Brandon Sanderson - 318R - #4 (World Building)

okay we're gonna start yeah welcome class oh that you guys are so enthusiastic I have here in my end a list of questions you guys asked last week mustard the TA gathered them together for us and they're very good questions questions I want you to be asking because most of them are questions we will address in our second plotting lecture so I'll tell you what they are people are asking how do I apply this to my story relating plotting and promises that's going to be the main thrust of this the second lecture on plotting I'm Jen like I said I'm going to go down each of the topics once and then revisit them just feels like the way that the form of the class works the best so I'll talk about that and how do I tie my character to a three point plot we'll talk about that as well so if you just kind of keep these things in mind do your best in your writing we will eventually get to some of this one question was do I need to follow these formats which is an excellent question I want to make it clear that you do not have to follow any specific formula or format for your storytelling once again the things we're talking about in this class are tools then I would suggest that you try out if certain ones feel like they might work for you but you're going to have to explore your way through your own writing lately as I've been thinking about writing well let me back up I once heard someone talk about playing games is actually a magic card player showing off my nerdiness I've watched commentary on how to play magic and he was talking about this idea that the more he played the more things he used to have to focus on in the game enter his subconscious and he's able to do them by instinct keeping track of certain things on a complex board of you know different states going on understanding the interactions between certain cards his instincts would just take over the more he played and that allowed his conscious mind to focus on certain things he knew he was consistently doing wrong or to higher-level problems and he felt this is the way someone gets better at playing any specific game is by internalizing enough of the easier things that you focus on the harder things that's what goes on when you practice writing a lot that's why I emphasized the idea of writing the more you write the more you will start to unconsciously do the things that once were hard or not done by instinct for you you will start to get a feel for oh I need a character moment here and you'll just put it in as you're writing and if you step back and analyze it you'll say oh what I was doing there was I was realizing that it was getting to plot heavy I was losing the sense of character in the scene I needed to make sure that there was an emotional reaction in connection to the character here you will do these things naturally and then your your conscious brain will start focusing on kind of higher level problems how do i interweave these plot lines how do i make sure that the chapter has the right narrative flow so you start a chapter have rising action and then have something interesting at the end of every every chapter and then that will start to come to you by instinct and you'll start working on the next level of things this is why practice is so hard are so important is difficult things will become easy and you'll find new difficult things to apply your mind toward now if you don't practice a whole bunch these things don't come easily to you you can still be a fantastic writer without practicing as much as some some other writers have done but it might take you a lot longer and you might have to work on things a lot longer the more you write the easier this will become for you okay so that's my suggestion and you're you're asking this idea of do I have to use any specific format or formula no the more you write the more you will develop your own methods and they will probably align with one of these in some ways but they will probably be very different and distinctive in their own ways as well and I can't teach you that I can only suggest to you keep practicing so that you start figuring it out on your own the next question was why are penguins knees so weird whoever you are thank you for making me smile and then the the other question that I want address was how do I make a hero's journey feel new is there any way I can approach a hero's journey to make it very interesting which is a great question it's a question you should ask regarding kind of all of these plot structures or all these stories if everything has been done before which it probably has been then why are we sitting here wanting to be writers shouldn't we just say you know what you know Tolkien did it there it is go read that well yes reading Tolkien is probably something that people like fantasy should do but genres evolve and change cultures evolve and change we as individuals evolve and change and the genre goes new and interesting places and what you can add to each story is your own individual take its person is an individual and if you practice the skills we're talking about your story will naturally start to involve things that you are passionate about I often say that with plot plot is the hardest one to be distinctive in because you know it's actually pretty easy to have a distinctive plot you just throw in a twist and turn that no one expected and doesn't make any sense and boom you have done something different on Chapter three all your main characters die and you introduce new ones in Chapter four then you kill them in Chapter seven and introduce all new characters having a different type of plot and suddenly what used to be you know a romantic comedy is now a post-apocalyptic wasteland and then you destroy all those characters and yeah I mean you could do this it would be a story like no one has ever read before and probably it would be very hard to get people to finish it because you're jumping around so much it is actually not hard to be distinctive in plot is hard to be distinctive and plot and still tell a good story but that's okay because we're all going into a book saying I want to have an experience this is the type of experience I want to have that mixture of the fresh the new and the the original the original and the familiar so where you can go more original is in your characters and your setting characters by making characters who are passionate about things that you are passionate about you'll notice if you look through kind of the history of modern fiction around the time that John Grisham released all thrillers kind of starred the same type of character and he came and said well I'm a lawyer I'm going to write thrillers about lawyers and they were wildly successful the plots were not the character was the characters were very different it was a fresh take on it you can bring whatever you were passionate about and experienced in to your writing and that will add a very distinctive level of freshness to it I believe it was Stephen King who said the last thing you should do as a writer is major in English I majored in English so it can't be all bad but what he was getting at is if you instead focus all of your attention and something that you're really passionate about and interested in you will find the stories relating to that and you will be able to inject a level of distinctiveness to your stories and as we talked about during the character time if you build each character in a way that they don't fit the stereotypes in some way and maybe they take elements from your life or your families left your friends life or something you're really fascinated by and say okay this is a journalist in a medieval fantasy world because I was a journalism major and I'm fascinating the history of journalism printing press has just been invented go that's a different story simply by taking a different type of character and if you lend your own enthusiasm for a topic to that story your passion will come through all right we are talking about world building today so if you remember we kind of have these these these realms we're talking about we've got plot setting character they all talk about conflicts so we're not going to do a specific day on conflict but we'll do two on plots one setting to one character and then two on the box you can all understand that right the box is the is the the probes the way you approach the pros which will start on next week I'm going to erase that before it looks too embarrassing for too long world building world building is as I said before while why we're all in this class rather than a different writing class we love world building as I said in my character lecture world building should not be at the expense of character but ideally you're going to do all three of these really well you're going to have a plot that serves the type of story you want to tell you're going to have really interesting characters and you're going to have a distinctive setting and setting is the place where you can be the most distinctive okay I think that fantasy and science fiction still have a lot of room to explore and setting and there are lots of really interesting places that you can go as writers and I would encourage you to take a few steps forward in what you view as a setting for a fantasy story this isn't as much of a trouble now as it was 10 years ago when I was first teaching this class seems like late 90s early 2000s epic fantasy got in this this problem where all the new stories had a very similar feel similar feel and plot and setting and there was some number of really remarkable bombs in the fantasy industry the most most infamous is one called the fifth sorceress where what happened is kind of this perfect storm where in the early 90s epic fantasy exploded in popularity all through the 80s it had been gaining and in the 90s with them with Robert Jordan with George R Martin with Terry Goodkind and and Robin hobb and some of these these names a lot of these fantasy books became very bankable they sold big numbers and hardcover which the hardcover is what has driven the industry until the ebooks kind of changed everything up and so there is this this idea that wow we can really make a bestseller it happened it started with Terry Goodkind actually so the story goes Terry Goodkind had this book was his first rule pretty good epic fantasy and Robert Jordan missed a deadline or you know his books would be coming out one a year it wasn't he missed a deadline but he was going to have two years in between books and so they slotted in a Terry this new Terry Goodkind book in the month when they normally released Robert Jordan books gave it a bunch a big push put a cover on it that was similar and it became a huge bestseller everyone the industry said we can now manufacture epic fantasy bestsellers they bought up a bunch of stuff that felt similar to Robert Jordan or Terry Goodkind and then they pushed it out with huge advances and lots of money and they all flopped and this was kind of an experience of the readership starting to say wait a minute this is too much saying too much familiar where's our original that's at least my take on it the iceberg so conventional wisdom about world building is this idea that world building is done like an iceberg that this is what you show in your book and this is how much you know it's a good place to start our discussion of world building because one of the reasons that people read epic fantasy in particular but all fantasy and science fiction is this idea that they want to be immersed in a new place when Dave taught this class and I took it all those years ago he mentioned the fact that the biggest movies of all time consistently shared this idea that they took people to a new time in place whether that place was you know a plantation during the Civil War or Tatooine they were all doing very immersive experiences taking people to another time in place and if you go look at the top 20 box-office hits of all time you will see consistently that the majority of them share this new time and place and an immersive setting people go into stories like this like we usually write wanting to believe that it's real and this iceberg Theory is one way that you can approach this if you've listened to Lord of the Rings commentary by actors and directors they mentioned that all the actors were given elven underwear to where the elves were they all were wearing you know elven underwear that never appeared you couldn't see it it was all covered up but they were still all wearing elven or elvish Tolkien scholars you can tell me what you did underwear this iceberg philosophy is the idea of the elven underwear even though it's not going to appear on screen your job is to convince the reader that everyone is wearing elven underwear okay um now the iceberg is one way to do this the iceberg philosophy is you extrapolate you spend a lot of time and you build yourself a nice world book and you are then able to answer some of these questions about your culture and setting so that as you're writing the reader gets the sense Oh the author is several steps ahead I believe that this is real and the characters are living in a world that exists beyond the page there are a couple of problems with that number one if you're a discovery writer you might say that sounds an awful lot like outlining and I don't like that um that's okay actually a lot of a lot of discovery writers just write this as they go and then they later on fill in a bunch of this after they finished their book and then they do a rewrite that makes sure that this part is kind of you know the iceberg part is kind of visible under the water a little bit if that makes sense this is a good method for a discovery writer to not get paralyzed by the idea that you have to do all of this you say well Brandon writes the Stormlight archive look at how much work goes into that world he's mentioned before they just got like four hundred thousand words of world-building that means I can't even start my book until I've done four hundred thousand words world-building and after I do like twenty thousand I'm bored of the book and need to move on that is not necessarily the way you need to approach this okay the idea is that you need to give the illusion that there's an iceberg there you don't actually have to have an iceberg one way to do it is to have the iceberg and it is a legitimate way if you enjoy that if it makes your storytelling better then yes you can make the iceberg though pay attention next week when we talk about how to not do this accidentally right where the readers like oh wow you've got such an iceberg in this book everything is iceberg Wow okay that's that's the problem with having an iceberg is that oftentimes you want to show it off you want to be like I've got an iceberg here's little thing and that's real boring real fast and a fantasy novel let me tell you so even if you know all of this you work around giving hints of it and the way you do this there are a couple ways you approach it either to fake it or did you do it for real the idea that um you dole out information in a very careful way so that the readers are I mean the characters are never talking about something familiar to them in a way that makes them sound unfamiliar with it we call when characters do this maid and Butler dialogue okay this comes from old stage place where they would have the maid in the butler come onto the stage at the beginning of the play and they would step up and the butlered say as you know the master is away for the weekend taming some wild horses and he loves horses and the maid would say yes and as you know the missus is here alone with the horse master and he would say yes and as you know and then they would like set up the whole plot by having a conversation about things they already know about all right this happens a lot in world building and fantasy worlds where characters are discussing things that they would already know all about now you might be saying but how do I make sure the reader is not confused if I don't talk about these things some general strategies number one is your first few chapters try and construct your story in a way that you don't need to dump a lot of proper names on the reader and you can do this you can you can just design the story so you're opening chapters are a little more intimate with a character and rather than saying on her quest for the magical Glore flank for King cos orbs uh or whatever she just say you know she pulled against the wall breathing heavily as the bandits stomped past and you start to get into who this character is in an intense moment and leave out the proper danes leave out you know dole out your world building and a very gradual sense to bring the carrot with the reader into character first then into what the character wants and then into their larger place in the world this is what we call a learning curve the idea is that eventually your readers going to hit this point in their world building their reading of the world building where they are an expert in your world where they understand all the names and terms and things and your learning curve is how long it takes them to become that expert every book has a learning curve whether or not it's a fantasy novel moby-dick has a very steep one okay not a fantasy novel very steep learning curve alright some fantasy books despite having lots of fantastical things going on have a fairly shallow learning curve Harry Potter does a pretty good job of having a relatively shallow learning curve by introducing you to Harry first and the problems that are going on with him and how much he hates being with the Dursleys and how mean they are and weird things are happening until then Hagrid sits him down and says you're a wizard and by then you're like duh but you know the learning curve is shallowly eased you into this to the point that then JK Rowling can start throwing things at you so I kind of say Harry Potter is kind of like this gradual gradual and then she steepens it once you've got your feet underneath yet um you're going to want to decide what your learning curve is for your book if you're Steven Erikson your learning curve looks like that if you're writing most middle grade fantasies you want it to be really shallow um not very steep at all that's going to be one of your tools for figuring out how to give the iceberg because you can sprinkle in the occasional term as you go along and have the characters talk about it and let the reader pick up on it by context readers like to do this as long as you're not overwhelming them particularly for the genre and age group you're running for they like to be like oh that's a new term that's important to the character try not to use throwaway terms in your first few chapters just to give spice to the setting instead try to use the terms that are going to be relevant to the character and to the to the plot so that they become familiar with on through context with those terms all right so that's that's one of your tools for for showing the iceberg is kind of talking about things as if they're really part of the world another way that you can do this is you can change something about the world change one little thing say you know every person has the ability to summon snowballs into their hands I don't know and you change this one little thing and then you ask yourself what are the three questions that readers are going to immediately ask you know you go ask people your brainstorm the three things they're going to assume and then over the course of the next couple of chapters you put in four things right that the reader might have thought of and they'll start to trust that you've extrapolated you know okay if everyone can summon snowballs then you know there are no water shortages ever in this world and also people get carry around shields to block the snowball fights when they happen or you know whatever it is people refrigerate their drinks by like making a snowball and stuffing their drink into it if you start showing the everyday life of a world rincon Snopes summons snowballs what you're doing is you're promising what you're really doing is you're saying here's this thing right here I'm showing you really a big depth on this one aspect of the world and then you will trust me when I mention these other cultures and and things in our world and I don't have to dig so deep into those because you're already invested in the world you know that the reader the the author is ahead of you and it gives the illusion of the whole iceberg by only showing a few pieces of it okay and if you even know the whole iceberg then you probably want to avoid doing this by doing some of these same strategies questions on the iceberg go for it I think that sometimes you make mistake by in the prologue maybe giving away too much back what's going on yeah historically in fantasy the prologue have been one of the big problems and if you're going to be a chef instead of a cook what you want to be asking yourself is what is the prologue what purpose does it serve does it establish tone for me later on like we talked about it's a good use of a prologue if the prologues job is say okay basically you need to know all this stuff there'll be a test on page 50 then that's going to bore a certain percentage of the readers me included okay and I have fantasy books have kind of picked up on this remember fantasy is kind of an infant genre still the first really big fantasy books post Oakland didn't come around till 78 or something like that so when sort of Shannara came out and that's around when the David Eddings books started getting published and things like that Anne McCaffrey was before that but she didn't count hers his fantasy but but before that you still had some fantasy but you didn't have bestsellers right it was the first actual post Tolkien fantasy bestseller was I believe one of the Thomas Covenant books and so that's early 80's right this is a genre and so you read a lot of these books from the early eighties and people are like well Tolkien had these huge appendices let's put those on the front so that people know what's what's happening people love those appendices and they put them all in the front and thus readers are like yeah yeah yeah skip that okay story and then we'd maybe go back and read and become an expert because we're nerds and we got to do that but you can see you see what I'm saying now if you know what purpose your prologue is serving and why you're doing what you're doing for all it can be an excellent tool but if it is let's info-dump you have given me a brillo so that i can dump all of this on top of you you're probably going to have a bad experience with that prologue a lot of editors are going to suggest that you cut it and readers are going to be bored and put off by it yes so I know the joys and yes yep other ways to tell you're doing it too much yeah the ways there ways to tell if you're doing it too much and things like this number one up front you want to be more sparse if you can I'd focus on character once the reader trusts you you can start to dig into it more as long as you were giving them payoffs on what you're giving them not everything but if you give a couple of good payoffs you say you know it's one of these things like if you're paying detailed attention you will notice that you know this certain aspect of the setting becomes a very important aspect by the end of the book the readers like wow I feel rewarded for paying attention to what you were doing therefore I'll pay more attention in the future of these things it's kind of like every book the reader has to buy in to an extent this is important particularly important in fantasy and science fiction right if a reader picks up your book and was reading on page 400 there's a decent chance it will just sound ridiculous if they read it out loud okay and so reader buy-in is so important and you need to get them to say yes I'm there with you yes these things are these people are called Jedi that might sound silly but it's actually awesome they have laser swords stay with me like you've got them you need to need them to be willing to say yes it's a giant plastic mask but you know what he's really scary and if they don't do that your book fails for them they come out at saying this was ridiculous it was hackneyed I mean things like this and you do that by giving them just enough and making it feel real and then making good on those promises not making these details throwaway but making them relevant in some way again not every one of them but enough of them that the reader feels like their expertise is paid off one of the reasons why the series is so popular particularly in science fiction and fantasy is because of this learning curve once you get here you say okay I am now an expert I want to take your 50 page tests on your world throw them at me I've spent all this work and so yes while the next book may you know heighten to learning covered a little bit really the idea is that now that you are invested in this world in these characters and feel like an expert you now want to just enjoy the ride for a little while that's the kind of explains really the fantasy epic series you want to get an ending but you also want to use your expertise other questions on the iceberg now we will talk next week about how to avoid info dumps and kind of a specific line-by-line way where we'll talk about alright here's how you can kind of write some lines of dialogue one tool I want you to make to make you aware of is a Watson one way to dig into this a little bit without feeling like a maid and Butler if you feel you need to is to make a character in your book someone who is unfamiliar as Watson was unfamiliar with Holmes that's why we use him as a standard but Bilbo fulfills some of the same exam things in the Lord of the Ring he is the little hobbit from a world that's a lot more like ours than the rest of the world of Lord the range you ever noticed that he lives in kind of you know a suburb of London kind of and then he leaves the suburb of London and lo and behold epic fantasy world this is him I don't know if it was a specific choice on Tolkien's part but it is a great tool same thing with Harry lives in the outer world and transitions in or you have some sort of character along for the riders like wait a minute I am from the elven lands would you use these utensils rather than just snorting the food up through your fault the hole in your forehead or whatever it is that they do and you have these these opportunities for explanation between these two characters where you can reveal some of this by having discussions arguments points of tension and conflict between two different people from different backgrounds you see this a lot and stories that's part of the reason for it now um when I approach world building one of the main things that I do is I split in my head between two different types of world building and today we're not going to talk about magic systems we all do that during the next one that's a big topic mainly because I'm really interested in it for other professors it might be like five minutes but for me it's a lecture um but I split my world building into what I call the physical setting and the cultural URL setting all right physical Oh cultural setting this is to help me attack the problem now once again your discovery writer this is not necessarily things you need be doing up front but it might help for you to divide in your head how to approach some of this stuff the physical setting is all this the world building stuff that would exist even if the humans weren't there okay so this is things like when brainstorm something for me what kinds of things world building has you a physical setting okay your flora and fauna okay what else geography geography it's a good one what else wetter weather yep what else yeah yeah your cosmology or whatever the actual cosmology not the foundation myths or things like this the astral actual astronomy and things like that yeah what else yep for me Wow we covered it all that quickly uh yeah Wow okay wildlife this kind of falls under the floor in fauna but yeah wildlife yeah what did you know geology yes yes Sciences science stuff um laws of physics I actually kind of put the magic over here that the idea of what what laws of physics am i changing how am i tweaking this is for me because I like science space magic you do not need to make a science base magic but if I'm going to approach and be like alright I'm breaking the laws of thermodynamics what's up with that that's useful for me as a writer but these were all great things this is this is basically what we're looking at now this one goes a bit bigger let's brainstorm what kinds of world-building can you do with your cultural setting you swear hit okay curses what did not expect that to be the first one okay economy all right right religions religion okay um rare lost laws go for it right okay go ahead okay politics and government okay landmarks wonders of the world okay okay wonders landmarks that kind of straddles between this right um go ahead all right your caste system if you have one customs ok customs and philosophy alright in the back food food lore is dr. thirsty still teaching it beam I am and the folklore department dr. thirsty is great she knows a lot about food lore she's a she's a folklorist so I would recommend aspiring fantasy writers take a class from dr. thirsty I took four I think they were really helpful language language is yes alright is it music yeah fashion alright and the way back folklore folk Laura fuller I love folklore folklore classes are great general gender roles good alright weapons hot dog yes weapons and tech technology was generally driven by two forces in our society three but really to you know who won beating up other people and trying to find out better ways to get from point A to point B usually so you can beat up different people history history the other one was how to grow more food so that your armies are better fed so you have larger ones so you can beat up other people better okay human rights or non human rights yes prejudice is yeah okay yeah education how do people get their learning okay okay yeah loss of war okay so yeah courtship yeah can put that along I I was really surprised when um you know I went on my mission and came back and while I was gone my family moved to Idaho from Nebraska okay and my sisters were teenagers they're 10 years younger than May 10 and 12 years and so I get back from my mission and there's like there to go on a date oh my goodness going on a date getting asked on a date was like this crazy things it's still this way like the boy would come over and he would like do this weird thing and there would be like a ten-foot pinata in the driveway and then you hit it and fireworks went off and they spilled out something out of order and you had to rearrange the letters and it took you to a place across the city where there was a secret person who asked for a code warden if you gave to him they gave you a coin that if you put in a certain coin-operated thing it would say will you go to the dance with me Jane right right what's that it's just what it's just for dances but I mean in Nebraska I called her and said do you want to go to the dance with me and she said yes or no here Jane's like all right I got to come up with something bigger than the giant pinata you know thing courtship can change a lot depending on even within well we would assume is assumed is one culture you know Mormon culture in Nebraska was got a different four Mormon culture in Idaho Falls is regard to these sorts of things so courtship yeah was there one other hand yeah go for architecture architecture yeah it's great all right now I want you to think look at these this thing on the wall and think how many fantasy books have I read that really only ever deal with like this one and this one maybe this one right um how many in did they can be great books but how many of them I mean how many fantasy books are science fiction books deal with education deal with courtship you know deal with philosophy deal with food lore I guess apparently George are Martin does a lot of that but deals with you know all of this stuff there is so much to extrapolate in fact we could probably if we put our minds to it come up with two more whiteboards full of things that we could talk about that are all kind of distinct from these ideas this is why I say that there's lots of room in fantasy one of the things we haven't even talked about is you know jobs I should mention that up they're gonna come economy yeah and there's kind of this idea of what in your fantasy setting what kind of jobs exist that don't exist in our world that could be really interesting well we'll stop with those for right now and I'll ask for questions in a minute now you may look at all this and your response may be iceberg crashing me um and this is where we start talking about grandpa Tolkien okay now great imple cane kicked off epic fantasy you're now getting the philosophy of fantasy according to Brandon Sanderson but I see three general strange strains of fantasy all right we've got our person from our we'll get sucked into a bizarre fantasy world experiences bizarre things and comes home the Alice in Wonderland the the narnia a lot of these have been have been middle grade or teen Harry Potter all of these things we have kind of another strain which is manly man by himself fights a lot of stuff maybe takes his shirt off and then probably dice unless you want to write a whole bunch of books about him and then he won't die and this is this is actually this kind of started this is the the Conan strain John Carter of Mars or princess of Mars as the book was called as one of these but they've kind of matured and developed over the years to kind of the gritty low magic fantasy stories generally about people who live in terrible situations murdering each other joe abercrombie is doing this right now and the the janitor of course is matured a whole bunch of david gemmell an author I really like the Elric books another series that I that I enjoyed by Michael Moorcock these are all kind of in this line right this is man doesn't control magic magic controls Magic's usually unknown scary different it shares a little bit with the horror strain which is kind of a cousin of fantasy the whole idea of this you know we don't know what it is and we probably are going to kill the wizard and if not we're going to get cursed and something really bizarre is going to happen is this green earth dream dark is the modern manifestation of this yeah grim dark is kind of the modern now the thing that happened is the third strain is epic fantasy large cast fate of the world generally at stake kicked off by toking lots of world-building generally high magic you have main protagonists who are using magic in some way and this sort of thing that's the kind of epic fantasy strain and then you had George R Martin in the 90s it's like I'm going to put one foot in group in the heroic and one foot in epic fantasy and they're really more like 75% epic fantasies with 25% in the kind of what I call the heroic the grim dark and he kicked off a kind of resurgence of the grim dark but it existed way before LR Inc was Thoth is totally grim dark a black company is kind of another one example of this and so you've got these kind of three strains of fantasy science fiction is all another beast entirely so with fantasy we have this understanding we're like grandpa Tolkien he kicked off our sub-genre for epic fantasy writers for people like me and there's the sense that we need to do as much world building as grandpa Tolkien did if we're going to justify writing epic fantasies how much time did grandpa Tolkien spend on his world building he never stopped is the right answer yes but it's like three or four decades I think it's 20 years is like the number I've heard her bandied around the most but I don't think there's an official number that's just he loved this world building he loved languages he loved coming up with all this lore and his books were almost more a vehicle to get his lore out to people and a plot was like something you he had to put in as a necessary evil to get people to experience the awesomeness of his lore he said he wanted to create a new mythology for England cuz he felt like they didn't really have their own at least his culture within the UK did not and so he's creating this mythology middle-earth to go along with that so there's the sense that we need to do that there's a problem with that now I should say if you want to spend 30 years world building a really awesome world because that's what you love there's nothing at all wrong with that if that's you know the whole idea is we're doing what we what we want to do what we enjoy you get out of this class what you want to get out of it don't don't come into it assuming you know you need to be such and such or something however I teach the class under the assumption as we've said that you want to be making a living off of your science fiction to see fiction sometime in the next 10 years if you want to be making living off of your fiction in the next 10 years you can't spend the next 30 world-building before you start okay and there's this danger of what we call Worldbuilders disease this is where someone spends so much time world building that they never get around to their story and if they do get around to their story they really feel like they need to drop the whole iceberg on you because they spent five years on this world building they're going to use it darn it right that is not necessary I would say what I would recommend is that you pick something on this board or one of your own you pick two or three things and what you're looking for is something that really pops off the page and is unique something that is at the foundation of what the conflict is going to be in your story or at least one of the character conflicts and then you be as wildly original with that thing as you can be and you try to extrapolate it as far as you can go um this is kind of like building a mini iceberg like I said in this one area the whole you can summon um snowballs in your hand what do you do with that you make that an interesting plot point you make that the center of your story and you pick a couple of these things and say we're going to do with education laws and prejudices I'm driving a fantasy attorney who is defending you know these fairies who have been exploited for whatever reason and that's what's interesting to me but you know she's a law student and so education laws and and prejudices and the news maybe spend your physical world building on the flora and fauna so you know what kind of species these are that are being exploited and you dig deep in that and then you let yourself say you know what I may not have to spend a lot of time on the languages the fairies can magically speak our language I will just not I will just leave that out entirely they speak our language I'll put a little flourish on say when they speak in their own tongue it sounds musical kind of like you know a scale going up and down and then you leave it at that one line of world building for the languages you maybe say you know this society we're not going to worry about caste system or things like that you know we might touch on the politics and some of the food but you know for right now we don't have to deal with the philosophy or even you know I will deal with the economy I'll make my main character say yeah this all works not sure how the money works but it all works either you know if you can make a character who is interested in certain things you can dig deeply into them or you can just start saying how do these things affect these other things and that's my world building we touch on folklore because we world build the history of the fairies in all of our folklore deals with interaction with the fairies what you do when you leave out food for them how you trap them what you do with their curses or their blessings this really targets your world building and it will start to feel very expensive as its touching on a bunch of different topics but you don't have to go everywhere the other important element of this is being distinctive and a few points of your world building don't just say I'm going to write another generic medieval fantasy with whatever name comes to my table to my mind taking place in a forest village that there are elves and dwarves and they're basically the same ones that were in Tolkien oh and I need to go find the magic sword again nothing wrong with sort of Shannara that was a great book um but we don't need 20 copy clones of sort of Shanna right sorry Shannara shy he always I used to say Shannara and then I met him and he's like yeah I say Shanna round I'm like okay so I changed my mind saying Shanna and now the television show went back to Shannara and tea is Terry's like yeah everyone says it that way so I just decided to go ahead and like now I can't I don't even know what it is in my head anymore Terry um so but do you get this idea that picking a couple of things that you're really interested in making them distinctive and interesting having either a new form of government or folklore in a way that doesn't exist in our world and digging into a deeply and having a character passionate about it can really cover a lot of your world building and make your world feel more way more real than if you had a hundred thousand word Bible for your world and you make sure every opportunity to mention the history of that hill and that type of architecture and what type of food that they eat in this country that we've never been to before questions go ahead yes how soon you want to start actually with the counseling like Facebook I mean like yeah you know tiny yeah dance with my house you start step how soon can you start saying this is a good question and it really depends on the type of story you're telling a lot of stories I will lead with this world is bizarre and this is why but I'll do it in a way that says this character is having to deal with this aspect of the world so that we get a character in a strange situation you know this is a world where everyone lives on flat you know plains of rock like cliff faces right because on the tops of the cliff there are monsters that eat them right and so you therefore start your story with you know your character hanging from one of these lines and she's crawling up and she gets on top and sees the monsters and like runs and steals an egg and then you know jumps off with her lines and such so you're like okay this is a weird physical setting but we're making the initial conflict of the story and a way to introduce how that setting works if it's not that integral or integral I'm not sure which way you say it if you if you're not what's that is it integral is it like like the math yeah uh-huh you're not making it that integral to what you're doing then you maybe just leave it off and have it be mentioned in a story and then you can bring it up in the sequel right the everything in between is also possible depending on the type of character writing in your conflict I don't make a big deal of some of these I don't make a big deal of the fact that in the Stormlight archive the year is longer than our year and so characters that are 18 or actually 19 or 20 it's about about you get an extra year for every 10 I don't make a big deal of that because you know starting the book and saying she was 18 but she felt like she was 20 just as there's no way to do that without you know without feeling weird or digging into you know they go through puberty then I don't know like it just doesn't it's not a big deal and then when people find it out they're like okay so there are a lot of things like that for learning curve versus purposes I don't make a big deal of I don't make a big deal the fact that if you met most of the people in Alf car you'd be like oh they're Asian people all imagine them basically how they want to imagine them but this is because I want to make sure that the learning curve on the things that are really bizarre like the storms and the spread are where the focus intention of the readers going not on so they have point 7 gravity and there's extra oxygen so the fires are behaving strangely I don't want to make a big deal of that in Chapter 1 right does that make sense yeah other questions about some of this stuff yeah yes yeah whatever so what are some other ways if you're not going to have a Watson one of the ways is to have write an introductory sequence like the the girl I described climbing the wall and stealing an egg which will tell you immediately to your reader okay they live in these weird places we know why it's dangerous up on top and they don't go there but we know that they like you know we know what their food source is right now because she stole an egg she jumped off the wall she now went to her house it's like built like one of those those nests that birds build on the side of on the side of cliffs right if you have an introductory sequence that shows each of these things you have set up a whole bunch about the world and never had to say she lives on a cliff monsters are up above and they will eat you and we sometimes steal their eggs you have just shown us a scene that does that you don't need to say a single word of any of those things and you've set it all up because it was important to the character and we're with the character now in that scene because it's so weird what's going on that's where you really want to avoid a lot of proper names you want to avoid you know having a reminisce about her whole family and their names and how they're going to be hungry if she doesn't bring home the food instead when she brings home the food you introduce a few of them did say thank goodness your brother hasn't been able to bring home food for three days we were running out of stores you've just established all that or you just make it really anxious and getting it really desperate you don't have to say all of these things and bald the reader down with details they don't need in the moment and that's how you do it if you're not going to use a Watson and introduce these things slowly by context okay all right other questions on this yeah we'll still being original but yeah a good question um so this as most things in the class can go several ways one of the ways is you if there's something you need to have an expertise in and you don't have it my method is generally to try and get myself like 75% of the way they're a good example this is Stormlight archive I wrote a character who's son of a doctor and he's learned medicine at least mmm you know Renaud's renaissance level understanding of medicine so I needed to know how to do field surgery and things like this I went and read up on it for a day or so understood as more than a day or so but you know it wasn't it wasn't like I was taking going and getting an MD right I read up on it I read some books I looked at it then I wrote him as best I could then I gave it to a field surgeon who it was a was a medic and in the military and I said what'd I get wrong and he said no yeah you did this wrong and they strong otherwise it's really good the idea for that is to get yourself as close as you can get with a reasonable amount of time spent it's like that last 20% of expertise is what takes the seven extra years right you get yourself there so you you're not constructing your story on really faulty premises and then you find an expert to help you out this works really well particularly if it's something like that you can research now your question was a little bit more along the lines of so I've researched earth religions how much research do you do and then how do you make use of that this is a little bit touchier of a subject because the idea is being inspired from what's happened on earth is basically the only way you can be inspired human beings I think I've talked about it what we do is we're really good at combining things we're not that great at imagining something brand new a taste that we've never tasted the color we've never seen it's just not something our brains do but say I'm going to put a horn on a horse and make a unicorn we do that really well so taking patterns and extrapolating from them is how we we approach things the danger is when you stray into something where you are saying this is not the Catholic Church but it's exactly like the Catholic Church and they're all evil right but this is where you approach saying I'm going to put a straw man in my book that is a very very weak copy of something in our world and that is something you really want to stay away from doing okay that doesn't mean you can't look at what the Catholic Church did its rise and be inspired by it and build something that is a that is you know a church that has Sarah some of these aspects but what you want to do is make it your own make it tied into the world and anything you're putting in your book like this you should try to show a well-rounded viewpoint of this is particularly important if you are writing the other writing someone different from yourself you want to make sure that you get inside the mindset of people who are like this and you present their arguments or their way of life in a way that they would want it presented nothing bothers me more than reading a book full of atheists with that one person who believes who is a complete idiot and who has shown every step of the way why they're an idiot I would be fine reading a book full of atheists if the one person who believed like I did actually made the good arguments right the right arguments the arguments that I would make and had everyone say yeah you're not an idiot you're wrong but you're not an idiot I'm okay with it with that do you see that distinction and I'm using it for religion because it's a little bit less of a hot-button topic but when you're approaching your world building one of the things that a lot of people do is they take a real world culture and they say well I'm and extrapolate this on one hand that's again the only way that we we do things like this and it is very cool when it's done well guy Gavriel Kay has made an entire career of taking an earth culture trading fantastical version of it and writing a fantasy historical novel but if that culture becomes a character ature suddenly you've strayed into something that it's really offensive really fast this is not an argument for not putting the other in other words you should try to approach things that are different from yourself and write characters who are different from yourself believe differently than you look different than leading you you should not make every character a carbon copy of yourself but what you should be doing is trying to approach these things in ways where you were approaching them from different directions where you're talking to people will actually believe this or live this life and using them appropriately to to get into this let's erase this for a second in a way that might be a little more understandable if you will indulge me for a minute we can talk feminist theory for a short time I know you'd probably do not expect that in your epic fantasy writing class but here we go this is a way you can understand it traditionally when people first start out men tend to be pretty poor at writing women and women tend to be pretty poor writing that it is a lot more obvious when the guys are writing the women this is something you wouldn't have to deal with and it's kind of a microcosm for approaching any of any type of the other whether it's a different culture or a different belief from yourself and you'll notice kind of some levels of subtle sexism that happen that we all do accidentally when we're writing and if we become aware of them it is easy to overcome them like the first one is what you would normally assume write the level one sexism is woman has object right all the women in the book there's usually not very many of them and if there are they have no real relevance to the plot they there only exist to to be moved around pieces on the board so that the manly men can go around being manly you're probably all going to recognize when something is that sexist but the thing is once you try to get past it you get into things that are actually still problematic and this is kind of the Paragon something to be watch out for when you're writing a lot of writers I did this early in my career too in my unpublished books fortunately we'll get to the ones that I did in published books but in the unpublished books I did this the Paragon is where you take the other and you say okay I know I can't be racist sexist or whatever so I will make sure that there is a character in my book who exemplifies the other and they are awesome there's only one of them but they are awesome they are good at everything right they there's nothing wrong with them and I make sure that I am not sexist by doing this I remember that this is racism m6 remember playing a video game I don't know if I told you guys this story to stop me if I told you this story but there was um right the the manly men were fighting in this video game right and they're all like exactly the same dude right except you know with the different sized chins and then I'll find you're playing along and they mention oh I hope that other character whose name is obviously black is okay out there right and you get along eventually and the guys get trapped and they're fighting like we will never survive and then like black guy burst through the wall with like two giant machine guns shoots all the bad guys says rah um and then they're like high-five black guy and then he like never gets to do anything else or have a character arc for the rest of the game he was just there to be like we're not racist we have a Paragon okay women do this with men too but kind of level three is kind of a variation of a Paragon where you're now having multiple of the other you know you're having multiple girls in your story but they still don't have get to have corpse or character arcs they're always the authority figure you'll notice this and a lot of like if you guys read web comics a lot of the early web comics the opposite gender of the writer is going to be the person who is like the straight man or woman in the comic you know and it's always the main character the the author's ones they identify with getting into the goofy problems and the other ones shaking their head there are you'll find this a lot in romance stories either one of these where the woman is like this full vibrant character with passions and dreams and the guy exists to nod and be like that was that was a little bit dangerous if you do I wish that you wouldn't be so careless you know I think she's like oh he's just so you know good and good natured and I don't deserve to be with him and he like broods um right guys do this too just as bad with the women um what the idea is that we're where this is wrong and then you have like level 4 where you finally have like you have like a full well realized character and then then there is only one right there's only one girl in the book she's a fully realized character she has passions dreams she has quark she has flaws but she happens to be the only care the only female character in the entire book or the only male that doesn't happen very often at all but this is the idea where you're still defaulting to like you for all the side characters you'll have like one really well-developed minority character and then everyone around them is default to white male if you're a guy I'm not saying that you can't write books about a bunch of white guys that's fine there are plenty of good books it's just when this becomes a theme in your writing you start to say oh what I'm doing is I'm engaging in tokenism I'm engaging in woman's object or the Smurfette principle you can google that one if you want to know more about it I'm making all of my the people different than me a Paragon so that makes sure that I'm not racist or sexist but I'm not letting them be real characters and what you're really striving for is - this kind of this level where you are thinking of each character where they each have quirks dreams passions where they are all in some way important to the story that they are part of there have to be the main character but they have sort of an independence and an agency over their destiny where they're allowed to be flawed one of the best ways to avoid tokenism is to force yourself and this is a big problem fantasy not with necessary minorities but different races you're like you've got this one from this culture this one from this culture this one from this culture and every person from this culture is a sneaky thief with a wise tongue every person for myths culture is a large burly man who carries a sword and doesn't get jokes you know and these sorts of things if you want to have a really more fleshed out fantasy story you say this person this person from the same city and this one is like this and this one's like that or you say I have two dwarves in my book there pull wildly different from one another to show the breadth of how this is an actual real culture rather than people who speak with a Scottish accent and carry an axe does that make sense to you is it why would this be important tell me this why is this relevant why don't we even talking about this in a fantasy class yes yes this is this is where we're getting away from our flat characters droid gauging characters well we're building an entire world rolls are not populated by white pants but only white males whoo yeah yeah whoo all talk the same go for it yeah yeah yeah right right right anyone else girls this mistakes we've all made good only down one yeah things that you've been rigging it yeah yeah and I've done some of this like I said in published books fortunately I don't think I've ever done like the first one or two but you know I further you get down the list the more you'll be able to find it and published writers and be like oh they're doing this it one of the things to understand is it's okay to realize that you've been racist or sexist in a small way and say oh I'm going to make sure I'm not doing that anymore and it's we've made it this big insult to say that was kind of racist and you're like no I'm not a racist well you're not saying you're racist you're saying that you're you you're falling into one of these traps that's the way our minds minds think we do it it's okay to be like oh yeah it was kind of racist okay I'll deal with that I'll try to make sure that as I'm approaching in fiction in the future and my own mind said I'm not doing the same thing all right any other questions we'll go ahead and I didn't get to the application park so I went on a sexism diatribe but there wasn't enough time for it anyway so we'll do that next week we will talk about taking some of these things and we'll brainstorm some cultures and we'll go from there okay all right guys thank you very much camera panakam allows you to find cameras and lenses like no other site find the nikon coolpix cameras with the highest base ISO Arkana 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 thirty different sellers camera 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Channel: Camera Panda

Views: 321,529

Rating: 4.930829 out of 5

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

Id: v98Zy_hP5TI

Length: 67min 41sec (4061 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 12 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/devutarenx]

Brandon Sanderson teaches a class at BYU in which his students produce a 50k-word fantasy novel, and one semester he recorded the lectures and put them online. He and some author friends also do a podcast called Writing Excuses where they cover a wide range of writing topics and give prompts for listeners to practice. His tips may not be perfect but they are very good and a great resource.

[u/Gelsamel]

Title should say 'Sanderson', which makes a lot more sense. This guy is famous among world builders for Sanderson's laws of magic, which deal with designing interesting magic systems.

It has been a while since I've read his work but I vaguely remember not agreeing with absolutely everything he said, but otherwise he is a pretty awesome writer on this topic. I hope the incorrectly titled thread doesn't lead to low interest...

[u/BoomToll]

Brandon Sanderson is a miracle worker, he creates worldsb that breathe with a deep history and culture

But all I can see right now is a tubby version of Dwight

[u/Aleksx000]

Why are penguins' knees so weird?

[u/TheVintageBacon]

he has many other lectures like this on writing

[u/Arandure]

I wonder if Brandon knows about this subreddit. I bet he would be interested. Calling /u/mistborn

[u/Nessius448]

This guy is one of my fave authors

[u/spccwby07]

He has such a fascinating ability to generate compelling and in depth works. It's so easy to get lost in his worlds. Thanks for the post!

[u/Dithyrab]

I love Brandon Sanders!