Lecture #8: Worldbuilding Q&A — Brandon Sanderson on Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy

BRANDON: Guys, you get me back this week. Yay! CLASS: [cheering] BRANDON: Don't sound too enthusiastic. This week we are doing Q&A from the things you turned in on world building. All right? Next week we will start into character. We'll do two weeks on character. Then we'll have two weeks on the business of writing, and there's probably a Q&A, time for a Q&A on character in there. I don't know how many weeks we have left. Isaac, how many weeks do we have left of the class after this one? ISAAC: Today is the 7th. BRANDON: Thirteen, so

there's six left? Ish. If you're wondering, if you're already overachieving, there is no final in this class. Don't worry about that. We used to watch a movie and have pizza for final, but then it just ran afoul of so many people's plans and my plans usually that we stopped doing that. I'm sorry. CLASS: [moaning] BRANDON: Aww! And then they have, like, don't eat any food in the auditorium, so we don't want to get in trouble, right? CLASS: [laughing] BRANDON: We're all law-abiding citizens. I don't have a thing of water right over there. All right let's

go to your questions about world building. By the way, there are questions in here that aren't on world building. I usually skip over those, and I'll try to have a just general Q&A at the end for things we don't get. But a lot of these are about character and stuff that, theoretically, we will get to as the class progresses. First question asks, "What flaws do you have that make you a better writer?" It's a very good question. I'll try not to be insulted. It's actually an excellent question because looking at this sort of thing does

really help understand flaws and limitations and things like that. I think naturally, as a writer, one of my greatest strengths was also one of my greatest flaws, which is often the way it is. In fact, if you can write your characters that way, it is usually a good idea. For me, this was my ability to write fast and my eagerness to work on new projects. What this did during my early days as a writer is it pulled me through a lot of books. I got through those bad words, those terrible words, that writers often have

when they're newer. I got to experiment a lot with stories. I wrote 13 novels in 10 years. This was a good strength to me. It helped me build confidence. It helped me build momentum. It was also a drawback in that I did not ever learn revision. The biggest thing that held me back from getting published was the ability to take an okay or good story and turn it into a great story. That is a separate and important skill. Sometimes as a writer who-- there are some of you in this class that are like me. You

are overachievers in regards to word counts. One of the dangers of this is taking bad habits and perpetuating them so long that it's that much harder to break you out of those bad habits later on, particularly prose-wise, things like that. Writing with flabby prose, writing with using the same three metaphors over and over again, writing using cliched terms and things like this. If you just get into that habit and you write two million words that way, it's that much harder to break you out. For me, that was a drawback, and also revision. I kept thinking,

I'd get feedback on a book from my readers, I'd send it around and I'd be like, "Wow, there's so much wrong with this book. How about I just write a better one next time that doesn't have all these problems?" Well, that was not the right way of looking at it, at least after I entered my journeyman stage as a writer. After I got my first couple of bad books-- I say bad books. They're actually not terrible, and the books that you're writing aren't terrible. But there are certain things you generally can't learn about constructing a

plot and how to make payoffs happen until you just get some fluency with writing endings. For most of us that means writing a number of stories till you start to get a feel for how the beats of a story work in the type of story you're writing. And then learning to take those books and make them better is just really, really handy. If we have time today, I'll launch into a little mini lecture on revision, to talk about how I do it, and how I know some other do it different strategies for that, like I

did prose last time with Q&A, or descriptions. All right. "How do you create a magic that doesn't seem like magic?" This is actually a really interesting question, because I do think that in a lot of books you have a magic system, even when you don't have a magic system. Like, when I use the term magic, I'm also referring to most technology and most science fiction books, and I'm just also kind of talking about the fundamental rules of how things work. You might say that a lot of spy thrillers don't have a magic system. But to

me, I kind of regard them as happening in "spy world" where there are certain foundational understandings, where it's like, the way that gadgets work, the way that everyone always betrays you. I've talked about this idea. Like, there's an aesthetic. That's part of, I think, the magic system for me. How do you make a magic system that doesn't feel like a magic system? One way is you make it technology. Science fiction, with a few exceptions of people who really knew their stuff, like Arthur C. Clarke, is generally not actually going to be real science. It's going

to be fantastical science. So let's talk a little bit along these lines. I promised you guys, I think, I'd talk about this, internal versus external consistency. And external. I don't know if I spelled those right. I probably spelled them differently both times. Yeah, did I? See? See? Yeah. That's one of those ones that I have set in my computer to autocorrect when I do it wrong. That's sort of the same thing. I've never had to learn how to spell it right, because my computer just fixes it for me. Like, villain? That I and that A

should not be in the order they actually are. Regardless, let's talk about internal versus external consistency. Or logic. I should just say logic, because I can spell that. Internal logic, internal consistency, is usually really important for most stories. Not for all stories. In fact, some humor stories make a big deal out of their internal logic just being haywire, and that's a feature rather than a bug. But for most of the time, when we talk about internal consistency, this is where the internal logic of your story fits and is consistent with itself. If this character puts

on a magic ring and turns invisible, then you can extrapolate that this character will later on put on the ring and turn invisible again. This is being consistent with your own rules and the rules that you give. This is generally really important for even soft magics. Really important for hard magic, but even important for soft magic that you can rely on a few things. It's consistent. Even if your soft magic is we're not sure what Gandalf can do, well then, you generally stay consistent of, we don't know what Gandalf can do. Now you can move

along that line. You can start moving from soft to hard magic. In fact, almost every fantasy story slowly moves along this line as you learn more and more what it can do. But you're just trying not to break your own rules. Now people mistake this with external logic, or external consistency, where when you try to explain why the things are happening in a way that makes sense to a person who understands physics and the laws of our universe. An example of external logic, logic is much better, external logic is when they say X-Men happened because

they have the X gene. That is an attempt at external logic. They're saying, you know how mutation works. If you watch some of the X-Men movies they're like, "Sometimes mutations happen, and evolution happens rapidly." And they're trying to give it some external logic to the story. Don't mistake those. Oftentimes I will mention in lectures that superhero magic systems tend to be very hard magic systems, particularly used modernly. People mistake that saying, "Hard magic system? Superhero magic doesn't make any sense." Well, yes, but Wolverine has a healing factor. He always has a healing factor. This is

what he does. It's consistent. It's hard magic. You understand what he can do. That doesn't mean it has to make sense. Internal logic, it doesn't matter that Superman gets power from the sun somehow. But that's an attempt at external logic. Try to make sure you understand, like, why is this important. Well, some genres really depend on your external logic working. This is hard science fiction, for an example. you don't have to be 100% realistic, but you have to give people an ability to make the leap of logic. And in fact, a little bit of external

logic, applied even to a fantasy book, can help people suspend their disbelief quite a bit. This is why, in writing hard magic systems like I do, I usually add in a little bit of external logic. I usually say, all right, this is the characters discussing the laws of thermodynamics if you know physics, and then pointing out the hole, and this is how it works. Like, I give a little bit of that so the reader can suspend disbelief. So how can you make a magic that doesn't feel like a magic? A lot of that's going to

depend on do you add a lot of external logic. Do you convince them that it's not a magic, that it's just the way things work? Or you can sometimes have a magic system that's built into just the way, the logic of the universe. We don't necessarily question that in spy thrillers people can wear masks that make them look like other people. Well, sometimes we do. But you know what I mean. You wouldn't call that a magic system really. But that totally is of the spy genre. If you have a spy thriller where no one had

had a mask up until the midpoint and then they pull it off, a lot of times in movies, the audience is like, oh, yeah, that's part of spy thrillers. I'm okay with them adding that, even though they didn't set it up ahead of time in the way that Sanderson's First Law says they should, because the whole genre has some laws with it. If a person who is a vampire drinks someone's blood and gets their energy back at the end of a book where they've never done that before, most readers are going to be like, oh,

yeah, that's what vampires do. That's another way to kind of have a magic system that you are playing off of, but that doesn't feel like magic, is if it's playing into the genre conventions in such a way that the general reader with fluency in that genre is going to expect it and not get tripped up by it. "How do we give enough exposition to make the reader understand the world, but maintain mystery and twists?" That's a great question. Let me ask you, audience. How do you, in your own writing, or have you seen it in

other people's writing or stories, have you read books with a lot of science fiction and fantasy mystery to them, where the explanations don't remove that? How did that work for you? Yeah, go ahead. STUDENT: I feel like this was achieved really well in the first Mistborn book. BRANDON: OK. Well, thank you very much. Your check's in the mail. STUDENT: Not spoiling it for people, but at the beginning of the book there's expectations and there's an explanation of certain aspects of the world and society that are lived in, so that the reader buys into it. Like,

OK, this is how it works. So a great twist is for them, the characters and the reader, to then find out, "Oh, no. We were lied to." BRANDON: The "Oh, no. We were lied to," to the readers is dangerous but very effective. A couple ways to do this is to-- the easiest way is to hang a lantern on it. This is a stage term. I don't know where it came from. It's where you have a character specifically say, "These two things don't look like they go together. Oh, well, they obviously do." That's you saying to

the reader, "Hint, hint. Something's wrong here." But a lot of times you can do it more subtly by showing two aspects of the magic or world that don't jive together, to the point that they start to form a kind of clash, a dissonance where these things aren't in harmony. Then the reader starts to subconsciously look for an explanation to stretch for why special relativity and general relativity don't mesh yet, or something like that. Like, where's our unifying theory? And then when one pops up, the reader's like, "Oh!." That's a way you can build some mystery

into it. But you can also, generally a good way to leave some mystery, is to say, "Here is your one little segment of the world you're going to understand, Harry, but there's so many other things that people are doing. You're just at school. You're a first year. You're going to learn these three spells. But don't worry about all these other things that people are doing." And that kind of, like I said, J. K. Rowling does a pretty decent job of balancing, in the Harry Potter books, this sense of wonder and a sense of internal logic.

She does not maintain internal logic between books, which drives a lot of people crazy. That's where J. K. Rowling had-- When someone says to you, "Why didn't they use a time turner for this? Why don't they use a polyjuice potion for this?" Her internal logic per book tends to be really solid. You get this sense that you're getting just enough explained that the characters can solve problems with the magic, but you don't feel like all the mystery is gone. It just breaks apart a little bit between books. But I give those books that benefit of

the doubt. I just say to myself, well, the kids just don't understand why they can't use a polyjuice potion here, or why time turners. They just didn't explain that to them because they're dumb kids, and things like that. I allow myself that because J. K. Rowling does such a great job with internal logic of a given book, that in some ways it's too much to expect those books to also have the internal logic of Lord of the Rings, which has really excellent internal logic. You just have to read a lot of The Silmarillion. It also

has great internal logic in the actual published books. Lord of the Rings is a gold standard for how to use magic systems, like I talked about before. But those are just a few ways. Anyone else have any ways that they have maintained mystery or seen it done? Yeah, go ahead. STUDENT: I was just going to say, and this kind of tags along with what you were saying, kind of just a variation of it, but focus on what the characters know. Focus on seeing things from their perspective, and that allows the world to seem so much

bigger, because it's around you. BRANDON: Yeah. This is the advantage of a third person limited. In case those online didn't hear, he said focus on what the character knows and seeing the world through their eyes, and you can maintain a sense of grand scale and mystery, while still having them have a little bit of control over their immediate situation. A third limited is just wonderful for this. Yeah? STUDENT: In the first Borne movie, Borne identity, it starts off with him on the island with the doctor, and the doctor studies him and makes basically a list

of Borne. Look at all these things you can do, including having him just mentally [___]. So you know that he has these capabilities, but you don't know where or how he got them. BRANDON: That's an excellent example. I'll repeat that. In the first Borne movie there's a doctor who studies him and says, "Here's all these cool abilities you have, but we don't know where you got these different abilities." This actually answers the question before. There's a great story that has a magic system that's not a magic system. Because the magic system is going to be

Borne discovering his memories and why they get them back. If you do it in a very logical way that someone says, "Hey, if you do this you'll start getting your memories back," that's a magic system. Fulfill this thing, do this thing, get this reward. And then the character starts to get his memories back and learn why he was able to do these things. At the end it ties very strongly into why he lost his memories, what happened, and who he was before, all kind of converges on a single kind of character arc and plot arc.

It's a great example of a magic-less magic system. All right let's go to next question here. "Do you change or modify rules based on the age of the intended reader?" I'll add to this one I know that's later in the list, which is "Do you, while you're writing, ever change your rules?" Let's talk about modifying rules. I think the person is asking, do I modify Sanderson's Laws, or do I modify how I use magic systems when I'm writing for different age groups. Generally, I do not. There's this really fine balance between writing down to an

audience and writing specifically toward an audience. It is a tricky thing to navigate. Generally-- let's just put this on the board so you guys know where I'm coming from. Generally, in the publishing industry, children's books are 18 and under. So when we say children's fiction, it includes YA. That is a difficult thing for a lot of people to just get used to that terminology, because YA, not children. But that is how the industry talks about children's books. When a publisher has a division between adult and children, children's is everything 18 and below. Now we have

YA in here, which is covering about age 13 and up -ish. A rule of thumb: Age of your protagonist plus 2 is about the age group you're intending the book for. That's why you see a ton of 15- and 16-year-olds. People will generally read about someone older than them, and they don't like reading about someone younger than them. Rule of thumb. These are very loose rules. The Golden Compass is a great example of something just kind of breaking all of these rules and just ignoring them. They get shelved in three shelves in the bookstore because

no one knows where to put it. But around 13, so this dividing line right here, there's a very big divide. Down here we call it middle grade. There's a big dividing line right here that's different based on the age of the reader, where the teen stops reading books that gatekeepers give them and start picking up books that they have chosen. That's usually seen as the fuzzy line between middle grade and YA. That's why you just kind of think about-- the other kind of fuzzy line there is romance. Like, middle grade, it's like romance needs to

be kind of puppy love-ish, and maybe a little hint here and there. They are curious about it, but they don't really actually want a romance in their stories most of the time. Or if they do, it's a very kind of Disney romance. There's no actually romancing going on. It's just the state of the world has become secure that these two have now formed a couple. We know that that's supposed to happen. Those are kind of your two big things, and that divides middle grade and YA. And then underneath it are, and there's some transitional books

in here, but then we kind of go to the chapter book sort of thing. Then underneath that, I am not an expert on, so I'll refer you to a different teacher to talk about the nuances between board books and picture books, and the easy-to-read books and things like that. Yeah? STUDENT: What about new adult? BRANDON: New adult has not become a thing. I'm glad you brought it up. There was an attempt at creating a new thing here that was like 18 to 22 called new adult. This was just the children's publishers looking to have another

audience. It has just not become a thing. You might be able to find people online who disagree. But my experience has been, the last five or six years, publishers just stopped asking for new adult and stopped trying to make it a thing. Already, the line between YA and adult was really getting vague, at the upper end YA. AS an example, Steelheart is shelved in YA in the US and in adult sci-fi/fantasy in the UK. That's the just publishers deciding, "Ah, this is where we think it goes." You see that in a ton of upper YA.

It's like, where is this line? Trying to put another line is there is generally, in my experience, not worked, but your mileage may vary. There may be publishers who think it worked fantastically well. My publisher, when I asked them about new adult, they're like, nah, just didn't become a thing. So good question. Where I kind of reside is I haven't really written underneath middle grade. Middle grade, if you're wondering, Harry Potter is a good example. It starts in middle grade and then ends in YA. Hunger Games is YA. Fablehaven is middle grade. Just kind of

some touchstones there for you. You do have kind of an important division right here. YA is not edited for content. Some editorial lines do edit for content. Like, if you're publishing with Disney, they are going to edit for content. But most editorial lines do not edit YA for content. That means they do not edit out swearing, sexuality, or violence. A lot of people have an impression that YA is edited for content. They mean middle grade. Middle grade is edited for content by most publishers, which means that they will try to get the middle grade to

have less of an R rating, if you've written an R-rated middle grade for some reason. Yeah? STUDENT: Do you ever have publishers or editors try to have you put more graphic content in? BRANDON: Okay, question. I get asked this a lot. Have I ever had editors or publishers try to get me to put in more graphic violence or sex? No. This does not happen. It happens in romance, specifically, if you're writing erotica. They may come in and say, "We need another sex scene right here." That has definitely happened. You will occasionally get, if you're writing

an action thriller, be like, "We need an action scene." But this is a perception that people generally have outside the publishing industry about the publishing industry, and that's just not the way the publishing industry works. They purchase a book from you because they like that style of book. The editor's job is going to be to make it a better version of that book. I've never had an editor even mention saying, "Oh, could we have more sex scenes?" or things like that. I did have Moshe once ask me, he's my editor at TOR, he's like, "Are

Vin and Elend sleeping together?" I said, "Yes, but I have a large audience that doesn't want to imagine that they are, so I just leave it off, leave it out." He's like, "Oh, OK." Like, that's the closest that we've ever gotten. Good question. Middle grade will, my experience with middle grade, they will edit for content and they will occasionally edit for word choice. Doesn't happen a lot, but sometimes they'll be like, "This just doesn't feel like a middle grade word." You can use challenging words here and there, but if a passage just feels too much

like they have to get out the dictionary to read it, I've had editors say, "Can we use a more clear word here?" For middle grade, generally, my editors have been like, "Let's streamline this. Let's focus on one character. Let's keep the complexity down. And let's make sure that your magic system is simple and straightforward." That doesn't mean the situations can't get complex, or the emotions complex, and that's the difference I think. If you write down to your audience, you are writing out the emotional complexity, and kind of the complexity that comes from the difficulties of

dealing with all of this stuff. That we don't want to do. In middle grade, some editors will tell you, try to streamline and try to keep the world building less complex and the learning curve much shallower. YA very rarely had that. Though the number one editorial request I get from my YA editors is to ask me to give the reader more emotional touchstones to what the characters are feeling. Where in adult I often have them go the other direction and say, "You're going overboard on the emotion. Just let the reader pick it up." That's been

the difference between my adult editors and my YA editors. STUDENT: This is a kind of follow-up question. My central character is 8. BRANDON: Your central character is 8, yep. STUDENT: What are the dangers of that? Why don't we see more adult books written with--? BRANDON: Yeah. Why don't we see more adult books written with child protagonists? Number one, they're hard to write, and number two, the marketing people just don't know how to market them. But, I mean, Ender is 8 through a big portion of Ender's Game. How old is he when he's in battle school?

He's still not that old, right? STUDENT: No, he's 11. BRANDON: Yeah, he's like 11. Ender's Game is a perfect example of a book that really is thematically YA, and you would call middle grade by age of the protagonist. But it's usually given to young adults. Young young adults, right? But it's usually read by people that Ender is younger than them. This does happen. Most of the time you're safest just saying it's an adult book, and if they decide to publish it somewhere else, great. The Golden Compass is another great example. His Dark Materials, where Lira,

it's like, how old is she in these? Is this a YA? Is it not? Nobody really knows. This kind of speaks to, another tangent. This Q&A, we just go on tangents. Remember that genre and all the things we talk about with genre, are marketing tools. This is why we have science fiction and fantasy sections in a bookstore. It is a marketing tool. That marketing tool can be very handy to people whose books naturally fit into one of these categories. If your books don't naturally fit, it can be harder for you. That isn't a reason to

not write them, but it is a reason to try to do a little bit of the marketing people's jobs for them by saying, "This is an adult book with a child protagonist like X, Y, or Z." They'll be like, "Oh, we know how to market X, Y, or Z. OK." This is why, a lot of times, if you have-- it's really hard in romance because you have to ask the question, does your Charlaine Harris True Blood mystery with vampires go in fantasy, or in romance, or in mystery, or in horror? In the few places that

still have horror sections of bookstores. Usually they will just use cover marketing and blurbs to solidify it into one of those genres and place it there in the bookstore, even if it's a pretty bad fit sometimes, because it has to go somewhere. This is why you'll find Neal Stephenson in literary fiction instead of science fiction a lot of times. They're like, "We think the best thing to do is market this toward that crowd that likes Margaret Atwood, who will like some science fiction-y things, but are really looking for interesting prose as well. So if we

stick Neal Stephenson there, maybe they'll get it." But half the other time you'll find Neal Stephenson in science fiction, because people are rightly saying, "Hey, the father of modern cyberpunk probably belongs in science fiction." Yeah? STUDENT: This is back to the internal/external logic. BRANDON: Yeah. STUDENT: What do you do if there's a case where they may conflict? How do you choose which one is better? BRANDON: Internal logic is almost always your best choice, if they conflict. If they're conflicting, most of the time it's because you are breaking some weird rule of external logic, some weird

sort of-- Let me give you an example here. This is going to be a weird example, but it will relate. I once read, I was reading a book, I think it was John Keegan's History of Warfare, where it talked about the theory that horses early in the classical era had not been bred to be strong enough to carry a rider on their back, which was part of why chariots became such a big thing. I'm paraphrasing a very complicated anthropological discussion. But this idea was, I loved the idea of, wait! Horses pulling something rather than having

something sit on their back, you could have smaller horses and things like that. So I wrote a book where you couldn't write the horses because it would break a horse's back. Every reader's like, "These stupid people. How can they not have tried riding a horse? You can obviously ride a horse. Why are entire cultures saying this stupid thing?" It took a lot of work to convince them that realistically people couldn't ride these horses because it would actually harm the horses. Readers had in their head that horses are something you ride. Therefore, this rule breaks my

external logic of this thing, even though it was actually externally logical in the first place. That was something that taught me, if you're going to go against people's expectations, you need to put extra work into it. You generally want to do this, because once you've done it, it gives you control over your story. I think that the internal logic is more important than the external logic, but you do have to realize that sometimes you're going to have to be upfront with a little more of your world building, which raises your learning curve. Basically your best

choice is to find shows where you can show this working in the world, that will really imprint in people's brains. Like for instance, showing someone ride on a horse's back and it is hurting the horse. And then people remember, "Oh, that's what happens," rather than just having people say it a lot. You run into this if you are using real world mythology. Because even though it doesn't have, real world mythology you have to pretend it has an external logic. People know what a vampire is. When we were talking earlier about magic systems without magic systems,

stuff like that. People are like, okay, vampires suck blood. They are turned aside by garlic and crosses, yada, yada, yada. If you aren't having your vampires act like that, then the longer you go in your book without explaining how your vampires work, the harder it is going to be to disabuse people of their expectations for vampires, and indeed they're still going to forget, even after you've taught them, unless you're very careful about it. This is important to do because it's probably going to be plot relevant to you. But you have to realize there's just more

work to do in doing so, which is often why you see the fantasy books that'll use things that are elves but aren't elves. They just have a different name. So it's like, these aren't Tolkien elves. They're 95% Tolkien elves, but there's one thing that's very different, so we're just going to call them something else and try to reinforce to you what that difference is. Yeah, let's go to the next question on the list. All right. Spoiler questions about one of my books. "Is there a way to see hard magic disguised as soft magic in a

book?" Yeah, it's very, very common. Do realize that the readers interfacing with a story element is going to be the most important thing. If you've got a-- for instance, Anne McCaffrey. Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern, she insisted her entire life was science fiction and not fantasy. All right, you know. She added a bunch of external logic to explain how the dragons worked and things like that. She worked very hard to explain this as science fiction. Everyone who read those books thought of them as fantasy. Because the way the reader interfaces with the story is actually

more important than what the author says about said story. I'm totally okay with Anne being like, "No! These are science fiction." You can say whatever you want. You can tell people all you want about your stories. But what they experience is way more important than any of that. If you are having a hard magic disguised as a soft magic, you've got to treat your book like a soft magic book, not like a hard-magic book. Though you can obviously make that transition over time, which is a very fun transition, as people find out the things that

were illogical, that seemed soft, get explanations and become hard magic. Fred Saberhagen's Books of the Swords, which are very fun stories, it's been a long time since I've read them, but what I believe happens in these books is a bunch of people from earth that are very advanced with science fiction technology go to a planet where there are humans and decide to be their gods. You only find out about these gods through secondhand accounts and things like this, as you slowly, through the series, realize, "There's a reason why this mythology just sounds like our earth

mythology, is the people who are these gods are just science fiction people who decide to go play god on a planet." Again, it's been a long time, so I could be misquoting Fred's entire lore there. But I've seen that sort of thing before, where it's like it's not magic, it's science, but the people doing the science, it's-- Who's law is that? It's Clarke's Law? Any sufficiently advanced science will seem like a magic to people who don't know about it. So yes, you can definitely disguise a hard-magic system as a soft magic system. Just realize in

most cases you need to treat that like a soft magic system because that's how the reader is going to experience it. "How do you prevent world building from feeling like a chore?" Ooo, discovery writer here. Most of the time when people ask this, they are discovery writers. And I would recommend to you, write your book and don't stress it. Finish your book, and then decide what world building things you actually need to expand upon to tell the story that you have already told a little bit better. Do all of your world building, for your first

book at least, afterward. If you're feeling like world building's a chore, don't do it yet. Do what makes you excited to write your story. Then after you're story you'll get done and you'll be like, all right, I really need to understand these religions a little better. But most discovery writers will have filled in a lot of that as they're going, because they get excited by seeing through the character's eyes and stuff. You can do a lot in post, so to speak, where you add all this stuff in. You only get into trouble when you are

then doing more books in the series and you're going to have to stick to what you put in the first book. So if you are a discovery writer, and that idea is very daunting to you, make sure you build in a bunch of mysteries that the characters don't understand yet, that you don't understand yet, that you can have fun exploring and extrapolating upon in the next book, so you have that same sense of eagerness, and then just make sure after you finish the book, you get some early readers, find out what they're confused by, do

your world building to fix that. Understand that, in general, any process that you use to arrive at a published book, readers generally, if you're doing your job right, won't be able to tell what your process was. In fact, I had a really interesting conversation with Cory Doctorow once where he said, "It's really interesting that readers generally can't tell which chapters took me six months of sweat, blood, and tears, and which chapters I wrote in an afternoon and they were great on the first try." That's because the process of publishing and revision is built around this

idea that by the end you're hopefully having a consistent quality, and the things that are really hard, or that come out really rough in your first drafts get smoothed over until the point that it is a finished piece of art. If you're a discovery writer, or if you're some weird hybrid between, which really most of us are, don't stress about this. Do what makes you excited to write the book. Finish the book and then ask yourself, all right, what does this really need in revision to make it better? STUDENT: How do you do this if

you're a hard outliner. Say that you have a plot and character, but you're like, well setting and details, and do I really want to explain how this works, kind of thing? BRANDON: The thing about it is, you can hybridize these things really easily. Try to pretend that it's not, like, one camp or the other. I bet there are a ton of people out there who come up with a pretty solid plot and characters and don't world build at all until they're done with the book. At that point you kind of have to make a few

decisions based on what do you want the feel of your book to be? How much world building and lore do you want there to be? How much of this is a selling point for your book? There are lots of great books that don't spend very much time on the lore world building aspect. A lot of these are kind of your David Gemmell-type gritty, or the kind of modern wave of the Joe Abercrombie-style books, where it's like, who cares about the thousand years of history and lore, or this thing. I'm telling a story about this one

person going and doing this one interesting thing. In that case, you can just say, this isn't a selling point of my books. My selling point is something else. I'm just not going to do it. I'm not going to worry about it. That's okay. In fact, that's advised. Do what is exciting to you. Now, give your book to readers. See what readers are wanting more of, and you don't always want to give it to them, but you can acknowledge, OK, they're confused here. We need a little bit more here or things like that and use the

tools to write the story you want to write. But just like in visual arts, not every piece of artwork needs to be an incredibly realistic, detailed oil painting. There are people who do with three brush strokes things that feel amazing, with very little amounts of detail put into that painting. It's hard to say, you can say which one you like more, but I don't know if one is more art than another, if that makes sense. Create the type of art you want to create, and if world building is like pulling teeth for you, then write

books where you don't need it, and only put in as much as you feel like you need. For the rest of you who are like me, just don't let it overcome the story, and don't let yourself spend too much time world building. Otherwise you'll never write your stories. What's my opinion on fan fiction? A little off topic, but I think fan fiction is cool. I'm glad people write fan fiction. I didn't come up through that community. I never really read a lot of fan fiction. I don't read the fan fiction based on my books. But

I think it's an important and valid part of the writing community. Once in a while you can shave the serial numbers off your fan fiction and sell 40 million copies, or whatever. If you don't know, 50 Shades of Gray was a fan fiction. You didn't know that? Oh, it was a Twilight fan fic. Yeah. It was. Very, very explicitly. It was posted online. And then she changed it around to not be a Twilight fan fic and sold a lot of books. Lot of books. All right. "How do you know if your magic system works?" How

do you know if your magic system works? All right. We have to define "works." Because like every other part of writing, a magic system is a tool to help you achieve your goals, and you have to decide what your goals are. That is different for every writer. What do you want it to do? This kind of comes into some Brandon Sanderson philosophy on art. I feel like sometimes, just in writing and all sorts of-- writing in specific, we have this sort of pretentious feel that is very different from other types of art. I'll often align

this to visual mediums, or even food. If you don't like fish, then that's OK. Nothing wrong. Now once in a while, even in food, people will die on certain hills about how you cook a steak. It does happen. But a lot of times someone says, "You know what? I prefer this flavor of ice cream to this flavor of ice cream." And everyone's like, "Oh, that's too bad you don't like the thing I like, but I can understand everyone has different tastes." In fiction we put a lot more behind it. Some of this is valid, and

some of it I'm like, I don't know if one art is necessarily better than another art. But it comes- you have to judge which is better art and which isn't. That's kind of what we do all the time. It's part of being a human being. It's not like we shouldn't do it, but as the same time, as you as an artist, when you are creating a piece of art and a piece of writing, your focus should be on what do I want this piece of art to achieve? What is my goal with it? I'm going

to measure your success in creating that art based on how well you were able to do the thing you were trying to do. Once you do that, then there's other levels of certain types of art, whatever, and things like that. But at its core, the first thing you should be looking to do is, what do I want my art to do? In that case, use the magic system to achieve what you want it to do. How do you know? You find your audience, somehow, who are people that you are writing this book for. May just

be your family. It might be you wanting to go full time and are looking for a large segment of the fantasy-reading public, or the science fiction-reading public, or whatever. You give the book to them and judge their reactions. This is why it's better for readers to say their emotional response to things, rather than trying to fix it. Because sometimes you will have a book that you planned a character to be the funniest character ever put to the page. Then the character turns out to be Jar Jar Binks, and your audience hates this character. You have

done something wrong in that case. But sometimes you are writing a character that you just want to make a certain segment of the population very uncomfortable, and another segment of the population to laugh a lot, Mr. Bean. Some people detest Mr. Bean, and some people laugh uproariously at Mr. Bean. That is not wrong because half the audience hates it. I wouldn't say half. But a segment of the population hates it. It is targeting the right audience, and you find out what that audience is and see if you're-- there's a very big difference between Mr. Bean

and Jar Jar Binks, where one was intended to do something and didn't do it, and the other one did exactly what it's intended to do. Is the magic system working? What is it intended to do in your story, for the audience you are trying to reach? Do some experiments with this, and then use the magic system as a tool to help you achieve the type of art that you want to achieve. Easier said than done, I do acknowledge that. Let's see. Let's see. "I'd love to screen write for animation. Any tips?" No. Well, one. Go

to a screenwriting class. I am, unfortunately, not an expert in screenwriting. I have written one and a half screenplays. Maybe someday I will become more of an expert at screenwriting, but I am very much not an expert in a screenwriting career. Now that's the thing. I am only barely an expert in how to break into sci-fi/fantasy publishing. Why? Because I broke in 15 years ago. Anyone who broke in 15 years ago is going to have a very different experience from people breaking in today. And in fact, the further I get from when I broke in,

the more difficult it is for me to be an expert on how you break in right now. That's something you should always keep in mind when you're getting advice, specifically on breaking in, because the market and the way people break in changes a lot. When I was trying to break in, there were a lot of people who were like, "You need to write short stories." These were the old guard, who all broke in in the '60s and '70s by writing short fiction for the magazines. I was trying to break in in the '90s and the

2000s, and guess what? The magazine market had dried up. There were much fewer magazines in circulation. They paid a lot less. And beyond that, the people who were really good at short stories were really good at short stories. As we proved last week, this is not something I'm really good at. I could become good at it, but I read novels. I wrote novels. I enjoyed novels. And so the advice of break in with short stories was terrible advice for me. In fact, I think it was terrible advice for the majority of people trying to break

in in my era, because they didn't subscribe to the magazines, they weren't reading the short stories, so they didn't know how to write them. In the same way, I can't give you advice on breaking into screen writing or animation. You've got to go to somebody who's done it recently. I can tell you, this person asked, "Is editing fantasy/sci-fi a good backup plan?" OK, let's talk about becoming an editor. OK? The answer is no*. All right? The reason that planning on becoming an editor as a backup for becoming a published author is that there are fewer

editing jobs than there are jobs for professional writers. Now, the editing jobs are a little easier to get than breaking out big as a sci-fi/fantasy writer. But there are way fewer of them. So if you have a dual interest and you like them both, it's totally valid to pursue both at the same time, just like if you read a lot of short stories and novels it'd be perfectly valid for you to try to break in on either direction. But if you're like, "Hmm, I'll just become an editor as a failsafe," it is really hard to

become an editor of sci-fi/fantasy. There are, in Utah there's like two jobs for sci-fi/fantasy editors, and I don't think Lisa Mangum is going to quit any time soon, and I don't think Chris Schoebinger is going to quit any time soon. So guess what? There are no jobs. I could be exaggerating. They might have an intern or assistant at Shadow Mountain who cycles through. But if you want to be a trade science fiction/fantasy editor, you are going to need to move to New York. That is where 95% of the jobs are. The little percents that are

not in New York are in Seattle at Wizards of the Coast, or in Boston at Houghton Mifflin, and that's about it. Unless you're talking about Europe and going to London, which, yeah. So you're going to have to live in New York. OK? You're just going to have to be dedicated to moving to New York, which is extremely expensive. You're going to be competing against people for jobs who have master's degrees in editor from Columbia, who live in New York and are applying to all the internships, because they have editing programs at NYU and at Columbia,

right in New York, and those are who you're competing against. It not impossible. One person from my era at BYU, Stacy Whitman, managed to break into children's trade as an editor. She went and got a master's degree at a prestigious university in Boston, made a lot of contacts in New York and Boston, managed to get a job at Wizards of the Coast, and then moved to starting her own imprint at a children's publisher in New York. It is totally possible. She's the only one who did that from my age group, and I've got-- there's, like,

seven of us who went full time as writers. I guess you can count Peter, my editorial assistant. He took the Manga route and went and got a job at Tokyopop, and then I hired him away here. But it is just really hard, OK, really hard. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it if you're really excited by it. But don't use it as your failsafe, the "of course, I can just become an editor." It's really tough. If you want to do it, you're going to need to start talking to editors about how to do it, how

to get into the programs, how to get the internships. And good luck to you, because people do do it. Ann Swords from BYU, who was the generation before me, is a senior editor at Ace. So there's at least one person from BYU who went on to become a professional science fiction/fantasy editor at a major big five house in New York. She's the only one, I think, who did that. So it's possible. Someone from this class, Ben Grange, became an agent. Becoming an agent, little bit easier. There's a few more jobs, I would say, as agents.

But also it's very demanding, because you make money based on your authors, and if you have a bad eye for picking authors, you just won't make any money. But we'll talk about agents later. Did that make sense to you guys? Any other questions on that? BYU does have a decent editing program. You can go into that and see if you like it. And do know there are lots more jobs if you are willing to not edit sci-fi/fantasy. If you're willing to edit trade manuals for hearing aid companies, there's a lot of jobs. "How can you

make limits or weaknesses appear natural and not contrived?" Ooo, boy, contrived. Here's the thing. Everything in a book is contrived. Everything in our lives in real life is coincidental. Coincidence is basically how everything works. Every story is a set of coincidences. This, on one hand, is not a problem, because having a character win $10 million in the lottery is no less or more likely than any person just winning $10 million in the lottery in real life. It does happen. However, there's this sense that if you make things too easy or convenient for the reader, then

the reader sees the author's hand. You want to give an illusion that it's not coincidental, even though it absolutely is coincidental and contrived in every situation. So this is a good question, asking yourself how do you make the weaknesses and limitations not seem contrived. Usually, we do these with some measure of internal or external logic. Superman's powers are taken away by a magic rock. Saying that alone is like, eh, that seems really contrived. Oh, it's a magic rock from his home world. And when he lived on it he didn't have powers, so when you're near

it he doesn't have powers. Oh, that seems less contrived. It's exactly as much contrived, but it gives a sense that it's not. That is usually one of the worst examples of magic rock takes away super being's powers for reasons. You can come up with better reasons. For instance, limitation on the One Ring, Sauron can see you. Why? Sauron built the rings to be able to do this. Every reader accepts that, because it's inside. It's internal logic. You've given it a reason and inched toward external logic by saying why would somebody do this? Why would somebody

create this? Oh, a reasonable person might, themselves, do this. Therefore the limitation, the flaw, makes sense. If you're doing this with a magic system, just try to juggle your consistency, your logic, in such a way that it makes a certain amount of sense in the book. In fact, someone asked me, "How do you tie disparate magic systems together into a given novel?" It's another question later on. And I say, use these things also. I developed allomancy and feruchemy as separate magic systems for two different books. Feruchemy came because I remember being in high school and

being an insomniac, and this was not a good match for high school. I was tired all day and then tried to go to sleep at night and just lay in bed. I thought, "I wish I could store up my sleepiness in some sort of amulet, and then take it out when I want to go to bed. And then when I don't want to be asleep, I can just put my sleepiness in this thing and be awake." Wouldn't that be wonderful? That'd be pretty great. That was the foundation for what became the magic system called feruchemy

in the Mistborn books. When I added that into the books, I said, "This is going to feel really weird adding this magic system to this one where people jump around on bits of metal and eat it. How do I make it consistent? Oh, we're just going to make it, metal be a theme. You use metal to put-- you can't just have anything. You've got a piece of metal. We'll make the different metals do different things in one magic and do analogous things in the other magic." And so suddenly it feels like they're cohesively one magic

system, even though they were developed completely separately and don't really, on paper, feel like they should have anything to do with one another. This is actually really easy to do when you're building your magic systems. Come up with a theme, ask yourself about this theme, and play with it for a little while. See what ends up working with readers, and get them to buy in. It's not as hard as it sounds, but it does take a little practice. All right. "What does Brandon think of The Mandalorian?" Continuing our theme of Star Wars stuff. I liked

The Mandalorian. I really enjoyed it. It was just fun. I liked the beginning episodes and the end episodes better. You can probably tell that from the type of books I write. I like a consistent story and a long-reaching arc, rather than the mini episodes in the middle. But the heist mini episode in the middle was really great, so some of those were good too. So thumbs up, good job, John Favreau and friends. They had, like, a ton of-- it felt like-- do you guys watch that, watch the different directors when they pop up, and you'll

be like, "Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Hey!" It's just like, "I know you've been in a Marvel movie, and you were buddies over here." It felt like a bunch of friends got together and were like, "We're going to make a Star Wars show," and they just did. How do you say his name? The director of Thor: Ragnarok? STUDENT: Taika Waititi. BRANDON: Taika Waititi? He was the voice of the droid in the finale. He directed the finale and he was the voice of the droid and stuff like that. I'm like, "You guys are just having

a party. You're just spending Lucasfilm’s' money to have a party." And I'm totally behind this. It feels like Star Wars hasn't been enough fun for a while, and that felt like just a lot of fun. All right let's see. "How do you decide that you need to add some new magic, and how do you add it smoothly without turning it into a deus ex machina?" That's an excellent question, very good question, because Sanderson's First Law came out from me messing this up. There's another question later on that was like, "Are Sanderson's Laws absolute?" I guess

I didn't make this clear enough. No. No, no, no. The whole theme of this class is, nothing is absolute, and I am going to be wrong some amount of the time. Sanderson's Laws have worked very well for me, in order to help me create the types of magic systems I like to create in books, and I think they have interesting applications to storytelling in general that are worth doing an entire class period on so that hopefully this helps people. But I am sure there are fantastic magic systems out there that just completely ignore any sort

of Sanderson's Laws, as well they should, because that's that creator's vision. Doesn't have to be mine. But how to, in my way, add a new magic system element without making it feel out of nowhere? Well, number one, you make sure, if you're worried that you're going to be doing this, that this will happen, that when you're writing your story you indicate that there are holes in the magic. This is really handy, particularly if you're going to be writing in a series and you don't know exactly what you're going to be doing in your series, saying,

"You know what? We don't understand this aspect of it. It's something else." Example of this in Mistborn is when I have Sazed use his magic, feruchemy, I have him use it mostly offscreen, and I have him use it in a moment that is kind of a violation of Sanderson's First Law. if you haven't read the book, Vin is unable to escape something that is happening, and rather than suffer the consequences, Sazed steps in and saves her. Now, this works on a couple of levels as a reason. Back then I didn't even really know Sanderson's First

Law. But even still, I would still have done this sequence the same way. One reason is, it's in the middle of the book. The purpose is not to give you a satisfying resolution to Vin using her magic. Vin is new at the magic, and it's mostly Kelsior's fault that she's in this trouble in that scene anyway. She does not deserve to pay the price for Kelsior's foolhardiness in this situation. And so I don't feel like it's pulling back, pulling punches, by having someone else, who's her other surrogate father figure in the series, show up and

save her when Kelsior's abilities fail. Beyond that, mostly this is here as an introduction to Sazed having powers that we don't understand that are going to be relevant later in this book and very relevant in future books. So having this moment to introduce that idea was more important to me than making Vin get out of this specific situation on her own, because it was well beyond her ability to get out of anyway. So in that situation, this whole sequence, which is violating Sanderson's First Law, but not really because I added in the "satisfying." "It's not

satisfying" gives me a catch-all for violating my own rules. But it does something else. What it does is say, hey, there's mystery to this other magic system that we're going to explore later. That is a really great way to do this. But another great way is to foreshadow things going wrong. How many times have you-- like they do this all the time in superhero comics, where it's like characters starting to manifest new power. We have them start to do it early on. I mean, they just did it in the new Star Wars movie. They knew

they needed to have a certain character perform a certain feat with the Force later in the movie that had not ever been used in the Force in the movies before. So they put in a wounded snake. What's that? STUDENT: It did in The Mandalorian. BRANDON: It did in The Mandalorian, but The Mandalorian was made after this movie. It also existed in the video games and stuff, but it hadn't been in the movie cannon. So they were like, "We're going to put it into the movie cannon early in the movie, so later on when we need

this special Force power, it has been used a couple of times." You put this in early, then use it later. In fact, you can always do that in post. In fact, there's a piece of me that believes, I haven't asked this, but there's a piece of me that believed that they got the whole movie done and they're like, "You know, this whole Force power comes out of nowhere. We should really add a scene where someone uses it early on and discovers how to use it." And they're like, "Yeah, giant snake." And Baby Yoda. But you

can't have television continuity. That's a separate-- they are the same continuity, but it's a separate viewer experience. Your viewer experience should not have to depend on a different viewer experience. Regardless, it happens all the time in comic books where the characters, like, they're trying to shoot their web slinger, but it does something weird, and they're like, "Why is this not doing this like it's supposed to? Something's going on." Then later on it becomes a plot point, and then they figure it out, and then they use it to solve the problem. If you don't want to

violate Sanderson's First Law, really all its saying is do your groundwork ahead of time, or in post. I actually write sometimes; you guys will love this. Any Bill and Ted fans in here? If I ever run into something where I've added in something that I know I should have foreshadowed, but I don't want to go do it right now, I put in brackets "remember a bucket." Because there's a scene in Bill and Ted where they're captured and they're like, "We've got to remember to go back in time and put a bucket right up there." Then

the bucket falls, and they're like, "Yeah!" I just tell myself to remember the bucket, and then when I'm doing revisions I'll go back, and I'll add in the bucket. All right let's talk briefly, for 10 minutes, about revision, just to kind of do something a little different this week as well. Revision. Boy, I hate revision. I just loathe it. I know there are people in here who love it. I have friends who love it, because they're like, "Revision is so much easier than coming up with the new stuff. Now I have something to work with."

Which I can understand. Writing a book is a little bit more like making a sculpture than non-writers might think, where it's like, the person who's making a sculpture is like, "First I get the general sense of the shape of the face, and then I work a little bit here." And each pass you do over it makes it look a little bit more like a face. Well, books are the same way. A lot of times, revision-- the job for me in my first drafts is to get down the main plot arcs, the character's emotional beats, and

just to make sure that the book has a satisfying set of promises and payoffs. And so I am not looking for anything related to the prose. But also my foreshadowing, like remember a bucket, I'll just write something. A lot of times, if I'm writing a book, it's more important for me to keep momentum than it is anything else. So if I change something, I'll just change it for the next chapter. Then if it works, I'll pretend it had always been there. But revision is this process by which we refine a book and make it better.

Now, I need to play devil's advocate for a second and mention that there is a group of-- there's a writing philosophy and a group of writers subscribe to this, who think you should not revise. This philosophy goes something like this. I'm hoping to not misquote it. I want to give the argument the best that they would, which is, you're better off practicing your writing skills and trusting your instincts. You're better off learning to do things in first draft, rather than making excuses for yourself to fix later. And most of the time, these people say, when

you revise you're not actually making it better, you're just making it different, and so you shouldn't revise unless an editor says you have to do this revision, or I won't buy it. This is a philosophy based off of-- those are Heinlein's rules. I don't know how strictly he kept to them. But there is a large group, not a large group, there is a small but vocal group of writers who believe that you should never revise. You can Google about this and find this. I have not found this to be true in my writing. Your mileage

may vary. I have found that revision is a vital part of taking something good and making it great. This is partially because, as I think I told you in a previous week, I can't keep everything in my head at once. I'm doing a Stormlight book right now. If you haven't read the Stormlight books-- I think I told you guys this. I don't know. If you haven't read them, there's things called Spren, which are attracted to people's emotions. It's almost like these sprite things that'll appear. If you're really angry, they'll appear in the form of pools

of blood at your feet. Visual manifestations of emotions are a theme in the Stormlight books. I don't put those in in the first draft. Too much to keep in my mind. I actually have an assistant read through and find any time I mention emotion, and then bracket what type of emotion Spren they think would be drawn by that thing, and then I will, in a later draft, it's like adding special effects to a movie, I will go through and add them all in. This is because keeping-- I am so focused on character arcs and making

sure the plot works in my first drafts, that I am not thinking about any of this. What I do for a revision, then, is 1.0, is straight through. My 1.0 draft is I go beginning to end. Then after I finish my 1.0, I build a revision guide. This is like an outline for a revision. I go through the book, and I've just finished it, and I'm usually taking notes as I write of things that I want to fix, and in the 2.0 I'm going to be looking for major plot problems or major character arc problems.

Because that was what my main goal was in my 1.0, and there will be things I get wrong. There will be things I change. There will be things that just aren't working that I know I need to pull out and fix. The 2.0 is to just get that down for me, and I will do it by making a hierarchical list of what is most important at the top, all the way down to little things I want to change here or there or include. The middle section will often say things like, "foreshadow that this character is

really good at getting out of handcuffs three times." I'll just give myself a rule, three times. and those are kind of the middle section, anything I can do with a spot fix a couple of times. Anything in the bottom section is things that are specific to one chapter that are a little tweak. And anything on the top, there's just too many changes to make to check them off. Like, it's pervasive through the entire book. Something in the 1.0 section might be along the lines of when I told you about Oathbringer where it's like, I didn't

know it at this revision, but it's like this whole plot cycle has the wrong promise at the beginning and is pointing readers toward the wrong thing. I need to do a major revision of this entire plot cycle, so the promise is working. That sort of thing, and I am just aligning these. And then when I do my revision, I start on page 1, and I have my revision guide open next to the document on the screen, and I just go through, looking to keep my focus on the things I've put on here. I will actually

start adding things to the bottom for a next revision, if there are things I notice I need to do for another revision. But this one is only these things on this list. I can only do a certain number of things with each revision. So let's make a targeted list. The 2.0 is all the stuff that I know how to fix. At that point, I give the book, ideally, to alpha readers. Alpha readers are going to come back, and I'm going to make a revision guide based on the things they say. Sometimes this will be stuff

from my editor that'll say, "I really think such-and-such thing." I'll be like, "All right. I'm going to try that in a chapter and see if it works." One chapter, and if I like how it is better I'll keep going, and if not, then I'll tell them, "I don't think this is the solution." Or several chapters. But alpha read makes another revision document. I add to the bottom of it anything I didn't get in the first revision, because my focus was on those top things. I sometimes won't get to the middle or bottom. I will add

those on and their own middle or bottom. I will add on new things that I came up with. Then it kind of becomes like I am bug fixing while I'm going through. After that we have a 3.0 that is the beta reads. Again, for me, alpha readers are business insiders who can tell me if something is wrong and how to fix it. Beta readers are generally going to be casual readers or super fans who are readers, those two. But the idea is that they are not industry professionals. They are my audience. How is my audience

responding to the thing I did? I want to know, in my beta read, if Jar Jar Binks is driving every character up the wall. And I might decide, "You know what? I'm really to keep Jar Jar Binks for the 10% that he doesn't drive up the wall." I might decide, "Oh, wow. I have made a major miscalculation in this character. I need to do something." I'm just looking for their reactions. Personally, this is to prepare me for how readers will react to my book when I release it. If I get a good cross section of

my readership in beta reads, I will never release a book and be surprised by the reaction to it. I will then do a 4.0 that is changing things based on what I think will better target my audience, based on the reactions. Lucas famously had the Millennium Falcon get blown up at the end of Return of the Jedi, showed it to test audiences, and they hated it. I don't know what happened with Jar Jar. But then this one he showed, and he's like, "Huh, let's not blow up the Millennium Falcon." And you know what? There was

much rejoicing because everyone was happy. Then my 5.0 is my polish. Now, I've been polishing all the way through this. boy, you can barely read that. Polish, yeah. I've been polishing all the way through this. Every draft I'm doing some. But this is my last one where I'm going to cut 10% of the book. I'm going to try and kill every instance of passive voice that I can. I'm going to try to make things active instead of passive. I'm going to try to use stronger verbs instead of weaker verbs. All the stuff that makes a

book more readable, that's my 5.0. And 5.0 is generally the one that I send to copy edit and proofread. If you have one takeaway from here, it's if revision is something that you hate, try to make a plan for how you're going to achieve a revision on your book. One danger people do get into that I'll take from this crowd over here, that we'll kind of end on is, I have had people who have revised the same chapter 20 times. They go to writing group. They go to workshops. They bring the same chapter, and each

time they try to revise it to whatever everyone said. At that point, the chapter's not getting better. It is just changing. It's becoming something different. Don't let your revision become that, from this crowd that say don't revise. But do try to make it goal-based and try to learn something new with each revision. We'll see you guys next week. We'll talk about character.