers, whatever, were telling the same sorts of stories. He called this the monomyth, the story that-- He said, he's like all stories align to this. No they don't. But a lot of

stories do, because it's got a very vague structure that has a lot of cool elements to it. The monomyth is you have a character at home who doesn't want to go on an adventure. They get called on an adventure. They refuse the call. And then they are Forced to go out and cross the threshold into the world. All right? What's that? Student: To the unknown. To the unknown. Yeah, to the unknown. Out to the unknown to the character. The classic example of this is Star Wars, because Luke is really like the monomyth. He likes it

a little too much sometimes. But he really likes, he has actually some really good, there were PBS specials about the monomyth that I think George Lucas himself did. But, yes. Luke is at home. You see the call. He looks up in the sky. But then when the call-- you see he wants to go. But then when the call actually comes and everyone says, "You must learn the ways of the Jedi," what does he do? He's like, "No, I've got to go back home and deal with power converters and stuff." No, I can't, I can't, I

can't. Then he goes home and what happens? There is no home anymore. Only Storm Troopers are so precise, or whatever. So he's forced to go out into the unknown world. Then they have the trials. This is the road of tribulation, or whatever it's called. Basically, problems are popping up, and the character is learning to overcome them. Usually there's a mentor. And then there's not a mentor. Whoop, whoop. No-o-o-o! Usually you get some buddies who will suspiciously not be around anymore by the time you get to the bottom of this, which is the descent in the

underworld, which is where the character either metaphorically or literally dies and is sent to the underworld. Metaphorically, they're at their lowest point. Everything's going terribly. But then they come out of it. They have the-- what's it called? There's the moment of apotheosis and redemption. They call it something else. Campbell calls it something else. What's that? There's rebirth, definitely. Atonement, that's what it is. Basically, the character's going to change in some way, make some decision, learn some new skill, make atonement. They're going to get rewarded with the elixir. Then they're going to go home with it

and take the elixir back. There's generally an apotheosis here, where it's like a meeting with divinity or with one's father figure, and kind of accepting and dealing with that, taking the elixir, and heading home changed, bringing the elixir back to the people at home, but having been changed so much that the hero is no longer the person who can stay home. Often there's an epilogue where they just wander off. Fallout, right? Was that Fallout One? That was Fallout One, wasn't it? Is this useful? Yes, it is. It's really useful for envisioning a character arc in

an interesting way. It's really handy. I would recommend reading about the Hero’s Journey. Where can it go wrong? Well, there are a lot of things in the Hero’s Journey that don't match every story. For instance, Campbell identified that the hero in the ancient myths was almost always the result of a divine birth or a virgin birth. In the old Greek myths, Zeus was doing something, there was a really pretty swan or whatever, and there is often this child of divinity or child that was born out of mysterious circumstances. So what did he add into episode

one? Where did Darth Vader come from? He was a virgin birth, born of the Force. Every single person in that movie theater when I was there was like, "What? Like this is cool, but what?" If I'm going to criticize one of the greatest and most successful storymakers of all time in George Lucas, which he really is, that is what I consider one of the dangers of being too slavish to a formula or a plot structure. This is where it gets different from an archetype. The plot archetypes are like, I want to achieve this emotion in

my readers, and here are some steps to get that emotion. Structure is, all right, here's how I actually structure my story. And if these are too rigid, you will end up putting things into your story that just don't feel like they fit. They generally will not ruin your story. But once in a while, people can be too slavish, I feel, to following one of these plot structures. How would you use the Hero’s Journey? Well, looking at this and asking yourself as a chef, why do we enjoy this story? Well, there can be lots of answers,

and we're down to 10 minutes, so I'm not going to go to questions on this one. But we can talk about the idea that all human beings kind of have to go through this. It's the story of being a teenager in a lot of ways, and arriving at adulthood, hopefully about the literal death and rebirth. But it is this thing where we are going to go through all of our lives, and we have to— I have a 12-year-old. I'm like, "You're going to go to college, not too much further by adult times, six years or

so." He's like, "I can't do that. I cannot move out." I'm like, "You don't have to. You're 12. 12-year-olds don't move out.” But to him, this is the most terrifying thing that he ever learned, is that he is going to be someday expected to leave the house and live on his own. That is really scary to a lot of people. We go through this. Why else is it cool? Well, it's really satisfying. Like this moment. It's full of satisfying moments, right? This moment is satisfying because you can usually see the hero wants to go on

the adventure, and then they're Forced to. That moment is kind of cool. The moment where they go into the underworld, where they're at their darkest point, and they pull out of it anyway, is really satisfying. The apotheosis and atonement, where kind of coming to face one's destiny, one's parental figures, to make amends for the things that they've done, and then return home a better person, having brought something that helps everyone else, whether it's having destroyed a Death Star or not, coming home victorious is really satisfying. This explains a lot of really satisfying small steps you

can take, and that makes progress really exciting. When the small steps of progress, on their own, give people cold chills, then you're doing the right thing. Then your book is coming together. The Hero's Journey is just all about those moments, those triumphant moments, or those moments that are really relatable, and it's why it makes such a good plot structure. Another one that you guys may have run across is Three Act format, which is kind of just a remix on the same ideas as most plot archetypes are. Three Act format imagines a story as three acts

with two major division points, the first one being generally where the character becomes proactive. Now, you can find a lot on Three Act format. I'll just say, if I'm not writing the one you know, it's okay. There are lots of different ways. But one is the change from inactive to proactive. This is the moment where you go from Act I to Act II, where the character says, "I will go do this." And everybody argues on where the different act breaks are, which is how you can tell this is a little more squishy than people pretend.

Everyone, again, usually uses Star Wars as a perfect example of this, but they will disagree on whether Act I ends when Luke decides to go with Obi Wan because he has no other choice, or when they get off of Tatooine, or when they get on the Death Star and decide to go save the princess. All are legitimate arguments for the end of Act I. You usually have a transition between Act II and Act III where you're at the low point, where all the things you have tried thus far have just dug you deeper. And the

way you do the middle is you have, generally there's a mid-point twist, where the stakes change in some dramatic way, usually an expansion of the stakes, or the villain's achieved something. Generally through here you have this rising action where you increase stakes, increase tension, and the character tries things, and oftentimes fails spectacularly. This is what we try a try-fail cycle, is how Dave liked to put it. The character has come up with a solution to their problem. They try it, they fail, and it gets worse. They try it again, they fail, and it gets worse.

They try it again, they fail, and it gets worse. And now we're at our low point because we've tried everything. Oh, no, what are we going to do? Frodo has decided to keep the ring. Spoilers, right? Yeah. Seventy years old, is it now? Some spoilers. Sixty years old? But, yeah. We are at a moment of utter crisis, and then the ending happens, and very soon after, woo, end, and then denouement. This can be really handy, again, to structure your story if you know you need to have a moment where your character takes initiative. You need

to have something right about the middle point of your story where the stakes change in a dramatic and different way, and that needs to lead into a low point where everything has been tried, but there is still one chance. If Luke trusts in the Force he can fire the torpedoes, even though the last ones missed, because he has the Force. You can bring in, when it works really well, your overlapping different plots. For instance, Star Wars has Han's mini plot of an arc of will Han be a good guy or not? Is he going to

learn to want something more than money? Lo and behold, what happens is you overlap the lowest moment, Luke finally deciding to finally trust the Force, Obi Wan speaking, and Han returning all at once, and it becomes this really beautiful moment where all your different plots intersect. That's what I really love, is when you can take multiple plots like a character arc, where the character makes that last big decision or understands at last the thing that they have been missing about their life, overlapping with a big surprise, overlapping with the climax of the story, that's where

a story can really get me, if they can do that. So, Brandon, what about discovery plotting. I don't have a ton to say on this, because I don't do it. I would recommend going to other people who do discovery write, reading what Stephen King talks about with discovery writing, reading what George R. R. Martin says about gardening. I will tell you one thing you can try, and we'll end here. Mary Robinette, which if she goes to a Q&A here you can ask her about it, taught me a discovery writing method that works pretty well, and

it is called "yes, but/no, and." Yes, but/no, and focuses on taking a character, throwing them into some sort of terrible situation at the very start, and then just asking yourself, all right, what's the most intelligent or reasonable thing they could do right now to get out of this problem? Have them do that, and then ask yourself, does it work? If you say yes, you add a but, something else has gone wrong. Or you say no, and you escalate that problem to a bigger problem. What this does is it creates this sort of sense of motion

where something is always going wrong for the character, which can be really handy to keep your stakes up in a discovery written story. Afterward, after you've written the book, you can go back and say, okay, can I move all of these things into being pieces of a larger plot? Can I somehow tweak this so this one is foreshadowing for this one? But as you're writing, you can just remember, everything needs to be getting worse a lot of the time. And yes, but/no, and is a method of doing that. You can find a lot of them

online. I would recommend listening to what other writers say. You've heard a lot today about my method. Go research other methods. Try out a lot of different things. See what works for you. I'll do Q&A next weeks on anything about plotting you guys want to know. And that's it.