Lecture #11: Character Q&A — Brandon Sanderson on Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy

we should be live hello class this is very strange we're going to do our best doing this fortunately it's a lecture series so I'm pretty good at just talking but oh now Adam is double-checking that I'm live so theoretically you should all be able to see and you should be able to type questions and comments and Adam over here in the corner will be able to ask them yes he will do his best if for some reason it cuts out on you or things like that we will post this on YouTube as we've been doing but theoretically we're going to be going through your questions about character right and I'm just gonna launch into that and we'll just go from the questions from here for a while and then we'll try to get something to some of your questions that you can type it reminder fill out the sheet that is your attendance sheets of the little questionnaire to make sure that we know that you were virtually here so question number one how can you use pity to help readers connect with a character who has a tragic past without making them too incompetent or annoying this is actually a really great question so couple pieces of advice here now if it's tragic backstory the thing you generally want to avoid is having the character themselves ruminate on it too much now we talked about introspection navel-gazing you will do some of this good suggestion is often to have something remind the character of the thing they've lost and then have them have a spike of pain and move beyond it people who move beyond their pain are going to be innately more sympathetic than people who ruminate on it this is difficult because it's very natural for a person to actually think about their pain and we don't want to minimalize the pain or the tragedy that people go through at the same time just having people be one note and focus on all the time it's gonna make people annoyed so multiple notes have them have multiple emotional reactions try to have them not be moan their situation too much and maybe have other people moan it show them trying hard to succeed and failing anyway particularly through reasons outside there can trol and you will be able to build that sympathy for a character who is failing or who has lots of tragedy in their life if you're worried something I should mention here is that there is a there's a what do you call it there's a trope called women and for refrigerators so that I would recommend you read it's a there is a theme and storytelling where a person uses a character who is not a lot of influence or power of the story usually a the girlfriend of a superhero which is where this trope origin originated so read about the whole women in refrigerators trope it is a troubling theme that writers tend to take people with no autonomy over the story and kill them as a way of building sympathy for the character who does have autonomy over the story and what this tends to do is treat a lot of characters particularly women in the stories as having no control over their lives and treating them as objects who exist only to further the motivations of the protagonist this is dangerous trope to fall into because it leads you into all kinds of difficult situations where you are both making your characters not feel risk realistic you were removing autonomy from a large number of your characters and you're falling into a cliched trope at the same time you do want your protagonists to care about the people in their lives who are generally if you're writing fantasy science fiction typing is going to have less power over their situation so it's not an easy never kill people in your books but it's also a be careful when you're doing this to make sure that they are full and developed characters who have autonomy in their lives and ask yourself if you're falling into the tropes a little too much what comes first the characters the plot what generally changes more during the writing process I would say for me it's it's about even my and but characters do change more during the writing process they change the plot rather than the plot changing the characters for me most of the time um does being a teacher BYU who agree who agrees to live the honor code ever affect anything that you ride or how you write this is very BYU set rate thing formula don't know BYU is a religious college which means it has certain rules that people fall follow who are faculty or who are students this is generally never affected what I write my membership in the church my personal morals and philosophy do you affect what I write but the the honor code is just something I barely have ever thought about so so no but the fundamentals that make me who I am certainly do influence what I write how does writing graphic novels different from writing novels especially concerning character growth ask a graphic novel writer ask me maybe and a few years after I've done it more I can't give you the answers there and it would be disingenuous of me to try to talk too much about that for you what motivates you to sit down and work out how to plan plot progression and character progression to work together not sure if motivates is the right term here right I am motivated by the same thing basically every day which is that I want to tell my stories getting them out of my head on to the page that people can experience is the thing that I love to do it is what drives me every day now that's my my motivation my large-scale motivation get these stories out of my head onto the page let people experience the things that I have dreamed and imagined what makes me work every day like my small-scale motivation my daily motivation is watching that number count up toward being complete as I finished more and more chapters like I've talked about I do really love it when plot and character meshed together and oftentimes it's a little bit of a revision process to make sure that alignment is working in rhythm of war which I'm writing right now I had a character that the the plot all worked but I felt like there wasn't it wasn't the right character beat and the third revision finally kind of made me find a character beat that worked for this character in this case I changed the character's journey a little bit so that it dove tailed into the plot in a better way and it feels really satisfying when you find that but yeah how much time do I need to devote to a secondary character to make people care there is no set limit this is a good question you can I say some writers some filmmakers can make you care about a person with just a short and brief scene I've found myself in films caring for a character who and it doesn't even have a line of dialogue if this person is presented very accurately I remember for instance that in the comic books again in the death of Superman storylines after Superman died back in the 90s there are a lot of people who tried to take up his mantle and the one I remember the most is the one who had the least screen time it was a guy who had a hotdog cart and started giving away free hotdogs while wearing a Superman shirt he's like this is how I'm going to be Superman and that's you know that just stuck with me right that's a character who I think had like three panels or something like that maybe I'm remembering wrong but doing something very brief to add a lot of rooting interest for a character can make a secondary character very powerful to us in a very short amount of time what does it mean exactly when you say add a viewpoint this is in context of the I believe where I was saying if you need to lengthen your story you add a viewpoint what I mean by this is a viewpoint character generally in a book the number of viewpoint characters you have is going to greatly influence how long your story is a viewpoint character is a character with your whose eyes we see in a first-person story this is going to be the eye you can have multiple eyes in a story in a third limited which is what I generally spend more of my time writing this is just someone else's head that you're in now I'll make the caveat here that occasionally writers myself included liked to jump to one person's viewpoint for a short period of time one chapter and you're not gonna get a lot of characters are a lot of viewpoints through their eyes usually this is to add flavor to the world or to show a plot point you can't normally show or to just show a scene from someone else's perspective while all the other characters are there just so you can do something new with it but each time you get through someone's into someone's eyes you're going to have to start establishing rooting interest or sympathy or you know antipathy if your antipathy I'm sure how to say that word you're going to want to establish this character in the readers eyes and that's going to take some extra words then using a character you've already used you have to establish the way that they think about the word world which is going to use extra words and if you actually want a this to be a solid viewpoint character you're gonna want to create an arc for them either an internal arc or an external arc or multiples of each and you're gonna want to have a sequence of viewpoints that shows them working toward their goals or in otherwise changing which just adds another parallel dimension to your story you can imagine this if you were watching a movie that was about teenagers going to school and about a young woman who is trying to join a sports team and her arc is this whole get in on to the sports team get on to the soccer team how that would be a story if you are going to add a viewpoint you perhaps add the coach's viewpoint and you're showing the coach's home life and all the things that are going on in her life and how things are difficult for her and how you know all of this and suddenly you've got a second storyline but then meets the dovetail into the first storyline in some way by the ending to make it feel cohesive and you can see that that just adds a lot of extra work but also it adds a lot of extra depth and changes your story dramatically now if instead of showing the coach's story you were showing the team captains story and this team captain has a different story it changes your book in a different direction so adding viewpoints is one of the ways that you sculpt the story and the way you're doing it how do I character development happening at a steady rate instead of too much at once are not fast enough this is practicing with your beta readers in your alpha readers this is not one of those things that I can give you a formula for very easily but this is one where you're going to just have to just can have to look at it you're gonna have to try it you're gonna have to see what works for you generally you're gonna want every scene with that character to either keep establishing you know their motivations or to show them changing in some way ideally every scene shows something like this they make a step forward or backward both in their emotional plot their internal plot in their relationships or their external plot in some way and also is helping ground their motivation even further and doing that in every scene if you can and watch what readers say watch what T readers talk about this is where your pacing comes in how quickly are you moving us through the progress toward your promise is what pacing means or at least one of the definitions of pacing how do you write characters that have mental illnesses that you don't know much about you come to know about them I highly recommend for topics such as this that so what our top is just this these are topics that if you do them poorly and you your book you can it you can do damage to a group of people for instance by in accurately representing mental health issues you can in your book help to isolate people you can make people feel worse or you can sway the public opinion in ways that are harmful because of this this is one of those issues that you should be really careful about I don't think you should avoid doing it this is where maybe I difference different opinion from some others who have legitimate suggestions that you just right about things that you don't have personal experience in for me writing is about exploring the world in the human condition and for me to do that in a way that is anyway satisfying to me I have to have every character explore being something or someone different from how I am and this is just part of my my writing foundation and so because of that I'm gonna get some things wrong and you're gonna get some things wrong and you are going to accidentally do damage so be aware of that do your best to avoid it by doing your research going to primary sources and asking them reading their blogs reading their biographies reading about them the things that they write about their life in any of these sort of situations and then make sure you get some people from that group to read your story pay them if they are an expert's or in other ways try to get people to read your stories and give you feedback so that you can know this is just something I feel that if you're going to approach these issues you take upon yourself as a burden as a writer that is part of your responsibility how do you keep character voices different from each other how do you make distinct characters we talked a lot about this last week and so I'm not sure if we need to delve into this again but I would say that remember motivations mixed with characters background influencing their view of the world mixed with their their individual voice their personality coming through in the way they describe the world that's gonna get work but last week's lecture covered this and this is a question from two weeks ago so let's see oh here's a great question how do you kill characters so it's kind of an interesting thing for me because I often take a little more of a philosophical approach to this one a lot of writers you'll talk to they say my characters my characters and I just let them do what they're doing and when I first started writing I thought this was complete luck I'm like now the characters do what I write for them to do I'm a novelist this is what I do but at the same time I can understand that particularly in characters taking great risks I as a writer kind of view it as I am going to not withhold the consequences some of the times sometimes I will of characters taking actions that could cause their deaths and I feel like when a character death is a direct consequence of actions taken by them or other characters in the story it is going to come across it's going to work lots of times in life stories our deaths are not direct consequences they're often indirect consequences and stories those tend to be very unsatisfying when you have a giant war epic and your protagonist general dies of dysentery on the battlefield it's a very difficult story to write in a way that's going to be satisfying that's challenge if you want to do it but most of the time that character dying as a result of the decision they made to have a battlefield in a certain place or as a decision another character made to betray that character or something like this is going to be a more satisfying story to tell because that's how we do storytelling now you're going to have to decide how you want this death to work what are you wanting the death to achieve so it's a very different thing if a character fulfills their arc and in fulfilling their arc decides to take a risk or make a sacrifice and die because of that that's a very different story that's a very heroic story it's a very kind of classical Hollywood story a different sort of story is the character is about to complete their arc and die right before it this is hugely unsatisfying which is something you can use as a tool in your storytelling I have done it before George Martin is very very good at this this idea of leaving you hanging in a way that all of the character are left hanging because they thought this characters Ark should be completed and it didn't get completed this is a very dangerous tool to use readers do not like running across this very often unless you've already established that this is a theme of your story and it becomes a plus instead of a minus how else do you kill characters making it a direct consequence of the actions of the antagonists is always a great idea if you are going to be killing characters in your story there are a lot of great ways to do this however you need to ask yourself what result do I want to have why is this character death happening in my story how can I make sure that it is not feeling tropi but it's feeling like the real death of a character that and understand this is going to have real consequences and on reader emotions and how what do I want it to do as a story piece that is a difficult balance to walk because on one hand I'm telling you make sure it doesn't feel like the author just playing with figures on a table and knocking one over and this and while on the other hand I'm telling you you are an author playing with figures on the table and deciding to knock one over it's about the illusion it's the illusion of this is all real don't let them see the author's hand when they see the author's hand then you have generally made a mistake software I use to keep everything straight all right so software I used to keep everything straight is wicked pad which is an open-source wiki software which I recommend if you want to keep a wiki for yourself there's you know moderate documentation about it I was able to figure it out and I am not terribly techy so I assume that you can figure it out as well I use Microsoft Word for everything else and I keep it on Dropbox those are really my tools I generally mean nothing else I have not used Scrivener extensively a lot of people swear by it and there are people I trust so I think it is probably a very good tool but I have never used it so how do I know when my character is too competent with 7os so character competence becomes a problem when things are supposed to be difficult for that character and they aren't now things not being difficult for the character doesn't have to be a problem is the thing this comes down to the tone of your story and what people are wanting to get out of your story for instance having a story that is a mystery where the detective is extremely competent and the fun of the story is watching the character the detective step through the discovery process is really fun this is Sherlock Holmes right why was Sherlock Holmes loved by everyone shock Holmes was incredibly competent and you just got to watch him solve a problem through the course of that story now if the story were more about Sherlock Holmes as a character as a lot of the modern adaptations are then these stories tend to focus on the areas of incompetence that Sherlock Holmes has while balancing it with competence so for instance if Sherlock Holmes were also emotionally very stable and great at relationships and had everything together in his life then the modern adaptations would not be as interesting because they're expanding to other areas they're not just about can he solved this mystery modern adaptations tend to be about can he solved this mystery while maintaining a relationship with Watson while his own life is falling apart because he's a sociopath right or something like that in this case competence in one area is balanced by incompetence in another if your character is competent in all areas you can still have a story that's engaging it's just a very different type of story it's gonna be we're gonna enjoy watching the character go through the motions we are not going to connect or empathize with that character generally as much but this can still work you just have to decide what type of story you're telling in general most writers myself included would recommend balancing areas of competence with areas of incompetence to give yourself more tools to tell a more varied story but it is not the only way to tell stories Adam do you have any questions for me all right how do you make a an iconic villain terrifying instead of cliche so um anytime so how about this a cliche is when a story is doing something that it's done it's been done so many times that the original purpose of the cliche has been lost and replaced with kind of the pop understanding the collective understanding of it for instance the original purpose of a villain giving a monologue at the end of their story is to fill the reader in on details now when a caret-- villain does that a significant portion of the audience says oh they're monologuing again that reminds me of that other story where they make jokes about that isn't that funny and instead of paying attention to getting the information the readers are instead remembering another story in getting the wrong mood applied to your story that's why a villain monologue is generally a bad idea now now of course it was probably always a bit of a bad idea but it's especially a bad idea because of the cliche so if you're asking how do I prevent a villain from being cliche this becomes you asking yourself all right what has the cliche been replaced with what was the original intent what is now what's going on but if the villain is cliched because a lot of villains these days you would say why are they cliched it is because they are OneNote they want only one thing they don't have a lot of time in the film you're watching for this villain to have multiple you know character traits so they focus on the one they want some MacGuffin whether it be a mother box or an infinity stone and they are spending all of their time getting this thing and don't really explain why they wanted except for nebulous power this is generally the most cliched type of villain that's pretty easy to undermine or to subvert by spending a little bit of time giving the villain interesting motivations for this thing spending all this work that we've talked about building characters devote it to your villain it's going to take more time taking more time and more screen time on the page can be difficult particularly if you don't have a viewpoint for your villain but this these are the sorts of things that you want to practice if you want to stop being cliche and it's in valence is particularly difficult because of a couple things one is screen time if you are not writing a lot of viewpoints from that character's eyes it's going to be harder to give them motivations but it's not impossible particularly if you have your main one of your main characters spending a lot of time with this villain and you present one motivation and then you add complexity to it with you for future scenes readers really like this I as a reader love this when I'm presented as a villain that says I need the MacGuffin and you're like oh great this is what the villain does and then the next scene they are I need the MacGuffin because my family is being held and I can use it to get my family back mmm suddenly more motivation and the further you go with that villain the more of course I did pick the most cliched way to give depth to a villain but you see what I'm talking about here more time more diversity of this characters perspectives and opinions and foundation of their motivation is just gonna serve you very well in this regard you make a villain not cliche in the same way you make any character not cliche all right I'm gonna jump some of the questions from last week let's see these are not formatted quite as well so okay let me do a few of these and then how do I make two characters who have opposing goals equally sympathetic especially when one of them is clearly on the road to villainy so we talked a little about this right now I want to dig into this idea just a little bit more and say putting them at contrasting goals is really really handy this is a just a great way to make a villain but you do ask the question of how can you make them both sympathetic they should both want what they're going for and make the achieving of it mutually exclusive meaning if one gets it's a zero-sum the other one can't get it and then you just show why they both want it right if you show their motivations if you should let us see why they need this thing then it will work for itself it'll work itself out if we have we understand their motivations and their motivations are sympathetic motivations meaning their motivations that a normal person would have one of the reasons that villains get cliched is this sort of I want power which is kind of nebulous like yes people want power but really in our lives what we want is I want this promotion so that I the work I'm doing I'm respected for yes getting promotion does give you more power but how then there seem to be very few people are just like oh ah I want power the more they're along the lines of I could do this job so well if I just could cut through the red tape if I can get to a higher level then get this promotion the red tape goes away and I can make it done the way I want it to be done and that would be great because everything will run more smoothly that is a realistic motivation as opposed to I want the promotion for more power and you know spend a little bit of time and ask yourself why a person would want to do this and you know two characters going for the same promotion one of them wants it because they feel like they can legitimately just make the world a better place and the other one wants it because they're there you know they need an expensive type of surgery that if they can't pay for they will die you have two contrasting motivations only one of them can have the promotion obviously there are ways around this but you see what I'm doing suddenly we're sympathetic for both but there's one that we want to succeed a little bit more this is how you go about things let's see how do you know which metaphors are appropriate when you're writing about a fantasy world that shares elements shares many elements of the real world oh you've got a problem ahead of you here well it's a problem in that I can offer you solutions but you're gonna have to make some difficult decisions this is the translation problem is what we call it basically you're asking when readers are reading my book and you'll have your character put their feet up on an ottoman do you call it an ottoman when the Ottoman Empire never existed in this fantasy world even though the fantasy world is very similar to earth in a lot of other ways you ask yourself can you say it is the straw that broke the camel's back without people saying wait a minute that's a saying in our world I know they have straw and camels in this world but they really come up with the exact same metaphor it's even worse if there aren't camels or you haven't introduced in that and you're like they're like wait wait wait they're camels in this world I guess there must be but that's just very very weird to me you have all kinds you can go down a rabbit hole in this for instance in Miss Warner I use a lot of Greek and Latin word derivations in order to create the fantasy words that I'm using for the names of the magic systems because in our world we use a lot of Greek and Latin so you end up with something like allomancy which you know Mansi means to see the future it also is a thing that sounds like a fantasy magic and so when I use the word allomancy am I saying that Latin exists in this world and that elements actually means what the Latin means or I might it you can go down a rabbit hole you'll have to make your own decisions here on what you decide to do I use something that Tolkien said and I'm paraphrasing him horribly but basically the idea was the books are translations from an original tongue and the translator has interpreted sayings into things that a modern Western audience reading in English would understand and so if Bill happens to say something that you're like wait a minute wait a minute there's no Ottoman Empire that is just the translator who is translated it into English and therefore using the word that is most similar this is what I usually use as my excuse for this it's being translated English and the translator is Brandon Sanderson and he is going to use some terms from our world now and then but even in saying that you have to be careful particularly in a fantasy work with how much you kick the reader out yes they can go through the thought process of that the one that is kicked people out of the books the most is when I used the term homicidal hat-trick for a character who had killed three members of another characters family and I just love the term so much I put it in even though my editors like this will kick people out and I'm like yeah but I like it and then indeed it is probably the phrase that has kicked people out the most because they sitting they think all right hat-trick means this it's a sports term do they have sports on this world what are they doing where they come up with this that sort of thing it is been you know it's one of those things that even if you're in the right right there is no right it's a fantasy novel right but even if you're in the right there can be the question of if you kick your audience out or a significant portion great you're right your story still works worse than if you were wrong and so sometimes it's better just to trim these things out but you're gonna have to make that call yourself Adam let's get a question from the audience right right character for the right plot in the early stages of developing a story hmm boy I do a lot of this on instinct I'll try to break it down for you generally I am doing in the early parts of my writing some free rights from the character's viewpoints sometimes these end up in the book sometimes they don't I posted for you the beginning of skyward where I did three different introductions to this character and the this was me searching to make sure I had the right character for this plot almost always as a writer you can make any plot interesting with any character with skill it is very rare that I sit down and after writing for awhile say man this is the wrong character for this plot because if you're doing your job right then the plot is often catching people who are not well suited to the story that they're in and forcing them to go on the adventure anyway that's what a lot of stories are about you are a fish out of water you are the person who has to save the world but you don't fit that narrative and as you write who the character is will influence how they decide to go through this story and if you're doing your characterization right the reader will be like yeah this totally feels like how this character would go about saving the world and that back and forth is what makes writing stories really fun and engaging so I would worry about this less than you probably are considering you're asking a question about it that said once in a while a character doesn't fit they are the wrong character this happens when a character for instance is distracting from another plot they are so usually it's somebody who's very curious right like their plot is super interesting but it doesn't align with the main plot and you bring them into the story and suddenly every reader wants to read about this character instead and they're not focusing on your main story that's when you have decision points we're like maybe this character should Bend the hero from the beginning or maybe this character needs their own story and I need to put someone in that that role who better folds into the group dynamic that I am creating for this ensemble cast that definitely does happen now and then but it's almost never do I think oh the character is the wrong character for the plot the most I've ever done is do what I did in way of Kings where I split a character in half and made two different characters out of them Dallin are in a delenn as I've talked about before so that that could split apart the motivations for the characters and the goals of the characters and have them in conflict with each other instead of the calm like internal in one character so let me take another one of these these are yeah this is not this is this is harder because my ITA didn't have time to get to it this time so it's harder for me too all right can you give us advice on how to submit to a publisher basically normally I get all the questions separated from all the I likes and now they're all together in one form so scam just scroll through but this will be next week next week we will do a big rundown of all the publishers and science fiction and fantasy and some of the table sure's and childrens we will talk about how to submit to them and we will talk about publishing in traditional publishing sense theoretically the next week we will do some brief indie publishing sort of things I have some some students in the class who are successful full time independent writers and they've given me some notes we were gonna have them talk to you but this whole format we're gonna use their notes instead and I'm going to share some of those things with you and some of my own because I have done some indie publishing so next week we will dig into it the big publishing lectures and those are Sur firehose lectures so I'm sorry about that let's see this every conversation need to be an info DUP that's strictly centered around the plot ah that's a good question and the answer is obviously no you're asking for me the right place every conversation should do something hopefully every conversation does multiple things that does not mean that they have to be an info dump which is one of the things that conversations do or advancing the plot there are lots of other things that conversations do for instance some conversations and books exist solely to show that these two characters have a background together this is when you have the character meet another character and they share a joke about Budapest right this happened in the it happens in the Marvel films you're like these characters have banter they have a history they know each other and are friendly to each other and go it can be also conflict driven where these characters have not gotten along in the past dialogue can achieve that dialogue can be there just to make the reader laugh or to make the reader cry to inspire an emotion in the character a lot of of characterization or a lot of dialogue in films is there to just be a joke now this is often doing multiple things it's making the reader laugh it's often advancing the relationship of the characters and it is often providing a break in the pacing of a you know tight action sequence or some other thing to give you a chance to feel another emotion for a while because one of the things you want to avoid in your stories generally is you you want to avoid always being at at end this is this can be a big problem I suppose I can write because we did all this stuff on the board if your story is always like this is your characters emotional graph right and this is time and this is how emotional they are on this topic and your story is like this this character is angry and they are always at attendent this is going to have it's gonna be bad for your story this is going to lead to that OneNote character problem that we talked about a couple of weeks ago it's going to lead to the reader feeling fatigued about this character and about the high emotions that are happening in it you are also going to feel the story is stagnating because there is no motion now of course if this character is having a time where something makes them a little angry but then they get over it but then something worse happens and they try to get over it but then spikes up and then this is where you know Hulk smash your story has motion your story has ups and downs your story is going to work better this is the same sort of thing with action if your story is at a 10 for action the entire time you're going to have fatigue in fact it generally is even the same way for tension and pacing now on pacing wise I will say that I have read shorter books that keep the pacing at a 9 or a 10 the entire book and it works for me because I read it in one sitting and then I'm done and then I'm like that was a page-turner those books if they ever get long enough that I have to put them down at the end of it I feel unsatisfied because I've been at a 10 or a 9 the whole time for you know characters this happens a lot in thrillers put it down come back and like how it's still at a 10 right this is getting old this is just not working so that's a matter of length of story I often feel like I can keep the pacing as a writer faster and the emotion higher in a shorter work than I can in a longer work in a way of Kings book I'm trying lots of ups and downs I'm trying a steady ramp of a lot of these things but then lulls where we have scenes where characters are just sitting around the fire chatting and having fun and remembering how much they they enjoy being around each other to give us a relief from some of the moments of tension do you have another question for right okay all right let's talk about humor um I would recommend to you that you go to some humorous and listen to what they have to say Howard Taylor my friend and writing excuses co-host um talks about humor in excellent ways and he is a better source than I am though I do know enough about this to start talking about it a little bit and so let's talk about humor humor works best either as a relief from some other tension as a way of creating character familiarity or division between characters or particularly humor works best when there's a lot of different types of humor humor is tough because humor is one of the most subjective things you will put in your book what you find funny is going to often be more distinctive to you than what you find exciting generally excitement and some of these emotions are more broad-based humor tends to be a little more individualized and the other thing to keep remembering cluded is the readers investment in your story has a large effect on whether something feels melodramatic meaning overly a sentimental or dramatic just regular dramatic you can see this by picking up a very dramatic story and reading only the ending and when you don't have connection to the characters it will feel way more sentimental to you a lot of times then if you are reading the book and it's a well-written book and you are getting to the end and you've been on the journey with these characters where you're like wow this emotion is earned therefore I'm going to let myself feel it emotion doesn't need to humour doesn't need to be earned as much as the other ones do so let's talk about a few aspects of humor so there are a couple of broad categories of humor you can use and these tend to be good at tends to be good to add a variety of these right so one of the large categories is what we call the comic drop the comic drop is where you are taking a person who is a high level of respect competence self-respect arrogance you might say and you are dropping them through a comment made by someone in the story or by a situation if you've ever seen a story where someone talks where a character's like I am so great and awesome I just succeeded they didn't say that like the character holds up the trophy that they have won and then like you know an egg hits them in the head right this is like complete undercut of the emotional moment by dropping that character from a place of security and strength to a place of being laughed at and the comic drop is one of the more useful types of humor you can you understand though that if you drop somebody who's already low that will actually drop the person making the joke more than it drops the person this is what we call about punching up or punching down when the person is standing on top of the podium and they have been victorious and they get an egg in the face that is very different than the person who is walking away slumped because they didn't finish the race because you know they tripped and fell and then someone throws an egg at them that characters not that character is being dropped a little bit but the person who threw the egg is the one who is really gonna get our ire so where do you use your comic drops is is one of the things that you can control you can also show banter between characters a lot of banters between characters involves a comic drop of some sort it involves a character laughing in another character and then coming back with a nice comeback that drops them a little bit but in a way that makes everybody smile even the character smiling so you the reader can feel like you're in on the joke you're all together and you're having fun when lopen glues his face to the floor and everyone laughs lopen has dropped himself this is one of the things Logan does here this is why one of the reasons he's an endearing character is he's willing to drop himself and have fun with it and laugh at himself and so in some ways he's doing a comic drop we are laughing at him and we're liking him more in the same situation so another sort of humor is the juxtaposition juxtaposition so things that don't belong together juxtaposed are often very funny this is the source of humor in a lot of the the movies that you'll see about you know he is a strong tough cop and his companion is a six-year-old with you know in a Tinkerbell outfit or whatever the idea of these two things alone are not necessarily funny but these two things together make us laugh your comic just juxtapositions you do have to be careful about because a lot of comic just a positions are going to by their nature make your story funny rather than making your characters funny a comic drop is generally done by the characters or people in the story and it's its humor that's in the story but for instance that story I told you you would not expect that to be a really tense drama about a character getting over you know some difficult thing in their life you'll probably add a little bit of that but you'll understand that the reader is mostly going to laugh about these two paired characters who do not get along the comic juxtaposition can just be used in joke form as well but again the more you use it the more jokey it can make your entire story again I am NOT an expert in this and so a lot of things I'm going to be saying don't fit into the big theme there people can talk about this thematically a lot better but is the rule of three this goes along with juxtaposition that a rule of three the idea for that I should stand away from it so you can actually see it on the board the idea of rule of three is that when you show things happen in a sequence you are going you are going to be expecting some sort of tying together of these thematic elements and or some sort of reversal for the third one and so for instance you can use the rule of three to to have a list of things where the third one is a juxtaposition or where the third one is a comic drop or where the third one is something that is finally you know the expected one and in example of this see if I can buy an example so example of this there is a there there is a an old Bruce Willis movie that is really weird called what's the Hudson Hawk so weird if they tried to do a really a comedic action thing and they strayed a little bit too much into chucks position and comic drops on Bruce Willis's character to the point that nobody knew how to take it it played a little bit like The Last Action Hero if you've seen that where I actually think Last Action Hero works really well whereas Hudson Hawk is like fascinating but one of the running jokes in this is this idea that he wants a cup of coffee right and every time he goes to take a cup of coffee get his drink of coffee something happens to the coffee and this kind of plays into a play on the rule of three means repetition repetition with some little variants in the repetition is innately funny to us so Bruce Willis goes to get a cup of coffee and the first time something mundane stops him right I can't remember what it is in the story so we'll just make up around the first time he he gets his cup of coffee he accidentally leaves it behind the second time it's a little sillier right he goes to get his cup of coffee and this time someone else walks by and takes it and starts drinking it the third time you do something completely ridiculous I do know this what is in the story he picks up his cup of coffee and someone shoots the cup out of his hand and it explodes right and so because we've done the repetition Bruce Willis can't have his coffee and because we're seeing this idea of the the rule of three I don't think the coffee thing in that movie is actually a thing I think it goes far beyond that but the idea is that escalation makes humor the more you escalate this thing the more interesting it becomes and one thing to be aware of with humor is that you want to start small with this escalation for the same sort of reason that if it's always up here it's always completely crazy then you you're not going to enjoy it as much as if it starts normal a lot of times if the situations are really crazy at the end of the stay in the story your buy-in is much lower but if it starts normal and then gets ridiculous by the end you are buying into very very insane situations a lot of what we kind of call the comic farce the you know like the Chevy Chase vacay movies the way these work is by starting with a small little thing that is going wrong and then the characters bumbling inability to deal with it escalates the situation to something that seems normal then this seems a little less normal and then seems completely outlandish but since each step is very small we are laughing at how Chevy Chase is able to top how ridiculous the situation is each given time but so couple of couple of things to help you I really would point you toward other humorous do realize that there are also kind of general themes of humor there is what we would call let me erase this guy and I try to in my books have a little bit of each of these so there's what we call character humor character humor is our humor that is often a character is just innately a little odd this is lopen glues his face to the floor Logan is really interested in using the magic to to get women lopen is fun because he's got very relatable sort of issues he wants to get women but his way of doing it is they'll really like me if I can glue my friends to the wall they'll think that's great that is character humor there is relationship humor this is when two characters quirks play off of it in a way that it exaggerated s' their quirks that juxtaposes their quirks and in this type of relationship humor is just fun to watch this is generally very good for this is generally good for building camaraderie between a team this is where your banter comes in there is a related one which is the insult humor where if someone is coming dropping someone else and making you laugh at it and then there is textual these are dad jokes right these are your your puns on the very nature of you know your standard you joke I love these I am a dad so it makes sense but generally a good book long book is gonna have a little bit of each of these going on in the story and that variety make sure that somebody's going to laugh or everyone's gonna laugh at something in your story even if they find some of the humor to be grating and not work on them all right what time are we at here we've got 20 minutes left so let's see I had a good time in person for the first time well I'm glad let's see when is introspection good for for characters this is actually a great question introspection is one of those things that's generally good for all characters but is generally you generally need much less of it than your instincts will want you to use and so all characters need a little bit of extra introspection I feel unless you're writing in some interesting cinematic form where you're not being inside of anyone's heads every character is going to at some point think man that just sucked I can't get over how much that thing that happened to me just sucked by having them think about something like that it just makes them feel like a real human being now one of the things that you may run into is that some people I am one of these have a narrative in their head they think to themselves I think to myself that just sucked when something happens that's up some people do not think like that it's more of an emotion or impression to them and so they aren't having a constant narrative of voice in their heads and writing different characters in different ways like this could be something you could try is very difficult to do another question from over here yeah specifically how you multiple plots and subplots without a feeling okay sander lanch so how do you converge all of these different plots so this is something I love in stories if you can't tell from the way I write my stories a spectacular ending where multiple plot threads come together at once it's just this is what I'm in it for right this is why I love it some tips so early in my career before I got published I started using these sander Lance's very naturally and I found actually that it was easy to lose track of some of the smaller climactic moments --is moments when you are constantly one-upping them with multiple other moments and so it became one of the things I had to practice was learning which moments together in an avalanche could be not forgotten and this is a matter of if we kind of go back to what we were talking about before this idea of of making sure that everything's not at a ten all the time you can imagine your character emotions on this thing and you have three characters who are all kind of let's grab a couple of different colors for this you've got three characters and they all have emotional journeys that you know one looks like this and then up the next one starts a little higher but then you know Falls and is not learning but then you know their emotions get high and right the end they spike and then character three has a more gradual sort of subtle you know we're not doing and then their arc is like that and they go like this or actually it would be so they get to their height right here all right let's use that you can see how theoretically this character's emotional moment and journey is going to completely be consumed by the fact that these very very dramatic moments are happening where you've brought multiple characters up to a ten where the action perhaps is up at a 10 where things are exploding and things like that well as another character is maybe realizing that all along their mother cared for them and that's just a warm thing for them to come to understand this characters arc is going to be better completed as I originally drew it over here where you get to while this character's arc is going down have a little high for this character where they come to their kind of realization where they can shine a little bit on their own where these two you want it you're going to interweave because they're kind of both getting to the same heights at the same time and so you want this to kind of be a one-two punch where you're in one character's head and something is happening and then what's happening to this character if you can do it right will relate to this character in some way so that they're kind of their plots are feeding off of each other and you're feeling like they're part of one great hole where they're intersecting this tends to work much better than having them separate if you're gonna have these separate bringing this one to their climax here and this one to their climax there is generally going to be a better choice for you also remember avoid having twists just to have twists early in my career I cut this from a laundress but I had one of the characters turn out to have at the end of the book a completely different heritage that he had been hiding the entire time from everyone else because I thought it was a cool twist it added nothing to the book in fact it was like something went like this and then ramped all the way up to ten because it's like oh this character came out of nowhere having a background similar to me and it's really important it's tying in and it didn't actually it meant nothing it was just confusing and the readers like wait why I can't focus on these other twists because you have too many twists happening twist four twists sake are generally not going to be as effective as making sure that it adds something to the character dynamic and that it reveals something about the plot and setting so there are some tips for you he says if the character is not going to get a happy ending what promises do you give at the beginning of a story so that you don't give too much away okay don't you have to reader up dissatisfied so this is an excellent question because you can write a tragedy where a character does not get a happy ending and where you are left sad that is kind of the point of a tragedy is you did not get what you wanted to get this can be very unsatisfying in a good way sometimes that's what you tried to do most of the time you want to give an indication that this is possible in the world do you do this by raising the question right if the character is a you're having a classic tragedy the characters flaw is going to prevent them from making the correct decision at the end of the story or their flaw early on is going to snowball to cause them to have consequences this is very easy to foreshadow because you are showing the same story you would as if they succeed with the same sort of foreshadowing except at the end they make the wrong choice and if it were if it were tense in the book where they made the right choice then you're foreshadowing would have been in place that they could have potentially made the wrong choice now I would generally recommend adding to this something else to balance it out generally a character who makes a right choice as a contrast or showing early in the story that this is a story that is that is a world full of tragedy and you are watching to see that tragedy unfold by giving foreshadowing by showing some characters have tragic ends earlier in the story another way that you can do this is of course the the sort of good version of a bait-and-switch where you show you give an early promise and then you show through the course of the story that the character doesn't deserve that that at the end the reader is supposed to be rooting for them to not get the ending because they don't deserve it they weren't worthy of it or flipping on their head the thing that the character is told they're supposed to want the character by the end of the story is realized that they don't want and so therefore when they don't get their happy ending it's happy in a different way because that character has learned they want something else more this does happen a lot in your again if we go back to the classic Hollywood action ending where what is the character want they want to you know to be in love and be with the person they love but what do they need they need to save the world so that person that love doesn't die so in the end this character makes a heroic sacrifice does not get the happy ending to be with the character they want to be with but also at the same time has achieved the need that the world needed which is saving the world this is kind of a classic bittersweet ending for an action hero so lots of different dynamics you can take here lots of different directions you can take it the tone of your story is going to influence this a great deal but make sure that you're giving that promise that it could be a decision that the character might not get what they want even in a story where they do okay great question how do you know if a character's story is going to need multiple books and how do you know where to break that story so worrying about multiple books is one of these things that I find new authors do too much because in general you will be better served as a new writer if you pretend you need to do the full art for a character in a single volume and give your best and your all to it obviously as experienced writers and some of you are obviously already experienced writers or want to try something a little more difficult know that characters having arcs across multiple books is also very important one of my rules of thumb is make the first book as satisfying as you can make sure that there is a complete arc for a character you generally do this if you're going to be splitting up your characters arc in tumult by splitting it up into multiple steps for instance we can go back to Star Wars the prime example that I often use the original trilogy of course in Star Wars Luke has an arc in three parts and we are presented only with the first version of his arc early in the story the first version was arc as he wants to go off into the stars in have an adventure then later on when he makes obi-wan obi-wan presents another step in that arc you are going to have to learn to become a Jedi Master and during the course of the story the I go off into the stars and have an adventure goes through a complete arc while the you have to go and become a Jedi goes to step number one learning to trust the force and if you were plotting this story ahead of time you would say okay step number one learn to trust the force step number two control your rage and your emotions step number three confront your father figure and redeem him instead of killing him this is your journey as a Jedi so movie one he learns to trust the force movie two he has trouble trusting his emotions and fails at it movie three he has learned to masters emotion goes to the end proves this by renaming his father instead of killing him if you came up with that arc and you and the first one said I'm gonna get make this first one learning to trust the force I'm gonna give it its own full arc in the story Luke is gonna fail to trust the force and get shocked by the little thing flying around him he's going to have a contrary opinion that says this is all bunk you shouldn't listen to any of it he's going to have a challenge at the end where he has to decide if he's listening to the guy who said blasters are really cool don't listen to force or his ghost dad who says listen to the force Luke he's going to choose between those two learn to trust the force and be rewarded by being able to make the shot that is impossible that the targeting system has already shown that another character was not able to use to make the shot so you have a full complete arc of what is step one so if you get good at this what you're going to decide you're gonna do is you're gonna say how can I make step one in this character's journey completely fulfilling in and of itself using all the tools that a writer uses to make something fulfilling if yes do that arc and write that book and then the next step in the next book if you're worried about this though a lot of times doing the full art in a story for a character can be very can be great practice it can make for a stronger story and afterward you can say alright the character is here in their life now what other challenges can I give them now that they feel like they've mastered this one art how can I put a challenge in front of them that makes them uncertain that they can continue and persist in this how can I make this character have to prove that they can hold on to and you know do some enduring to the end sort of sort of stuff but you can always with a character find something more to explore in them just do be aware that the longer your series becomes the more difficult this becomes for the reader to continue suspending their disbelief that this character is going to go through 14 different arcs and 14 different stories and that is a real and difficult thing to deal with but there are very few models of how to do this and you're gonna have to find your own way in doing it so if you're planning a 14 book series which right now I would say just write the first one the best you can and then sit back and ask yourself alright can I now plot more books for this character where each one is going to be fulfilling and I'll break it up alright how do you develop villains off-camera that is a surprise okay so you do need to do this once in a while develop characters off screen off the page so that when they show up it's either surprise or it's an interesting reveal and but you don't do this often but you do have to do it what I think you're talking about is where I'll see if I can find a great example of this in cinema or something like that there's an old movie called mystery men where they talk about the coolest superhero who ever existed being this guy who can cut guns in half with his mind and this character is not on stage until midway through the movie where someone shows up and a bunch of guns get cut in half and they're like oh it's the dude who can cut guns in half with his mind that's so cool because the rest of us have lame superpowers and that one's actually useful and it works very well as a reveal in that movie this is I think the sort of thing you're talking about you developing a character by their lore and this is generally what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to have characters talk about this other character you're gonna have one to have characters this character has had an influence on the world that is plainly visible and you do this with all the stuff that I've been talking about with other world building elements this person becomes a world building element until they step onto the page and becomes a character and at that moment you're gonna have to transition them out of legend and myth which is going to be a little by nature trophy and into person and that transition is the hard thing building up the lore of them is not necessarily that difficult um then treat it like any sort of world building element that you would that you would use last question yeah oh great question so how do you do this this graph while also making the characters have autonomy right and so that is really great you are going to want to make sure that your characters are by this point like what is this ramped up this is generally the point where a crisis is happening for the character and their knowing they're going to have to make a decision and this point should be a decision by the character one way or the other in here you generally want to show them making small decisions along this way and either failing or succeeding and then bearing the consequences for instance if your arc is the character needs to be more brave right and needs to you know grab the sword and charge the enemy army to inspire everyone else who's too afraid to do so to join in with them so if you going to do that you would earlier want to give them a chance to make that decision and either fail or make it correctly and then have terrible consequences on it so the reader is uncertain if they'll make it again this sort of thing having those decision points built along that where the characters actual actions change the plot in the course of the story that needs to start happening way earlier in your story then your climax and so the character failing to pick up the sword and go charging for whatever reason should have a consequence the reader notices and feels as a consequence the character has autonomy it's just the sort of thing where you're like man this is a kick in the stomach this sort of thing giving your characters an influence over the plot is really important particularly after about the first third generally and in the first third you can have the character be inactive some stories manage to make it go through two-thirds if you're doing this make them have control over small aspects of their life even if they can't have control of the large aspects of their life the more and the sooner you can move the character into making decisions that have really relevant to the story the better this is generally something you want to do more of not less all right guys we will come back next week leave us some feedback if for some reason this didn't work digitally for you and next week we will talk about the business of writing I'll have two fire hose ones for you where we talk about that and then we'll do another QA to wrap it up on business alright remember to take your tests or your quizzes thanks boo bye

Channel: Brandon Sanderson

Views: 337,645

Keywords: Brandon Sanderson, Writing Advice, science fiction and fantasy, science fiction and fantasy writing, sci-fi writing, fantasy writing, short stories

Id: VeXqndZdzwE

Length: 72min 35sec (4355 seconds)

Published: Sat May 23 2020