Brandon Sanderson - 318R - #8 (Magic Systems)

alright we'll go ahead and start the seats are more sparsely populated as always happens as they semester winds down I hope you guys are having a good semester you've got what about a month left a little over a month left of the semester I had a fun time on tour that is the like but I am I'm happy to be back from tour I'm actually flying out on Monday hopefully to Dubai there's a passport issue so who knows if I'll actually be going to Dubai so maybe I'll be here next week on Thursday know if if I'm here on Thursday that means bad things have happened but I have an assistant flying to DC to hopefully pick up passports so let's see how that how that works show today because I've been on tour I think we're going to do a world building because this is this lecture is fun and upbeat and I can jump right into it so we'll do the last plotting lecture next week and well I'll try to leave plenty of time for questions next week as well not next week the week after hopefully hopefully I'm not here next week I love you all but hopefully I'm not here so today we're going to talk about Sanderson's laws we're going to talk about world-building magic and kind of digging in deep into making your setting and then two weeks from now next week you'll have a sub two weeks from now you we will do plotting number two and then we will do business of writing number two where we talk about agents and things and so you can kind of plan for what's coming up and things like that and this uh the list of things we're talking about is pretty easy today because it's the first law the second law the third law and then the zeroth law which is kind of like a little tradition science fiction that you have a zeroth law so I have one so these are these laws where do they start they start with a story as many things - I was at my very first world con that well my first world home that I went to as a published author it was in Boston this is like 2005 I believe I'm bright-eyed and bushy-tailed I had just had a book come out I'm super excited by it and I get to be on paneling at a Worldcon which is a pretty big deal the world cons where I'd been going and seeing people like Terry Pratchett on panels so getting to sit on a panel and talk I felt I just felt very excited to be on my first panel and you fill out these little questionnaires for your paneling and I filled it out and the panel they chose to put me on is how does the magic work which I thought was a pretty good match for me right even back then I knew this was one of my things I was excited about it we got on the panel and the moderator got up and said all right I'm going to direct a question to the panel and you know what is the first thing you think about when building a magic system and Brandon will let you speak first which was great so I said well obviously good magic systems have rules now this is something I had learned from Orson Scott Card and his how to write science fiction fantasy book my favorite magic systems had rules and I figured I was doing something safe right I was going to give my first discussion in a panel and I was going to pick something that would not be contentious the good magic systems have rules I said this and then the other people on the panel all turned toward me and said you idiot no if you put rules on your magic system it ruins it and then we spent like the next half hour arguing about this point about how how magic systems I'm like no no this is like the fundamental thing magic system should have rules and they're like no no no if you put all these rules on magics then there's no wonder or excitement in your story and your magic instead just kind of turns into a video game and we've argued and we went back and forth and I got done with this panel and I thought how could somebody have such a huge ideological difference from me in something that seems so fundamental so I started looking at magic systems and I started trying to figure out how is this all working with people and I realized there are some really good magic systems out there that don't have rules or at least where the reader doesn't understand the rules and for this discussion whether the reader understands the rules or not that's the fundamental point that we're getting at if there are rules but they're never made clear to the reader that's the same story telling lies as they're having no rules and so Tolkien is the one you can go back to he uses both systems the one ring you basically know what it can do at least in Frodo's hands right what is the One Ring do makes you invisible and turns the apsara on towards you right it's it's a definite advantage and a definite flaw it's a very rule-based magic system of the style that I really like to use um it's it's it's a great thing but what can Gandalf do whatever the story seems to require ate everything except getting the ring to Mordor right and beating Sauron yeah like um so the the Tolkien fanatics can go and be like oh no no no here probably are the bounds of Gandalf power and he's one of the Mylar I don't think he's actually in my live bets a joke yeah oh it's my are right yes yeah if there's no L my lars like a oh oh hi hey it's okay we've we've all done it well at least two or three of us out hmm so II you you may know all of Gandalf get else powers or whatnot but really the reader doesn't and that's actually okay I realized I enjoy the Lord of the Rings I enjoy Gandalf scenes a lot I think Peter Jackson this is one of the things he was able to capture in the films is we don't really know what Gandalf can do you're never even sure if he's using magic but it's always all inspiring right um so I started developing this kind of rule for myself and you're giggling at something and it's really weirding me out yeah okay it's not not my fly's down or something like that yeah you warned me right this is gonna be on the internet Brandon so I start developing this rule and the idea was that the magic systems I liked seem to walk this balance either they explained the rules and then made the rules of feature like the One Ring right the fact that when Frodo puts on the One Ring the the Eye of Sauron turns toward him and it slowly corrupts him yet he has the ability to turn invisible these are all features of the story it's what the story centers around he uses that to advantage and to disadvantage throughout the story we understand what Frodo can do with this ring and therefore we are excited by seeing how it is applied that was kind of one style of magic and then there was the other style of magic of I don't really know what's going on here but when it happens I feel a sense of awe and Wonder though it doesn't ever seem to affect the story in a really intimate way and when it does it has these huge ramifications and the the idea Sanderson's first law is is the most complex of them and it just says and I'm going to try and write this out I'll try and write it up so you can actually read it well we'll see how this goes your ability meaning me these are all laws I kind of wrote to myself to solve problems with magic in a satisfying way this one gets in Underland depends directly approach promotion probe proportional to how well the reader understand said magic all right so there's a couple things going on with this rule now as I said the your and this is me and that's kind of legible that's good for me the your is me these are not necessary laws that I think everyone needs to follow because rule number one of this class and writing instruction is try it out if it works for you keep using it if it doesn't work for you throw it away most likely you will adapt it to your own needs and then it will become a tool that you that is useful for you but the idea here is if you want to do a lot of problem-solving with magic and the emotion that you're looking for from the reader is oh that's a cool twist that's a cool application the magic if the emotion you're looking for is oh they're in this problem how will they use the magic to get out of it oh that was a clever way to use the magic to get out of it if that is the emotion that you're searching for having a rule based magic system is going to help you enhance that it's going to let you tell stories where primary protagonists have access to magic use it frequently and can depend on it so that the magic becomes a tool for problem solving if on the other hand what you want your magic to do is to give a big sense of awe to the reader to put them in a wondrous place um and the magic does not need to solve problems in a satisfying way then the magic not being explained or having rules can be used to create this sense of awe and Wonder and of course you can have a balance between the two you can use both in your stories there are different ways to go on this now let's talk on this satisfying way because this is an important element of this um this is a greater rule than just magic what I've realized is that all these these laws are really just kind of course storytelling concepts and this is the concept of proper foreshadowing proper foreshadowing leads to that moment of ah I should have seen it ah this this is great and it leads to a certain emotional response in a reader but you don't always have to look for that satisfy response the the show of this the explanation of this is once in a while you will have a character show up at a last minute to save the protagonist somewhat unexpectedly now using this storytelling trope is very different in the first third of your story as opposed to the last third of your story okay what happens your main characters in in a tough position and you know someone rides in and saves the day in the first third of your story what kind of what's the purpose of that in a story can you think of reasons why you would have that in your story introduce a new character yeah um yeah basically yeah so he's often show that the new the new character is awesome right yeah raise the stakes okay sure exactly yeah yeah yeah yeah believe or build attention yeah you can really you can have kind of a small moment of tension and release of tension if you do this too many times you'll actually get a counter effect to that where people like Oh someone always shows up and saves them but if you do it once or twice and begin the story you can have one of these effects again as chefs rather than cooks you're like okay why am i why am i doing it like this with this unfortunate Oh character well I want to introduce this character in cool way so the problem is not solved in that case and a real and what week I call satisfying under this definition in that it was wells foreshadowed and a cool twist of the plot but it doesn't need to be because it's achieving a different emotion all right if you had the same thing happen at the end of the story the lack of size of a satisfying you know if it's done foreshadowed right the lack of that satisfaction is actually going to have a different effect on the reader how they going to feel if a nun for shadowed somebody shows up and saves the day at the end any how would you feel you get upset yeah yeah yep yeah deus ex machina or yeah that god from the machine whoever greek people should tell us how to say that but it's if you don't know that phrase it comes from back in greece where they would actually have the gods solve the problem at the end of the play because they're like oh we've written ourselves in a corner that god solve it um it has this emotion to you however if you have it well foreshadowed if the reader understands the rules of what's going on then you have a moment like the end of star wars where this exact thing happens right palm shows up and saves Luke the protagonist is about to be destroyed and an unexpected force comes in and saves them why does that work instead because it's foreshadow because it's the resolution of a character art um the same thing happens with magic the number one complaint the people who don't read fantasy seem to make about it I hear a lot is oh that's the genre where anything can happen right this is the this is the you know people just make stuff up and then they make up a way out of it well that can be a legitimate complaint about any genre if you're writing a romance and you have not properly foreshadowed you know the two characters actually hooking up at the end you can just write and they hooked up the end right that's not satisfying you can solve any problem with with a wave of your authorial magic wand um in any genre that you want to write the goal is to decide the emotion you want to have and to its when things well a great example of this in plotting so I'm going to use the Lord of the Rings again because a lot of people have watched the movies I'm going to explain two of the movies okay and I actually think that there's an element of the third movie that really fell flat for me as well as a viewer that was done very similarly in the second movie and worked and these two thing these they're basically the same effect in one film Gandalf shows up with an army unexpectedly if you remember in the second film they are trapped at Helm's Deep Tolkien nerds don't kill me if I say something wrong but they're trapped at Helm's Deep they're they're all doomed Aragorn and Gimli are like we're going to go out and we're gonna you know we're gonna we're going to have one last hurrah killing orcs and they kill like a you know ten thousand of them but there's a million so oh well you know the writers write out it's all really cool and dramatic right um and then Gandalf shows up and saves them in the third movie they are at is it - Tirith can someone tell me what meanest the the white tree place right yeah the white tree place with the crazy guy and there again being overwhelmed they're going to you know all that it's all terrible and then Aragorn shows up with a bunch of ghosts and the ghosts save them sweep they're the bad guys away it's only one aspect of the story it's not the ultimate climax but they these two different sequences had a very profoundly different effect on me as a viewer and the we'll start with the the one in the third movie with the ghost I didn't feel as a as a viewer for whatever reason that this moment was earned it felt like we are losing and there is no way to win oh good Aragorn showed up and we have now been rescued and it didn't feel like anyone's like you know if only we have the ghost to save us there was no setup there was no you know there's a little bit of Aragorn wanders off but basically the heroes failed and had to be saved by the god from the machine that is what happened the second movie but it works for me why did it work for me anyone got any guesses yeah yeah yeah the sunrise the third day or whatever right the riders yes it was the people of God we're coming back right right right well not the same not to say Oh Tolkien dirts are gonna kill you it's okay it was a foreshadow the army who had been banished whoo Kate went with Gandalf to protect people instead yeah they hadn't been based they've ridden off because the cane had gone crazy right yeah so all right better yeah it's not therefore when I watch the movie in the theater so that doesn't count um but maybe you know yeah and it is different in the books we're not talking about the books we're talking about the theoretical release as storytellers I don't want you to defend the Lord the Rings I want you as storytellers to say oh this you know these had two different effects maybe they both work for you that's fine but and this is what I started doing analyzing we'll go here and then in the back yet when the ghosts show up in the third movie it cheapens the sacrifice that everything has come before right only shown up three hours earlier that this whole thing would have been a piece of cake yeah yeah Mel's case if he hadn't shown up a day earlier it still would have been about right well in that yeah go ahead we'll go back here and then I'll talk some more yeah you'd forgotten about it but when he showed up they played over the look on the morning of the third day or whatever and then you like look at the Sun and like the riders right over it and you're like oh yeah those guys right this is a completely different emotion we're going to get off of this topic for right now you can write down these thoughts because this is what you should be doing but the idea is that these were two different resolution to two different plots at us as a viewer I felt in the second movie I was promised if you guys can survive three days you will have resources come and help you that was the promise set up and like she said I had forgotten that but when it happened I was reminded of it I was so into the movie that I thought oh they're just doomed then I remembered oh no they just have to survive till Gandalf returns and it worked in the third movie I felt like the setup was instead you guys have to beat this army and if you don't bad things happen oh you didn't know bad things aren't going to happen it's okay Aragorn school um and so this has a lot of relevance again to how you design your magic systems and you should be thinking about this maybe this rule won't work for you but if you properly foreshadow you can have those moments where the reader says oh this power plus this power together do what they're doing right now and you can have that moment where the reader I personally like it as a reader and as a writer when the reader figures without like a paragraph or drew before it happens and they're like oh what if they did this and then it happens and it works and it just kind of all clicks together now that is one's type of storytelling and I want to emphasize that you can go the other direction you can have I really like naomi novik's uprooted which came out last summer this is a very what we would call soft magic rather than the hard magic system it's very much more on the sense of wonder side than on the rule base magic side there's a little bit of rule base to it but it's mostly sense of wonder and the book works perfectly because the story is really about two characters and their relationship and the magic is kind of unknowable and that's part of what's cool about it is they're delving into this magic but it's it's related to ancient things it's related to myth and fairy tales and we're never quite sure why it's doing what it's doing but it always leaves us with a sense of wonder when it happens the proper emotion is expressed for that book in the story it doesn't solve their relationship problems which is the main conflict it does help them with some of the external problems but even though it feels occasion like a deus ex machina it's okay because the sense of wonder overshadows that if that makes any sense I would suggest that as you read books you watch for these two kinds of emotions and you see how different authors are using their setting their world building particularly their magic of their science to create these two different emotions in readers I do want to take a moment and talk about the idea of a hard magic system versus a soft magic system because a lot of people get mixed up about what do I mean by hard when I say a hard magic system I mean one where the rules are explained and repeatable this does not mean that the magic has scientific origins okay most superhero stories are extremely rule-based hard magic systems particularly these days even though the fact that they have powers in the first place makes absolutely no sense we have the X gene and the X gene for some reason creates a different ability and everybody who has it turn some into frogs and it makes other ones able to turn into ice and shoot ice from their hands no no right this is not a very scientific magic system but it is very a very hard magic system particularly in the films it's repeatable and dependable you can you know what's going to happen with it right it if you say for instance now comic books aren't always the best at this you know particularly Silver Age then it's like oh he needs a new power ok he has a new power now um that happened a lot but I'm I'm talking about this idea of Nightcrawler can teleport and it does this and you know it's repeatable and every time it kind of has the same effect and then he uses it do lots of cool different things that is a rule based magic system ok and then you can play off that as a writer by making the things that he does exciting you're like oh we one of the it exists in x-men I believe it's to where we have night crawlers main character he says you know I can teleport to places I can't see but I'm scared of doing it so what it does is it sets up a rule it sets up kind of a limitation of that magic and then it sets up a character moment for him where later on when he teleports to save someone in a place he can't see you know that's very hard for him but he's capable of doing it so he overcomes his character limitation at the same time that he develops more ability in his magic and it doesn't feel like a deus ex machina he didn't manifest a new power that rules were explained to us and then the story manipulated those rules in a way that was satisfied ok questions about Sanderson's first law it's kind of the doozy of the laws um but it's been very helpful for me and a storytelling set so let's jump to Sanderson's second law yeah Sanderson's second law these are they get a little easier so I'm second law is is much simpler it's the idea that um flaws are more interesting than powers WG RS and that pen doesn't work for a while so we're going to hide it over there flaws are more interesting than the powers themselves this is again a kind of course Terry telling concept your story is generally going to revolve around what your characters have trouble doing around what the magic can't do rather than what it can this might seem counterintuitive you're like I've developed this cool magic system and now you're telling me I'm going to write a story about what it can't do but the same goes for characters if you're developing a good character they're going to be interesting they're going to be good at some things then you're going to create a story that test them in ways they are not prepared for the stories about what they can't do or what is hard for them to do rather than about what they can do the things that they can do will definitely be an aspect of this story and will be a fun part of it but the story is about overcoming flaws limitations a good example of this again something a lot of people are familiar with is Superman right anyone uh what what does Superman stories usually revolve around kryptonite why yes here is this person who is basically deific and can do anything now we're going to introduce one of three things to a Superman story one the thing that takes away all is power so he has to be like a normal person to someone equally as powerful as he is or three a woman right Superman stories revolve around those three things um yeah right that's the third situation I made it jokingly as well move really eights it's usually him integrating to human society or trying to do relationship stuff or figure out a way you know to achieve something that his powers just can't solve a problem that does not revolve around brute strength or being able to fly or being able to shoot lasers from your eyes which are really interesting that those are like the cannon ability Superman ended up with and had thought of him way back when I loved I've mentioned the one Rican she once was able to shoot like little versions of himself from his hands that one's real fun but but yes yes there are a lot of Superman stories that they're all around this this is based you know I use this as an archetype because it's easy to see but Lord of the Rings is another good example what can't Gandalf do destroy the ring on his own we need a little hobbit to do it instead the story revolves around something that's very hard a very small person in conceptually what's the hardest thing for them well you are very small from this little town you've never left before you need to go across the entire map will show you the map right you are the smallest person in the entire entire world and you need to go from here over to here um and the Eagles can't take you because of reasons so yes because like what the ring right flying things will come eat them or something but the idea is that this story revolves around what is difficult to do now when you're designed in your magic systems what you're you are your world building I suggest that you kind of keep this in the forefront of your mind that flaws and limitations of magic are more interesting now you'll remember I believe I talked about the difference and my distinction between a flaw and limitation right uh and it's it's a little less clear-cut with magic systems than it is with characters but the idea without within magic system is you know the flaw is more like kryptonite takes away the powers and the limitation is more like Superman can shoot lasers from his eyes but you know I don't know not from his hands right there the limitations of the scope of the magic and the flaws are the things that that are broken about the magic if that makes any sort of sense it's a purpura arbitrary definition that I use to help me visualize how I'm going to build my magics you can have your own purely arbitrary definitions you don't have to use mine Mistborn one of my books is an example of this Mistborn and this porn people can push and pull on metal this is basically just telekinesis right you've seen it a million times everybody uses telekinesis and basically every magical story ever written from you know the sword in the stone animated movie to Star Wars to to the x-men to everything else right we move stuff with our mind in which mountain they do it by playing a harmonica I believe right is there's an old joke for you old people nobody laughed at that because they haven't seen that movie but it's a good movie actually it's not terrible but what I loved is a kid but the idea is it's basically telekinesis um it is an extremely limited version of telekinesis where in a lot of ways the in fact basically every way the magic would be less interesting if you could move anything you wanted with your mind in any direction and instead I'm like hey wouldn't it be cool if you could drop a coin push against it with your weight and it would throw you upward because it's pushing against the ground and so you have this whole vector dynamics you can only go directly a get away from or pull directly toward your center of gravity and you know wage is a very big issue to it these are all limitations these all make it weaker than what the Jedi use right which is I've never really been able to figure out because at one point Darth Maul's like points something appoints something else and just kind of flies over to that thing and and so it's like okay whatever but that magic the the force has some cool things about it but the telekinetic part always feels flabby right it's just so it's all flourish whereas in the store as I was telling this telekinetic part worked really well and people really like it and it's a big selling point for the books it was a big selling point for me writing the books why is this it had an interesting limitation and it's expressly expressly weaker in every way than what you would see in another story yet in some in most ways it works better yes yes yes definitely it does um yeah is the inability to use allomancy on aluminum and silver and weakness or a long um I would I would look at that as a flaw rather than a limitation but it's my arbitrary distinction like I said they're all just kind of how the magic works the idea is what the magic what can't the magic do or what limitations are bound the magic so limited you know limitations are what is it bounded what can to do is kind of the flaws I don't know it like I said it's completely arbitrary it's just something that I kind of fiddle with when I'm writing and it helps me to kind of wrap my mind around different types of limitations on the magic okay so what what does this have to do with storytelling well be searching for the problems be searching for what your characters can't do and when you're designing a magic system if you're like wow this feels like a magic system that I've seen a hundred times everybody does this how can I make it my own well one of the best ways is to make it more limited make it more flawed now there are a lot of different ways you can do this the one that Scott Card talked about a lot is cost adding a cost to a magic is an easy way to make it have make it more limited and then it's an easy way to connect it to other things if for instance the cost is economic you can work it into the economy of the story you'll see that I really enjoy this type of thing right this is this is a big thing in my stories it's probably because I love how dune works in doing the magic is an economic magic first and foremost without the magic you can't travel between planets if you can't travel between planets you're going to have a space Empire therefore the spice must flow right and so the economic cost of that stories is what drives the magic system in my opinion and is part of what makes dune so great and I just have to like that aspect of magic systems but it's not the only way you know famously I think it was Scott Carter said if you have a magic system that when you use it one of your grandparents dies then you can use that magic system and a maximum of four times maybe fewer times and it has kind of this like this this more I was an emotional and when what would you call that cost it's a it's what's that it's social a Chamorro cost yeah there you go a moral cost the David Farland serene Lords has a nice moral cost to it right you can steal like somebody's metabolism and brand it on yourself and then you have double metabolism and things like that really cool economic and moral cost to your magic system a lot of these you know we sacrifice a goat and something happens are like you know these these like really bizarre and twisted moral costs of magic systems um what other kind of cost can you guys think of for a magic system physical okay like you know like yeah yeah yeah fatigue yeah this is like this is the old standby of magic system costs right it is it is not a cliche but it is the standby so you need to be aware that if you use it it will feel a little more flabby I've used them before and they work out fine but they aren't usually as powerful as the other things there are some books I've read where it's like you know it's a cost you get really tired but the readers like yeah but they'll always be able to summon that reserve and lo and behold the writer every time the character gets into a sticky situation summons the reserve of strength it's like how gunmen never run out of bullets until it's dramatically important for them to do so your characters your readers know that your characters will never run out of straight until it's dramatically important that they do so and so this one is a dangerous one for you to rely on because it's going to naturally push your magic to put toward being softer despite pretending to be hard which is a dissonance that can get you in trouble try fail would I recommend having your character fail if you're going to try I would recommend that there be lots of conflict in your story one way to do this is to have someone fail several times at something before they succeed if that is a natural way that your story can protect rest and be satisfying than yes but it does not need to be the only way you know that whole thing that merit that Mary likes the yes but no end you can do the yes but a lot the character succeeds but the problem was bigger than they thought the character succeeds again but it causes untended consequences the character succeeds again like a lot of the the spy thriller genre with you know Superman characters in the the lead role have that sort of plotting they don't fail very often this yeah James Bond types things they they succeed but they succeed anyway that is not quite enough or that there's not there's something they didn't realize like you know they get the person they were chasing down but that person you know has started a bomb somewhere else they need to go get that it's the kind of Jack Bauer thing it's always every you know every episode that he succeeds like five times but it never works enough that's it another way of storytelling and you don't use either one of those if you can write a satisfying story that makes good promises and fulfills on them don't rely on any one thing to say yes you have to do this alright ah so other questions on flaws any other costs you guys can think of yeah go ahead mental okay yeah um this is the kind of you have to study a whole bunch before you can even use it the setup cost or it drives you crazy the Cthulhu thing yeah don't ever read the book if you ever play a good fuel again don't read the book see I tourism so yeah right right gives the enemy information yeah I mean these are all kind of different realms of costs if you start thinking about it that's that's a very good one so yeah cost the that's just one way to do it you can also kind of put boundaries on the magic the actual limitations the magic can you know you could go crazy with this I can I can fly on every other Tuesday that might be you know a little silly but it's that kind of thing I can only push and pull on metals I can't push and pull on other things I can fly but only if I've eaten my spinach in the morning whatever you know you can put these boundaries on your magic or I can fly but I can't go higher than 10 feet in the air or you know I can fly but when I fly become nearly wait list and so the wind can blow me around coming up with things like this immediately make for more interesting stories then I can fly each of those things that I said I immediately said oh that's an interesting way of taking it what would I do with that story as soon as you put some interesting boundaries on your magic system you are going to have a natural feeling of intrigue by the reader and oh I haven't seen that before it feels really new to them even though they have seen a magic system where people fly like even more than they have seen magic since with people with telekinesis right all right any questions on Sanderson the second law okay I'm going to take that as you did understand it not as this is all really weird oh let's go to Sanderson's third law and this is go deeper into a magic instead of wire this one I started to kind of get a grasp on when I was trying to build the Stormlight archive and this is one that Hollywood has a lot of trouble with this is the idea that a fewer number of things in a world building situation that are well explored will actually feel like a wider cooler world than a large number of things explored very shallowly okay so let me give some explanation of this when I was developing the Stormlight archive people came to me and said you know you had three magic systems in the Mistborn series how many is your next book series going to have and I started to get into this philosophy of oh I'm going to have 20 magic systems in the next one it's this sort of sequel itis right how many villains did you have in the first movie one how many villains will you put in the second movie well let's do two third movie let's do seven right it's the idea in Hollywood and in our own psychology that bigger is better but bigger can have multiple different meanings and in this case we I find that the magic system that you have explored deeply in an interesting way is far superior to a large number of things for instance if you're building races for your book having two races who have a really interesting relationship that you can dig into who are fully expressed and you've spent a lot of time world building on them will actually make the world feel larger than having 20 races that only have one gimmick to them each um and are all really really shallow um video games tend to have a problem with this large world's the big thing in video games right now if your video game is we're going to create procedurally generated worlds we're going to do spaceship simulators where you know there are millions of planets you can visit and each of them is as boring as the one before it right this is this is a big issue where being able to say there are ten thousand dungeons you can visit and every one of them is boring is not a very good game what's that did you just joke yeah it is so true and that makes really cool marketing speak for the box but once you visited the three archetypes of dungeons they come up with and realize that if they had just put in ten dungeons that they'd spent a lot of time on you would be excited to go to the next one and you would actually spend way more time in the game will make a better story the same thing is going to happen with you with your magic so instead of saying I am going to develop a book where there are thirty different elements and I'm going to have different people using these different elements in really cool ways you might want to ask yourself wait a minute can I back up can I take a couple of these magics I was planning add some really interesting flaws and limitations add some really interesting character ties in these magic to the people who are in the world can I make them opposed to each other can I make it so that they are tied to the economy to the religion to whatever all that stuff we brainstorm during the first world building thing if I can tie these things all together to a couple of my magics will I have a better experience for the reader the answer is generally going to be yes that's what's going to happen so considering the ramifications of what you already have is worth doing instead of creating something new questions on this go ahead with barely like a roll in the story that's not going yeah story to space how you may go deeper in fast um so what I would do in this situation which may not be what you want to do but let I have done is I have left hints that this magic exists in the world and promised that a future story will deal with it and then I leave it alone and deal with the magic I'm doing right now with the characters using it and then I write a sequel later on that delves deeply into that magic so this is the this goes back to the iceberg philosophy we talked about before where it depends on your world building style right I like to do a lot of prep beforehand so that I can then use these tools to solve problems in my stories as I go along and I try not to break my own rules but if you're a discovery writer you're pantsing along the idea should be that you think of it in the moment right you say okay I need a new power to get through this because that's totally okay to do in a first draft guys well then these are the final draft things it's okay to be like I don't really know what my magic can do yet I want to have a role based magic by the end of the story but each time we come across a problem I'm going to figure out what the magic could do to solve it and I'm going to add that in as a rule eventually okay but what you want to do if you're a discovery right in that situation say what have I already done instead of inventing a new power can I take an aspect of the power I've already developed can I expand it a little bit further and then make it work for this situation and then in your revisions you make sure you set up those things as the rules at that ahead of time does that make sense for you I apologize it's so hard in this class to give definitive answers because of my kind of cardinal philosophy of teaching which is that I'm trying to give you tools to solve your problems rather than giving you hard fast rules one thing I should mention that I should have brought up before now is that even in my fairly rule-based magic systems I like to leave holes for the sense of wonder what this means is I will often and since I'm a planner I will do this in a foreshadowing way where I say look this has a different magic say said does something weird and bizarre we're not going to talk about it in this book he's mysterious and what that does is is it gives us some of the sense of wonder it gives us oh he's got something mysterious and cool another thing that I do is I often set up a rule and then try to immediately chip away at it and explain to the reader this is not a rule of the magic this is the way that human beings are trying to understand the magic there are only ten metals but there might be mythologically other metals because we've heard rumors about them just like you know historically we're like here are the elements oh we found a new one and we've added to the periodic table science doesn't know everything so I like it in in my books I kind of try to write in this that you'll often have a scene in my book where people are like we think this is the way it works but the people who really know a lot of magic understand that we don't understand it nearly as well as we thought we did we're very Socrates about our magic right we we only know so much because we know how little we know about our magic and by writing some things like this and what I generally am trying to do is is move my magic systems back from like a 100 percent hard magic to like a 75% hard magic system where zero would be really soft where there's like 25% of wiggle room and softness in this magic we're like there's still stuff to explore and discover there are metals we don't quite understand yet um and we are learning and things like this I like to do that this is more of a hey try this tool out guys then something that you need to do and if you do have a very soft magic doing what Tolkien did which is write in the occasional really hard magical piece of it can help you have your cake and eat it too as a soft magic system writer yes the world of magic is very unknowable Gandalf is like kind of an angel deity thing and he can do stuff and there's all this weird stuff in it's a wide wonderful world and Tom Bombadil and Barrow whites and yada yada yada but the The Hobbit with the ring this ring will turn you invisible that's what it does this one we can explain and you'll see a lot of the really soft magic systems will do that sort of thing as well they'll add in one or two powers that are very repeatable even if sometimes the consequences are very unknowable all right other questions about making your Magic's deeper instead of wider okay so we'll go to Sanderson 0th law so I called it the zeroth law for a couple of reasons one is because Clark and Asimov I think both have a zeroth law and so it's a fun kind of insider joke but the idea for this one was I was thinking about it then like Brandon do you really do you really do all this when you're sitting down to design your magic system do you say ooh what are the flaws how do i you know and the answer is yes to an extent but I'd be lying if I say that's the origin of my magic systems that's how all these three laws these are how I refine my magic systems and how I use them in my stories where do they originally come from they come from Sanderson zero flaw which is always err on the side of what is awesome so for me fantasy really is about oh that's so cool right that that's what gets down to weight we went and watched with my kids Kung Fu Panda 3 last night you've seen any of these movies they're like serious kung fu movies except for Jack Black's character who's a fanboy of kung foo and so like this enormous ly cool kung fu moment will happen and everyone's posing and he's like oh that was awesome guys you know and he totally kind of breaks out and goes fanboy um that there's a Jack Black Kung Fu Panda inside of me for all things fantasy right when I'm developing a lot of these magic systems and stories and things that I'm doing really the origin is Oh super we'll magical swords that you can summon right that would be so cool everyone always does these like big magical swords in fantasy books and that's totally ridiculous because you you you can't actually use something like that in a normal fight so how can I make a story we're having swords like that is the rational thing to do right that is where it came from right is this idea of these are cool let's make it work and that is where a lot of my Magic's come from after I wrote Mistborn I was talking to my editor and I'm like where do you think I should go next and he says well a launchers had this kind of dour setting the if you haven't read the book they're there in the city that's crumbling everything's got this like kind of haze of grime all over it patina of grime on it everybody's miserable and then Mistborn ashes falling from the sky everybody is miserable he's like you should do something more colorful for your next book and I said oh yeah that's a good idea whoo color based magic died be cool and that is the original story of how war breaker came about was Oh color based magic that'd be cool um so I try to keep this in mind I try not to write myself out of what was the awesome concept that started this idea because I do want to have that sense to my books and maybe it's I don't know maybe it's it's not as literary maybe this is a reason that people point at fantasy and shake their fingers they're like you know instead of having people you know living in whatever the Middle East and having a terrible time of their lives you're writing about oh that's cool but that's what I love about fantasies you can write about people having real problems and you can write about people dealing with issues and you can also have aa cool awesome swords right so it's kind of like all of this stuff is a nice balancing factor to me for a lot of the realism which is also very important to a story I want it both and I like to keep this in mind whenever I'm designing a magic system I like to keep in mind the idea that there should be stuff about it that is just awesome that why are you doing this Brandon Brandon because it's cool that's why I'm doing it it's just cool now I'll justify it I'll come up with rules I'll come up with limitations I'll dig into it I'll connect it to this to the world around it but that's not what I'm doing and I'm doing it because it's cool any questions about that one it's the easiest of them all I feel right at the end I hope that some of these help you kind of start thinking about magic if I get on my hobby horse for a minute or my soapbox or whatever I get on the soapbox and talk about my hobby horse part of the reason that I became a writer was that I felt that I was being given the same worlds and magics to repeatedly as a reader in the 90s the late 80s and the 90s I felt like oh I'm getting all these kind of flabby magic systems and all kind of feel the same and the settings are all like generic medieval Europe II without you now I'm like I want more I feel like fantasy should be the genre that is the most imaginative with its settings because it doesn't even have to follow some of the rules that science fiction follows right and so I would suggest that these are areas that you can push yourselves further than perhaps you have thought that you can and where readers will go along with you more than you think that they will with interesting setting elements and interesting magics and different takes on limitations and things like that okay but write the stories that you want to write now we have about 15 minutes left of questions about anything I'm going to try and start leaving more room for these at the ends of classes as our class wines down yes yes so I cannot remember like me if this is in the theatrical release for the extended because of it's been years since you oh I always like the way I saw it was that in that moment Aragorn was like trying to be as awesome as Gandalf and coming with the giant right that was that culmination of he actually got to be as awesome as Gandalf that's the way I saw it so with a culmination of everyone's life o capable you can do this that's great I'm it I don't intend for a minute to suggest that my interpretation of events is the only interpretation that is possible the whole point of that object lesson is just that in watching the film I it didn't work for me this one element of this film which by the way that it's an awesome excellent film and very well made didn't work for me and I and it led me toward this path of thinking if it works for you that's fine I hope the path that I thought along was still useful to you as an object lesson but I don't want to argue whether it was the right move or not because the point whether is right move or not is moot as long as as long as the lesson makes sense all right other questions how do I write imagine where the main occurrence I repeat it just in case so for the for those who might be watching where the main interaction of the magic is the magic is not working anymore I think that's great I think it can be a wonderful story elantris is basically that right magic stops working ten years before the book starts and then it's a so what you have to ask yourself is what is the emotion that you are looking for in the readers with this disappearance of the magic what is it doing for you and I would answer that there are lots of things it can do but one can be you could make a mystery plot out of it we talked about building a mystery it that becomes why is the magic no longer working or you can kind of get this sense of loss and regret with a we need to move forward anyway emotion from this that's kind of Tolkien's elves right magic is leaving the world and the elves are going to go away and this is a sad thing that we're going to sing songs about but we're not going to change it it is just an emotion and in that case the story is probably something else and this is just an aspect of the story the main character having magic and it running out and stopping working could be an awesome limitation to the magic then you will need to have them learn to stand without the magic and that's your art for your character is I need to be able to do this without the crutch of my magic that's a great story also these are all different ways to take this same story break it down and say why am I doing this what is cool about it what is going to make my story the best version of the story that I want to write back here is that it is powerful you can't control it so wipe out the flaw is powerful unlimited but you can't control it you do see this fairly often in math and fantasy it's great you know there's even an aspect I believe in Earthsea kind of to this that there's unintended ramifications when you use magic and the idea is that you make the problems caused yet again so many ways through this I would say that one is that you want the reader to be scared that the character will have to use the magic because they know that it's always going to be a yes with a big butt and anytime they're going to be using the magic you have the reader be saying no don't do that I know it's so easy to just use the magic but it's going to cause bigger problems and then it does your story then becomes a suspense / horror story in regards to the magic not the whole thing but that's the emotion that you're getting do you see how that could be one aspect of it another aspect of it I mean could be this magic is powerful we're going to figure out how to harness it and control it the bad guy's just going to use it willy-nilly we are going to figure out what those rules are then it becomes again more of a mystery instead of this kind of suspense horror look for your emotions look for what the magic problems it causes or what it can't do and if what all it can't do is be used safely then build your story around that yeah is it possible to power too many laws in too many it comes yeah like awesomely limited but at the same time what do you do with the knowledge oh yeah is it possible it totally is possible I would say it's definitely possible play it by ear and again the danger of these things is getting into the every you can fly on every second Tuesday type things right where if the reader has to have a spreadsheet to keep track of the magic then you're running into issues and you may want to back off then the the best magics are ones that are both elegant and have elegant powers and elegant limitations you can't always pull that off as Elliott Lee as you want but that is something to keep in mind and I'd say definitely it is possible to have too many limitations except you know there's one story I want to tell maybe someday I'll write about us a sapient sword you know a sword who claims to be the most powerful sword ever created in numbers of powers right so it's everyone knows it's the most powerful sword ever created but then you actually find the sword it's like yes I can turn a pebble into a wombat but only if you sprinkle time on it right and then kick it three times and then you know suck it in your mouth and then throw it at a frog right and I have like seven million types of powers like that I am those powerful sword that's ever existed and that is true except they're all pretty useless right um there that becomes a joke but I think it'll be really fun so maybe alright that's that story someday yeah go ahead how do your do your loss would they be able to apply to writing science fiction and if so how do you think that adapted the idea for these laws is that they are just storytelling laws or storytelling rules of thumb rather than just magic I've adapted them all to magic but I would say you know your ability to solve problems with science depends in a satisfying way on well how well the reader understands that science now this sounds you want to dig deeply as a chef in this for instance if the rule you've set up is if Scotty has enough time he can fix any problem then the technobabble Scotty gives you is not necessarily breaking your rule if the rule is Scotty's a genius and there are many times where Scotty works even though we don't know what Scotty's doing even though what he says is not necessarily repeatable the repeatable fact is we need to buy you know 15 minutes for Scotty and if we do he will make this work that's kind of the Star Trek rule of magic this year and your chief engineer can fix any problem if you'll give them just a little less time than they say they need but set up that rule right make sure you understand that that's your rule your rule is not that the reader needs to understand what a tachyon and the deflector dish can do the rule is the reader needs to understand that data is really smart as you put data and Geordi together then they can probably solve your problem if you can keep the Cardassians from blowing your ship up right and does that make sense and then you know the second law flaws limitations things like this they do this all the time in science fiction our teleporters cannot teleport through a through a shield unless you know the shield's frequency so the story becomes let's find the enemy shield frequency and then we can teleport a bomb onto the ship and blow them up right or we can teleport data over there and he'll do something but again the we have this fantastical technology now let's put a limitation on it that becomes our story so yes you can adapt these all to science-fiction it depends on your type of science-fiction the harder your science-fiction the more you're going to have to keep to the real laws of physics and the softer your science fiction the more you'll want to just kind of keep to your own loss but in both cases the laws are important for the rules yeah what's the last thing that I read probably the coolest thing it's been a little while but kind of you go back there's been plenty of cool things but Brian McClellan's powder made stuff um which is softer than any of my magic systems um but when I read that and I'm like oh the story is the clash between cliched elemental wizards and all of our protagonists who are the newfangled gunpowder wizards who have a cool magic this is awesome because in some ways it's the clash between the old guard of fantasy novelists and the new guard of fantasy novelist or technology and progress versus you know the the status quo that was so cool and it made those that whole series for me just that one concept so yeah possible with oh I think you should read whatever makes you excited to read I do think generally the rule of thumb for people is that you should read widely in a lot of different genres and for most people that is a good piece of advice because it can allow you to see what a different genre is doing and transpose that to your own genre and make some freshness and some newness to it but the same times you don't read what you're writing then it's a in my opinion a little bit like a doctor not keeping track of what all the other doctors are doing and so that everyone else has this brilliant new procedure and you know instead you're still you know doing what they did in the 50s that's you're not going to be a very good heart doctor if that's the case right um and I think you should be watching what people are doing but I mean there are plenty of writers who don't read their genre at all and they do just fine there are plenty of writers like myself who read it almost exclusively I read nonfiction and sci-fi fantasy is basically it because I feel like I can find within sci-fi fantasy all the subgenres then a lot of the other genres are doing but you know already I'll read the occasional thriller and things like this the occasional mystery see what they're doing but I think you should read but I'm not going to tell you what to read yeah how would you say your experience chemistry yeah so how would my experiences so if those don't know I was chemistry major my freshman year how did it prepare me for being a writer I would say that I am a fan of pop science and being a chemistry major taught me the pop art is very important to me meaning that when I was solving equation after equation with Avogadro's number or whatever and I'm like how many moles are in this I was bored out of my skull but when I was listening to a lecture of this is how we discovered this thing and this is why it's cool I loved that absolutely loved it then when I was at BYU there was a an astronomy class that was the no math astronomy class it was actually called this what was that camera was called descriptive astronomy something like this that was one of the best classes I ever took because you know I got A's in calculus I'm fine with Matt I think math is cool but the math part was not engaging that part of my brain that I felt was making me into a better fantasy science fiction writer whereas all the concepts were so I was super excited by those for me personally that's what it did is it taught me to that I I don't have to be an actual scientist I can be an armchair scientist and get a lot of the same things that I love out of it alright guys that is our lecture for today enjoy having your uh your sub next week and give a young mustard here your your sheets so you get credit for being here camera panakam allows you to find cameras and lenses like no other site by 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 panakam striving to be the world's best camera and lens shopping site

Channel: Camera Panda

Views: 423,553

Rating: 4.9393187 out of 5

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

Id: jXAcA_y3l6M

Length: 71min 2sec (4262 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 10 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/OshiSeven]

I've read a lot of vague and cryptic writing advise, but Brandon send to be the only person who genuinely has good solid advice to give. Even if your methods are different, I don't think you can go wrong listening to his reasoning and logic.

[u/Prysorra]

Listening to this guy is like reading TVTropes. I think it's the very specific attitude and tone.

[u/[deleted]]

Looks like the seats are more sparse... great way to start a lecture. :-)

[u/cdsk]

8?! My subscription was telling me there were only two new videos. That was so much more manageable!

[u/Rostrom]

It's weird now at my office because the other copywriter attended his lectures at BYU and I'm a little jealous.