Brandon's Philosophy on Plot—Promises, Progress, and Payoffs

[Music] i'm going to talk this plotting session about brandon's philosophy on plot when we do plot number two i'll try to give you some other tools we'll talk a little more about the hero's journey we'll talk about three act structure we'll do all that stuff in the second plot lecture so first up you're just getting brandon's take on it we'll do this with setting in character two you'll probably first get a lecture on brandon's take on things and then a lecture on if that doesn't work for you which for a lot of you it probably won't but hopefully it'll teach you some things that you can apply we'll move on to other things so brandon's plotting method um is about i actually found a way that this all is uh is alliterative it is about promises it is about progress and it is about payoff i like to try to view stories as a sequence of promises progress along that promise and payoff of which progress is actually the most important of the three for the bulk of the amount of writing you do but promise is where things go wrong the most often so i'll talk you through a few times where i made improper promises caught it because of good beta readers tweaked the story and it ended up working um so when plot is going wrong i think it is usually at least for me not understanding these three things people go into a story um giving you a certain benefit of the doubt if they weren't giving it to you they would not be opening your story they wouldn't pick that book up and read it some of them might be hot tougher audiences and tougher cells than others but every one of them has opened that book and started reading they are offering you something they're extending their hand to you in return what they are wanting you to do is quickly give them some promises about what type of story this is and why it's going to be enjoyable all right those promises take several forms um and they work in different ways one of the promises you're going to give them is a tone promise another promise is generally going to be a genre prominent promise and usually your packaging of your story has already made this promise but it's important to recognize genre is one of these things you are promising them you're going to give them a promise about the plot specifically the type of progress that's going to come in this story uh this is the promise of this what is going to make you turn the page and you're usually going to be making some promises about character did i spell that right i didn't character it's spelled right now you can't tell me it's not it's in my own language um you guys actually have adam who can like zoom up on this so you can actually see my terrible handwriting whereas in the normal class they just have to sit back and be like does that act did he i can't make yeah you get to see it in like glorious hd um 4k 4k 4k scribbles on a whiteboard uh yeah all right so promises these promises um can indeed be undermined in some ways almost every plot twist in a way is a slight change or twist on one of your promises and we'll talk about that later on when we get the payoffs right and a lot of your promises that you'll be making is that i am going to give you this expected thing but it's going to be better than you expect um tone let's talk about this one first tone promise usually is telling people when they pick up the book what type of feel the book is going to have this kind of gets into is it going to be whimsical is it going to be humorous is it going to be dark and gritty is this going to be adventuresome you can do different subgenres of every genre dealing with those tones you can write a romance that is adventuresome or that is whimsical or that is comedic um you can write a fantasy even in a specific sub-drama you can write an epic fantasy that is dark and gritty you can write an epic fantasy that is hopeful but uh you know points of light in darkness where there are certain it's going to be a rough world but there are points of light you can write one that is going to be fun and whimsical you can write one that is going to be a comedy all of these things are important promises at the start of your story i don't fixate as much as a lot of writing teachers i've seen on your first line nearly as much writers tend to fixate on it too much in my opinion what you want to have in that opener is a indic an indication of what kind of story it is your opening paragraph should offer some sort of motion i recommend this for every type of story because every story should be promising motion there should be some sort of conflict promise of change or some sort of motion um even if you are writing um you know a story that is mostly going to be pastoral um i often use pride and prejudice right um the opening line of pride and prejudice is in conflict with itself because it's irony i can't quote it exactly but it's like what is it every man yes there you are that a man in possession of a fortune right so opening line to a book in the 1800s that is a much slower book than modern ones already says this is a promise of the tone it's going to be kind of funny right this is also something is going to change there is a guy in this book who has a fortune but does not have a wife and he wants one we have motion and change promised in the tone of this you generally have to be a little faster even than um books in the 1800s the more that writing has become a um a popular mode of storytelling the more that you want this opening page to make sure that it has motion and change and if you can at all an active protagonist who wants something and tr is trying to get it you don't have to do any of those things that's the recipe but the reason the chef reason for this is we in our lives have so many things trying to grab our attention does not mean that your book has to have add um and uh you know work like a vine or what the tick tock where it's 15 seconds long and you grab someone's attention that fast but what it does have to do is promise motion promise conflict promise change um one of the things i often use is a great example of someone who knew what they were doing and this is robert jordan's wheel of time robert jordan's wheel of time is a book series um that is about the end of the world in a fantasy world the fantasy apocalypse he wanted to start his book with a young boy on a farm uh in a kind of hero's journey sense in a pastoral location he's going to be forced out onto his hero's journey he knew that that would give some of the wrong promises to some of the readers because by chapter 2 like everything is going crazy already in that book um and so this is why you often see in fantasy books a prologue like robert jordan's that takes place during the previous apocalypse of the world ending showing how awful everything was um kind of making all of these cool magical promises of stuff you're gonna get to see it's very short it's one of the best prologues in all of fantasy um and it says to you as a reader here is our tone promise now we're going to go to the character promise of the young boy on a farm and by melding these two you're going to realize this boy's young pastoral perfect life is going to be upended because of an apocalypse that's coming just give me time to get there and you know as a young reader i was on board i understood i'm like all right this is where we're going i can now give him the time to set up this character properly um because i have had this promise up front it's why you see prologues a lot in fantasy novels um definitely can become a cliche unto itself and indeed it can be a recipe thing where you're like well fantasy books at burlogs i'll add a prologue not every book needs one not a lot of books can start with the right tone promise this doesn't mean that you need to introduce your plot the actual plot of the book straight off um what you often want to do is introduce some smaller conflict that then introduces some of the same ideas that are going to be part of your plot and again this is a something that uses a prologue which you don't need to do but a great example is uh indiana jones on the radius the lost ark right lucas and spielberg love the cold open the cold open where you join someone in the middle of their previous adventure which they are just wrapping up which is going to be a small microcosm for the big adventure you i've it's been you know everyone knows this now but in case you don't you know you meet indy he's this mysterious character he's cool he's got a whip who has a whip um he's investigating a um a temple he's smart he outsmarts all of the traps he gets betrayed but outsmarts his betrayer and there's this this wonderful moment where indy knows that this guy is untrustworthy and so he leads him wrong through one of the traps uh where indy it's a pressure plate he steps on but he puts his hand through the uh through the light to indicate oh the light sets off the trap the guy dies to that trap after betraying india a little bit later because it was actually the pressure plate india is really smart and at the end of this thing indiana jones loses anyway right tries really hard still loses um this is a small sort of plot promise it's also a tone promise and a genre promise but the plot promise on this is you're going to see a bigger version of this you're going to see indiana jones struggle you're going to see that he's really competent and he still gets the crud beat out of him uh he still has to deal with snakes he still has people betraying him um and he just as a guy who has a lot of grit and can push through that and at the end you're probably going to get some sort of bittersweet ending guess what that is the entire movie right they did a very small version of the exact movie um that's again why uh indiana jones is used as a really good example of a tightly paced um hollywood formula movie um you want to do something like this it does not need to be on the scale you don't have to have like a mini adventure that explains the whole adventure that's going to be happening but having a character who is struggling with a problem that is going to become a major issue once the plot insight intersects them is a great way to say look you're going to see this character grow and struggle with this problem and it's probably going to become an even bigger problem as the story progresses make promises of the type of story and you know what kinds of characters you're going to look forward to reading about doing this is a really important skill for storytelling if you don't learn to do this granted a lot of people do this by instinct it's not like you have to use my formula for it but if you don't learn to make promises and show progress on those promises your books are going to be boring and it's really interesting because boredom is this weird construct right it usually is the the readers like it's not moving fast enough or i don't know what's happening or i'm just not engaged not every time but a lot of times the problem is that you have made wrong promises or that you're not showing progress on those promises if you up front promise people something but then your progress is all on a different axis what's going to happen is in their heads they're going to treat the actual progress of the book as a side deviation from the thing they're expecting so what happens is they stop investing in this this thing because their brain tells them this is a side story this is a side mission this is not important to the main plot this is a bunch of characters going to canto bite and getting their car towed um little did i get the last jedi there sorry um your brain says not important this is not the main plot of the story um and i can't see how this is progressing and how it relates conversely you might say this is their main plot but you don't signpost that progress is being made you as a storyteller your job is to give a sense of progress why a sense of progress because all progress and stories is illusionary um you can do anything progress wise in a story if you want to say you are writing an underdog sports story and you want to say all right and then they won the championship that's the next chapter of your book you're done you've given them progress it's happened you've solved the story right uh and then she got over her hang-ups and realized that he really wasn't that bad a guy he's just really kind of bad at making introductions himself to new people and they got along swimmingly got married the end right there's one sentence resolution to um to a plot you can also if you really wanted to don't do this but you could write 50 pages where only one second passes i guarantee that every one of you could do that uh you could describe in my new detail in a frozen moment everything happening in this frozen moment and go on and on and on and you can fill your whole book with that right you have absolute control over how fast your book moves and how or how slowly the book moves your reader needs a sense that goals exist for the characters that goals exist for the story and that progress is being made toward those and the different type of sub-genre and genre you are doing in your story is going to tell you what those signposts should be right um this is where it gets a little complicated because every story is doing multiples of these right um again if we use uh star wars uh because a lot of people have seen it and it is a really tight screenplay you have kind of an opening promise right uh from the from a new hope the opening promise is little ship big ship bad guy in black armor good character in white clothing who is who has uh friendly little droids right uh what is your tone promise science fiction about the little ship against the big ship uh first image in the movie tells you what the story is about um and so that's your first promise little ship versus big ship right well then nested i'm drawing brackets here is your next set of promises which are the kind of actual plot promise which is where princess leia says take these plans to obi-wan kenobi he can save us so you've got a plot that is kind of a bit of a travelogue a character has to go to a place and find a person travel plot right um go to a place find a person so you're nesting these big plot is we're going to uh little ship's going to beat the big ship uh sm smaller plot is find this person go to this place travel to this place then it cuts to luke and you have your character promise right and in your character promise luke skywalker is doesn't want to go do whatever he's supposed to do and instead he walks out and looks up at the double suns and is like man i want to go out there and have an adventure this guy wants an adventure right um and so what happens is lucas starts working on these various stories as he goes and he will open up small little promises and pay off in the middle like you find obi-wan kenobi but the travel plot gets expanded this is a very common sort of twist you put in your stories is where you expand a previous plot into a larger plot the travel plot changes from find ob1 to we need to go off planet and go uh find this princess and bring these plans to rebellion right the travel plot gets bigger and the character adventure gets bigger doesn't it he meets obi-wan and obi-wan says you must learn the ways of the force and train to be a jedi guess what your adventure's going to be you wanted to have one here is what it's actually going to be you are now expanding to not just going on adventure you're going to become a jedi right and this is all very well signposted as part of the big plot little versus big why are we going to go on our travelogue because this will help us destroy the big ship in fact we will find the biggest ship ever we will expand our plot to holy cow it's a big old death star right it's not just a big ship it's the biggest ship that's ever been built and we got to blow that up with a little ship um travel plot says if we can get to this place we can blow up the biggest ship by using little ships the character thing why do you need to become a jedi because darth vader killed your dad and he's on the big ship right um everything is related back and so as lucas is signposting each of these things you are told reasons why you should care and it is indicated to you we are making progress right and then you kind of out starts outlining the steps this is very common in a travel log we need to go to mos idly spaceport to find a pilot when we have done that we have achieved a step in our journey right and almost all the journeys uh the steps and uh star wars are journey steps it's mostly uh character um that is a hero's journey with an actual literal journey that is a travelogue that's the type of plot progress you're getting most of the time and so we go there we find a pilot uh and indeed this pilot is a big old meanie right han is mean and scruffy-looking right he's a scruffy-looking nerf herder um or whatever um and you open up a new character plot han is mean we wish han weren't mean because he's also cool maybe we can have a little character journey for han where han is no longer uh you know han is no longer mean i mean you have little bits in this where you uh where you open up a new one that is all right to get these plans we actually actually got sucked into the death star right oh no we're stuck to the death star we were trying to get to the right place the right place isn't there anymore instead there's a death star and we now have the expansion of even bigger ship right and then we start closing the brackets right all right we close the death star plot uh not the death star they get off the death star right uh we closed that one out by us escaping but it costs us obi-wan kenobi that's bad that's an escalation now we have to do these other three thing four things with no obi-wan kenobi suddenly you have another twist and it's expansion of the danger um and the scope by taking away the strongest member uh and the support of the team right um you then actually close the travel plot by getting where you're supposed to be so they close a little bit out of order this does happen but you close the travel plot and then you close the character plot right you close the character plot by having the moment where luke is going to trust the force right um where luke has learned and this these these next ones happen almost in exact quick succession in fact i think you close the han plot first don't you uh han comes back and he's not a meanie anymore right and he saves you um then you close the jedi plot guess what luke's turning off his targeting computer he's become a jedi not really but enough for this book or this movie and then what happens last right we have han these two i think i got backwards um then you what happens a little ship blows up a really big ship right um and an exact reversal of the opening shot the little ship blows up the big ship um the important thing to remember about these is this sense of progress let me ask you guys do you get a sense that luke is learning the ways of the force through the course of the story yes he fights a little ball that shoots him he learns about stuff han is mean about it is han mean yes but does han stop being quite so mean you see progress for han along this thing well maybe we can save a princess maybe i like that princess maybe i like this guy maybe this is actually worth fighting for something rather than looking out only for myself you see progress you've been promised it and you signpost it um do you see that they are making progress in their travel yes we've got to go here and do this thing now we've got to go here we went there and it's gone and we had a little venture on the death star next travel is escape the death star then we got to get to the rebels we do that pretty quickly travel plot has been signposted all along and this is kind of your structure for the first star wars movie which is why we hold it up as such a great example because the great thing is that i love is that these three close almost simultaneously and so what's happening is two character plot things we'll talk about this more in character both han and luke's character climaxes overlap in a matter of a few minutes and then it is the those two things closing learning the force and han coming back that allow them to destroy the death star right they can the little ship can destroy the big ship because we trust in the force and we're good friends right you we joke about this but the death star was destroyed by the power of friendship without the power of friendship no death star getting destroyed because luke dies um and so the character moments happen in service of achieving your main goal this all ties up in a really great bow everyone gets a metal but chewy um and uh movie ends r2d2 is happy um and so what can we learn from this it's this progress thing that is so important that people get wrong a lot of times we're gonna erase this but uh so take a screenshot uh if you wanna have this for some reason um right identifying the type of progress that you are going to be writing into your story and then making the proper pr uh promises and then signposting that as you go is the way to go about this in kind of the brandon method wow 6 23 already so i got like i got is 650 yeah we got a little time um so what i try to do when i'm building my uh my books um is i don't build a traditional outline that is like heading one subheading b these sorts of things i ask myself what kind of things do i want to have happen at the end of my book i outline backward what are my payoffs that i want to earn when i write a story where a character is going to use the magic in a really interesting and cool way at the end of the story um i imagined that scene and say all right i gotta earn that scene what do i got to do during that scene well first the character has to practice right we have an apprentice plot and we have to explain the magic and usually we have some sort of mystery right a lot of my books that you'll read i love mysteries about the magic system because it's just a thing that i love um so the characters will be trying to figure out how the magic works while they're training in it and while it's getting explained to the reader and i will then say all right what sort of progress can i show along these things and i like to try to identify the types of progress for certain sub-elements of a story for instance if you've got a mystery in your story you need them to discover clues information is usually your progress in a mystery you give information some of it's red herrings um some of it is actual information uh some of it's partial information but you can identify all right the progress on that is going to be getting information but with the character getting better at a skill a lot of times in movies it's a montage or something like that for but in a book basically you're going to say all right here are my kind of signposts of showing that they're getting better right um in star wars it's let's make sure we show a scene where luke has the blast shield down and is trying to sense what he's supposed to do to imitate being in the cockpit later on with helmet on and let's show that right now he can actually kind of do it but not really well and so you have this nice scene where he's got a lightsaber um and things like that what's another thing you need you need obi-wan kenobi to speak in his head because he's going to give him the last piece of advice at the end right you've already imagined this ending and so you're like all right we need a scene where obi-wan kenobi says through the force go do this luke and we do that right after ben dies right um and so we have this you know escape get away luke follow obi-wan's directions um and things like that you have these scenes if you're writing a book about this you devise these scenes and show progress of the characters uh skill with the magic through the course of the story or whatever it is they're learning so that at the end the reader has been able to watch these signposts it is really fun to watch a character get better at something lots of reasons for this one reason is you get to show them be bad with it and that's funny when luke gets shot by the little thing that's funny right uh when a character is trying to use the magic and flops on their face when neo jumps off the building and can't leap and falls down that's fun these sorts of moments are really they bond you to the character you like watching them and it's also each one of them is a promise that later on i'm gonna get able to see that character kick some butt and i'm gonna enjoy it because i feel vicariously like i had to suffer like they suffered through not being good at it so later on when they use the skill in a really interesting and cool way you feel like they've earned it you feel like you have earned that scene by reading all the scenes of them going doing it poorly those hopefully weren't painful because the author wrote them the way that they're fun but that whole thing that i like watching numbers count up on a spreadsheet that principle works for almost everyone we love seeing steps and progress and if you are good at signposting this people will not find your book boring the best writers i know can write a story um about like uh lee modesit has a scene where a character makes a barrel he's a he's a barrel right whatever that's actually called um what's that maybe yeah and he makes a barrel and it's like a whole chapter and it's fascinating because he's really good at this stuff he signposts what needs to be happened watching someone who's really skilled at somewhat something someone who's really skilled at something do it is fun for us to watch and we get to see the barrel get made it's the same reason that we enjoy baking shops right watching people do something if it is properly promised to us is really exciting um and there's this principle in storytelling that a lot of you are going to disagree with i disagree with on moral principle but the the principle of storytelling is that readers enjoy stories if they know what's going to happen this has been studied numerous times in studies granted it's a little bit i mean how do you study this they usually say on a scale of 10 how much did you enjoy this experience and stuff like that but uh the data seems pretty conclusive that people having movies and shows spoiled for them increases their enjoyment of that i hate that right as my morally opposed to it but it actually has a really good fundamental principle that um that is baked into all of us i don't know if you guys have read um uh which one is it it's one of the malcolm gladwell books the one that talks about um about blue's clues which one is that outliers i think it's outliers might not be um but regardless what they the blues clues made an interesting uh revolution in children's programming by realizing that kids enjoyed blues crews more if they'd seen the same episode a couple of times and they were the first one to try airing the same episode five days a week and what they found is that kids preschoolers who watched this got really excited because preschools are used to not knowing anything is going to happen in stories it's all new to them and but they could realize oh the i know what's in the mailbox it's the it's the shoe i saw this yesterday and they love being able to say it's the shoe i anticipated the story beat that's really exciting to me readers love this across the board this is why the promises are so important readers love being able to say read the book and be like wow i bet luke is going to get good at the force oh wow he's really good at the force now that's fun figuring out what your your progress is and we can't go into it maybe next plotting episode i'll try to go into it a little bit more but all different subplot cycles all have kind of different progresses relationship plops are a good example if you want an in-depth look at a lot of these my podcast running excuses did a whole season it's like season 11 i think maybe 12 on what we call the elemental genres um and this is where we just look at the progress for each type of kind of sub genre of a relationship plot is uh is very commonly you can take the same things and apply them to different genres uh like i always like to point out that like a buddy cop movie and a romance generally use the same story beats right uh if you strip away and look at the core skeleton they have very similar story beats um ender's game and hoosiers and uh the way of kings all have the same story structure this is science fiction this is a basketball um uh story and an epic fantasy they're all the under dog sports story they're all played very differently um but you can find the same beats and pitch perfect that you find in ender's game um this is understanding the difference between like this progress the type of progress genre you're doing and the trappings of your genre and i should have mentioned when i was talking about your promises of genre genre can have both trappings and plots and you like progress associated with them right like uh oh people point out that star wars is kind of a space western it's using a western story structure but it's trappings or science fiction with a little fantasy mixed in so don't mistake your trappings for your plot that those are very easy to separate apart and part of being a chef i would challenge you is going in to your favorite pieces of media the books you've read the movies you love and start ask yourself what are the differences between the trappings and the actual plot skeleton and the sense of progress that we're getting a lot of thrillers are creating a sense of urgency through someone chasing them but at their core they're either a travelogue or a mystery right some of them are what we call heists um that happens a lot too but you just start to learn this stuff get yourself a book and start to break down what different types of plots you are seeing in the things that you love and ask yourself why do they work what do i love about them what's the progress that they're making and why is it keeping me engaged good progress is the thing that keeps you turning the page one of my favorites examples of this it's a lesser-known book uh called inferno by larry niven and jerry pornell mostly known for their other science fiction work this is a story about a science fiction author who gets drunk at a party falls out a window and wakes up in dante's inferno turns out that's the afterlife um and it is mostly uh because um larry and jerry uh grew up in an era where the the uh the science fiction short in uh in magazines was a much bigger influence on the genre that is now a lot of stories from back then feel very episodic this is one of them it feels like they go to a place in the inferno and have an adventure with some dead historical figure and then move on to another one right it's just vignette after vignette um of what if you know you went on a wacky adventure in as fidel and billy the kid was there right um that's basically the premise and i was reading this book and i was just eager to turn the page and i thought this is really the definition of an episodic thing why am i eager to turn the page and it was actually really simple they drew the inferno as a giant circle with a mysterious dot at the center and they dropped him at the perimeter and each adventure took him closer to the center and i realized that that natural momentum of me following his progress along the travel log even though each episode was episodic it took him one step closer to the center and the big cool mystery that was going to be there that was the way out of dante's inferno um and i just was you know i was hooked it's a very short book that works to its advantage also in this um i that map in that case was the thing to give me the sense of progress i needed and they carefully signposted where we were along this map as we went and that's all i needed for that story i could see their progress i knew i was making progress you have an advantage in books storytelling that they know the reader knows how many pages it is and you're using those pages up and giving them a natural momentum if you can make good on that by just making sure if you have a mystery plot you are giving information clues and signpost famous progress if you have a relationship you are showing the progress as he is getting made on that relationship even if there's a step backwards now and then things are happening that reader can say they're getting closer even if they don't realize it these things are gonna what's gonna make your book interesting to read page by page

Channel: Brandon Sanderson

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Id: -hO7fM9EHU4

Length: 38min 4sec (2284 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 09 2021