Brandon Sanderson Lecture 2: Plots by outlining (2/5)

for me the way that I usually generate books is and this is only one method alright this is one of the twelve to stick in your toolbox and see if it works for you the way that I generate books oh you're fine um the way that I generate books is that I am always watching for things that don't even necessarily fit completely into the arm to the friction section but fit fit into the plot or character or the settings section meaning I've got this late I get this cool setting idea I'll use miss born again because it's one of my most famous works and many of you may have read it but it involves you know these misty nights I am I just I drove through a patch of fog at 70 miles an hour and thought it looked cool I'm like okay I'm going to write that down that's an interesting visual so ensuring sinks setting elements someday I want to use that in a book um I visited the National Cathedral in Washington DC and loved help saying glass windows were lit up at night shining out into the into the darkness and onto you know just on the things out there and I thought wow if I combine that with the misty nights you've got these beautiful radiant lights shining out into mist and making these patterns that through the you know from a distance will just look like these glowing balls of light of various colors that's a great image I'm going to save that and I'm going to slowly what I do is over time slowly combine ideas until I build a story it's almost like I've used another science metaphor I was it I was a chemist on my first year at BYU it's like a molecule being built right where things are reacting and you've got you know your thing and your thing here and your thing here and your thing here and they slowly are like building chains with all these ideas working together and they start to make links like this things and suddenly you've got this cool story where different things are creating links conflicts or relationships in ways that they slowly grow into a novel when I have enough of these then I usually sit down and I make for myself a book guide this is a document where I open it up Microsoft Word I open up the document map map on the side which I like and I say you know plot setting character and I highlight all of these is heading number one and then I write down these with the relationships kind of underneath them on here as my starting point is kind of my subheadings you know setting we've got misty nights we've got ash falling from the sky plot we've got you know gang of thieves trying to overload overthrow the Dark Lord we've got character we've got this guy who was once a kind of gentleman thief who was out for himself then something terrible happened in his past and now he's um he's out kind of more for revenge he doesn't want to just rob the Dark Lord he wants to topple him completely though he's using the robbery as a method to kind of get everyone else on board each of these things were developed separately um these characters were developed separately in most cases and then interwoven connected and I build my um my setting guide out of that okay um often I do um this is this is my little writers notebook sort of thing I carry around here's a here's a gummy bear um yes question Oh us one too didn't you hear who you okay I usually write them down I actually have a document on my computer I call cool stuff that has to use some time and actually what I usually do is once I've done this I open up the cool stuff document and I go through and see if anything else fits in here kind of more trying to make some of these connections and I try out different things on here from there I start brainstorming to fill it in okay and this is where I devise things I've spoken about before it Mistborn there are three magic systems allomancy ferret Kimmi Himler G allomancy ferret kami were developed debt differently distinctively for different books I eventually started writing this one to have allomancy I pulled Pharaoh Kimi from the cool things that need to be used sometime because it worked really well with allomancy in an interesting way and then I made it a third one for the plot structure that I was building and so I developed team alergy rather than kind of brain letting it you know come organically at that point and put it into the story do this this thing is going to have holes in it so my process then is to fill in the holes by by by by patching them by brain brainstorming by figuring out what needs to happen and I do a lot of reworking here and that is where my book guide comes from usually this is the most extensive first off for me okay character I'll have one or two lines about everybody with their major passions and conflicts but I won't go too far into pou they become because as I said I tend to discover write my characters and I'll need to try them a few times before I know where they are at this point my next step is the plot i plot backward and then right forward and so under here these are my plot brainstorms this is really my outline and with my outline I then start with the cool things I want to have happen in the book awesomeness Trump's almost everything for me I can find a way to make something work if it's awesome that's one of my secrets perhaps I should admit that I should be like I don't know it's all you know it all know I make it awesome first and then I make it make sense I can do that because I'm developing everything you know sort of freeform here where I can change things if I come up with a great idea I'm gonna take it I'm not going to say oh that won't work now once I've written the book sequels I have to throw away sometimes ideas that might be um awesome because at that point I've given myself Canon and consistency sometimes Trump's minor amounts of Awesomeness alright as fun as it would be to add some crazy new thing into the Mistborn world it usually isn't going to be appropriate because at that point I've got consistency but that if that becomes a problem for you that's a good problem to have because it means you're getting published and people are reading your books and then you have to worry about Canon okay so that's not a big deal for most of you yet yes it will be a big deal for all of you yes that's right notice how I give you a new one so the one I'm in squishing my fingers I'm such a good future you're saying it's most expensive but a genius it enums and like no naming stuff is not important don't waste your time too much on naming stuff okay that's I thought so you mean more like like a general the atmospheric feel yes this is level technology we'll do an entire day on this but yeah that also um cultural setting the religions the governments the history these kinds of things I kind of divide setting really and we'll talk about this in the two categories which is kind of the physical setting and the cultural this is the kind of stuff that would exist with or without the people getting involved and this is the stuff of the people create and so and one thing to keep in mind as an aside about setting different books have different focuses and was setting don't think you have to do it all okay even Tolkien didn't do it all in he took what 20 years I'm building a setting for one book you may need a very distinctive set of languages because your stories about the differences between these cultures in part and they're interacting and their conflict between their different ways of thinking you'll need to have very distinctive naming styles for the different cultures and you don't have you know some some work build in two languages and things like that for another book the culture may be homogeneous you may have just basically one taking place in one city and yeah you'll have some little cultural influences but it's mainly people from the same culture if you're writing for instance a Regency fantasy they're basically going to have one you know culture you'll you're gonna have a cast of 12 instead of cast of 500 they can all come from the same culture you don't spend your time than building all the different kingdoms around that are not going to really interact don't spend your time there and some books you will want to will build the religions very deeply and other books you want to will build the science very deeply in other books you can ignore that because it's their points of conflict and they aren't you know your book is not going to live or die on them and that point I would not build them ahead of time very much whatever your comfort level is but you only need to be you know vaguely aware of these things you know it would be nice in your Jane Austen book to know what the other kingdoms are and the kind of the relationships but you know we're talking like two or three hours worth of brainstorming rather than two or three weeks worth of brainstorming for that sort of thing so my outline I build my outline backward I build my outline by starting with the coolest moments on the most powerful character moments the most powerful plot moments usually they're plumb their big plot moments but other times they are they're actually scenes that I think will fit into this book and I start with these and then I work backward in my plot saying what do I need to have happen before this can occur in a way that's very uh that that's fulfilling so if you are writing a romantic subplot and you have two characters and a court then your big moment is when they they profess their love for each other and get together write the hook up if you're if your end of thing is the hook up then you'll say okay what do I need to have happen what am i list of occurrences before we can have that moment what what things will make this moment more powerful what things will make it really shine what things you know what problems need to happen first and I will actually well build those outline those backward and then work forward okay when I write my book I work forward now the thing about this is I usually have about a dozen of these different things with bullet points underneath them in my outline my outline is not this happens and this happens it is here is this subplot and here are a bunch of things the things need to happen for the subplot to work and here is this thing and we'll do a whole day I'm plotting so don't worry too much about this right now but the idea is that when I'm going to write a scene I'll grab the next bolt pointed this one and you know we've got this mystery cloud over here the next thing revealed here and I'll kind of shake them up together devised what the best setting and viewpoint will be and then I'll write the scene achieving those goals so I'm a goal based writer another way to view this is ah the points on the mat philosophy ah some writers have described it as I know I'm starting in San Diego I'm driving to Washington DC that I know now where do we want to visit along the way well I'm pretty sure I want to go here and here and here just on my travels alright so these are my points on my map let's then fill in this part these parts and make them interesting that is one way that people write books I'm not going to drive the drum at the United States because then you would know how horrible an artist I am and it's better for you to imagine that imagine me being a terrible artist some questions there questions about how to start and how to brainstorm how to how to begin working on your story yes um so for these different subplots that yeah you have like the hook up in the mystery yeah right do you just have like a big list of these and then you as you're going along like oh I need something I need to profess this thing and so you go and just check it off yeah that's basically it and I get an instinct for which one's I need in your next how do you know what won't work when you're brainstorming ah you don't always a lot of experience a lot of practice generally it's worth giving a try some pitfalls you can fall into sometimes now I say you want to have lots of ideas but you do want your lots of ideas to work together in good ways the be kind of somewhat cohesive I do run into new writers occasionally who kind of have the the everything and the kitchen sink philosophy which is like they're trying to write four books at once and they can't decide which book they want it to be that can be a problem the difficulty there is I you have to kind of diagnose those separately because I would say seven out of ten writers don't put enough ideas in and then you know three other writers if they had seven out of ten will have a problem with this the other three are stuffing and everything in the kitchen sink and they're like I'm going to write a paranormal romance also at Regency that's also this that's also you're going to have space penguins and it's all going to take place an alternate dimension and they're all characters in a book but they don't know it and the book is being written in their self they become self-aware and Don I boom so there's a there is a fine balance to be had between streamlining and making sure things are cohesive enough and also filling your story with enough ideas that it's interesting to talk about for you like Rachael Revere books before you like comparin right um you know most of the time I'm doing it without talking to people once in a while I will brainstorm with people on a larger project or something like that but usually it's just me the thing is that's going to be very situational depending on how you work I have people in my writing group the that thrive on here's this idea kick back to me the different ways it could go so I can like have all of these and juggle them and then decide how I really want to tell my story all right hey this is your gummy bears yeah I'm gonna throw you when you're gonna be r-spec yeah um hue oh I almost began to consider yourself professional drivers how important was your writing book to you I mean is it still as important to you now as it was back when you were still like in our position I would say for me it is I I tend to write very quick first drafts relatively quick meaning you know I mean writing the last all the time book took me a year that's quick for a book of its length in the business it's not like I'm writing in a weekend but I tend to write very quick relatively clean first drafts because I do plot my outline in my world fairly extensively um however because of that I'm usually I usually have medium level chapter level problems that I don't spot because I'm not reworking it and going over the the possibilities and plausibility as much as someone who's maybe discovered writer that kind of really thinks their way through as they're going and so my writing group they're not generally picking out large scale problems with my book they're usually sick giving me chapter by chapter in this chapter I think you really forgot this or in this chapter I was confused here or what about this sort of things that are very useful to me how do you balance writing and researching like if you have your plot points right fine is so distracted with research on that right how do you balance writing with researching I keep my direct research to a minimum until I finished my first draft because I found that that's the case there you can't always do this but some but a lot of times you'd be surprised you can write something for instance in the reasonable kind of the way of Kings I had a character who was the son of a surgeon and I wanted to be a really good field medic he's a he's a soldier and he's been applying what his father taught him to field surgery I'm not a field surgeon I don't know a lot about this I wrote the book and in those things I would even say things like he makes it better and then I went and researched at the fact when I was sure I wanted this to be my characters um you know one of my themes for the character because you know this there's no way of telling if I'll even end up using all that or what I'll specifically need to know and then I get to the situation like alright this is the wound I can figure out how to make this better with minimal you know minimal resources for him and usually the research I found you can get yourself and that by doing that method if you do like the the base minimum research ahead of time so you know a little bit of reading here and there to not sound completely like an idiot then after the fact do enough research to give you like set like yourself like 70 percent of the way there and then give it to an expert for the other 30 percent which is what we did with wave Kings we found a surgeon and said here read these scenes and tell me what I did wrong and he fixed the little things that from there I would have had to spend you know it's like it's like this kind of parabolic scale where you know with I did that backwards tonight maybe I didn't with if this is amount of time you have to spend and this is how much you learn you know if you stop here you're getting much more learning for the amount of time spent this is the most effective upfront and then you can kind of do amount this amount would take so much more time that you just then give it to an expert and it's in enough of a state that they can fix it for you does that make sense this is the method I found to be the most useful that said I do know writers that the researchers look gets them into the story and gives them brainstorming necessary to write their book they go read about the perry in the middle medieval era and that gets them really excited you know i think this is how Connie Willis does it it's really excited about an era reads for a year in that era and then can sit down and write this brilliant book and that's their process that is not my process my process is I like to have control over the story I'm not usually drawing as much from research I'm using the research as a tool to enhance the story I already want to tell rather than looking to the research for a story I want to tell okay yeah how many of these do you juggle at one time um I write uh did I give you one I didn't did I woo I should throw it at the camera so they can like feel they're part of the class here you um I am okay yeah don't leave those on the floor because I don't people to step on them but someone else can eat it if you don't want to eat it her it went on the floor and that's bad but you know your college students you're eating food on the floor I'm sure you are so with the law being in college if it's free you eat it it doesn't matter if you'd like it or not or where it's been I usually am writing new material on one book at a time revising a separate book and planning a separate book that's the maximum I can do often I'm only doing one of the three but at times I'm doing all three em very rarely if ever writing two books at once so do you like create one of these in this I don't want to run it right now and then do a different one on sometimes but more likely I've got this thing that I'm tweaking for one while I'm finishing the end of another I'm starting to fill in because at this point you know I've written 80% of the book and the other 20% is really well plotted at that point in my head so they're not much brainstorming left to do it's just a matter of getting it on the page at that point some of the brain space that have been devoted to that can start moving over to brainstorming the next book

Channel: Write About Dragons

Views: 94,869

Rating: 4.9506984 out of 5

Keywords: brandon sanderson, writing, science fiction, fantasy, novel writing, the way of kings, mistborn, elantris, warbreaker, the wheel of time

Id: arhb_G3A5X0

Length: 21min 16sec (1276 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 01 2012