Lecture #4: Viewpoint and Q&A — Brandon Sanderson on Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy

All right, guys, today writer going to answer questions. Yay! CLASS: Yay! The things that you guys have written down for me about plot we're going to talk over, and then if I get bored of that we'll do maybe a short lecture, maybe not. It depends on how bored of answering your questions that I get. I'm just going to go down this list that my assistant has given me, and I'm going to cherry pick some questions. If you have other questions about plot you want to throw at me if we don't get to yours, we will

do for questions from the audience today as well. "How long is too long for introductions?" Is the first question. This an interesting question because, like most writing questions the answer is "it depends" on a lot of factors. Novels are not like screenplays where it's very easy to pinpoint the number of pages you should spend doing a given thing because a novel's length is going to vary wildly and your structure is going to vary wildly, depending on your own preferences and the genre you're writing in. While you can a screenplay format book that's going to be

like, "On page 6 you should have done this," I can't tell you that for your novel. I can tell you this. You generally want to go a little faster into it that you are comfortable as a new writer. The sooner you can introduce the tone of your story and your character's main conflict, maybe not the main conflict of the plot, but how the character is going to relate to it, the better off you're going to be. What you want to really do is you want to sell us on being in this character's head, and that

is your-- if you can do nothing but sell us on the character's personality in the first couple of chapters, you can coast a long way on that in a novel. This will also depend on your genre. And, unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, how famous you are. Let me explain. Readers going into a book are going to come into it willing to give you a certain amount of leeway. If they have read previous books by you that have had excellent payoffs by the end of that book, then they will give you longer to establish your introduction because

they know that the payoff will be worth it. This is the advantage you get when you release a number of books, and it's why I can get away with Way of Kings more easily than you could get away with Way of Kings. I still would recommend you follow your passion for telling the type of story you want to tell, even if it is something like Way of Kings that is going to have a steeper learning curve. Do your thing. But understand, there's this way I talk about stories and people picking up stories. It's like, every

reader has a certain number of, like a threshold of crap they'll let an author get away with. Everyone's threshold is different, and the things they count as crap that they have to let the author get away with is different based on the individual. For instance, some readers might pick up a book like this and that's immediately, "All right, I'm skeptical, Sanderson. I have read big books like this before that have meandered a ton and then haven't had a good payoff. And because that's my experience, that's crap that is going against your stuff I have to

put up with." You already have basically a red mark against you. Other people pick up that book and go, "Oh, I've had wonderful experiences with big books. It is way cheaper on my pocketbook to buy this with an Audible credit instead of this with an Audible credit. Same price. One gives me 9 hours. One gives me 55 hours." If you want to know why Oathbringer was the single most preordered book in the history of Audible, 55 hours. You can see how that reader desire and expectation plays into giving you a red mark, or maybe a

green mark? Something like that. Readers all have different thresholds here. But generally, you want to have as few red marks as possible for the story you want to tell. The story you want to tell is more important than getting rid of all red marks. If you try to get rid of all potential red marks that anyone could have against your book, your book will probably turn out to be bland and uninteresting and nobody will love it. So you're going to have to take risks. You're going to have to do some things that are going to

turn off some readers, but then are going to become selling points to other readers. That's why we have genre sections in bookstores, because certain people, "That corner of Barnes & Noble is the danger zone of nerddom and I will never walk over there," and others are for sure like, "Okay, where's the sci-fi section? Here." That doesn't mean that we wouldn't enjoy other types of stories, but we have enjoyed enough stories in the past of this sort of thing, that being sci-fi/fantasy immediately gives us more of this green mark, so to speak. It gives us more

threshold. We're like more willing to buy in. This is a long way of saying how long is your introduction. Make it as short as possible to achieve your goals for the type of story you're telling. Get as soon as possible into the main characters head, the main characters conflict, and the proper tone of your story, as soon as is possible for the type of story you want to tell. You will rarely ever get feedback that, "Your book started off too explosively and too interestingly, and I was too interested in the character." Never going to get

that feedback. You might get feedback that they're like, "It progressed so quickly I didn't have time to get to know the character, and I got whiplash," or things like that. That can totally happen. "How do you reverse engineer good stories to rob them for their parts?" And another question from the next week's was, "Can you give us a big master list of all the plot archetypes that are out there? Pretty please?" There were a bunch of you that wanted this. I can't. Because I haven't been able to find one. Because I'm not sure how if

people-- I know a lot of people-- I share this story about Joe Russo because I'm like, okay, I know other people do this. I met someone else that does it, that is able to describe this way. I'm sure there are lots of people out there that do this, but I don't think anyone's made a list. If you look for "What are the basic stories?" They will boil it down a little too far, and you'll end up with rags to riches, that plot archetype, which is fine. But rags to riches, they're “Here are the seven stories.”

I don't want the seven stories. I want the 200 stories that are very commonly used that you can adapt and create a framework. I have not found anyone who has a good list of that. But Writing Excuses Elemental Genres season, which I think is Season 11, we spend all of that year breaking down Brandon's philosophy on this story structure thing, and we look at something like, here's a thriller type of plot, here's how you build one of these, and here are some examples. And that might be your answer in long form. I don't have just

a list of them, I'm afraid. Start making your own list. When you go and you watch a movie. The Marvel movies are actually really good for this. Because the Marvel movies are all superhero movies, but one of the things that they have done is they've said, "Well, we're going to make each of them a different genre of film." For instance, Captain America, The Winter Soldier is a spy thriller. It's hits all the beats of what a spy thriller is, and you can compare that to several of the Mission Impossibles and to other spy thrillers and

be like, all right, spy thriller type thing. Whereas the Ant Man films are comedic heists. And you can be like, oh here are the heist beats for a kind of comedic small crew heist, as opposed to a large crew heist. You can just kind of look at each of those and be like, all right, here's Thor. It's our epic fantasy. Here is this-- you just start splitting them up. But start watching the movies you watch in a different way. Start reading the books you read in a different way. Say, can I boil this down to

some similar themes and similar plot archetypes of others and build your own. Because I don't think there's one out there that covers all of these types of things the way that we would want, or at least the way that I like to talk about them. Let's see. "How can I more effectively nest plots? How do you keep those from feeling like diversions?" There were a number of questions along the lines of how do I make sure that my subplots don't feel like diversions, or that they're interesting to the reader, and how do I nest these

things properly? Really good question, because this is something that is hard to do. You might notice sometimes that you see a film and you'll feel like, "This portion is just a bunch of characters spinning their wheels and not accomplishing anything, and I felt bored by that side quest that they were sent on." How do you make the side quest relevant to the main story? How do you make multiple characters plot lines relevant? One thing I'll warn you of is that readers will generally pick their favorites out of a cast of characters. I've found that generally

they will gravitate and pick a least favorite, a most favorite, and a "I don't care" if there's like three. But there always seems to be this balance of "This is my favorite." And the further you write in your book, the more that that weight will actually, a lot of readers will just kind of pick up momentum on that. "Oh, this is the character I don't want to read as much." It becomes kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is one of the dangers of large, multi-viewpoint books. Of course, the advantage you gets is the variety is

itself a big green checkmark for a lot of readers, where they would rather read even some characters they're not as interested in occasionally to keep the story having a lot of variety and to have the epic scope, which is why we often like to write these big epics. But I will warn you, sometimes that's going to happen, and sometimes it's inevitable. At least, if it's not inevitable, I haven't yet found the method of making a large cast dynamic with multiple viewpoints that people don't start polarizing about their favorites as they compare them. Perhaps there is

a way to do it that I haven't figured out yet. But, how do you make your side plots relevant? Well, there are a couple of ways to do this. One of them is to make sure that we are really invested and engaged by the viewpoint characters and we understand their motivations. Not to pile on The Last Jedi, because there are a lot of good things about that film. I'm impressed with a lot of what Ryan Johnson was trying to do in that film. But one of the things that a lot of people say is, the

plot with Finn and Rose felt very-- it didn't connect with a lot of people in the same way. This might have to do with promises and connecting to the character. For instance, Finn is introduced in the movie in a way that, if you haven't seen it, this is a character who had an interesting relationship with another character in the first movie, and then is introduced in the next movie saying, "I need to get to my friend and I need to help my friend." And instead of doing that, the story sends him on a side quest.

This is very much the same problem I had in the original draft of Oathbringer, where I say, here is your promise. This character's really interested in X, and all the characters are really interested in going to X, and then I sent them to Y. And the initial draft everyone's like, yeah, but this is the side quest. I know this is the side quest. When are we going to get to what you've told me was the main story? So Finn coming out and saying, "I need to get to Rey, my friend, and help her some way,"

but somehow ends up on this wacky adventure riding horses and things, where all the while you're been keyed in your head to be like, "Yeah, but--" Even though after that introduction they did work to try and establish why this side quest was important, it just felt like the character wasn't achieving his motivations, and we were not invested in what the character was doing to the extent that we wanted to be. We were really invested in the A plot of that movie, a lot of people were, and then the B plot of the movie seemed like

it was going to be involved and then wasn't. It's hard to pick apart why something like this, a very successful movie is not something I want to sit and bag on, but I look at that and think there's a lesson there in making sure when you are doing these subplots with your side characters, make sure the reader is invested and wanting to see more of that character, or at least that their character arc is going to be engaging and interesting. Make sure you're making right promises for that character, and the showing progress upon the thing

you promised the reader that you were going to get. You use all the same sort of tools you use for the main plot line on this side character. And then it is usually really handy to start showing how this is going to combine to the main story, how it's relevant to the main story in some way. Now, this isn't an absolute must. Particularly in a lot of epic fantasies, you start with, here are four characters in different parts of the world, and they're doing their own thing, and you're not quite sure how they connect until

at the end of the first book and maybe not even until later volumes, and in that case you have to treat them each like their own book, rather than side quests, which means do all the things that you're doing with the other characters. Make sure people are invested, that you have progress, that you have plotting and these sorts of things. If you do your job right, people will be invested in that character to the point that it won't feel like a deviation from the main plot. It will feel like its own secondary plot. Those are

separate from the stories where all the characters are together, and you want to start to express subthemes and subcharacters. This sort of thing just kind of comes down to making sure you're keeping a good balance. It's much easier if all your characters are in the same place. The reader's going to give you a ton more leeway if your characters are all together, at least at the start of the story. Guardians of the Galaxy, the second Guardians of the Galaxy movie, is a good example of giving a lot of subplots to a lot of different characters,

and introducing them all while they're together, and then some of them split off a little bit. But the idea is you're invested in this whole, and you're invested in the story, and then because so many of them are together for so much of it, taking a little bit of time away to find out why this character's this, or why this character's that, and then wrapping up those arcs, can feel very satisfying when everybody kind of has their own little mini arc through the course of the story. You have an advantage over a filmmaker in that

you have way more pages to play with. You can take a chapter or two now and then for a side character, and particularly if they're all on the same place on the same quest, and you're still like-- What you want to do is you'll be like, "We're going to see through Character D's eyes for this chapter. And this character's perspective on what we're doing as we go on our quest is going to add a new and interesting view of this quest, and we're going to see they have this subplot where they are in love with

this other character, and they haven't expressed it openly." And you say, "Oh, that's really cool." But you also still get the main plot progressing. Because say they're on a travelogue. They arrive at this next place. You're still progressing your main plot while showing the world through a different character's eyes. Way easier in that case than if you split them up. But, like I said, if you do your job right, if you treat them all as when you're in their eyes, they are the protagonist of their own story, then you're going to be much-- you're not

going to have problems with this as much as you might think. "Sometimes twists can be cliché, because some writers just write twists for twists' sake. How can I avoid that?" Excellent question. And this is a relevant thing to be asking yourself and to be thinking about. Early in my career, particularly when I was unpublished but getting really close to being published, I started to find that I was doing this, that I'm like, "There aren't enough twists in this book. I'm going to put in more." I had to step back and start asking myself why. What

emotion is this twist adding? What is the purpose of it? There are totally valid purposes for twists. When, early in a book, when you kill of a main character in a way that is unexpected, it can add tension for the rest of the story and the rest of the series. Game of Thrones did this and earned a huge amount of sort of tension-building ability by giving the idea that main characters were not safe from being killed, and in fact, it became the big selling point for the series, is it's a series where characters are not

protected from the consequences of their actions, which is why many people were upset later in the series when it started to seem like people were being protected from the consequence of their actions. It became the selling point. So that twist, the idea of taking the reader's expectations and turning them against the reader, that subversion, serves a real purpose in that story. You can ask yourself what does this subversion mean. But let me tell you a story I often relate in this class that I haven't done this year yet. This is about, so forgive me if

you've heard this story, I have a friend who released a first book around the same time that I did. Mine really took off and this friend's book series just did not take off on the same level. One time we were sitting and chatting, and I had read some of this book but had decided pretty early on it just wasn't a book for me. It was not poorly written. It was a perfectly acceptable book. But it just didn't quite work for me. He was asking, "So why was that?" I'm like, "Well, it felt like a very

kind of standard quest fantasy, a very Terry Brooks-esque standard quest fantasy. I really enjoyed those when I was younger and read a bunch of them, but I'm, as a reader, just kind of bored of that story. I've read it enough times that I just don't want to read it anymore. I've heard a lot of feedback from people about this same idea." And he said, "But that's the thing. About the three-quarter mark you realize that it isn't a standard quest fantasy. It turns everything on its head. It inverts all of those tropes, and it undermines everything

you've been thinking. It does this really cool new direction for the story." Now, I didn't get there, so I can't speak to whether this is true or not. But it set me thinking a lot about this idea of subverting expectations and twists as stories go. His book seems a perfect example of why simply subverting expectations is not itself necessarily a virtue. This is because if you wanted a classic quest Terry Brooks fantasy and you read this book, what is your reaction likely to be? "Hey, you gave me three quarters of the book full of promises

of a certain style, and I'm the person that wanted that, and then you took it away from me at the end." Now, if you're a person who loves subverted expectations, and you love the idea of taking classic tropes and twisting them and mangling them, what happens to you? What's your response to this book? “I don't get to the part that I would enjoy, because I'm bored by the first three quarters of it.” So whether or not the book actually did this, this is an interesting object lesson, I think, for you to take, where not fulfilling

on your promises is not a virtue. Now, if you can do a subversion in a way that gives the reader more than they expected, better than they expected, or if you spent a lot of time convincing them they actually want something else, then you give them that, then those subversions all work. And if you can use a subversion to expand the reader's desire to see more, if you can expand on a character-- The classic example of this is at the end of the second Star Wars movie, well, the fifth, you know what I mean, Empire

Strikes Back, when we find out that Darth Vader is Luke's father. Now, this was not necessarily something we were wanting. So you could say, "Well, this wasn't promised," though it kind of was because you had foreshadowing with the cutting off of Vader's head and there's Luke's face in it during the training. So there are those little clues. But you could say, "No, no. I wasn't getting into this story to have a huge reveal at the end. So why does that work when this other he pulled the rug out from underneath doesn't?" T he reason mainly

being is this story is about Luke's quest. It's about his journey as a character. This thing at the end lends us huge investment in his character as it develops. You knew something was going to go wrong, because you don't have the main character ignore Yoda and have it turn out all right. Like, that is totally set up. So you knew something. You were prepped. You have this dangerous scene where he's training with Yoda. He disobeys his master. He goes off. Everything's going wrong, and you know that the other show is going to drop. You've been

promised that. You're really kind of wanting it, right? You're wanting, "Oh, Luke better pay for this." Then he finds out about this whole thing, and it's earthshaking, and it's incredible, and it expands your understanding of the character. It introduced new conflict that's going to be really interesting into this relationship. It is not so much a subversion, though it is slightly, as a really great escalation of the conflict. So try to do that if you can. Escalate instead of completely undermine. All right. "Will Spensa and Jorgen ever get ma-a-a-ried?" with lots of i's. “Can a story

be sort of episodic and still keep you turning the page?” Yes, you absolutely can. A story can be episodic and keep you turning the page. Most of the time, the secret to episodic page turners is to have a good hook at the end of your episode to promise what the next episode's going to be and make that really interesting. One of my personal philosophies is, if you're going to do this, there are two ways that you can give a twist hook ending to a chapter or an episode of something you're doing. One is to say,

she went to the door. The knock came to the door. She went to it and opened the door and-- cut. This is kind of a classic mystery formula hook at the end. Then you turn the page to find out who's at the door. You can do those. It's kind of a dirty trick, but we do dirty tricks in writing all the time. If you can instead have her open the door and it is her father that she thought was dead, and then cut, that is a better hook. Because that hook only works if you have

properly set up who the character is so the reader can infer what this twist means. Those twists at the end of episodes are going to be just far better, far, far better if you can come up with them. The problem with the open-the-door-and, you have probably read books like this, if you haven't, you probably actually have and you didn't notice, a lot of them is they open the door and-- start the next chapter, it was the pizza delivery person. They got pizza. I'm exaggerating, but a lot of times authors know to put this sort of

hook at the end of a chapter or the end of an episode, but they don't actually know how to make the next thing interesting, so they use the cheap trick to get you to turn the page, but once you've read another age you're kind of committed to another chapter, and so you keep reading. Avoid those if you can, and instead make them legitimate moments of crisis or curiosity to the reader to get them to turn to the next episode. That is how you get a page turner out of something episodic. Television does this a lot.

This is main television format, is to try to give you a stinger at the end of an episode to bring you back next week. Again, some of those are dirty tricks, and some of them I don't like, but you can learn a lot from that method. So if you are writing something episodic, looking at great episodic works like some of the better television shows, will teach you how to do this. But yeah, you can have page turners. Then after that point, once they turn that page, you're over the big hump. The big hump is, will

this start the next episode? Because once they do, you have a chance to hook them with character, with conflict, and with your expert storytelling again, and keep ahold of them. All right. Let's see. Hmm, that's a spoiler. “Is there always a twist?” There does not always have to be a twist. Now, it depends on your definition of a twist. They're usually, in fact almost all cases, it should be an escalation. An escalation does not have to be a twist, but it usually fills the same role as a twist. An escalation is when things get worse.

The status quo has changed, but it is changing in the wrong direction. This is why most romantic comedies, even though you know they're going to get together, everyone knows they're going to get together, has a breakup scene somewhere around the three-quarter mark of the story. You could call this a twist, and it can happen because of a twist. But a lot of times it's just the two characters' personalities. You've seen the thorns all along. Remember how I told you about Dave braiding roses? You've seen the thorns, and you've started braiding them, but right near the

end two thorns just jab into each other. You knew it was possible. You were kind of waiting for it. It does, and now, oh, no! Everything's gotten worse because she knows the worst thing about him, and he knows the worst thing about her. This can be handled very expertly. It can be handled very poorly. I'm sure you have seen both. But the idea is, there is an escalation. Problems are being introduced, more obstacles. Things are getting worse. Like I said, those fill the same function. A twist should generally fill one of those same sort of

functions. When the twist happens it should escalate the problem. It should make you reassess goals. It should make you look at the story in a different way and in hopefully a way that makes the reader more excited and more interesting. Discovering that Luke is Darth Vader's father is a great escalation twist. Yeah, backwards, yeah. Eh, you know, it's Lucas. Who knows? But yes, Darth Vader is Luke's father, that's a great escalation because these two characters are already in conflict. The story has been introduced that they're going to be in conflict. The story is building to

a confrontation between them, which you now know Luke has lost, and then you are given a twist, which expands the scope of their conflict to new and unforeseen dimensions, that also puts Luke in conflict with his other father, Obi Wan, who now lied to him. So suddenly it's a twist that expands the conflict in beautiful ways. It is the picture-perfect way to manage a twist in your story. Try to make your twists escalate, but you don't have to have them. You can just have the problems mount and mount and mount, and then people overcome them.

Don't, particularly twist endings, get hung up on twist endings too much. Being satisfying is generally better than having a twist. Generally, if you can have your twist also be satisfying, it's going to, in general, be better than either of those two former options. But if the twist makes your ending unsatisfying, then you have to have a very special story for that to work. Can work. It's really hard. I often bring up Into the Woods and things like this, which are stories that are about deconstructing a story and about the reader having a miserable experience in

some ways and enjoying that miserable experience. Those sorts of stories can work with a twist that is not satisfying because there's a kind of native satisfaction in the "Oh, you got me. You got me. I thought I was going to be happy and now I'm sad. And that makes me so happy, but I don't want to talk about it, because I just want to be mad at you." Really tough to pull off, but possible, obviously. "How can I tell if it's my character or my plot that needs to change?" There's a couple different ways for

me to read this. I don't know if I talked to you guys about the idea that a lot of times I think this is building off of the idea that sometimes I am writing a book, and I tend to discovery write my characters, and so they grow to be something that isn't going to fulfill what the plot of the story would indicate. At that point, you kind of reach, as a writer, a crisis moment where you're like, "All right, I've built this cool plot for the character to go on." You discovery writers, you're like, "I

don't do that, so I don't have to worry about this." But maybe you're writing along and you get that sense. The more you write, the more of an instinct you have when things are working and when they're not. This starts to build as you finish multiple novels, or multiple short stories if you're a short story writer. If you haven't finished multiple, you probably don't have this instinct yet. You might think that you do oh, but you don't. Because this comes from a familiarity with your own process and you trying things that have worked in the

past and then finding out they're not working this time. That is different from what is probably happening if you are a new writer and you haven't finished multiple books and stories, which is, you get to the middle, you've never written a middle before, middles are hard, and you get writer's block. That is different from, you finished 8 novels, you are three-quarters of the way through your book, and you know it's not working. You know something is fundamentally broken. All of the things that you have done in the past that have worked, you have tried, and

this time it's not working. Two very different problems. The latter one you can really only figure out by instinct. If you are a newer writer, my recommendation is that most of the time finish the story. Don't stop, even if you think something is fundamentally broken, because the mere act of finishing the story will start to give you the tools to fix that story. The best cure for most writers’ writers block, in my experience, has been to write anyway. Nobody's taking your pen away. No one's unplugged your laptop. When we talk about writer's block it usually

means my subconscious feels something is wrong with this book and I don't know what that thing is that is wrong. Or, my subconscious is terrified about the fact that I don't know where this is going and I feel like I should, so I'm a fraud, and so I can't keep going. As a new writer, those things can be very paralyzing, and all of their cousins that work like that, and the answer to both of them is, remember that your job in writing right now is not to create a perfect book. Maybe you will. Maybe your

Pat Rothfuss and you will write a brilliant first novel. It happens. Harry Potter was a first novel. Thirteen drafts, I think she said, but a first novel. It's possible. But most likely, your job right now in writing is to turn yourself into a person who can write great novels, not writing a great novel, because you just don't have the skill yet to do that. And even if you do, you're probably going to have to revise many, many times, and you need a finished product to do that. The best advice for most new writers is, just

keep writing. Do something. Have something happen. Go ask your roommate, your spouse, your kid, whatever. Say, hey, what should I do? Your kid, they're going to be like, they go play Fortnite. So your characters go play Fortnite, or whatever. Have something, just do something. Even as an established professional who has written a lot, my go-to when I have this feeling that something is wrong is to write anyway and see if it persists across a couple of chapters, because even still, more often than not, writing that chapter the wrong way will put it into my subconscious

and across the next day while I'm thinking about it my brain will say, ah, now that we have a finished broken chapter I can fix that. I have all the tools from studying writing for so long that I can look at something broken and say, you had the wrong viewpoint for this chapter. That's why it's wrong. We need to be in this character's head and make this revelation, which would turn the plot the way that we want it to be going. Nine times out of ten, the next day, I set that chapter aside, I write

a new one, and that one goes in the book, and it works. Even still, once in a while there's a bigger problem than that. This is when I dig out all of the writing tools that I talk about in class, that my friends talk about using, that I see in books on instruction in writing. I say, all right, let's break this down to things like, where are my motivations for my characters? What are my promises? What is my plot archetype and my trajectory? How am I pacing? How am I doing? And I start digging apart

the story and looking for where the problem is using all of these tools. Almost always I then find the solution. Sometimes I don't. I had a book a couple years ago, The Apocalypse Guard. I still don't know how to fix it. I could identify that something was wrong. My editor agreed. It wasn't just that I was having an off time. But the book just didn't click, didn't come together, and I still don't know what's wrong with it. I had the same problem with The Way of Kings in 2002. I managed to spend 9 years, no,

8 years, thinking about that book in the back of my brain, came to the decision of what I had done wrong fundamentally in the story, wrote it again. I guess it was 2009 I wrote it again. It came out in 2010. So 7 years of time later I knew what to do and I started from scratch and the book worked that time. That's maybe not what you want to hear, because it's-- well, take 7 years. Maybe it'll work out. All right. Let's ask for any questions from you guys, and then I'm going to jump into

the next week's questions. Anything you guys want me to get to? All right. We'll go over here. Yeah? Q: How can a really character-driven plot, like say Name of the Wind was, because when you do that it feels just kind of like meandering around. Right. Good question. Q: Probably not [___]. Yeah. So how can a very character-driven plot work, using Name of the Wind as an example, because it is basically, it is a series of vignettes tied together by a character. So how can that work? That actually brings me into, if you guys will let

me deviate for a minute and talk a little bit about what I want to talk about today. Where are our markers? Right here? Oh, there we are. All right let me do a short little lecture on viewpoint. Right? Viewpoint. Because the answer to this is deeply connected to viewpoint and what we're doing. So viewpoint. There are three standard viewpoints that you can use, of which two are really the ones that people use. We have omniscient. Om-ni-scient. I can spell that, right? We have first person. And we have second person. Yes. Of these you're probably going

to use omniscient, or you're going to use first person. Second person is used, "You did this. You did that." Choose Your Own Adventure novels are usually in second person or some version of them. Nora's Broken Earth Trilogy uses second person quite extensively. It's usually very literary and very difficult to use or very pulpy and very Choose Your Own Adventure. Second person, generally, I would recommend don't do unless you want to make it a major selling point of your story and you know what you're doing. So that brings us down to our two main viewpoints. Now

the nice thing about these viewpoints is, there are a lot of different models you can choose among these. Each of them break down to a couple things. First person has what we call epistolary. I think I spelled that right. I don't know. So epistolary is where all of the story is being told through ephemera or pieces of writing that someone has found and collected. So Diary of a Wimpy Kid is an epistolary story. It is written in diary form, where the character is writing it down. Dracula is a classic example of this. It is mixing

letters and people's journals together to create a narrative. There was a really cool one that came out a number of years ago now, like 5-6 years ago, called Illuminae, which was told through redacted documents that an agency had gathered together that had all the reductions on them and stuff. It was text conversations, and letters, and emails and things constructed into a story. Epistolary can be very fun. Another famous example from sci-fi/fantasy is Sorcery and Cecelia, which I believe, I could be wrong on this, but I believe the authors that wrote it were just exchanging letters

as if they were their characters, and then they published that as a novel. Which is great, right? That's just a really cool way to write a book. "Here's what happened in my life." "Here's what happened in my life." And then being professional writers, they work in these connections. I think that's where it went. I might be thinking of a different one. But these sorts of things can do really fun things with epistolary. We have kind of another one. These are kind of more my terms for them. You won't find these online necessarily. But we have

the, what'll I call it today? I call it something different every year. We call it the flashback. This is your classic first person. You're classic first person is your flashbacks narrative where someone is telling you a story. The character basically is two characters. They are the person they were in the story, and they were the person that they are now. This is Name of the Wind. Name of the Wind is the character now telling you about the story of how they became who they are. Classic first-person storytelling method. This is, in many ways this is

actually what The Hobbit is, though it's actually kind of a hybrid between this and an omniscient present narrator. Because Bilbo pretends he's not writing the book, even though he is, even though Tolkien--so Tolkien is pretending to be Bilbo who is pretending to not be Bilbo writing a book. Right? Yes. But flashback, sci-fi fantasy version of this, the Farseer books by Robin Hobb are told as first-person narratives. They're kind of separated from epistolary, in that you get the sense that yes, this is the writer telling the story, the narrator, the person, but it's not actually necessary

have to be ephemera. A writer doing a flashback type of story will include way more detail than someone actually writing in their journal would. It reads like a novel, just someone telling you the story, and that's part of the affectation of it, is it's someone's going to tell you their life story, but it comes across like, Name of the Wind takes like 40 hours to listen to but they pretend he's telling the story in one sitting or two sittings or something like that. That's actually impossible, but it works. But that's a flashback story. The third

is the, I'll call it cinematic this time. I've used different terms for it. The definition of this one is, this is the kind of standard for YA right now, which is, it’s being told in the first-person but kind of as if the character were narrating their life as they're living it right now. It's not being written down. It's not actually being told to you. But you are instead, like you have a little, like you've embedded an implant into their brain, and that implant, as they are thinking, is framing all their thoughts into first person and

they are living their life this way. There's no expectation that there's going to be a frame story or any sort of thing telling you that this is a journal. There's no epistolary things. It is just a first-person story told in kind of an immediate sense. I often called this immediate first person. Usually that one is in present tense, while usually the other two are in past tense. These each give you something. They're each tools that you can use. Omniscient has similar ones. We have what we call a present narrator. And when I say we call

it, I call it today, present narrator. So present narrator, what is this? Well, this is where there's a storyteller telling you a story, and it's a hybrid between first person and omniscient where, while in the story, you are not in any one characters head. The narrator is jumping all around and telling you things. Basically you have a first-person frame story of the person jumping into an omniscient narrator telling you a story. Aladdin kind of uses this sort of thing a little bit, even though it's cinematic so it's not in anyone's head. What's some good examples

of this? The Hobbit is a good example of this. In fact, it's the quintessential example. The idea is that Bilbo is writing the story down, but while he's telling the story, he's jumping into other people's heads and giving you their thoughts, even though when Bilbo himself was in that story he didn't know them. Anytime a writer writes the words, "They didn't know it at the time but," that's usually some sort of present narrator. You see this a lot in comics with the present narrator where there is like an omniscient narrator who's telling you the story,

stuff like that. Then you have true omniscient, which is, you are going to write an omniscient piece where there's no necessary narrator, but you have, as the reader, access to everyone's thoughts and emotions concurrently. A given paragraph could be in any viewpoint at any time and the author will decide this, but the author is generally not going to withhold any information from you. Dune is the classic sci-fi example. When someone walks on stage that's going to betray them, you jump in his head and he's like, "Boy, it's going to suck when I betray these people."

You as the reader are being given all the information. This is why, is it David Lynch who made the film? If you watch the original cut of Dune, even the theatrical cut of Dune, the original movie, you are often getting the characters thoughts as voice-overs when they are sitting there, because the book is in omniscient and they are trying to find a way to do that cinematically, and it's really weird. I don't need to say that about Lynch's work, but that's taken for granted. And then you have limited. Third limited is, of these, I would

say the most common that you are going to do are going to be this one, this one, and this one. Ninety-plus percent of all books published are one of these three. Limited is, for a given scene, you pick one character's viewpoint, you see through only their eyes. You'll only see and understand their thoughts, and everyone else, any thoughts they may have, are the character interpreting them saying, "It seemed like they might be wanting this," or something like that. You are very soundly rooting someone in someone's head, but as soon as you change scenes, you can

change to a different head to be in. When we say third Limited, why it's under omniscient is because you can be in anyone's head, but only one at the same time. The reason this lecture, this thing came out when you asked about character-driven stories is these styles tend to involve advantages and disadvantages. And one of the big advantages of first-person is that if that character's voice is interesting, then you can get away with a ton of stuff that you can't get away with in, particularly if they're in limited. If reading the character's voice, they are

beautiful, poetic, or funny, or sarcastic, or something like that, it covers a whole host of sins that otherwise the story would feel boring because of. Info dumps in first person are a lot easier, because since you can put them in the first person character's perspective and tell a funny joke or give a really lush and interesting, poetic paragraph as the description, that itself become such a selling point that you kind of want to linger, and you want the info dump to maybe go a little longer because you're learning so much about the character and having

so much fun with them. And that dynamic is a huge part of what makes Name of the Wind work. Name of the Wind does the reverse of a lot of stories, in that a lot of stories will use the present narrator and kind of have this frame story and things like that. The frame story is third limited in Name of the Wind, and then the first-person narrative starts up as he's sitting down to tell his story to the person who's come to collect his story, which is a really ingenious frame story. It works really well.

And because of that you get all these sorts of things. You get his voice being a drawing point or a selling point for the story. And beyond that you get the sense of a storyteller telling you a story, kind of like present narrator, but done in a very strict first-person flashback sense. And you are really interested in this character. And so almost all the plot progression can be character motivated. Instead of, "We need to go to the place and get the thing" being the way your progress is, you are shifted into thinking, "How is my

character changing as they go to the place and get the thing?" Getting the thing doesn't matter, but what it does to this character really matters, and it allows you to really focus on them. You can do that in limited. In fact, you should be trying to do that in limited. But in first person, you can really make that sort of thing sing. While you're reading, all of your progress is character-based. Who is Kvothe becoming? And he gives you a promise in that book by showing you old Kvothe, who's like, what, he's only a couple of

years older, but old Kvothe, right? But old Kvothe, who's beaten down, depressed, and has given up, and young Kvothe, who is optimistic and excited and going to take on the world. Your promise is right there. How does young Kvothe become old Kvothe? You have been given right immediately a huge promise, and your promise is, this is our progress. It is a character losing their innocence, becoming beaten down, and turning into this person. Which is why if you think the series is going to be a comedy and not a tragedy, you may be wrong, would be

my expectation. So there you go. That is a large part of your question. Now, since we did all this, let's talk a little bit about what each of these can do and what their advantages are and why you might choose them. Let's throw it to you guys. Let's take epistolary. What's an advantage or a disadvantage that you can see of doing an epistolary story? STUDENT: Mystery. Mystery, okay. Mystery. Epistolary has this innate, built-in mystery because it's the only real-- I won't say only. As opposed to flashback, in flashback you know the character lives. Unless of

course it's one of those stories where the character dies and is telling you the story as a ghost, which totally happens a lot. So it's not that unique, but it totally can. But either way, the character is around to tell you the story. In epistolary, you don't know. You're living it moment by moment. Yeah, what? Go ahead. STUDENT: It's extremely immersive. It is hugely immersive. You can build in all kinds of interesting lore and ephemera that you can build into this. If you're doing a full-on epistolary you can be like here is-- like Watchmen does

this. If you're reading Watchmen, it does these epistolary sections at the end of each comic, which are, "Here is one of the character's marketing plan for the action figures that they are creating," is your epistolary section at the end of that comic, which is so cool. It tells you so much about the character. And the questions are, "Do you think I'll get my friends to license the rights for this huge deal that we have coming up? Make mine buffer." I don't think he actually writes that, but you know what I mean. It can tell you

so much about the characters to have something like that. So enormously immersive. What else, advantages or disadvantages of epistolary? STUDENT: First a question. Would you say that, like, on a small scale, that Mistborn has a little bit of epistolary in it? Yes. The epigraphs of Mistborn are epistolary. I often use epistolary form in the epigraphs, the beginnings of chapters. STUDENT: You can kind of drop hints. Yeah, you can give up all sorts of cool little hints and you can-- in this, it is the easiest of all of these forms of them, in my opinion, to

hide information from the reader and have them not feel like you're cheating. Even in flashback they'll feel like you're cheating if you're hiding information. In epistolary, it just wasn't in that letter, right? It's a lot easier to hide information that the character may know. Go ahead. STUDENT: Asking for another example. Is Skyward Cinematic? Because it's written in the past tense. Yeah, Skyward is cinematic. Both Skyward and Steelheart are done in this cinematic, or this immediate, whichever way you want to call it, which you are there with the character, in the moment. But Skyward has third

person limited interludes in between to show other characters' story. This is actually what The Martian does. It's an epistolary that when it's not being epistolary its third limited in order to set that off and differentiate it. I think it's third limited in those other scenes, if I'm right. A lot of times, switching between one of these forms is a really great way to kind of help the reader have some structure when there wouldn't otherwise be structure. Like, in Skyward, if you haven't read it, there's a character I knew I was going to want her viewpoint

for the ending, because I needed to stay externally to have this great moment happen. But I knew if I dropped that viewpoint at the ending it would feel just out of the blue and would kick readers out of the story. So I set them up for it by having a viewpoint for her at the end of each chapter to give further ways of just like looking into the world and into the characters from a different viewpoint, and I set them in third limited to be like, this is something different so that you know we're going

to come back to what you've been experiencing, rather than just switching to another character's viewpoint also in first cinematic. So epistolary, if it has limitations, I'll just say, big limitation of epistolary is the form. This is kind of a rigid structure that can be difficult to work with. and some place people may not like it as much. Did you have another? STUDENT: I was going to say, when I read epistolatories, it can stretch my disbelief a little bit more, especially when they go into great detail. Yep. It totally can. That's one-- I haven't even brought

that one up before, but absolutely. When you're reading some of these and you're like, "They really remembered exactly what this person said and put it in their letter to this other person verbatim? Come on." And if you're doing too much of that, you may want to move to flashback instead. So flashback. Flashback has the big disadvantage of, you generally know the character lives, which deflates some of the tension. Of course, you can use it effectively by saying the character lives, but the person in the future that you're saying is a very different person, so you

get to see how they're changing through the course of time. Not always do you have a frame story. This is what Alcatraz vs. The Evil Librarians is, and it has almost no frame story grounding you in the modern-day Alcatraz telling the story about the young Alcatraz. But it still has two characters, because the character of Alcatraz is occasionally addressing you in the present tense, and that is the one who's telling the story to you, not the character that modern Alcatraz is telling a story about. But flashback. What are some advantages and disadvantages to flashback? STUDENT:

I'd say the advantage is you really understand the character on an intimate level. Yeah, you really do. In fact, both this and cinematic, the biggest selling point is character voice and really getting to understand them. In some ways flashback gives you more, because it gives you two time periods to play the same character and that contrast can be really fun. The contrast between modern character and early character, really interesting, and a big selling point to this. It's what you get, in fact, by giving away that they live. STUDENT: It makes it really easy to tell

your readers, "Pay attention to this." Yeah, yeah. The characters say, "You should pay attention to this. It'll be important later." And it's the only one that doesn't feel like cheating when you do that. Even the present narrator feels a little like cheating. But when the flashback character says the thing like, "I didn't know it at the time." You can frame it in a way that makes the reader understand, "Ooo, this is important. I better catch this clue." Anything else? Yeah? STUDENT: Is the only difference between limited and cinematic that you jump between multiple heads? The

limited and cinematic, yes, that's the main thing. The main difference, but also there's a tone difference when you're using I. When someone is telling you their own story, it feels more personal, and in limited it feels a little more distant. And what this does is, limited, for instance, limited is much harder to have an untrustworthy narrator, an unreliable narrator. In both flashback and cinematic, it's a lot easier to have an untrustworthy or unreliable. Even though limited is in someone's head and kind of very much colored by the way they see the world, if you are

actively lying to the reader in limited, they are going to feel cheated. And in fact, in Mistborn where I have Kelsior, I get around this sometimes. Kelsior's got a big secret from the rest of the team. When I'm in his head, he's like, "I can't think about that thing. It's too painful right now." That is the sort of thing you'd have to do in limited to keep information, and it is cheating. It is absolutely cheating. It's sometimes a necessary cheat. But you don't have that problem in these others because the unreliable narrator can say to

you, "It's still too painful for me to talk about. I'll get to it in a minute," and you're just like, "Yeah, I can understand that. This is really hard for you." Because we're running low on time, I'll just kind of go through the rest of these. These two are very similar except for whether you're going to give away the future or not, but then you lose the ability to play off of the future. Their biggest limitation is, the more heads you're in doing a flashback or cinematic, which you will find books that'll do two first-person

narrators, or even three, in a cinematic or a flashback, the more you do, the harder it is for the reader to track, because they aren't seeing the character's name be repeated very often, and because that personal connection you build with the person writing the story starts to get-- like, there's interference. It starts to feel weird to you that you're feeling this deep personal connection to five people, and it just stops working. And the biggest reason to jump to limited is that, number one, you get that credibility, that you can say, "What this character is seeing,

they're actually seeing." The narrator is being straight with you in limited, even if it's colored perspective. And this allows you to have tension between what the character is seeing and how you're describing it. This works, for instance, Mat Cauthin in The Wheel of Time. He will have direct thoughts where he's like, "He thinks this," and the description of it has completely made it clear that's not what it is, and then you get a contrast between reality and the way Mat sees the world, which you can't do very easily in the other thing because they're all

filtered through their head. So you have that distance between the character's actual voice in their head. Still, when you write limited you want every description to be colored through the lens of how that character sees the world. But there's a trustworthiness to it that you don't have in the other one. It is much better for large casts also, because allowing you to keep track of this large cast of characters by using their names more often and by having that little bit of distance where the reader is kind of understanding that a storyteller is telling them

the story, and now they're in this head, this head, this head. You can have a one-off viewpoint in limited really easily where you're like, "Everything else has been in this character. We're going to jump in this character's head now." This is the Tom Clancy method, right? It's just like, who is this? But it works because it's third limited. Omniscient is really hard. I would recommend studying if you want to do it. What it gains you is you have this really interesting form that not a lot of people do anymore. But you have to build your

tension based on, not mysteries, but instead tension based on expecting and anticipation. Something terrible is going to happen. I know what it's going to be. Let me see how the characters react because I've already seen the betrayal coming, or things like that. Present narrator just kind of does these other, one of these other two flavors, with adding a character who can address the reader directly in the same way the flashback does. All right, guys. We will, next week, jump into probably character for a couple weeks. So we will see you then. Take care.