Brandon Sanderson - 318R - #3 (The Illusionist Writer)

we are going to talk about the random stuff I've written on the board it's going to be mostly a plotting lesson though there was one really good question people asked in their little slips they filled out after last time which talked about what we discussed last week characterization and so I'll do a little bit on that first the question was great Brandon you've just told me how to kind of describe characters how do I use this right what good is it to know these sliding scales of characters what good is it to know what my character is if I can't apply it and this class is all about the application well that will tie into what we're doing today one of the main reasons I was trying to establish this for you and help you is I really want you to be able to know your character motivations alright when characters go wrong in a book and we'll talk more about designing characters in our second characterization lecture but when characters go wrong it is usually because of motivation problems the reader doesn't know why the characters doing what they're doing now the flip side of that are when the characters feel stilted this is where the characters feel like they are simply following a plot rather than being people but this is also at its core a motivation problem you are not staying true to your character motivations in that point you probably have gotten your motivations your motivations across and then you are having the character seemingly Trey their motivations for the good of the plot readers are very perceptive of this this is one of those things they notice even if they can't put a finger on why or what exactly is happening they notice it and so you as an author your job is to make these things invisible to make them so when the readers comes along they love the book they may not be able to explain why but they love it motivation so we'll talk about motivation but if you know where your character is on for instance the scales or or if you have your dossier or whatever method you're using to build your characters you've done you're free right kind of a handle on who they are then you'll be able to have them act in line with who the reader feels they should be and if you're going to betray that you'll foreshadow it so that the characters motives are changing and the reader follows along and says ah I can believe that this character would do this thing that seems contrary to their nature because of event one two and three you need to have a good handle on your character before you can do any of that now I wrote up here Superman versus Scrooge one thing to keep in mind with the characters and using the sliding scales is deciding whether your characters are going to have motion or not what are your character arcs and we'll talk a lot about this through the course of the class and it has to do with what we're talking about a lot today I list these two because not because getting in a fight would be very interesting in fact in that I don't think Scrooge would do very good against Superman in any kind of combat scrooge mcduck maybe not the classic Scrooge but if you look at it in their classic story lines Superman does not have an arc this the quintessential Superman character is a character who is somewhat flat and this is pretty if you're looking at like the Golden Age and Silver Age comics version of Superman where we're using him as an archetype for that doesn't mean that there are good storylines with this character who have arcs but in the general the idea is the character is in the same place that began emotionally and things like this generally they haven't learned anything what they have done is they have accomplished something where is Scrooge if you kind of look at it in the the course of the Christmas Carol he starts here but his character changes a lot he may not come accomplish nearly as much as Superman does Scrooge is not saving a city he is not fighting off aliens he is not learning how to shoot small versions of Superman from his hands as Superman did once um that's true uh Silver Age comics are weird but what he has done is he has changed into a very different person over the course of the story um this is character arc this is not a character arc both types of stories are valid now I would say that in general what you should be looking to do is have both of these right to have a story that has great motion something being accomplished as well as the character becoming someone different either that direction or that direction these are much more uncommon a lot of the best stories do this but you can do both of these but you can see there are many very successful and popular stories that only do one or the other and your job as a writer is to decide where you want to be and trying to stay true to that to to understand the type of story you're telling and make use of the tools to tell that story rather than letting that someone else tell you what type of story you should be telling all right so today we're going to talk about plot plot as illusion one of my favorite metaphors about writing I heard it for the first time when I was a very young writer and I can't remember who explained it to me was that writers are very similar to stage magicians a stage magicians job is to keep you distracted by one thing while they're doing something with their hand over here and if you watch any sleight of hand magician show you'll see just how good they are at it in fact there's one where a Penn & Teller I believe do the famous cup trick where they're moving the the ball between the cops and it looks like it's appearing in this cup when they put it in that cup but they do it with transparent cups so you can see exactly where they are putting each of the little balls as they're moving around it's really cool to watch and I would recommend that to you as a writer because that's what you're doing you are creating an illusion while people are reading your story you want them to feel that it is real the people sometimes talk about the idea of suspension of disbelief that's part of this but the whole idea is that you are foreshadowing in such a way that the foreshadowing is invisible so that your ending is as we like to say in the business surprising yet inevitable now not every story needs to have a big twist ending it's okay if your story does not have a big twist ending that's not what I'm talking about though eventually I'll talk about how to properly do that if you want to what I'm saying is you want to set up your story so that the reader is caught up in that story enjoying that story and anticipating what's going to happen while at the same time not quite knowing what is going to happen there's a great essay I would recommend to you called the strange attractor by Terry Rocio he's one of the screenwriters who wrote Pirates of the Caribbean he wrote Aladdin he has a website he hasn't updated it in years so some of the essays are kind of old but one of my favorites is where he talks about the strange attractor which is the idea that every story combines something familiar with something strange now depending on your genre and the type of story you're telling the amount of familiar versus strange may change in comparison to one another middle braid right readers if any of your writing middled rate one of the standards of middle grade is that you change very little from book to book now again any rules can be broken don't take any of this is law but generally this is what happens so for instance while the Harry Potter books are very middle grade you see that the books format change very little the first and second book are very similar it's an example of this sit the series of unfortunate events are basically the same book over and over again and as a reader grows older they generally want the difference to become more and more because younger readers are still figuring out things that we take for granted the tropes and this sort of stuff that we recognize they yet have built haven't yet haven't yet built those pathways children's TV program preschoolers is even more formulaic Blue's Clues was the one that kind of people talk about is kicking this idea where they would show the same Blue's Clues five days in a row and the kids would like it more and more each day because they were figuring at that age oh I can anticipate what's going to happen I can guess and be right when I've never been able to do that before because I don't have the experience yet to do it so on the third or fourth showing they would love to yell out the answer because they can anticipate it in ways they never had been able to do before as we get older we generally want a little more of the strange however different genres blend these in different ways certain things like the the cozy mystery the cozy mystery generally does not have a huge character arc for the for the detective some of them do but many of them don't and they generally have the same sort of format so the familiar is very familiar in those books and the strangest can you guess the ending which is often very hard to do and done in a clever and interesting way and that is where the fun of those books come from you're going to have to decide where's my my threshold for familiar and strange how am i blending these together as an illusionist one of your jobs while you're doing that is to kind of hide your foreshadowing but the other one is to give something I call a sense of progress and this in my opinion is the most important part of plotting now I call it a sense of progress because it is an illusion certain people are better at that illusion of others practicing will make you better but it is an illusion what why do i why do I call this illusion let me ask um plotting any given book it takes that many pages to get to the end could it take this many instead yeah right right for me an ending to the Lord of the Rings that takes one sentence who can do that yeah go for it they flew the Eagle to Mordor dropped off the ring and went home for tea you laugh but you could take any great story and you could boil it down to an unsatisfied one sentence conclusion all right could you very quickly describe how you would make Lord of the Rings take five times as long as it currently does go for it you describe every single battle of the War of the Ring all over the world and have the main characters there for each one yeah there you go or you could you could describe they decided to stay with Elrond for 10 years and now we're going to describe every day of those 10 years I think Peter Jackson would probably film it and the extended edition would include the Knights of them sleeping with just a camera on them all right that's an easy you know cheap joke I'm sorry but uh you as the writer have absolute control over this you have the power to make a million years pass in one sentence and a million years past you have the power to make one sex sentence last a thousand or one second last a thousand pages you freeze time and you start explaining things and you could just go on and on and on I've read James Joyce books that feel like that so a sense of progress you have absolute control over this this is the number one thing I think you should try to understand as a writer working on plot is that this is your domain now your job when you're writing the story is to make it exciting ten years in in L Ron's house explaining every hour of every day is not going to be interesting for most of us likewise saying and the Eagles flew the ring to Mordor and dropped it in is not going to have tension and excitement to most of us so since the progress is about you creating that conflict and tension in your reader and the tools we're going to talk about today are ways of accomplish that and a lot of people have talked a lot about different types of plotting and different formats of top plotting we're going to go over like five different schemas that people use for plotting their stories today most of these are for out liners but we're going to do some pantsing at the bottom that's what that word says that has too many flourishes on the G we are going to talk about how you can have an eye toward this sort of stuff while you are discovered writing your plot for those who are discovery writers I think everything we're talking about today will be very useful to you because the best discovery writers I know tend to discover write their book then look at that as a very very long outline and go back and revise so that then you build into the story a lot of these things that we're doing so sense of progress the second most important point along with this one is sense of progress number two is promises promises for plotting one of the best things that you can do as a writer is learn to make promises early in your story then learn how to fulfill them in a satisfying get some somewhat still unexpected way satisfying yet surprising write promises I often say you know at the beginning of the story it's like you're picking up the football and you are just hooking it with the promise that by the end of the story you're going to catch that and make a touchdown the reader wants to know what kind of promises you're making your opening page your opening chapter will usually be one of the things that establishes this promises this is by the way one of the reasons for the the epic fantasy prologue now if you've been listening the last few weeks where we've talked I've mentioned that I want you to be chefs instead of cooks the cook says Wow a lot of these great epic fantasy stories have this this prologue I'm going to put mine on and make it similar because that's what an epic fantasy story does the chef says what's the point of this pearl what is it doing for me is there a way to you do that the right way is there ready to do that the wrong way and the answer is yes what does what does a big prologue in the beginning of an epic fantasy story give you go for it well it generally it just kind of puts you into the world and it gives you a chance to look at things from someone's angle is probably not going to be a viewpoint character for the rest of you okay yeah that's that's often what they do go for it absolutely set up flexibility and then it will go away not completely yeah yeah yeah that's very good go for it kind of throws you in further than the beginning of the story so it kind of throws us straight to the conflict if we're actually setting up if you for being here right right it really often does that go for it kind of into an epic feel because it's not about just means like she started to make character with mr. notes I have a story but having like big things happening at the beginning and then going right right yeah sure so especially with the epic fantasy is kind of part of the solution is to give you some sense of action in conflict right right and I'm going to explain this is the question you're asking is yeah people expect a lot of world-building they expect a lot of all of this but they also want action and epic scope so one of the purposes for putting a prologue in is to say here is the promise of my tone this is the type of book you are getting into this is a book in which mountains will be created by people they will have the power to do that kingdoms will fall and you will see magic and mystery and power and all of these things and then talking about I of the world you jump to a guy on the road with his father and walking away from their farm going to the fair the implicit promises this is look I just showed you what's going to happen in the series so you can get excited about it now I'm showing you somebody who knows nothing about this the journey of the book is going to be cut this person becoming like the people in the prologue that is promised that those books are making now you can do that promise without the prologue if you want to for instance I've mentioned before Indiana Jones was I think has one of the best prologues in storytelling the opening to the first Indiana Jones film is an Indiana Jones story in short action-adventure some humor humor you know dodging things dastardly villains but at the end he fails again there's a promise your tone is we're going to get all this stuff you're going to have an hour and a half to two hours of sitting here watching fun wisecracking action with an awesome hero and even though he filled the beginning the implicit promises he works hard and you're going to see him succeed next time that's what the purpose of that prologue is it acts as a hook it acts as an establishment of tone and it acts as a promise that you now get to see the character who failed succeed yes can you drag out the prong into the first chapter as well like a combination of the tone of the prologue plus the tournament yeah usually can you drag up they promise between the prologue and the first chapter and say my books going to be a blend of these two yes and a lot of books do that um you in fact you can do all kinds of stuff you can do whatever you want as a writer if you are in control of this is what I'm doing and a lot of new books go wrong with promises of tone there was a writer who when I was a brand-new writer maybe two years after I published I met this writer we did kind of a little signing together and he came over me said you know I've been watching your career with a lot of interest I liked your book I hadn't read his but he liked my book and he said we published it about the same time and your book really took off and mine didn't he was very frank about that very nice guy I'm not going to mention who it is very nice guy he said you know I've always wondered why your career kind of launched off so so fast and mine kind of nosedived and I looked at his book and I remembered that I'd actually read a couple of chapters of it when it came out and I've been bored um and I said it felt like a kind of generic fantasy you had you know you had the peasant in the woods and you know one of his friends was like really good with the bow and one was good with the knives and then you know they find out that he was the long-lost prince um and he's going to get chased and it felt like a lot of the same things I had read before so basically I was saying oh my threshold as I've grown as I've read a whole bunch more this generally happens as people read a lot in genre not always but generally means that my weight shifted toward wanting the strange and this book had too much of the familiar right and he said to me he's like well that's the thing about the 3/4 mark of my book I append all the tropes the book becomes you find out it was never as Phantasy that um that this has been played all the main characters been played all along that I'm hitting you with these familiar tropes so that I can pull the rug out from underneath you and upend everything into this really complex modernist take on the fantasy genre which is kind of what you did with Miss Warren so I was surprised that yours worked and mine didn't I'm now part of why mine worked in his didn't is pure luck let's establish that all right this is entertainment and entertainment nobody knows at the court why one thing works and one thing doesn't but I've long thought about this discussion that we had and I felt that what happened in this author story is that he made the wrong promises he promised a very standard Terry Brooks style sort of shan'er a plot a very standard story that I in fantasy and I said you know what that's fine there are people are going to love that but it's not for me because I like to moved to where I like things a bit more strange and there are no value judgments here that's one thing you need to understand there should be no value judgments between the familiar and the strange you shouldn't be looking at things like Eragon that people fell in love with and say oh that doesn't have enough strange for me ergo it's not a very good book to the people who were getting into it it was exactly the right blend for them but for me this book didn't work what I think the real problem was is that it got to that three quarter mark and then all the people who had been reading it and loving it because it was the type of story they had been promised suddenly hated it and all the people that would have loved a modernist take and deconstruction of the classic fantasy story never got to the last quarter or third of this book and so while the author was doing something really cool it never found an audience because of these problems this is something I think you should be aware of in regards to your promises now that's again not to say you can't write that book because there will be a few people who will feel like they want the standard thing be reading it hit that point to be like wow I never knew that I wanted something so awesome is the but for him it didn't end up working another story of this is another writer I know I can mention him by name because his books are very good and he had a successful second career his name he publishes under Jack Campbell right now these are the what's it called Isaac yeah they're they're really good military science fiction about loss fleet the Jack Campbell Lost Lee books thanks so the Jack Campbell lustfully books he published under a different name John Henry a sequence of books that were basically described as that the TV show that was kind of big back then was called Jack which was military like lawyers right and he said well it's jag in space I'm going to take a science fiction military science fiction and I'm going to do lawyer stuff on the big starships and so it's going to grab all the people who love jag and all the people who love science fiction and it turned out it only grabbed the people who loved jag and science fiction right so the Venn diagram went exclusionary instead of inclusionary and the books crashed and burned despite everyone really like him his publisher said these books are really good we think you're a great writer let's change your name and try again with something yeah I mean he kind of sometimes have to do that you laugh but it happens a lot in publishing and so they did that he wrote a new series tried again and these ones took off they're all great books he writes very well but you can see that sometimes the familiar the strange together you know don't work right two strange things don't work sometimes two strange things really do work sometimes you're like hey it's like my fair lady mixed with Lord of the Rings and you get miss Bourne and it works right um yeah this teenage girl training to learn how to infiltrate noble society yeah it kind of works it's not how i catched it originally but it is fun to say it's really more like my fair lady meets Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon sometimes you can get some of these these these elements that are strange and blend them together and have something that really clicks sometimes you don't so let's talk about a few ways that people in writing and in storytelling approach creating their clothes and perhaps the most famous method is what we call three act format by anyone here in the film Department yeah we've got someone a couple of you in the film Department you guys study 3x format you can tell me what I do wrong okay because 3x format is fun I have studied it enough to try it out a few times it is not what I use but it is it is very fun and it is very interesting um now let's preface this by saying if you guys ever heard someone say there's like there are only five types of stories that can be told now you guys heard this you'll see essays or occasionally the nine types of stories that exist and usually these essays are right these are all glum pings of the types of stories they exist but they're right in the same way that you can say well everything on our planet is either animal vegetable or mineral right and saying well that means there's only three things in our universe doesn't really capsulate the fact that you're stuffing a whole bunch under these umbrellas and yes there are only a few types of archetypes of plots but you can split those into infinite variety in the same way that we have near infinite variety of animals in the animal kingdom even though you can very quickly write on the board animals in one circle and pretend that they're all one thing in the same way you can look at something like 3x format and almost every story particularly Western stories Eastern stories don't always follow this because they sometimes just kind of take out this one and start this one like right here anyway in eastern stories don't always don't always follow the same sorts of things that we do and that's cool to study but generally you can take most western films or books and you can you can put them in 3x format somehow and three ad format is is kind of very simple you've got the kind of introduction and kind of a I call it conflict what do they call it yeah confrontation and the resolution so introduction / setup confrontation and resolution this is breaking your story into three parts with an introduction your introduction your introduction includes on the setup of the character um kind of established in the setting and the establishment of tone and all of these things the begin your story these transition with what we call kind of a crisis point different talks about the three-act format call this thing different things but the idea is that there is a point where the protagonist is forced to kind of make a decision cross a threshold and are forced into a plot from which they can no longer return right things are never going to be the same after this point this is the point where Luke's looks grant our aunt and uncle are found dead I can't return to my life everything is wrong different people argue that it that the transition here is actually leaving tattooing for Star Wars you'll find all sorts of discussion on what this point is but the whole idea is that you've got this main character and something happens where you know they've been called to action life will never be the same I am leaving oftentimes I talk about this point as the point where the character transitions from being forced on a quest to deciding to actually do something on the quest and in that case the point in Star Wars might be the point where Luke says let's go save the princess but you can you can kind of decide where you feel this is the whole idea is that there's this point and then we transition into the confrontation which is the problem usually we write this just as things get worse her um right this is where stuff goes wrong sure stuff like wrong in here and here it really goes wrong some people say you know act 1 we discover a character right here they get chased up a tree right here rocks get thrown at them and right here you know they get out of the tree the tree gets cut down well this would be the tree gets cut down right here then and then here would be we to fight defeat the person who's throwing rocks at us but you know it depends on what what your problem is really right here by this point if you're using three-act format the big thing to understand is you have to establish what the problem that the character is working on is by this point you could ask the audience or the reader okay what is this what is this character going to try to accomplish and hopefully they will answer this character is going to try to overthrow the empire that you know he's hunting him down and building this thing that blows up planets that's what you want them to be able to say at this point that doesn't mean you can't mature that concept as you go along but at least the reader should be able to answer at this point oh okay something I know what this character is trying to do I know this story is trying to accomplish right here we have the low point this is where it's kind of it turns into do-or-die time usually during things get worse err the characters try a few things and they fail and it gets worse because of their failures and at this the low point it is now we can't fail again otherwise there the story ends right this is as low as we can go the death star is now pointed at all of our protagonists that aren't on the ships trying to fight the death star the if they if it blows up this planet that's it lose game over and so then the resolution is and it's trig unit sounds these satisfying conclusion where you make good on this promise satisfying does not have to mean the hero's win it just has to mean that you make good on your promises and the breeder gets done with it says yes that was the end I accept that as the ending some films then do this and this but we won't talk about them so this is 3f format why is three right format useful well it's it's very simple the simplicity of it helps if you've got a big story you're trying to tell and you say I need some structure for my big story what do I do you can look at something like this and say okay let me break down my story into three chunks and the end of the first chunk will be where I've established what the characters are trying to accomplish the end of the second chunk will be where you know they have tried several times and failed to do what they want to do and now they're in very big trouble and then I will have an ending where they either succeed or fail to do the thing they want to do again the sounds very simple in fact you might be like but I don't want to keep the formulas Brandon that's good I'm happy that you want to keep the formulas remember that these are tools these are tools to use to help you tell the story you want to tell if this one doesn't work try a different one okay um screenwriting terms there's there's a famous book that outlines all this called save the cat so anyone read save the cat save the cat is depending on who you talk to either the most influential and important book on screenwriting ever written or the worst thing to ever happen to screenwriting Screen Rant save the cat tries to break all of this down into little beat point by points and actually sometimes assign timeframes to win the things should be happening in a screenplay on page three this is what you want to do and things like that a lot of Hollywood has been about lately can you you know what page should this happen on what page should this happen on and what minute and each page of the screenplay is roughly a minute so you can kind of they can boil down to in this minute this thing must happen that gets really strict I don't like that I don't even usually use this really but again it's a tool that can work if you want to go more in-depth into this Dan Wells has an excellent series of YouTube videos called seven-point story structure which is basically three-act format with a few other points in explaining important bits like the pinch and things like that about three-act format it's very well done excellent storytelling method and dan is a discovery writer it was very helpful for him to understand these sorts of things and internalize them so as he was discovery writing he could be like oh this is what you know this moment is in my in my my structure now I can keep writing and kind of have that under under my belt as that's this point or after the fact looking to storing that he's already written in dividing them out so a threat for many questions kind of on this idea go for it yeah for like a trilogy would you have this in each book and then fans all free yeah yeah I mean you can look at the Star Wars trilogy right the originals so you can say that it the first one we've been talking about you could say that the first movie is a character set up setting in tone the second one is wow things just got worse sir and the third movie is all the satisfying conclusion Oh Ewoks um and that's you could look at that and usually people use the Star Wars original film and then the trilogy as an example of when three-act format is working because you never kind of feel like it's heavy-handed and they you feel like it's natural you get the kind of emotional beats and all of these things from that trilogy of films so yes this is a very good way to align a trilogy and everyone who's ever made a second movie in the trilogy has been trying to do this as well as Empire Strikes Back did it it's generally heralded is the best second film of a true of a trilogy of this style yeah how long should these sections be in relation to each other and how okay if you're doing too much intro you're how long should they be in relation to other standard kind of story is the middle one's the biggest and even some three-act format things I look at split the middle one two three little pieces itself um intro is the second biggest generally and resolution is generally shortest you can tell whatever story you want to do but that's the kind of rule of thumb is it's kind of like you could almost divide this one in the middle into failure one failure to in failure three if you want to kind of really put a point on what's going on here when is it too long when is the inch or too long it's an excellent question it's going to depend on when your reader is feeling kind of bored like the story isn't progressing the whole idea is this sense of progression this idea that each of these points on this story are going to give a clue to the reader ah we're moving forward and if the reader always feels like they're moving forward and is always intrigued by what's happening next you're probably going to be okay right water haha and I am having trouble creating a sense of progress in a story that is primarily internal sense of progress and story that's primarily internal on the plot the last plotting method method we talked about might be of help to you so hold that question until we get to it so let's go ahead and look at the monomyth here with a thousand faces any one right here a thousand faces yeah it's an interesting read you as I mentioned in another week it's very worth looking at you should not use it as a guide book but use it as a tool the difference between those two in my opinion is again this idea of oh I need to have this versus oh if I added this piece it would make my story better for these reasons okay keep that in mind the monomyth is basically kind of looking at three act formats or maybe three at Fermat as a way of looking at the monomyth um with some specific ideas attached to it that commonly show up in science fiction and fantasy so I do want to talk about it the monomyth instead of describing in three acts though describes a circle so the idea behind the monomyth is this idea that you have a character starts at Point a at this point they are going to cross threshold a threshold and you can kind of say this is your first act the idea is you have a character who's kind of ignorant but at peace and something forces them into motion but usually they have a meeting with a mentor or they have some sort of experience early in their in the story that indicates to them that they are going to have to change that they can no longer remain the person that they are and the crossing of threshold one is them acknowledging that they are willing to change that's kind of what this idea means the mentor is a big the figure in the monument because it's kind of a it's one of these tonal promises the promise of here is this wise mentor your job is to become like them right so your job Luke is to turn into obi-wan your job Harry is to be a wizard like Dumbledore your job is to look at this mentor and get the promise of tone as a reader that this mentor is going to guide the hero and the hero is then going to adopt some of the attributes of the mentor so they cross a threshold and the monomyth is big on this idea of thresholds because it's big on the idea that this is home and this is what we call the strange world this world is weird there's something bizarre about it it's mystical it is it is a different place it's it's the special world usually in here in the monomyth there is at least one refusal they did this very well in the the Lord of the Rings I mean The Hobbit movies The Hobbit movies you know they have their problems but one thing that they did really well is this character of Bilbo Baggins and if you haven't seen them at the beginning you know Bilbo is at home in a peaceful setting everything's great and then these dwarves show up and start ruining his life and he doesn't want to go be the thief and he refuses and they leave without him and then he has this moment of I need to change there's something wrong in my life I've turned down this opportunity to go on adventure and it was the wrong thing to do and he literally just chases after them you seemed like anyway I'm going to go be your thief and that's this idea of he's willing to go into the strange world and cross the threshold leave Hobbiton and go on an adventure and the middle part and the monomyth is much you know you can kind of see how beginning and end are a half the size of the middle the middle act of the monomyth is this idea of where you are entering the trials a lot of this was based off the the ancient Greek myths and plays an idea there you're entering a world of trial where you're going to be tested sometimes in threes three was a big thing to to Joseph Campbell with the idea of trials and there will be these tests to who you are and eventually you will die it might be figurative they call it entering the underworld you may go into the underworld to retrieve somebody but you will die in some way this is the equivalent of you know the being at your worst point there is some sort of metaphor for death for the hero in the monomyth um there's a there's usually a loss of the mentor somewhere in here and there's usually a boon usually there's some sort of magical gift granted to the hero that is just given to them whether it is Harry Potter for some reason Voldemort being near makes your scar burn and you know you are like auntie Voldemort he's madder and your antimatter or vice-versa you've got some sort of special power given to you their supernatural aid this is kind of a big part of it and then there's kind of this idea that you pull out of the underworld and this actually happens in the second act quote-unquote in the monomyth with this idea of of resurrection and then there's a moment of apathy OSIS kind of coming to understand God in a moment of kind of peace and understanding and serenity or whatever um followed by the return usually there's there's also kind of the last there's the theft or gaining of power there's something the elixir he often calls it in the monomyth the the hero has gained something on the last part is returned sometimes the flight and actual running sometimes it's more contemplative usually there's a refusal and this one as well I don't want to go home but I know I need to and then here returns home with the elixir as representation that the hero has now returned home to give to the people who are still at home of the knowledge and has then become the mentor for the people who are still at home so this is a cool storytelling tool it can be very helpful but again you got to ask yourself the whys why do these things happen why are they important to your story let's go through a few of them and ask ourselves the whys just to get this started we don't have time in the class that you know we could probably spend an entire course on hey here's the monomyth let's talk about the why of this today but tell me so um why why the refusal why why the initial refusal what is what is that accomplished in your story yeah yeah Willie we like strange yeah I would say that's the biggest part there's definitely more but yeah it said nobody likes change this character is like us go ahead it's also a promise you know they refused at this point and they're not going to change after this point though there's no book right you know that if in their refusal that it's not really ever beautiful they're gonna happen right right there's some tension there but there's also kind of this momentum yeah go ahead huh go for it No yeah that's excellent they have opinions they have room to say no they could they could just stay there in fact often times and these stories someone will stay behind as the hero goes out they'll leave somebody behind who's not willing to cross the threshold kind of show this idea I often say when you're designing a character it's goes back to last week it's really important for you to understand who this character is and what they would be doing with their life if the plot had never hit them I believe I said that a couple weeks ago who are they and what would they be doing and ask yourself this for the side characters as well as the primary character because otherwise you risk having you know the idea that the main character is somewhat dynamic they have agency they're making choices in their life whereas all the side characters are just you know don't seem like they would exist except to enhance the main character's existence and the story that they're telling stay away from that it makes the story feel flat and it can be really offensive depending on how you do it so that's it that's why we have the refusal why the loss of the mentor yes mentor it doesn't make sense and there's no story and also on both members there and help you out but you know it really bad tension if they're gone yourself yeah excellent very good you have to deal to problems yourself and if you're going to replace the mentor I had you then yeah having a mentor there go ahead like she said you know fill in what's missing from the character fill in the rest of the process I'm Union right if the good himself become the main program goes home become the mentoring I'm some become independent yeah I mean I think this one's pretty off obvious let's talk about I think you guys can figure out the death and resurrection kind of low point idea what's this idea this was really important to in apathy osis today can anyone say like the original would that what it actually means it's Latin isn't it yeah become a god yeah so in this it's like becoming like the gods it also he talks a lot about a moment of peace and understanding of the world and the characters place in it why is this part of the monomyth yeah well if you didn't gain anything from this journey it was kind of the risk yeah they didn't gain anything for the journey it's a big waste of time good like that this happens before the resolution is like you needed this thing they discovered to be able to have over right you need that moment of understanding before the resolution happens now sometimes happens you know in some of these books right before like this ending is rushed and Star Wars I would say it's the moment where Luke's turns off the guardians computer right where he's like oh I understand the force I trust the force I have a moment where this is Who I am I don't use a guidance computer I'm a Jedi and he turns is off the guidance computer that's what that means and that's kind of Luke's moment not a big moment in that story because it's an action movie with lots of explosions and other stories you'll have an entire chapter where the characters like and they're kind of reflective and then they've got this kind of transcendent moment what else might this to go for possibility to understand the importance of the story yeah right right now so if you dig into things like this you might say you know what I don't want any of this other stuff but that moment we just talked about that's a cool moment and I think I should have that my story because this is the first time my characters really become self-aware as near this ending and I should have a moment for the character like that so I'd be asking yourself these questions ask them in your writing groups talk about them start figuring out how you want to story tell alright let's talk about a few quick ones for panthers to help you out and then we'll get into the last ones I didn't put on the board just kind of the branded method of plotting so for Panthers I have to kind of general suggestions that I've seen work one is the idea of try fail cycles when I took this class from Dave he talked a lot about the concept of a try fail cycle and he talked about this idea of rising action that you may have seen in school and he says this is too simple for to be really that useful to a writer what he said is what if you but if you do this suddenly it starts to make sense to a writer that is that you occasionally have these fall backs even though motion is progressing he suggests this idea of the anything that you want to have a nice moment in the story the characters tie at least twice maybe three times to resolve and have something go wrong with that resolution now along these lines the other method that I've heard work is the one that Mary from my pocket from the podcast ranks uses Mary Robinette Kowal talked about which is the yes but no and this is a plotting method for people who are pantsing who are discovery writing and this is where you introduce a problem like in the first few pages introduce a problem have the character try to resolve it and then you ask yourself does it work if you answer yes you add a but yes it works but something else goes wrong and if what they tried doesn't work you say no and it gets worse for this reason and you can keep doing that until the end of the story sounds really simple the let's talk through how this might work what so it's a complicated on page two of a book give me give me a conflict yeah little brother gets lost little brother is lost in the big city you are you were acts you know you're at shopping um then the character turns around and her little brother that she's been tasked with taken care of is gone okay what is something she can try to do to find the little brother ran around screaming his name okay does running around screaming his name work someone tell me no no yes yes it does work she finds him but but you find out that he's wanting to turn around purposes so it's hard to find an ally against away okay so you find him but you find out that he has some sort of issue where he doesn't want to be with you and now you've got this this conflict between yourself and your brother because your brother hates you okay she tries to resolve her brother hating her how does she try to resolve this hey raise your hands yeah pretzels she buys him pretzels does it work raise your hands yes go ahead no what no and or yeah yeah no and and a dinosaur ski and in dinosaur estates from the zoo okay they go to the zoo would buy pretzels she buys a pretzel for him she's like here's a pretzel he's like great I let the t-rex out I'm hoping he'll eat you you know you can see how this would work you want to string it together into causality so it's not just random events so that there there are reasons and motivations and things like this but it can go silly if you want it to this is a way of telling a story where you just keep doing that and it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse and you let it snowball the trick to it is what I did when I was talking to you which is to remember character motivation work character motivation the things that are happening so they're not completely random and causality so that the characters are doing things and are proactive rather than them just happening alright so any question about the monomyth or these kind of weird pantsing methods uh would there be a play with it it's like exhausting for the reader just to always get a lot of yes but yes in questioning skin is there is there a point where it can get exhausting to the reader books that do this all the way through sometimes do a book that does this is Battlefield Earth the the book is better than the movie but it does this basically the whole book it's just like it's a never-ending string of this guy you know Johnny whatever his name is be like alright I fix that problem hey what did you people do to make this worse okay I've stopped that oh they've not lost the nuclear missiles and it just keeps going and it gets exhausting a lot of thrillers do this a lot of thrillers are the Dan Brown books basically are an endless yes but no end until the ending um it works in a book that you're supposed to just sit down and read in one sitting or two sittings better than in a book like this because of that fatigue but there are ways to get beyond this there are ways to the the main way to get beyond that would be to be nesting your plot cycles so that certain things are being resolved while other things are still ongoing so that reader has moments of ah we finally accomplished that that that plot cycle was resolved okay the argument with her father she and her father have come to terms we are done with that now let's deal with the t-rex right and that's part of the way that you you do this let's talk about for the last 20 minutes or so last ten minutes or so Brandon's plotting method so I don't use any of these though they're all use I I don't have time for questions right now we had up we got to keep moving on you can ask me later on these are all tools that I'm aware of and it helped me but I don't sit down and say okay what what are my acts what I ask myself is I start building on in my outline a series of promises and great moments I want to fulfill I will write them down I'll say okay I want to have I'll do this form is born sorry if any of this is spoilers but all right we've got a romance alright and so I've got a romance where a female lead and male lead hook up right so I've got that is one of the things I want to have happen I have overthrown the empire that is one of the plot cycles that I want to have happen at the end of this book part of the pitch for Miss porn was I wanted to do what a lot of books do in a a book series I'm going to do it in one book that was the kind of the concept the pitch for it so we're going to overthrow the Empire we are going to you know bin learns magic so by the end of that by the end of the first book I want VIN to be really good at the magic so we kind of have this we have you know the mystery in order to do this we need to kill the Lord ruler so we have mystery how can you kill an immortal yeah um and I just start putting these up here and there will be lots of them for a book that I'm writing particularly an epic fantasy these are all my different goals there and usually they're attached to really cool scenes or moments that I have imagined in my head and what I start doing is I start saying how do I learn this and I start bullet pointing alright and oftentimes both pointing will lead me to say I need to do something I've got it I need to do then learns to trust right main character can I have a romance if she's not learned how to trust because she's had a life that is pottered you can't trust anybody and so I start building this one say okay what are moments that are going to lead me along this path and what I am looking for is progression I talked about this idea of progression readers turn the page and feel like their book is moving and are having an exciting time almost always because they are seeing little progress and it is making them feel excited I learned this once an aspect of this by reading a book called inferno by larry niven and jerry point out it's a great book it's about a science fiction writer who's that a party gets drunk and falls out of window and dice and wakes up in Dante's Inferno that's the afterlife and this story what's interesting about it is is simply a series of vignettes it's almost like a series of short stories as he travels through Dante's Inferno encounters famous historical figures who are under different names doing different things in hell and eventually you know tries to get out of the infernal and it was really exciting I'm like why is this really exciting it is just a series of otherwise isolated events and what I realized was they had a nice map in the beginning that showed where the character started on the outskirts and had it pointed right at the center of this map and I'm like I got to know what's it and I vaguely remembered and like oh you know I've got to read and this idea of every every little adventure was one step closer to an ending was in itself enough of a sense of progress that I enjoyed this story despite the fact that it otherwise didn't seem that you know have a lot of connected parts a lot of travel logs exist to do this Lord of the Rings the plot of Lord of rings is here's Mordor here's Bill ere Frodo a team that's a long ways and one does not simply walk and Mordor and so we get to see them going along now of course Lutherans has a ton of other cool stuff going on yeah you know it has the the friendship between elf and dwarf represented by two characters it has you know kind of Frodo's being corrupted this is a great example of a character arc that goes down right it has all these cool other things going on but the framework of it is we've got to get from point A to point B and you can follow along being able to follow along is very useful and so really what I'm doing in my books when I'm doing an outline is I try to define different types of promises and different types of subplots um and I kind of split these up in my head you can find your own for what these would be you don't have to use mine but you have things like you have mysteries you have romances actually it's really just relationships because buddy cop movies and romance movies actually follow the same plot they they really do um we got relationships you've got mysteries you've got travel logs you've got one wants another one then you've got time bombs which is not really its own one it's just kind of often attached to one of these if we don't do this by this time the something terrible happens you have the the character arc the the overcome internal problem overcome it flaw by the main character then needs to learn to trust again it was you who asked me the question was right here you as you that's the question you said I've got a primarily internal character thing well you can do this same stuff you just identify what is this thing the characters working on what is their internal journey and then you put it in something you start writing bullet points what are steps along the way how can I indicate to the reader the motion whether down or up that's going on you have moments than in your story where you know Frodo's journey is mostly internal despite the fact that he's crossing all this him as a character it's internal and you have moments that show that he's getting corrupted by the ring where he's putting it on more and more where he doesn't want to let someone else hold it where he's you know becoming like we saw you know happened to Smeagol and things like this those internal things have some outward manifestations and that's always a good idea but brainstorm your points along so that when you put them in a story the reader says ah I get that I see we are moving we're not staying in the same place the last thing you want the reader to say is this is getting boring because nothing is happening you can have a story that takes place in one room with one character that is not boring because things are happening even though it's all happening kind of inside of one person so you need to start giving this sense of progress you just need to be thinking about why they're going to turn the page now when I'm done I have all these things with all these bullet points right I'll maybe have ten or twelve of them I build a book by going and saying okay I'm going to grab you know the first one you know let's say this is the end point this is the first one I've come up with that I brainstorm that I like I didn't use all of these but feels like a step along the way okay then meets Elland at the ball and you know there's these certain things that that make them seem like they would work together and certain things that make you seem like they wouldn't right I take that and I say okay I'm going to mix that with a villain character moment I'm gonna take those two things and I'm gonna build a scene out of that the characters first meet and also then has been working on this like you know over coming here internal demons and I'm going to show a moment where okay I can she has this moment I can do this I've stuffed my demons down behind my insecurities and so you have the scene in this point if you've read it where VIN enters the ball and realizes you know yes I can do this it's like putting on a costume they're not saying me it's a step along the way for gaining back kind of our self-confidence and trust and also she meets Ellen and so I just grab a bunch of these things and I build a scene out of them an interesting setting and these are all kind of my moments along now to do these well you need to make sure there's conflict you need to make sure there's red herrings you need to make sure that the clues are adding up together and you need to make sure that your sense of your your bullet points match the type of plot that you're doing for instance a mystery your bullet points are what are steps toward solving mystery clues your bullet points are clues relationships your bullet points are character moments of interaction between the two of them where you show why they'd be good for each other or perhaps really rub each other the wrong way things like this you know you travelogue your points are peace places on the map right and so you kind of look at these things and try to match these moments building up to something cool with the tone of each of these and this is kind of how you nest multiple plots together and multiple subplots often you'll like toss it's like tossing 40 footballs in the air and then catching them one at a time at the other end of the end zone all right okay so we're going to talk world building next week make sure you turn your sheets in if you have any questions about all of this go ahead and write it down and we'll start next week with questions I want to let you get going so thank you guys very much oh thank you yeah you don't need to clap just because we're on film but he does stay down yeah camera panakam allows you to find cameras and lenses like no other site find the nikon coolpix cameras with the highest base iso or canon cameras with full-frame sensors find sony e-mount zoom lenses ordered by aperture and just three clicks camera panakam shows you prices from up to 30 different sellers camera panakam striving to be the world's best camera and lens shopping site

Channel: Camera Panda

Views: 239,057

Rating: 4.9510241 out of 5

Keywords: Brandon Sanderson, Earl Cahill, 318r, creative writing, fantasy, science fiction, camerapanda.com

Id: 1ovtiazIzJA

Length: 67min 2sec (4022 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 05 2016