Promise, Progress, Payoff - Plot Theory: Brandon Sanderson's Writing Lecture #2 (2025)

hey welcome to Brandon sanderson's 2025 writing science fiction fantasy lectures today we're going to cover plot specifically the ideas of Promise progress and payoff so I hope you enjoy the lecture we'll be on plot next week as well hey everybody Welcome to class it's science fiction fantasy writing [Applause] yay because this is a year where we're recording it I am on the ball and have uh outlined the rest of the semester for you so you can see what's coming up uh and I guess if you're planning to uh I don't know go to Ruba one

week you can pick the week you're least uh engaged by um so there will be two guest lectures uh usually I have two uh first one's going to be on the February 6th and the second one will be on February 27th um so we aren't 100% sure who those people will be yet but I think maybe we'll try to get uh Indie publishing people the second one is we are a little closer to the publishing lectures and we'll see who we uh who we bring in for uh for talking about character so uh that's what

we're going to doing like I told you last time we're going to go uh three weeks on each topic and uh your questions that you write down in your take your quiz by 845 we will save those for the Q&A lecture um and that's when I will try to dig into those usually I get to like three of them and then there's enough questions from the the the crowd and tangents that uh I don't answer everything you write down but it is uh the nice way that we keep rolling it does give me a starting

point uh for going into the Q&A lectures so uh we're going to do plot first uh I kind of go back and forth on where I start I should say back and forth and further forth uh because there's a stories are built up generally of three things they are built up of your plot your setting and your character and the intersection of plot setting and character is conflict what you're looking for is how to create that conflict and as far as stories go co uh setting plot and character all should exist to create some sort

of conflict or to facilitate some sort of conflict because that's what your story is about um so I'm going to talk a little bit I actually took notes this time um yes I know look at that um so what's the purpose of plot right why why what do we talk about when we mean plot I often talk about plot in kind of two different categories and I label them big p plot and Little P plot a capital P plot and uh and a little p plot capital P plot is when someone says what is your

book about that's what you tell them this is the what you can boil it down to in a sentence or two plot what is the Lord of the Rings about uh it's about a furry footed British dude taking a magic green and trying to throw it in a pit right uh that's the the funny way of putting you but you know what I mean like what is the Lord of the Rings about trying to over destroy saaron through destroying this r that is the the conflex of his power Little P plot is what happens chapter

by chapter in order to keep the reader engaged so the plot of low of the Rings might be destroy the ring but the lower cast Casp plot might be all right um there's um some Orcs here and we can't get past them what do we do well we'll dress up like them right like that sort of thing uh how it's the the small little problem and then you resolve it small little problem you resolve it building toward larger problems that you're hopefully resolving next week we're going to talk about plot Frameworks So today we're not

going to talk about the hero's journey or plot archetypes or things like that instead we're going to talk about the general idea of what plot is for and in my mind plot is for a couple of things first is for facilitate conflict it's going to be the primary way that you create conflict in your story a thing needs to happen and the characters need to do it and something is standing in their way pretty obvious um the second thing though a plot is there to give the reader some structure to give the reader some sort

something to hang on to to to give them a sense that a story is being told and is moving along um plot tends to be the one because of these reasons that is the most difficult to innovate upon of plot setting in uh character I'd say setting is the easiest place to innovate character second easiest uh plot is the most difficult um there are various we'll talk about them um next week various plot Frameworks but there's certain things people expect in a satisfying story and yes you can subvert those and most of the ways you

would subvert those just makes your story unsatisfying now you may want to tell an unsatisfying story there are reasons to do that but in general you're looking to tell a satisfying story and there are certain things that work for that and certain things that don't and because of that you'll notice that if you go on and you know start googling plot and start researching it people will be like there's only three plots there's only only seven plots there's only one plot right um the hero's journey they um uh he would be like yep there's one

plot it's been told uh in all these different ways uh but he stretched a ton to make that count I don't know how many plots there are but I can tell you that innovating here um is not necessarily something that needs to be done um in general if you are combining your plot with interesting characters and an interesting set and you have you are kind of using what we're going to talk about today in this class you're going to create something that is going to read and it's going to feel fresh and unique right it

doesn't matter that Dune is Hamlet right is The Lion King right right down to the break in the middle of Lion King and dune which I've always found interesting that both of them are like we're going to skip all the growing up part right maybe it's cuz Hamlet he was already grown and then Hamlet skipped the whole first half of the story and its hamlets the second half but there's something about that story son is wronged as father dies and Uncle seizes the throne son goes away and comes back stronger maybe crazier uh in Hamlet's

case uh and becomes a rival for the for the uncle's Throne killing the uncle and restoring order to The Pride lands or whatever they call them right uh to oracus um you would not look at The Lion King and dune and and be like wow those are the exact same story even though the general concept the general structure is the same structure right you've probably I would guess never thought that Dune was Hamlet uh everyone talks about Lion King being Hamil so you probably already knew that one um but the fact that they share these

these very similar plot structures even to the point that it's like the uncle and things like this uh doesn't make these stories feel unfresh or unoriginal fact Dune is probably my favorite book of all time um and so because of that you can use plot as a tool plot should be in my opinion one of these places where the chef knows what works and can use it to their Advantage without with only taking pieces and parts you'll even notice like as I said when Shakespeare wrote this uh story he to tell the story he wanted

to he started with Hamlet arriving back right well when Dune tells this story it backs up and shows all of this and the the wrongs being committed that need to be writed um the stories are trying to do different things um and so you know it's uh in The Lion King you need cute Plucky animal Sidekicks in Dune you need an animal that will eat you if you walk without Rhythm so the different needs are different for the different stories now I think that plot breaks down to this idea of Promise progress and payoff and

all the Frameworks we'll talk about next week and the ways of constructing a plot will kind of rely on this same concept you might be saying to me Brandon I Am Naturally more of a pantser I like to um I like to write by the seat of my pants I don't like to have a structure as I mentioned with Stephen King he feels that if he makes an outline he's already told his story and it makes it harder for him to then go tell his story because discovering the story is part of what drives him

to write um don't worry you can do all of this while Discovery writing um right now the Frameworks we'll talk about next week some of those if you're a discovery writer you just don't want to use right you don't want to sit down and use seveno story structure um but the more you learn about the Core Concepts of what makes people read books and enjoy them the more you can apply that as you're discovering your story and one thing to be aware of is the difference between Discovery writers and outline liners and again Everyone Falls

on the spectrum between and indeed most people are little of both and it changes based on Project most people spend about the same amount of time the outliner spends it up front the uh Discovery writer spends it on the back end right and these sorts of things we're talking about are often really handy tools for analyzing a story that's gone wrong in fact that's kind of a theme for this whole class um when you sit down to write a lot of times writers are not like are not thinking what is the what is the progress

here right um I do because that's how I analyze story but I think most people are writing by Instinct and then if something doesn't work writers back up and say all right what's the disconnect here and they will often arrive at things that essentially mean I've made a promise but my progress is something different how do I fix that well I go back generally and make new promises because the progress that I'm writing along is what I want to tell the story about so don't worry and feel that you have to learn all of this

up front and apply it to your outline before you start writing your book writing will teach you how to do this better than any other activity will as we T talk about talked about last week so take all of these things use them as analytical tools to help you begin understanding story and if things are broken then maybe you can analyze them according to some the things we talk about and if you're an outliner they might be really handy in making your outlines so questions on any of that before we talk about uh promises yes

um how much of this is just North American culture yeah um so how much of this is uh is I would uh say uh Western storytelling Traditions um right but really modern Western storytelling Traditions how much is it uh this is a little bit hard for me to put a point on because um definitely in um in Asia Japan uh Korea China you're going to see a different use of payoff most often that's where they deviate the most uh the payoff there based on kind of subtle uh story storytelling archetypes over time mean something different

and is what is satisfying to that audience can be different that said they are homogenizing whether for good or for ill you are seeing more and more of ambiguous endings being more popular in the the west and you're seeing more payoff endings uh in the East and both are kind of viable it just depends on what kind of payoff that you want to have you still generally use um in some of the the Eastern style storytelling even going back if you're going to read Journey to the West right you're going to see see kind of

the same progress and promise methodology you're just going to see very different payoff methodology uh excellent question um so yeah go ahead just just out of curiosity when you're writing something like when you've been writing something longer like Stormlight or something where would you put yourself on the scale between Discovery and outliner Discovery and outliner so um every author uh then the question is so it can be repeated for the the camera um where like on Stormlight in particular would I put myself um between outliner and pancer or whatever um every author is a pancer

is a discovery writing at the core as they're working right even if you have bullet points you're still Discovery writing like nobody's outline is as long as their story so you're always Discovery writing something um I remember a famous uh story that I was told that I have not been able to confirm I tried very hard and I think it might just be apocryphal but the story I was told when I was young is that in uh the movie ET the screenplay just said Elliot and ET escape on the bikes right and uh at least

in one of the drafts and then that became the most iconic scene in the film a lot of times your outline will say the characters escape and then you have to Discovery write that right so the outliner you know it's it's a bit of a misnomer to call anyone true truly an outliner cuz it's just how much pancing you are uh comfortable with uh I tend to fall much more on the outlining side for everything and the longer the series The more detailed my outlines are um that is because I'm kind of throwing myself footballs

and then trying to catch them 15 years later right um and the better guess I have where I am uh the easier will be to catch those footballs that said I knock out walls that I would have considered loadbearing uh and I change things around and as you write uh the story matures and so even myself who I consider myself one of the more hardcore outliners that I know um I would say that more Discovery writer than outliner in general just compared to other people I outline more and here's a fun thing for you here's

anecdote time and then I'll get to this question um I have been on many panels on writing and I generally find myself one of the few outliners this has changed over time I find that there are more outliners now than there used to be uh but I still tend to be in the minority and so I talk about myself as kind of being odd sometimes as such a strong outliner I once sat on a panel in Germany me and I kid you not I said this and uh like how I do it and all the

Germans looked at me and they're like no that's how it's done I'm like no there's Discovery writing they're like horrified they're like people do that without a structure um I I thought it was funny it's a little bit of stereotype but it literally happened that all the Germans are like the it's insane to not have an outline um so all right question here and then we'll go we'll do this one then we'll do uh yeah how you to terms with dropping plots or plans that you feel are C your how do you come to terms

with dropping plots or plans that you feel a core to your story how do you come to terms with killing Your Darlings which is a famous uh screenwriting uh terminology for this sort of thing you tell yourself a lie okay I'm going to tell you what the LIE is I will find a much better place for this character plot or idea where it can shine in its own story and then nine times out of 10 you won't because that idea actually wasn't that great you just built the whole story upon it the story then evolves

because the process of building a story is where the real creativity takes off and as you start writing it you start applying all of your ideas and that that thing that started you actually is not as good as the rest of it and part of you realizes it once in a while that one out of 10 that lets you have plausible deniability on your your lifee once in a while that one out of 10 becomes its own story and it deserves that space and time I I will say this um just as a blanket I

almost always throw away my first chapter often my first several chapters of a given book and write them over once I'm finished this is how you can tell even though I'm an outliner Discovery writing and really focusing on the progress side of this which is in many ways the most important but the least showy right it's the one that people will pay attention to to the least but it's 90% of your book um once you know what that progress is you then know how to signpost that for people to enjoy it and throwing away your

early chapters is really common in the industry so this is one of the reasons why it's best not to become where's Nate not to become an eternal hey you were right there and I just looked past you not to learn as Nate has done to not keep revising your first chapter until you finished your book because for most of us you won't really be able to do that until you've gotten far enough along to know how to make those promises so thank you for being two years running my really great example uh on this so

all right I'm going to go into to promises then we will do more Q&A okay so promises promises are the easy one okay you should not stress Promises at the beginning of your book Because Why once you learn your progress and once you've written an ending and if you're a discovery end writer it'll be a bad ending don't stress that either once you know what the core of your book is about throwing away three chapters and rewriting it so that your promise Nails what you want to do uh in your story is easy throwing away

40 chapters in the middle is hard right if you just look at the the weight of time so but promises in many ways are the most important they're the easiest but most important why are they most important well you might have heard um people talk about how important your hook or your first line is and things like that I find rarely the first lines actually matter um we like to talk about them usually it's your first couple of pages really matter and yes a Zinger of a first line can be really great right um you

know what what what is the the the the the great ones you can go look at some of the great ones what's that call is call me Ismail is a really great first line uh snow crash has a really great first line um you know 1984 has a really great first line right like there's a bunch of really great first lines they're awesome having one of those is worth doing but really your first chapter your first few pages they are important because that's where someone's going to decide whether or not to put your book down

and that's dangerous and it's also dangerous for you because most of the books you read the authors are actually relying on something before the first line to not make you put the book down and that is the name on the title right so when you pick up the way of kings and you read the way of Kings I can get away with so much in that book because I'm trading on my name and popularity right um like how do I pitch way of Kings I say this is the book to read once you trust me

you might trust me because your friend won't leave you alone and wants you to read it you might trust me because you tried a different book once you trust me you can read the way of Kings it has three prologues that's a terrible idea don't do that right only one of them's named prologue but I cheated and named one Prelude right and then the next chapter is a prologue also um it's just called chapter one um it really is that's if you haven't seen that's the one from from the eyes of the kid who's on

the battlefield it's not even you know a main character right um so so don't do that unless what you are willing to get the ad yeah how should I say unless you're willing for people to just put your book down you got a question on this um I do with promises how in your in larger series yes how do you keep promises between books how do you keep promises between books change people between books and you can't do that by making a promise each book yes you can you can make it the promise each book

but a lot of times it depends on the structure of your story all right a lot of romance novels do this by saying here is an whole family of unmarried young eligible people book one's about the eldest gu what book book two is about right inherent structure you can promise that in your first chapter if you if you do it right so that everyone knows oh it's going to be a seven book series cuz there's seven girls right um and then there's cousins so we're going to keep going um that's how you know if a

series made money if Cousins start getting married I'm joking but it's real um so uh but you can also do that like if you are an established author there is a promise that this is the first of a Trilogy people are picking it up the actual packaging of the book can give you your promise of sort of structure um in the The Wheel of Time Robert Jordan Promises at the end of this book series The Dragon reborn will fight the the dark one he said he'd get there in three books when he pitched it to

Tom dhy I have that straight from Harriet his wife he thought he could do it in three books um and the the first book was going to end with him taking the sword that was not a sword from the stone that's not a stone right if you've read the series that's book three and then it just got longer from there um Discovery writers this is what happens when Discovery writers get series um so um but he made that promise right often times if you have a big series it can be really handy to make one

of the kinds of promises the kinds of promises can be um this is a large Continuing Story and there's something cool at the end it can be here are Seven Sisters it can be these are the continuing Adventures of said character then you just name your series something like the blank and blank files or the blank of Blake you know the Dron files are a great example of this right um then each one is going to be a contained Adventure that's your promise right you can do all of these things but may you be so

lucky as to have to worry about this let's talk about the promises you should be worrying more about right now because you're going to be looking at making a couple of big promises in the beginning of your story and they don't they aren't all in innately obvious the first is you often want to make a tone promise okay a tone promise is separate from the plot promises that you're uh otherwise making what is a tone promise well a tone promise is a way to tell the reader this is the kind of story you're getting into

uh and this is the sort of feel that it's going to have if your story is going to involve a lot of humor you want there to be jokes early on if this is a story about tragedy and it being Grim dark well you start your story with a Viewpoint protagonist who gets beheaded by someone who doesn't want to kill him right Game of Thrones right um right if you want you know you you give a tone promise through descriptions naming your characters the Stark family is a tone promise um that George Martin made in

those books um whereupon if you're going to name your wizard School Hogwarts and the your your Gandalf was name Dumbledore you are giving a promise of Whimsy right uh and things like this the way that you're naming things the way you're introducing your stories um the way you're you're using your Pros in your opening is going to give someone an important promise about what your story is about this is why the prologue became a really big thing in Epic Fantasy because Epic Fantasy wanted to start its plot slow uh Epic Fantasy generally leans on this

sort of um progression fantasy that is you know like a lot of the um a lot of the the lit rpgers do this very explicitly these days um if you don't know what that is it's it's a very popular genre particularly in Indie publishing where you add your characters have like bars of experience bars and level and things like that like they're in a video game um but most epic fantasy is the story of the young nobody who ends up saving the world I wouldn't say most but a large number of the the very popular

ones it's the uh the traditional Heroes Journey sort of thing those stories tend to start with a young person standing and looking up at the Suns and imagining a world Beyond right um but because of that that's not the tone of the whole story the tone of the whole story is we're getting chased by space Wizards and things are exploding so what do these stories do they add a prologue that that is basically there to give you a tone promise we start with the door being blasted off and Laser fire and a dark Samurai coming

through the smoke and you know using magical powers and then we cut to Young idealistic uh every man standing and being like wow what's beyond the stars the answer is space Wizards and lasers but you know that and he doesn't yet um one of the most masterful uses of this is Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time um which is going to start with a young man on a farm and things are going to feel creepy right it does feel creepy but the main story is uh the story of what happens if you get too much power

and you might kill everyone that you love but you need that power to save the world that is the basic premise so what does he do prologue hey there's a person who has all this power but has gone crazy and killed everyone he loves right um you will see this very commonly as one of your ways to make a tone promise uh to the point that it's almost a now so you need to be using it carefully don't do it just cuz it's done do it because your story really benefits from it and be aware

that if there are lots of people doing it then it's harder to stand out doing it that said I did it in Stormlight I didn't in mistborn right um I used that kind of tone promise prologue for different reasons that's why Stormlight has two uh prologues here's one tone for the whole series Melancholy about these people who have been Immortal and things are falling apart next tone promise hey assassinations and Wars um and then you know yeah so what's that yes and then yeah then number three oh the poor kid on the battlefield that's going

to be a that's going to come back isn't it um hey yes I knew why I did each of those prologues but uh but yeah it is a lot it is a lot to swallow um so other reasons things that your promises you're going to make some stories choose and you don't need to do this but some Cho stories choose to do an opening what we call a cold open which is actually what Star Wars is do starting in midor res right at the beginning but they often will do this little mini story at the

beginning and the purpose of this is to say here is our story in microcosm we're going to do it in five 15 pages and then we're going to do it in 150 Pages uh Indiana Jones love to do this right um the first one is really excellent this Indiana Jones cool Adventurer going to overcome trials it's going to be really hard for him but he's going to be he's going to use his wits and his whip uh to overcome these and at the end he's going to lose right that is the opening uh to Indiana

Jones and the Raiders the Lost AR um and then the rest of the movie is the exact same thing done a second time at length in slightly different ways uh you will see this used pretty commonly as your sort of Promise of here's what my story is often when you have a cold open that's what the cold open is for here's our characters pulling a heist so you can know how good they are at pulling Heist and then we're going to use that either H to replicate it or something's going to go wrong with the

next Heist so you knew how it's supposed to go and then this whole story is about how it what happens when it goes wrong um excellent ways to kind of introduce your characters and things like that sometimes your opening does that um a lot of times you want your opening to give you a promise of what the plot of the story is going to be even if you don't do it in microcosm um you want to introduce some metaphor for the main conflict and this is difficult sometimes because sometimes your main conflict won't come until

much later sometimes it will for instance Star War hey it's right up there we need to get the Death Star plans we're going to blow up the Death Star boom in the cold open and in the tone promise you've got it all um sometimes though you don't right like what is Lord of the Rings are we going to find out the plot of Lord of the Rings well it kind of has the mini thing you gather your group of friends it's really hard you get to this place um that's uh Rivendell and then you do

it again and it takes three books that time um but a lot of times your characters like not going to discover what the big problem is until around the end of act three if you're using the ACT structure this is a problem for giving a promise about the plot what do you do well sometimes you just let the tone promise hold handle it sometimes you spend those opening things saying here's the tone of the book here's my character and why you should like them now we'll introduce a problem that is really hard to overcome and

that is fine you don't have to promise all of these things sometimes you try to find a mini way to introduce what the character's conflict or the main conflict might be in that opener uh what am I talking about with these sorts of things well sometimes you will read a book or see a film um where a character is trying to fix a broken down hunk of junk and then you know I mean the Transformers movies do this it's about I need a car Dad car car car oh it's hard I found this car well

the movie is going to be about cars and getting cars and you kind of have this little mini introduction to what the character wants and why they can't have it um and this is really kind of what you're introducing in this opener if you're trying to get to kind of your character promises is what do they want what do they need why can't they have it and you can kind of start there and then throw the capital P plot at them at the at the end of act one as long as your lowercase p plot

kind either gives a promise of tone or is in microcosm some ex some sort of picture small snapshot of the larger picture that is going to become the book this is why all of this can be done pretty easily in retrospect right once you know where you're going you can start making these promises a lot easier so I'm going to go off of promises for a second but I'm going to let you ask me questions first and I'm going to look and see what um yes I think I got to it all yeah um what

about just like skipping the entire first part of your story Al together yeah it's done it's done uh anything can be done and it can be done well right I mean I just referenced Hamlet Hamlet essentially skips of what most people would do it skips act one of this very classic story that I would be willing to bet during Shakespeare's time because this is how Shakespeare worked he had heard that story I mean it's a really common story to be to telling you know the the prince who has to reclaim his kingdom from the person

who over through it through it he' heard that story uh and he chose to skip act one and start uh with act two uh which is weird I'm talking story structure act not playwriting acts which are different in that case right same terminology but they mean different things so this happens all the time you will um you will you've probably seen Min a story Monkey Island too does this um there's a deep cut Monkey Island uh um where you have a character start with some interesting thing happening and then record scratch you're probably wondering how

I got here emperor's new grp right um right and then they tell act one in flashback catching you up to often times the middle of act two or sometimes even the end of act two and then they launch into uh you know that you've probably seen that but there are plenty of stories like Hamlet that just say pick it up from Context we aren't doing act one we're in the middle of a story um in fantasy I would say that the Malazan Book of the Fallen loves to do this just like boom we're going figure

out where we are uh if you can so yeah totally doable um yeah what if you switch between tones back and forth deliberately like from more of a thriller tone to kind of a travel log and then back into a thriller as the story progresses yeah um excellent question what do you want what do you do if you going to be switching between tones your example being a pretty good one of travel log Thriller travel log Thriller um so you can promise both of that at the beginning and I would really suggest that you do

uh you can do anything you don't have to give any promises famously the big breaker of all of these rules is Into the Woods if you haven't uh seen into the woods it like it starts off it's like here's all these people on their adventures and then promises are stomped flat uh when you come back from the intermission goodbyes promises sometimes literally stomp flat um and uh the thing about that is he very cleverly does something we're going to talk about in twists where he makes you want the pro tone to change and and so

often times there's that but with this sort of story you could give it uh you could make promises at the beginning something in microcosm that's like you know this story is about these kinds of things it's always more difficult more difficult things make you grow and if you do them right when you break the rules here's here's kind of a a rule of thumb that you could therefore break I don't know here's a rule of thumb things that break the rules have a harder um a bigger threshold to overcome to grab the readers attention but

once they do they tend to have a stronger and more dedicated following right blandness tends to get fewer dedicated followers um whereas something that is that is doing what it shouldn't but makes it work tends to When It Go gets big tends to to be very big um and this is a reason why for instance there are within some genres um let's use r Rance within romance there are uh some very formulaic stories that people still read and love right but they don't really capture people you read them you dispose of them you read the

next and dispose of them the ones that break the rules a little bit uh it ends with us as a great example of this it's not really a romance novel um but kind of is but kind of isn't suddenly when those take off they can take off really big because they are are standing out they are breaking those rules but they have uh they take more inertia I I always say I'll get to you but I got a question back there after this I always say that books all of them have like these certain red

marks against them right uh and all every great book has a ton of these your job is not to get rid of all the red marks a red mark being something that would make someone put the book down make it harder to get into your job is to get rid of the ones that aren't integral to the piece of art you're making and then you try to rely on the ones that are that that are integral you can't get rid of to be things that also distinguish it way of Kings has three prols what does

way of Kings get from that well it's really hard to get into if you're going to put down the way of Kings you're like most of my books if you read the onear reviews they're very different for the way of Kings the onestar reviews just could not get through the first uh 10 chapters too much going on too many names too many characters and Callin is way too depressed um right uh but because of that I can start really low and go really high I can then World builds so much that when it all clicks

together and you get it it's so distinctive and interesting it's not like anything you've read I'm able to do things with this red mark that you could not do with a book that didn't have it so as long as you are using them to their fullest yes they will break the rules right now to sell in fantasy they say we want $120 ,000 words traditional published wave of Kings is 400 right elrus was 250 when I submitted and I got down to 200 as long as you're earning that 200 then suddenly it becomes does that

make sense so um so yeah uh let's go back here and then up here and then we'll see where we are where there was one back there in the corner and I didn't want to ignore you because it's hard to see so yeah um about promises and like you said that the first two chapters are easy to you know edit after the fact you find your also editing a lot in the middle um keeping up with your promises that you found you made it end well that's more progress we'll talk about progress next so I'm

glad you asked that um I'm not doing as much mostly I'm trying to make the ending and the promise match what is the interesting parts of the middle is really what I'm shooting for but I'm a bad example on this because I generally know my ending so my progress and my ending usually align pretty well it's just nailing the right promise at the beginning is easier after I've actually written that ending all right down here how do you like how do scale with like length store like say like have like a shorter store like for

installment in like athology how does that scale so how to promises scale with length of the story the example being you've got a smaller piece maybe part of Anthology or a short story um so in a short story and maybe we'll try to get Eric in during one of the weeks I'm gone to talk short stories everything just has to be trimmed down but and it also has to be distilled it's not just a matter of writing shorter it's writing in a more distilled way so you still need to hit that promise in some ways

you need to hit it harder it because it does need to be like in your first paragraph in the short story um rather than the fantasy book where you can spend a whole prologue giving us a tone promise and then switch characters just can't do that in a short story right or you could you can do anything but in most short stories I wouldn't recommend it so therefore um what you're trying to do is you're hitting it just really hard in a long story you can do what I did and have three separate chapters doing

three separate promises um right before you even start your book readers will look at the length of your book and they will determine how long they'll give you to start getting around to it based on that length yeah can you and should you make new promises as you progress through this can you and should you make new promises as you progress to the story the answer is yes and yes asteris right uh depends on how long your story is and it tends on depends on what kind of twists you're going for all most stories will

be making new promises you'll be interesting a new charact introducing a new character and you're going to make a promise about that character usually every character is going to have some innate promises attached to them uh usually this is with their character Arc right uh and we'll talk about this in uh probably actually sanderson's Second Law um but the idea is you're going to attach to them flaws handicaps and challenges right uh and you're going to like you know you're going to figure out what you're going to signpost which of those are going to be

overcome which of them are going to be expunged which where the character is going to grow or fail to grow right um and so every characters but each little plot sequence will often have a promise in fact every chapter generally has one uh often times chapters just like unfortunately as frustrating as it is to go back to your high school classes your teacher like thesis paragraph a lot of the best chapters start with a stealth thesis paragraph that introduces what the chapter's going to be about and what you're going to learn and then at the

end we'll have a stinger of a line that indicates you know now you've learned it right but it depends on the type of plot that you have we'll get to that in progress all right where are we um I need to move to progress we're going to move to progress if there's time at the end I'll take more questions but we got we got progress and progress is the most important of them and so save your question and when I do questions at the end after payoffs you can reference back okay but let's talk progress

all right so my notes yes yes NES um so you absolutely control progress in your story to a greater extent than you think it's pretty easy to explain this right uh at any point in your story let's say you're writing a romance you could write he stopped being stupid and so they got together and got married the end at any point you can just write that at any point tolken could have written uh and to Bilbo fell through a wormhole appeared in in midor and dropped the ring into the thing and everyone was saved right

you've maybe read stories where at the ending a writer rushed this a little too much and you felt a little bit like froto had been dropped Through the Wormhole um right uh we call that a deox Machina right um You control time and progress absolutely in your story you as a writer I could give you the challenge right now to say all right you need to spend 50 pages and only one second can pass it would be really boring but you could all do it right you just describe everything in the room uh right and

and then get into philosophy it's in the character head and then you know do a flashback or whatever you can you could you do 50 pages in one second is passed I bet you've read books for feel like that before uh those of you like manga here there's lots of filler uh uh chapters sometimes um yeah so you can also be like and a thousand years past I've read books that use uh structures like this right um You control time you control progress so your job as a writer is not to make things pro uh

progress it is to give a sense of satisfying progression through a story and you do this by deciding a couple of things first is how fast your progress is going to be your short story is going to go faster you're also going to if you're writing say a thriller um you're writing a story where a lot of the opposition is external obstacles to overcome characters got to fight this grab this get to this place right I mean tenant is this um it's almost all external and it's the next problem the next problem next problem those

stories are paced very differently from the story about a character wrestling with whether or not it's right to kill your uncle um you know or how you would kill your uncle and you know if you'd even make a good king or you know H how how awful it is that you're driving your girlfriend and saying like all of this stuff you're wrestling with all this um right that's a that has a very different pacing you're going to decide kind of how your pacing is and it's nice to match it to your story and to your

own natural writing style so how fast you want to go the most important thing you'll probably decide is what kinds of progress you're going to make and how you're going to signpost that to the reader so this is a little bit of a hard one to explain so give me some time on this there are lots of different types of progress you can make in a story and you want to generally match that to what your climax is going to be for instance if you are telling what is basically a mystery plot which doesn't mean

you're writing a mystery but you're plot is based around characters lacking information and needing to find this in information and your ending you're going to in is going to involve a big informational reveal the mystery uh story is obviously the best example of this right uh who done it we have a murder we know somebody did it we don't know who it is the detective is going to over time sort through and discover Clues and at the end reveal who did it information style plot right a lot of stories have Mysteries built into them in

these cases your progress is measured by information what Clues have been given what suspects have been discovered and which ones have been eliminated you therefore often want to find ways to signpost that progress is being made you can do this in a lot of ways if it's a mystery the detective is saying I've almost got this I feel like I'm so close uh you will watch a lot of mystery stories do this we're getting closer we're almost there we need but one more piece Watson um right and there are these signposts that are saying you

are making you are you were getting there and you are at the same time giving this information to the reader a relationship plot which buddy cop movies and romantic comedies follow the same structure for these right um it's just whether there's a fist bump or a kiss at the end um in these sorts of stories what you're going to be doing is the relationship is going to be making progress you're going to start off with the with a very clear indication these people do not get along and then you're going to show ways that they

do but then there's going to be back steps occasionally but then you're going to through the course of the story be like wow these two people work better together than they ever did a part they are filling holes in each other's lives and so when they finally get together that's your Climax and I the the trick with this is stories often have multiples of these going on at the same time that are different things and identifying which is the most important to your story and therefore the key component to your ending is actually really important

Guardians of the Galaxy is ostensibly an adventure story about get the McGuffin and prevent the world from ending but the real story is can these people work together and almost everything that is not an action scene and even some of the action scenes is a relationship plot and so that movie really cleverly has its climactic moment being where the main character who's refused to take his mom's hand when she wanted to give him a hug when she was dying takes the hand of his friends and they all take each other's hands and then together that

you know with a dance battle is what beats the bad guy right it is not necessarily that you know the McGuffin beats the bad guy it is literally the power of friendship that defeats the bad guy and that when a plot really works it that what happens and to do this what gets really tricky is you sometimes have to identify the difference between kind of the trappings of your story and your a plot and your B plot and what people are going to think they are Guardians is a great example people like ostensively your big

p plot is actually get the McGuffin chase down the McGuffin get them in the guffin clear our names um to prevent the world from being destroyed but the actual little PE plot is character um is a is can we get along can we become friends uh and so you're going to have multiples of these and usually want to pay them off alt together you just kind of have to decide what your soul of your story is uh the longer your story The more souls of your story that you can have and often you can introduce

things like this have a whole Arc about people you know becoming friends and then go into act three and solve the McGuffin problem uh guardians of galaxy doesn't do this doesn't WR on top of each other but you can do things like that you've probably read stories where for instance Moana Moana has a you know a a subarc for Maui in the middle of it uh it's handled that's a really good movie but it's handled kind of clunkily with Maui's return but they're trying to do this right they're trying to have like we're not going

to do this at the main climax just right before it so Maui has his character climax at and comes back uh and things like this so figuring out and identifying what your various plots are and how you're going to make them all have a sense of progress is really vital I think uh for making a story work a page Turner is usually a story that really understands progress and how to dull it out a boring book when people get you know when you don't write it on purpose like I did um I th those who

aren't laughing I literally released a book called the most boring book ever last year um it was a kid's book though um um where a a book that people like boring or I got lost usually the signpost of progress are not there now a big reason the signpost of progress cannot be there is that you gave someone a really interesting promise and then you as a writer got really interested in something else and you have a giant subplot going somewhere else that doesn't seem to advance the main story The Last not yeah the Last Jedi

does this um as a film um you know Last Jedi does this and so what happens is Finn as a character has been introduced to us in the first movie and then reintroduced to us in the second movie as a guy who cares about his friend Ray and really wants to go find her and help her and then the plot says you know I did promise that but what if you let some horses Go free what if you really needed to learn that horses should be free and Finn's like uh my friend Ray the fate

of the universe uh Luke Skywalker blah blah I want to go to my friend Ray and the plot's like H but those horses um and not everyone had this experience but it was a lot of people and it was the experience I had like why are we here what are we doing I am not feeling that this is progressing the promises made to me by this story and so whatever is interesting happening there we don't invest in I had this problem in oathbringer um where I'll try to explain it without giving too many spoilers I

had a plot I'm going to draw on the board for you a little harder to draw on the board in this uh in this one um all right oh I'm supposed to use black because the uh the camera can pick it up better so you all know to take your quiz it's already passed right no no no no it's 7:45 not 845 yeah it's all passed you all fail so sorry come back next year um so I had a story where characters were right here and I needed that knew they needed to be right there

right characters all are kind of set a drift they don't know what they're doing they're in a new environment um they land here and um they all are like well if we can get to this place then we can get out of here and so they all make a plan to go to this place and then I have them going there and then they get diverted by something and then they get diverted and who they end up where I knew they needed to be all along readers were so bored with this plot right which was

shocking to me because the new environment that i' put them in I'd done a lot of World building the sort of things that make my stories Pop I had put in there this is why we will talk about it World building is actually the least important of the three it is I'm sorry great world building with a bad characters and Bad plot is an encyclop IIA right great characters and great plot with a bad with bad World building is still often an excellent book you can probably name them the fact that time termers break the

entire universe of Harry Potter wide open does not prevent that from being the strongest book in the entire Series right right amen so World building is important don't get me wrong you ideally want to do all three but really great world building cannot save a sequence where you have said hey people need to go to uh point B and then you send them to point C because the whole time the readers will be thinking this is a side quest and we are being diverted from our story until we start heading toward point B where we'll

be making progress again because we are making no progress I will not invest in this plot cycle because it doesn't seem like it means anything my solution was actually pretty easy my solution was to have the primary Viewpoint protagonist of this um right near the beginning be put in conflict with the rest of the group because he's been told by a source that he believes that if he doesn't get to Point C someone he loves will die and he believes that so strongly and he's the main character we're seeing Through The Eyes of right here

or at least one of them that Suddenly It's a it's like oh are we supposed to go to B or C oh I think we need to get to C because the consequences of not getting to see if this character is Right are really really really dire so even though he's in conflict with them it works and suddenly that little change and suddenly the whole plot sequence worked in the next group of readers nobody had problems everybody was enjoying it all the things that I wanted to have happen uh on wanted to be enjoyed were

enjoyed this such little changes and Promises you see how I whoever asked you want to make promises I made another promise in the middle of the story promise is if you don't get here something bad will happen um and so he needs to get there and so you can see how just little diversions with really interesting things can end up not working if you don't understand progress payoff most of the time not all the time most of the time if a book is boring or if people people aren't investing in a sequence that you thought

they should invest in you have made a misalignment of progress and promise how consistent should we be with ping throughout the book uh it depends on your own personal style how question is how consistent should you be on pacing um it really really depends right generally if you want to use Thriller pacing which is you're going to write short chapters you're going to try to put a hook at the end of every one of them or at least most of them um Dan Brown is pretty good at this for all his faults he's really good

at this and that's part of what made that dent code work um is that short chapters with a hook at the end of each one and a lot of external conflict can really Propel a story but they run out in my experience right around 70,000 words and if you're not going right into the climax then you start to lose people uh so it works really great for a story that's 90 to 100,000 words long really hard to keep that up for too long because you generally in a book want um you want slowdowns in pacing

for the reader to get a breather for the characters to get a breather and for you to kind of come to um come to you know process what's been discovered so that then you can ramp it back up because variation is noticeable and lack of variation creates sort of a um a sense that you're coasting along and it starts to lose its impact if every sentence is a one sentence Zinger then none of them right what's that syndrome said if everyone has superpowers nobody does or something like that right um and it yeah if everyone's

super nobody is yeah there you are uh sorry Brad Bird uh misquoting you um so there is an example of why you would want to do both but if you can keep it up like a lot of things people like this is an absolute page term it's 80 to 100,000 words of just Relentless plotting that you're supposed to read in one sitting and not sit and not stop I don't do that in The Stormlight Archive um right um I did it a little bit in wind and Truth uh which is why the pacing feels different

in wind and Truth um than it does in other books uh so it's really kind of up to you um what you want to do with this generally no you don't want the same pacing through uh a book generally you want to change pacing and have breathers and things like this it's up to you um some books are just really slow the whole time um and that's just the author's writing style right so yeah excellent question go ahead yeah how do you deal with uh speeding up progress when you want to the characters to get

to a destination but you don't want to like take time with the traveling right how do you speed up progress when you want to um not have to take time traveling I would give a mini promise early in your book that sometimes you're just going to time Jump um and then just time Jump just say and then they arrived uh and you can do this pretty easily um like if you're having problems with people being like Oh it feels like I missed too much end part one with and then start part two with them having

arrived stuff like this like actual structural physicality breaks like if you break a chapter and then say 3 weeks later so much easier for a reader than if you try to in the middle of a chapter say and 3 weeks P that said uh Joe Rowling does it all the time in Harry Potter and three weeks passed and it was Christmas time now um and so you I don't think you have to worry about this as much as you think you do as long as you've kind of established early on um that you're going to

you know like if you even have one chapter that says at the end of chapter 2 and then chapter 3 is like 3 Days Later X you've already established this as a pattern uh and nobody should ever have a with um you know at sometimes you even do it right at the end of a chapter you're like over the next 3 days um she kept worrying that something was going to happen but at last they crested the hill and saw boom and you've done it in a paragraph so yeah uh back here and then we'll

do some of you up here so you said that proper pacing proper progress sign posting yeah but you also warned against not making promises your so is I guess is the key to a good plot twist proper sign posting uh so we'll talk about plot twists and payoff in a second but yes that's part of it the real good thing of the the secret to proper twists is generally to promise someone something and then make them wish you'd promis something else all right uh so to explain this we'll we'll do some others but do to

explain this since the question is here I imagine twists working like you have given some you promised someone a gift for Christmas and you you you say I do you like toy cars I'm going to get you a toy car and then you put a package under the Christmas tree and the twist is what do they actually open plenty of you've got yeah plenty of stories give you a toy car and there is nothing wrong with that right one of the greatest books of all time is Pride and Prejudice what is the first line of

Pride and Prejudice truth univers single yeah first line is this is a book about someone getting married right and then oh twist nope there's no twist they get married right there's complications and escalations which are different from twist and equally important in fact even even more important you do not have to have a Twist however if you want a Twist as was uh guessed earlier here one of the things you can do is you can escalate you can over uh over um deliver you promised a a toy card you give them a real car right

but one of the classic twists is you say I'm going to get you a toy car they're like heay and then through the course of the story you show them how cool planes are to the point that they're like I I'm going to get a toy car but boy I wish I was getting a toy plane and then you give them a toy plane um I usually use an example the the movie While You Were Sleeping I'm going to spoil while you were sleeping I'm sorry okay yeah it's a fantastic film that uses twist perfectly

in this sort of style it's a romance woman is like dreaming seeing this guy pass through her toll booth cuz she works it like a toll booth on the freeway and thinking that's the guy someday I'd like Mary and she blah blah blah blah blah and then like he gets in a car wreck and she's there and she like helps him and he wakes up and she tells a lie cuz she's like oh I'm his girlfriend but not really meaning to tell that lie she just was you know dreaming it or I'm his fiance and

then everyone's like he had a secret fiance oh no she's like oh no now everyone thinks I'm his fiance I don't want to let them down uh hi Jinx and Sue right and so this story is about oh I'm pretending to be his fiance cuz he's lost his memory and things like that or he's in a coma and then he's like whatever right um in the meantime while he's in a coma uh Slash wakes up and his lost his memory because there's your escalation right rather than a Twist it's escalation what what's going to happen

when he wakes up and the LIE becomes revealed oh he doesn't remember I had a fiance oh wow she's pretty oh that's good uh right like I'm glad my secret fiance is Sandra Bullock um right um in the meantime through the whole time uh this is this is not uncommon right I think the Wedding Singer does the same thing uh she's been hanging out with his brother and falling in love with his brother that's the airplane right you find out they match each other really well and she doesn't actually match this other guy at all

even though you were promised a toy car in scene one you through the course of the film really come to want a toy plane and then of course the ending is she ends up with the plane with the brother right um right she the hinks continue to ensue until they you know go to comical and ridiculous well they start at comical in ridiculous proportions they blow go further than that and then boom the the the wrap up and the twist is you get your plane it's pretty well sign poost that you're getting your plane but

there are plenty of books that do this uh more subtly um not that while you're sleeping is bad for not doing it subtly it's a really excellent story um but you can do that more subtly so that the twist is oh wow this is what I always wanted and this is actually the secret to why uh into of the woods Works um cuz into the woods shows you idealic fairy tales in the beginning and then starts to put cracks in them so that you start to not necessarily want the fairy tale ending and then boom

second act happens and everything gets smashed to split uh splintering but then it's rebuilt as something better so that it ends up working it's a really gutsy move and a lot of people really dislike into the woods for that reason like my mom does not like into the woods she's just like give me a fairy tale that's what you promised you lied to me sonheim I'm never watching any your plays again mostly CU they're about people eating other people or assassinating people and then there's Westside Story but um she'll watch that one um sorry does

that make sense um yeah what how much time we got we got five minutes okay all right let's we got do promises write your questions in here let's just do payoffs for a little little bit uh I've already done the most important one which is what do you do with twists right um but payoffs are really just um giving people a surprising yet inevitable fulfillment of your promises you make it surprising through a couple of ways one is the twist but usually what you do to make it surprising is you give them plausible deniability you

make them believe that it won't happen and most stories get a lot of mileage out of this um right like a ton of mileage out of making the story work so well that you worry you wonder the if the character you're like oh is the character actually going to succeed you know we we were pretty sure that froo is going to succeed and that the the world is not going to end but then when he get get uh gets uh stung by sheab and dies you're like wait wait maybe Frodo won't maybe Sam will have

to do this all by himself that's horrifying right escalation um and then we get Frodo back um but then froto collapses uh then Sam has to carry him right like things like this like you keep getting these obstacles escalations and through obstacles escalations and the last one being red herrings you man to make people think that they aren't going to get what you promis them then you do anyway that is your basic that's what you generally do the twist works really well also um sometimes your surprising yet inevitable um is built around this idea that

as you're going through your story you forget the promise right my favorite of The Lord of the Rings films is the second film where the promise is right the end look for me on the morning of the fifth day right and this is a beautiful sequence and this will kind of be where I'll wrap up I love the second movie and I like the third movie I like the Thro of s part but the Battle of Helms Deep versus the Min turth battle um they work on very different axes it's all about promises right in

the Min turth battle in the third film uh because the plays out slightly differently in the books so I use the films um because they make a better object lesson um and this is in the third film minus terth They're Up Against All Odds they are going to be destroyed and the promise is if they don't you know fight this off themselves they will fail this is their last resort and then they fight and they're really strong and they can't do it and then Aragorn shows up and saves them in the second film it's the

same thing they're in this the this Bastion it's their last resort if they don't win this they're all going to die and then Gandalf shows up and saves them the difference in these plot Cycles is promises in the second film Gandalf says look for me on the morning of the fifth day and Peter Jackson very expertly uses it what's it it's what it's uh um it's uh what's his name um the is it Yer yeah it's no yeah it's y y yeah I was gonna say fman it's not F it's Yer um and I was

gonna say oh it's a it's um it's it's bones but it's not bones it's yr because he's in a different movie um um but we very expertly has them leave it doesn't work this way in the books but he expert has them leave so you have hanging on the mantle there this idea of oh there's an army out there that was faithful to the king until the king pushed them too far and left and you have Gandalf saying look for me on the morning of the 5ifth day I still wish it were the third day

for mythological reasons right right morning of the third day the sunrise anyway um but it's it's the morning of the fifth day I went looked I'm like oh you you missed out could have been third um um because anyway through the course of how awful that fighting is awful in a good way and how dark everything gets you forget like Aragorn and gimbley and legal Los forget that gandal has promised because it's so dark and they're at their last stand and they're going out to die and then Gandalf shows up and it's just brilliant and

wonderful and you love it because you remember and they give a voice Stinger remember if you can do that you don't need a Twist you can just make us Forget by making it so dark that when the light comes back and The Sun Shines and the Orcs are like oh we can't see because Gandalf might have magic we're not sure um and they get ridden down and they're saved you're like cheering whereas when Aragon shows up the ghosts I don't know if you guys have that I'm like oh good the ghosts are there I'm glad

they didn't die but I'm not cheering right ghosts did all the work they should have just everyone should have hid and waited for the ghosts um and then the second one you're like ah they had to fight every inch of the ground they gave up so that they could last long enough for gandal to show up and that's what promis progress and payoff mean is making this work so that you have when these work people cheer this people get cheer chills the story just is magical for a minute when this works and when it doesn't

well you have other things that can carry your story but I really like this in plotting and so that's why I talk about it next week we'll talk about actual plot Frameworks and strategies thank you guys so [Applause] much e