Sanderson 2012.2 - Plots and Genres

outlining brainstorming we talked last week about the fact that ideas are cheap um that's not to say they're not important but you should as you become a writer start generating ideas pretty quickly if you are if you have trouble with ideas which is actually fairly common if you know you you have you're developing good style but you don't quite know what to write about there are several tricks to use to kind of jumpstart you um one is the ubiquitous writing prompt um writing prompts are okay I give them on my my podcast write excuses because they do work for some people I have never found that I really like writing prompts that much because I'm searching for good conflict with which to intersect good storytelling really a book in my opinion is about an intersection of three things you at the top you have your character the side you have your setting and over here that you plot and the thing that kind of drives them together with our little super Venn diagram thing here is conflict conflict is what's going to drive these stories you've probably heard the little famous adage you know the the Queen died is not a story but the Queen died and then the King died of grief is a story the reason for that being that the king dying of grief implies more conflict and implies a question and implies a relationship it's a very simple way of putting it but when I write a book when I start a book I am searching for intersections between character and setting they create conflict or between plot and setting plot in this case I'm talking about your story concept plot your kind of plot has many definitions you can define plot as you know that the stuff that gets you from chapter to chapter even from paragraph to paragraph and this definition it is your one sentence pitch okay Lord of the Rings this powerful ring was created that could rule the world and the only person that can destroy it is you know an unexperienced furry footed hobbit who likes to drink tea and doesn't want to walk to the land of death but has to you know I mean your story hooks you could give your plot you can kind of describe in one sentence a better one for that's probably you know Frodo traverses the the dangerous grounds between the Shire and Mordor or you know Mistborn gang a thieves tried to rob the Dark Lord Himself these are your these are kind of capital key plot as I sometimes put it a capital P plots not going to be enough usually for me I need an intersection of these things gang of thieves drip off the Dark Lord is fine but who are these gang of thieves and where's the inherent conflict in there for them why are they doing this that's where a story starts getting generated for me and I suggest that for you start looking if you're one of those that's a brilliant world builder on which there will be many in this room what you need to start doing is start developing characters or plots based around that's world building in points of conflict you um you generally want to try to put your characters as close to that conflict as possible one of the biggest rookie mistakes in writing is making an inactive protagonist okay this happens because you develop this character and you like have them wander into town and see all these problems happening and then want to fix them without giving them a personal attachment to it or you know you write a team problem novel but the team problem novels about the girls friend it's trying to help her friend get through the problem well that's usually not enough direct personal involvement it can be if you do it right but if you do it poorly it comes off as an outside observer observing the story rather than participating in it I frequently read new pieces new writing where the first chapter is like this the first chapters is involves a main character a viewpoint protagonists not actually doing anything but watching other people do cool things this is a terrible way start your book even if your book is going to be about you know the three-act format which we'll talk about a little bit which is you know react um act being kind of your plot your movement for your character it's one of the main ways people build it is at first the main character reacts and then they actually act this is this is known as is tangent kind of the superhero problem Superman would have nothing to do if that people didn't force him to do things and this is this is a conundrum for writers a lot of the protagonists will write would be happy as Frodo was happy sitting in their house having Pleasant afternoons and I'm in drinking tea unless until the bad guys who are very active come in and force them to do something and this is why we've had this habitual problem in fiction it's manifesting superheroes a lot on but it's not limited them that the villains are more interesting than the heroes this is because the villains end up acting and the heroes end up reacting and so your chore as a writer when you remain chores is to devise ways that your main protagonist can be proactive even as they are reacting okay this means that they want you want them to have passions and goals related to the setting really the other characters things that are going on that they're working on even though maybe the large-scale plot things are forcing them and forcing their hand and moving them around okay so that's kind of a tangent something to keep in mind that active protagonists are extremely compelling to us extremely compelling we love active protagonists this is why when you um when you watch a lot of good classic action films Indiana Jones the first one is a great example of this they will often start with a beginning which shows the main character being extraordinarily active before they move into something big bad has gone wrong and now you have to react to the do to the situation for a while before you can gain control of it again we shall prove how active they are how they're capable of doing things and then we kind of take that away from them for a while out and watch them struggle back up to it so um if you are one getting back to the original supposition here if you're one that has trouble developing plots it's actually you're developing you know starting off it's actually pretty easy start brainstorming your setting we'll talk about setting a little bit probably next week maybe a little bit today start brainstorming your setting where is this taking place what's interesting about it and start placing characters at the intersection of conflict points don't play some observing it if you have an interesting religion in your world put your character directly in conflict with it or as a member of it directly in conflict with someone else inherently as soon as you start to do that you'll begin to build a story because your story you will start to resolve that in your head or work on it and suddenly boom you have you have built for yourself a way for your character to go if that um isn't working another good way to do this is actually read history books you can find in history lots of great examples of interesting situations one I usually talk about who knows like the marching the elephants over the Alps right Hannibal Alps elephants this is a cool concept you read about this um for a while if you go read about that situation maybe that you know the assassination of Sir Thomas Becket um wasn't sir st. thomas a becket or things like this you know you start reading about some of these cool situations in history and you can take the core idea of that theme and build another story around it maybe yours isn't you know isn't going to be elephants across Alps or even you know whatever lizard creatures across the desert it could be it can be four or five steps removed you're going to take your space convoy from this plant to this plant it's got to pass through nebula and you're going to have some of the same hardships you start kind of with this concept of here's my conflict we have to get from here to here and there's this huge obstacle in the way let's look in history and see what kind of complications were involved and see if I can adapt those works very well you will see people doing it all the time George R Martin wrote an entire book series doing this he's miss medieval historian he took War of the Roses he said I'm going to do a fantasy version of the war of roses you have a game of Thrones alright the long-standing tradition of this to get inspiration it's not cheating or cheap in any way because what you're doing if you're doing it right is you're starting with that as kind of a loose launch off point point a springboard and then you're going to extrapolate it's kind of like if you've got in science you've got these concept of the supersaturated solution right and if you drop one little crystal something in the whole thing explodes you're looking for that crystal to start building upon and that crystal can come from lots of different places so what there you got clumsy 107 2107 mmm everyone gets a chair yeah and so the the professor who is just leaving yes he was he said that his class goes to 515 uh-huh no what do they couldn't schedule is for the auditorium ah well they wouldn't anyway because they don't want us to have a large room so but you want to risk it um I want to do since we're all settled in here right now I want to do this for an hour then I want to send someone up to check and see if it's um if it's occupied during the next hour and if it's not then next week we will try starting in that class room and see what happens okay does that make sense yeah you're fine so one of the other great methods of doing this and idea generation is to look to stories you have loved reading and try and boil them down to what about them you really really loved try and get it their core but there is an issue here you have to do this delicately for instance my um my suggestion to you is if you what you love if you love talking to take a few steps further than the it is about elves and dwarves that I love that's probably not when you actually love about talking and many newer writers make this mistake it's like well it was that his setting so I'm going to write something very similar to his setting it probably wasn't that it's at its heart that really grabbed you maybe after years and years of familiarity and playing DMV I mean reading books like this that is what you love and if that is what you love that it's fine to write that don't not white write what you love but um for most people it's going to be the depth of world-building the um the all of the different songs and things he put into it it might be that or it could be the seed the completely opposite I talked about last week which is the seed of the common man trying to struggle against this enormous thing that some hero should be in instead of becoming men maybe it's that which really captured you about talking whatever it is if you can boil it down and develop that and then say I'm going to take that as my seed to start my story you can go a completely different direction with it and use that as your kind of your soul of your story this works very well if you go see a movie and you say you know what what I love I love this movie because of X Y Z you know I love heist novels I love high stories the Great Train Robbery my Michael Crichton is one of my favorites the movie sneakers one of my favorites and so I for a long time had wanted to do a high story set the fantasy world taking something as genre like that and saying I'm going to do it set in a science fiction or fantasy world it's a perfect way to do this sorry I've had I'm getting over a cold so I'm gonna have a scratchy throat today usually for me one idea like that is not enough and so the reason I didn't write Mistborn for many years as I was looking for a second idea to intersect with and I suggest that you try and pack more ideas rather than viewer into your book form is born when I got the when what made me want to write it was the intersection of that idea with a separate idea I've been having which is the world for the Dark Lord one if you know the heroic monomyth Joseph Campbell and all this stuff that you have someone who went on the hero's journey and actually failed and then became kind of this dark overlord of the world because of his failure you know what a Frodo had kept the ring or you know what if Voldemort killed Harry Potter this sort of thing intersecting with the heist novel created Mistborn for me and so those two things ramming together were part of my story seed and you can do this oh do we have someone out there yes they want you oh okay you can do this and build your story from that so if you how many of you haven't that started your novel yet yeah a couple of you so not very many of you this is good this is good if you haven't started your novel yet it happened pick something like this and look for a good area of um of conflict in it and just start writing okay I don't want you too far to fall fall too far behind um you really need to just get on this and explore the concept no um question yes okay so like I might be on this but I was just on your diagram uh-huh looking lovely and completely non confusing diagram uh-huh so like I heard you say like conflict between like character and setting yeah character and character or right yeah can you just give an example of like a conflict between boughten setting conflict between plot setting sure I may in a lot of ways you know miss borne has this because what I'm looking for these kind of friction points and conflict between them doesn't necessarily mean they're in conflict with each other when they rub together they create friction for me the idea was I created this world with Dark Lord one and so I then built off the setting this horrible setting where ash falls from the sky and things like this and this is an intersection between between plot and setting and a way that creates a conflict in the world if that makes sense and so that's what I was looking for but another way to do it would be to say something along the lines of so I have to achieve what I want to become the the greatest swordsman in the world and then devise something about your setting that says no you can't do that maybe it's a case system you're setting involves you this rigorous case system and the person belongs to a case that cannot learn to use a sword you've created conflict between character and setting right then does that make sense and you've created conflict you know your your plot bad thing can be the story of the sword championships sword championships plus conflict built around the concept of people who can't compete and the sword comes championship are allowed to for the first time this year or something like that you see what I'm saying you're just trying to build friction points so that you'll end up having um having a story to tell for me the way that I usually generate books is and this is only one method alright this is one of the tools to stick in your toolbox and see if it works for you the way that I generate looks at your find um the way that I generate books is that I am always watching for things that don't even necessarily fit completely into the arm to the friction section but fit fit into the plot or character or the settings section meaning I've got this like I get this cool setting idea I'll use miss born again cuz it's one of my most famous works and many of you may have read it but it involves you know these these misty nights I am I just I drove through a patch of fog at 70 miles an hour and thought it looked cool I'm like okay I'm going to write that down that's an interesting visual it's an interesting setting element someday I want to use that in a book I visited the National Cathedral and on Washington DC and loved health say glass windows were lit up at night shining out into the into the darkness and onto you know just on the things out there and I thought wow if I combine that with the misty nights you've got these beautiful radiant lights shining out into mist and making these patterns that through the you know from a distance will just look like these glowing balls of light of various colors that's a great image I'm going to save that and I'm going to slowly what I do is over time slowly combine ideas until I build a story it's almost like I'd use another science metaphor I was it I was a chemist on my first year at BYU it's like a molecule being built right where things are reacting and you've got you know your thing and your thing here and your thing here and your thing here and they slowly are like building chains with all these ideas working together and they start to make links like this things and suddenly you've got this cool story where different things are creating links conflicts or relationships in ways that they slowly grow into a novel when I have enough of these then I usually sit down and I make for myself a book guide this is a document where I open it up Microsoft Word I open up the document map map on the side which I like and I say you know plot setting character and I highlight all of these is heading number one and then I write down these with the relationships kind of underneath them on here as my starting points is kind of my subheadings you know setting we've got misty nights we've got ash falling from the sky plot we've got you know gang of thieves trying to overload overthrow the Dark Lord we've got character we've got this guy who was once a kind of gentleman thief who was out for himself then something terrible happened in his past and now he's um he's out kind of more for revenge he doesn't want to just rob the Dark Lord he wants to topple him completely though he's using the robbery as a method to kind of get everyone else on board each of these things were developed separately um these characters were developed separately in most cases and then interwoven connected and I build my um my setting guide out of that okay um often I do um this is this is my little writers notebook sort of thing I carry around here's a here's gummy bear um last question oh you last one too didn't you yeah um you do okay I usually write them down I actually have a document on my computer I call cool stuff that has to use some time and actually what I usually do is once I've done this I open up the cool stuff document and I go through and see if anything else fits in here kind of more trying to make some of these connections and I try out different things on here from there I start brainstorming to fill it in okay and this is where I devise things I've spoken about before it Mistborn there are three magic systems i'm allomancy farah Kimmi Himler g allomancy farah Kimmy were developed debt differently distinctively for different books I eventually um started writing this one to have allomancy I pulled Pharaoh Kimi from the cool things that need to be used sometime because it worked really well with allomancy in an interesting way and then I made it a third one for the plot structure that I was building and so I developed team alergy rather than kind of brain letting it you know come more organically at that point and put it into the story do this this thing is going to have holes in it so my process then is to fill in the holes by by by by patching them by brain brainstorming by figuring out what needs to happen and I do a lot of reworking here and that is where my book guide comes from usually this is the most expensive first off for me okay character I'll have one or two lines about everybody with their major passions and conflicts but I won't go too far into who they become because as I said I tend to discover to write my characters and I'll need to try them a few times before I know where they are at this point my next step is the plot i plot backward and then right forward and so under here these are my plot brainstorms this is really my outline and with my outline I then start with the cool things I want to have happen in the book awesomeness Trump's almost everything for me I can find a way to make something work if it's awesome that's one of my si crits perhaps I should admit that I should be like oh no it's all you know it all know I make it awesome first and then I make it make sense I can do that because I'm developing everything you know sort of freeform here where I can change things if I come up with a great idea I mean take it I'm not going to say oh that won't work now once I've written the book sequels I have to throw away sometimes ideas that might be um awesome because at that point I've given myself Canon and consistency sometimes trumps minor amounts of Awesomeness alright as fun as it would be to add some crazy new thing into the Mistborn world it usually isn't going to be appropriate because at that point I've got consistency but that if that becomes a problem for you that's a good problem to have because it means you're getting published and people are reading your books and then you have to worry about Canon okay so that's not a big deal for most of you yet yes it will be a big deal for all of you yes that's right notice how I give you a new one so the one I'm in squashing my fingers I'm such a good future you're saying it's supposed to sense it but it do you mean like you're like getting like city names and like no naming stuff is not important don't waste your time too much on naming stuff okay that's what I thought so you mean more like like a general the atmospheric feel yes this is level technology we'll do an entire day on this but yeah that also cultural setting the religions the government's the history these kinds of things I kind of divide setting really and we'll talk about this in the two categories which is kind of the physical setting and the cultural this is the kind of stuff that would exist with or without the people getting involved and this is the stuff of the people create and so and one thing to keep in mind as an aside about setting different books have been front focuses and was setting don't think you have to do it all okay even toll King didn't do it all in he took what 20 years well I'm building a setting for one book you may need a very distinctive set of languages because your story is about the differences between these cultures in part and they're interacting and their conflict between their different ways of thinking you'll need to have very distinctive naming styles for the different cultures and you don't have you know some some work building two languages and things like that for another book the culture may be homogeneous you may have just basically one safety place in one city and yeah you'll have some little cultural influences but it's mainly people from the same culture if you're writing for instance a Regency fantasy they're basically going to have one you know culture you'll you're gonna have a cast of twelve instead of cast of 500 they can all come from the same culture you don't spend your time than building all the different kingdoms around that are not going to really interact don't spend your time there um and some books you will want to world build the religions very deeply and other books you want to world build the science very deeply in other books you can ignore that because it's their points of conflict and they aren't you know your book is not going to live or die on them and that point I would not build them ahead of time very much whatever your comfort level is but you only need to be you know vaguely aware of these things you know it would be nice in your Jane Austen book to know what the other kingdoms are and the kind of the relationships but you know we're talking like two or three hours worth of brainstorming rather than two or three weeks worth of brainstorming for that sort of thing so um my outline I build my outline backward I build my outline by starting with the coolest moments on the most powerful character moments the most powerful plot moments usually they're their big plot moments but other times they are it they're actually scenes that I think will fit into this book and I start with these and then I work backward in my plot saying what do I need to have happen before this can occur in a way that's very that that's fulfilling so if you are writing a romantic subplot and you have two characters and a court then your big moment is when they they profess their love for each other and get together write the hook up if you're if you're anything is the hook up then you will say okay what do I need to have happen what am i list of occurrences before we can have that moment what what things will make this moment more powerful what things will make it really shine what things you know what problems need to happen first and I will actually will build those or outline those backward and then work forward okay when I write my book I work forward now the thing about this is I usually have about a dozen of these different things with bullet points underneath them in my outline my outline is not this happens and this happens it is here is this subplot and here are a bunch of things the things need to happen for the subplot to work and here is this thing and we'll do a whole day on plotting so don't worry too much about this right now but the idea is that when I'm going to write a scene I'll grab the next bolt pointed this one and you know we've got this mystery plot over here the next thing revealed here and I'll kind of shake them up together devised what the best setting and viewpoint will be and then I'll write the scene achieving those goals so I'm a goal based writer another way to view this is ah the points on the mat philosophy ah some writers have described it as I know I'm starting in San Diego I'm driving to Washington DC that I know now where do we want to visit along the way well I'm pretty sure I want to go here and here and here just on my travels alright so these are my points on my map let's then fill in this part these parts and make them interesting that is one way that people write books I'm not going to drive them draw a map the United States because then you would know how horrible an artist I am and it's better for you to imagine that imagine me being a terrible artist so questions there questions about how to start and how to brainstorm how to how to begin working on your story yes um so for these different sub processes yeah you have like the hook up and then the mystery yeah right you just have like a big list of these and then you as you're going along like oh I need something I need to prevents this thing and so you go and just check it off yeah that's basically it and I get an instinct for which ones I need in your next how do you know what won't work when you're brainstorming ah you don't always a lot of experience a lot of practice generally it's worth giving a try some pitfalls you can fall into sometimes now I say you want to have lots of ideas but you do want your lots of ideas to work together in good ways the be kind of somewhat cohesive I do run into new writers occasionally who kind of have the the everything and the kitchen sink philosophy which is like they're trying to write four books at once and they can't decide which book they want it to be that can be a problem the difficulty there is I you have to kind of diagnose those separately because I would say seven out of ten writers don't put enough ideas in and then you know three other writers if they had seven out of ten who have a problem with this the other three are stuffing and everything in the kitchen sink and they're like I'm going to write a paranormal romance also a Regency that's also this that's also you're going to have space penguins and it's all going to take place an alternate dimension and they're all characters in a book but they don't know it and the book is being written in their self they become self-aware and down boom so there's a bear is a fine balance to be had between streamlining and making sure things are cohesive enough and also filling your story with enough ideas that it's interesting to talk about for you like brainstorming for your books before you really compared to right um you know most of the time I'm doing it without talking to people once in a while I will brainstorm with people on a larger project or something like that but usually it's just me the thing is that's going to be very situational depending on how you work I have people in my writing group that that thrive on here's this idea kick back to me the different ways it could go so I can like have all of these and juggle them and then decide how I really want to tell my story all right hey these are your gummy bears yeah I'm gonna throw you one you're gonna be r-spec yeah um hue oh I almost bender consider yourself professional drivers how important was your writing book to you I mean is it still as important to you now as it was back when you were still like in our position I would say for me it is I I tend to write very quick first drafts relatively quick meaning you know I mean writing the last real-time book took me a year that's quick for a book of its length in the business it's not like I'm writing the weekend but I tend to write very quick relatively clean first drafts because I do plot my outline in my world fairly extensively um however because of that I'm usually I usually have medium level chapter level problems that I don't spot because I'm not reworking it and going over the the possibilities and plausibility as much as someone who's maybe discovered writer that kind of really thinks their way through ways they're going and so my writing group they're not generally picking out large scale problems with my book they're usually sick giving me chapter by chapter in this chapter I think you really forgot this or in this chapter I was confused here or what about this sort of things that are very useful to me how do you balance writing and researching like if you have your plot point right fine is so distracted with researching them right how do you balance writing with researching I keep my direct research to a minimum until I finish my first draft because I found that that's the case there you can't always do this but some but a lot of times you'd be surprised you can write something for instance in the recent book kind of the way of Kings I had a character who was the son of a surgeon and I wanted to be a really good field medic um he's a he's a soldier and he's been applying what his father taught him to field surgery I'm not a field surgeon I don't know a lot about this I wrote the book and in those scenes I would even say things like he makes it better and then I went and researched after the fact when I was sure I wanted this to be my characters um you know one of my themes for the character because you know this there's no way of telling if I'll even end up using all that or what I'll specifically need to know and then I get to the situation like alright this is the wound I can figure out how to make this better with minimal you know minimal resources for him and usually the research I found you can get yourself and that by doing that method if you do like the the base minimum research ahead of time so you know a little bit of reading here and there to not sound completely like an idiot then after the fact do enough research to get your likes like yourself like seventy percent of the way there and then give it to an expert for the other thirty percent which is what we did with wave Kings we found a surgeon and said here read these scenes and tell me what I did wrong and he fixed the little things that from there I would have had to spend you know it's like it's like this kind of parabolic scale where you know with I did that backwards at night maybe I didn't with uh if this is amount of time you have to spend this is how much you learn you know if you stop here you're getting much more learning for the amount of time spent this is the most effective upfront and then you can kind of do amount this amount would take so much more time that you just then give it to an expert and enough of a state that they can fix it for you does that make sense this is the method I found to be the most useful that said I do know writers that the research is what gets them into the story and gives them brainstorming necessary to write their book they go read about it peri in the middle medieval era and that gets them really excited you know I think this is how Connie Willis does it it's really excited about an era reads for a year in that era and then can sit down and write this brilliant book and that's their process that is not my process my process is I like to have control over the story I'm not usually drawing as much from research I'm using the research as a tool to enhance the story I already want to tell rather than looking to the research for a story I want to tell okay yeah how many of these do you juggle at one time um I write uh did I give you one I didn't die woo I should throw it at the camera so they can like feel they're part of the class here you um i am i hey yeah don't leave those on the floor because I don't want people to step on them but someone else can eat it if you don't want to eat it her it went on the floor and that's bad but you know your college students you're eating food off the floor I'm sure you are so the law being in college if it's free you eat it it doesn't matter if you'd like it or not or where it's been I usually am writing new material on one book at a time revising a separate book and planning a separate book that's the maximum I can do often I'm only doing one of the three but at times I'm doing all three em very rarely if ever writing two books at once so do you like to create one of these and decide you don't want to write it right now and then do it different one on sometimes but more likely I've got this thing that I'm tweaking for one while I'm finishing the end of another I'm starting to fill it because at this point you know I've written 80% the book and the other 20% is really well plotted at that point in my head so there's not much brainstorming left to do it's just a matter of getting it on the page at that point some of the brain space that have been devoted to that can start moving over to brainstorming the next book do the same use this whole same process for your own no my alcatraz novels are are free written books and so let's talk about other methods of right of building stories now I believe I mentioned the Kevin J Anderson method which is the start and write out a really detailed description of your book and then you take that and you take it one step and you put it into viewpoint and then you take that and you take it one step further and do a more detailed outline and then finally you write the scenes where you take each kind of paragraph and say this is a scene and write your book I've never tried that method before but I do know many authors who use it the method I use for the Alcatraz books is I say is somewhat like you guys seen that show whose line is it anyway it's like whose line is in any way with the Alcatraz books my goal with the books is number one they're only one viewpoint books number of new viewpoints you're going to use magnifies the complexity of your book many fold alright for new writers I suggest try and stick to two or three viewpoints maximum if you're writing a why a book do one or two okay if you're doing epic fantasy maybe let yourself have four but remember something like you know the Wheel of Time big massive epic scope the first book was halfway through before it added a second viewpoint because the complexity of the world is so big that adding a lot of different viewpoints right off the bat can just can just make things explode for you so as an early writer I once said I'm going to write a book these twelve main characters and they're going to have an own cool plots and be doing different things that book was disaster okay so that's a little aside then the idea here is that if I don't want to say don't be ambitious because you want to be ambitious but if you think about it this way and I will get to the answer to this how to do out books but if you think of it this way you think of let's say your writing skill is right here you know on on some arbitrary scale this is where you are and if you shoot for a book that's like right here in your skill level the book is going to turn out let's you know how's it going to turn out whether the point if you shoot for one like this and let's say you were going to write these two hypothetical books this one turns out just wonderfully even though it's in smaller and scope and this one turns into a trainwreck this one is going to be a better book even though you may look at that and say oh but it's less ambitious it's less complex well sometimes taking the thing that's just you know challenging you enough to make it really interesting yet not so grand in scope that is going to trainwreck can actually step your skill level up a bit it's it's it's like saying you know that say that you you weigh 120 pounds you're like I'm gonna go fight in the heavyweight division because that's where the real champions are well no it's you know you can there are fantastic books of small scope Pride and Prejudice is a very small scope book it's a wonderful novel okay there's you know you don't look at Pride and Prejudice and say well yes but you know it doesn't have the cast that something like Game of Thrones has they're doing completely different things and so it's not even though you know the number of view points might make this one more ambitious this one is an equally good or better book in my opinion because of what it's what it's trying to achieve and how well it achieves it and so saying um yeah I'm not saying don't be ambitious but I am saying sometimes it's best to try and look and say I'm going to write a really great book at this level ambition rather than write a mediocre book at this level ambition until I get better I say that because of personal experience um this is this help me become a better writer when I kind of stepped it up the books that I tried at this level of ambition when I was a new writer really turned out to be horrible and I didn't learn as much as the books like a laundress which launchers is a smaller scope ambition book than something like way of kings and yet there are plenty of people that like Elantras more because ambition is not the only thing that makes a good book it's only one factor of many that can make for a good book all right so keep that in mind but so with Alcatraz only having one viewpoint means that I don't have to worry about the detailed plot outline as much because you know where our scale of complexity is going to remain relatively simple one direct plot line it's going to be sequential in chronological we're not going to do time jump jumps and things like that which add a lot of complexity and I'm going to kind of only have two or three set piece scenes meaning we're going to be in this location and in this location then maybe this location so what that allows me to do is to do some to write the books much more freeform for me so what I do with them is I sit down I say okay I'm going to give myself the grab bag brainstorming session I'm going to take just a couple of days I'm gonna brainstorm just wacky screwy interesting things that make me laugh sorry about that you've been warned that make me laugh and then I am going to try and write a book where they all make sense okay so I'll sit down say okay we're going to come up with new Smedley talents if you haven't read the books these are books about people who have their magical powers or stupid things that that people do like you know when persons magically good at arriving late to appointments in other person's magically good at ripping stuff like that um I'm in brainstorm cool lenses lenses they have magical glasses that do cool things um and then I'm going to come up with random elements kind of like you know in whose line they like draw and say okay tell a story using eye pain and you know a wet noodle um this is what I'll do be like a gay talking dinosaurs and a bad guy made of little pieces of metal and you know I'll just all of these random things I'll end up taking about 2/3 of them saying okay I've got to tell a story with all of these elements that that feels cohesive it makes sense go oh and it has to be funny um and then I'll just go chapter by chapter and see and try and get these things all in and hit all these points by the end of the story it's a real fun writing method it it creates for a lot of spontaneity but it also is very silly so it's most suited to a middle-grade type book the reason for that being the older we get the more we want our silliness and our seriousness separated it seems to be while as a middle grade kid we'll read an action-adventure book with a lot of silliness and still still enjoy it as a serious book it's harder to pull that off unless you're Terry Pratchett for adults it really is you know and that's why you end up with something more like a Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy which is really crazy but really does not have anything in the way of compelling characters or a compelling plot it's just humor just insane just humor I mean it's brilliant it's great humour but it is just humor he's not doing a lot of things Pratchett somehow manages to take it and have a good plot and some decent characters and the humor together I'm he's dealing when I've read that can do that but anyway if that's your bag then go for it but remember for for adults generally humor is not random elements mixed together the way it is for kids taking you know say if you said if I write in an Alcatraz book my penguins are on fire they've left they're like why do you have penguins and why are they on fire that's hilarious that's not generally going to be as funny for adults adults are going to be looking forward place or or dramatic irony or these types of humor that are not as well suited to this kind of random brainstorming thing I do for Alcatraz okay so question for you guys um have you used other methods of kind of generating story and getting started that I haven't talked about if so tell me about them and let's talk about with the class um I'll give you a gummy bear yeah um I once had a friend who was trying to encourage me to write and so she said I shouldn't come tell me a story touch Gambier uh it wasn't on Facebook she said why you told me a story so I just told her story and then she was like oh tell me more tell me more tell me more okay yeah it just it was basically free right but it was because I had an audience right I knew when she was accepting what would bore her and said okay considering audience that can be very useful I just talked about that lil with the Alcatraz bucks and we will talk about the different genre divisions in fact maybe we'll talk about that today because that is kind of on my list of things to talk about but yeah considering audience what else we got I'm gonna throw your gummy bear at this hand that they didn't cough on awesome mm-hmm how I roll my well just the one novel I for some reason it was Christmas Eve and I just thought it's really engaging dialogue nice I have to write this day okay then I just started asking those questions going back with the plot basically well what brought them to this point uh-huh and I just started kept going I wrote a novel out of that awesome I once challenged followers of me on Twitter to do a dialogue exercise which is very fun which is they try to write a story with three or more characters in which you use no dialogue tags a scene not really a story and what you use no dialogue tags but which you differentiate each character by the way they speak and that could be if you're having trouble starting a good way to go salmon I'm going to come up with three characters I'm going to come up with different ways that they talk not necessarily dialect dialects you know dialect yes but not like cockney accent dialect that you write on the page in not Mark Twain type dialect but more you know this person favors compound sentences or this person always uses a driver Jordan does this fishing metaphors you know as a woman from from a fishing background and she's like one of the most powerful women and most cultured woman now she always uses fishing metaphors and it's great because he you know she'll start using these complex fishing metaphors no fisherman would ever come up with but they're still about you know chopping off the fish head as being a metaphor for you know and so that's a great way to characterize someone just through dialogue and you could do something like this build your character so that each have a different way of talking maybe one of them it uses you know very direct blunt speech and the other one always tries to talk around things and placate everybody building a building a dialogue exercise that way what else you guys used yes right here excellent whew that was awful I'm sorry about that throw okay what's wrong with them how to fix it that's a great way you know one of the one of the one of the tools I've seen people use that I like is also the what does the character want most and why can't they have it is not very often that this kind of making my dreams make a little bit more sin okay dreams sure works fine yes quite a bit younger than me ah and they like to draw funny pictures and I'll just say what is that what does it do where does it go okay and by the time we're done we've we've written a short story together excellent was there one back here um I was actually gonna do along the same lines I'm American man check that sorry I missed it why was it was actually just going on with you oh yeah the dream girl yeah dream journals are great okay right here and then over here and then we'll go on to something else um I actually um one of the things that happened to me recently was over here you're fine it's under your feet bigoted MIT so had recently a original character idea from a dream emotionally I forgot ninety-nine percent of the plot in the dream so that's so I could just write rewrite everything dream journals are good though dream journals are useful all right who is the last person you were the last person okay that's excellent in fact I do that a lot when my points on the map thing my big powerful scenes are often come from listening to music while I'm working now and devising something to go there okay I'm gonna eat this one because it's red and you're getting your enjoy sorry I'm the teacher I can do that let's let's talk a little bit about genre nature of genre as it is as it comes to understanding audience this is kind of kind of it I don't usually do this to later in the year but this will be good I found more and more that learning to consider audience is a very useful thing for a writer to come to understand particularly if they're writing for children remember children goes up to 18 19 in the publishing world start using the terminology that they use in publishing by the way to start thinking of a professional start talking a word counts don't talk in page counts because page counts can change very easily so start talking word counts and nowadays the standard is just to use the Microsoft Word word count it used to be you know count them you know format in this format and that you know has an average page that words per page of this yada yada they don't have use that anymore cuz we just push a button and that we get a word count so we use that yeah so um so Jean rrah why is Jean reporting Center well it is important to consider because genre will really help you place where you're going to market your book and place even writing your book certain decisions you might make the thing to keep in mind is there are no rules okay there are guidelines that make a book more publishable or less publisher by the standards every book is going to break some of these okay the thing to do is to know what they are so that you can choose which ones are important to you and your story so you can break them wisely alright so we'll start start talking about length okay length on the short end of what we do in this class is what we call middle grade novel all right a middle grade novel is a novel targeted scholastic targets there's as young as 8 that's about the bottom of where you can go for middle grade and it goes up to 13 or 14 at its maximum the sweet spot for middle grade is sixth seventh grade okay so middle grade novels middle grade novels have unless you have an established name generally have a maximum of 55 K words okay around 5055 um you can break this but break it knowingly um that this is this is a pretty hard one to bust out of okay they're pretty strict on this the reason for this is they like to keep them short to grab the attention span of as many kids at this age as possible they want to be able to use large print and make the book feel like it's reading really quickly okay feeling like it's reading really quickly it's an important thing in publishing these days for whatever reason and they like in certain genres you to really feel like you're tearing through this book to give you a sense that the book is a real page-turner okay we don't do this in epic fantasy um but they love it in thrillers in fact if you go and you pick up your average um what's his name Alex Cross books what's that guy he writes like a book a month James Patterson do you look at your average James Patterson um and then compare it to your average book in the science fiction fantasy section you'll find that the pages on his are like this like where is over here we're like like that okay you'll distinctly notice it they have wider margins larger print more letting space between the lines and when you pick up that book you really do tear through it because it's deceptively short okay or deceptively long I guess is how you'd say it because of that they do like to do the same thing in middle grade when they can alright so middle grade is 55k what is middle grade on middle grade generally and ours genres are the whimsical stories all right not always but usually on there they they're often the leave our world and go to another world kids sucked into Fantasyland are often a middle grade that's not the only thing that happens but that's that's a common theme in middle grade they are the the fun adventure often they can be in school or not but more often they're not in school there are some that do take place in school whimsical they tend to be third-person but not always I'd say the third person like 60% of the time maybe 65 um I don't know what else does anyone else here at children's fiction major they can are taken some taking classes from some of the children's writers they can they can steer me a little bit better here do I pretty much have it down one viewpoint yeah you're right right yeah simple plot in fact one way to visualize the simple plot is that most of them I will you read take place in like one day that's very common okay one day or you know that that's not always the case but it's a way to keep things simple like this is an adventure that happens this day or this summer that that happens pretty frequently - I mean I'm saying this though Harry Potter was a whole semester in first Harry Potter book was very much middle grade kind of straight down the line on a lot of these things unless a lot of them like the characters that really needs deep moral reasons for doing yeah they're not Veet moral reasons they're having fun um so some great examples of this um fable Haven great example of this and the the book that was kind of inspired by um what is it that fairy tale fairy monsters book it made a movie out of it ah Spider Man chronicles first Harry Potter book um what are some other ones that aren't the but sad Chronicles of Narnia are a great example this how about some not ones that are not kids sucked into Fantasyland bears children run okay um ranges Ranger's Apprentice I haven't read those so I don't know for sure twine we've got Magic Treehouse books yeah the cute thing about no Wimpy Kid and Magic Treehouse are probably the age one step younger how are they yeah probably but Nicola is also probably one step younger the middle Grimm those are the books that are actually like 15,000 words you can read them in like a couple hours and they but yeah but they those are like chapter books mil greatest not chapter books middle grade is targeted at the kids who are done with chapter books but aren't quite ready for for ye but anyway let's let's talk about why Eamon why is largers onre um it generally goes 13 ish up to 19 ish um your upper limit for milla grade air for yaa is a lot more loose but people set tend to say they want 75 K words as a starting point Twilight was 120 and it's still that published that's the the biggest one I've heard of recently from a new author that you know but it does happen but 75 or 80 K they are usually very frequently at school not always very frequently why would that be why would the middle grade ones take place in venture and Fantasyland and why Fantasyland comes to school balls around it's real life revolves around yeah perhaps yep they want more of an escape from their perhaps perhaps I don't know I'm just I feel like when you're younger like schools like yay school and then when you're like Wyatt you're like that's for all your problems right swear this it's the conflict school is conflicts or the yeah by in that a lot to do with adults too yeah oh yeah we left that one big thing they did you can escape by going to fantasy yeah yeah don't you goes yeah um do you want to come in this yeah well there's so many people were just sitting out in the hall we really there how many of you are there well there's three of us okay um all right we could make room for you guys if we want to UM one thing I forgot about Miller great and this is huge I can't believe I forgot this big difference from middle grade where the kids get books if they're middle grade kids they're given to them by adults okay given by adults if they're going to school library they're often being pointed to a book and so these middle grade books are the librarians are so influential they're still very influential Wyatt but they're so influential here the parents are buying the kids books here why a kids are where they start buying them themselves or they're choosing them the cells or they're picking the books distinctly because these are the books and they don't think that they would be told to read okay that changes everything alright despite what you may think why a our middle grade edited for content why is not edited for content it's going to change based on which on which imprint and you're going with and what their reputation is Disney imprint is going to edit for content but because it's just because it's why a book does not mean they're going to edit for a content in fact they're likely not to because the kids are in a rebellious stage the kids want to read things that feel edgy edginess is big hungry yes I even have spell edginess edginess is big tithe is an example out of here tie this is a book by Holly black which she was one spider with Chronicle riders um tithe has the f-word um it has pretty graphic sex all of these things it dried parents are like but it's a kids book why is not it for content okay just understand that you don't have to write that you can be edgy in a different way Twilight is edgy to to buy it to a ye audience but just understand that that's how the industry tends to view these things it's not going to be the case for all publishers on that said that I've never had a publisher come and say oh you need to add X Y or Z into your book they look to what the book is trying to achieve um and some books are going to try to achieve this this this level of super edginess like tides was doing and other books are not going to but Hunger Games is a great example Hunger Games is an edgy book ok that's a brutal brutal novel and that's that's that's a why a book alright so um in middle grade um one thing to keep in mind is up adults are useless okay adults are useless this is a recurring theme I you don't have to do it but almost all of them they're useless anyone read um serious unfortunate events milligrams adults are useless how useful are the adults in Harry Potter not very particularly in the middle grade era Harry Potter becomes y a and you'll notice something about Harry Potter's Harry Potter becomes Wyatt becomes it becomes edgier um it becomes that the conflicts stop being whimsical kids in Fantasyland and they start being the big why a trope of boys / girls okay there are um there are some things oh we've got a chair yeah I'm not feeling well okay can you tell my group that I saw them an email okay I group you sent you an email we'll see you next week make sure you submit for next week all right well honey that gummy bear yay yeah probably I came here from the floor um boys and girls okay boys and girls is huge in why a it's barely touched on a middle grade okay guess literature this takes between boys and girls are like it's targeted no no I'm talking more about the idea boys noticing girls girls noticing boys then yeah I mean again hey JK Rowling is a brilliant writer and wanted their main focus of her brilliance is our understanding of children all right and you can see as the books become um Hawaii for middle grade you can see exactly a lot of the things we're talking about she transitions her books into that and it works very well um so angst did I smell angst right ate that's a big thing in why a problem novels you know I mean by problem novel I have bulimia but it's my secret thing that I'm not going to tell anybody about and I'm going to struggle with it and it's so hard I shouldn't make fun of you know it's it's a real thing but there's so many I have bulimia books they're called teen girl problem novel books and they are targeted you know I have depression I have this I have that these are all Wi-Fi they don't do that as much in middle grade um so am I missing anything here you do adults and pairs become more like her problems yeah that's what I was ever give you that yet parents are useless and why adults with a brother yeah adults are untrustworthy you don't have to do any of this ults but and so you can kind of see like the difference between so spider chronicles versus like Percy Jackson's over here right you can kind of see what those two books and so these are guidelines for if you're kind of looking at where you're going to target your book Shannon Hale has kind of an interesting story that she tells where she would she took the goose girl and was targeting it at adult fantasy publishers and she didn't get it published until she sent to Bloomsbury I'm Harry Potter's publisher and they said oh this is a why a book we're going to move the protagonist down to years and age and we're gonna we're going to release it as a why a novel and so knowing your target audience for your book can be very helpful for these kinds of reasons usually I would say write the book that you want to write and throw aside anything that gets in the way however if the book you want to write is going to work equally well if you do one of these things or not then doing one of these things that makes it more in line with kind of what works in that genre that you're shooting for is usually a really good idea does that make sense so let's let's jump into the to the adult genres um do note there are several epic fantasy yaa I think Ranger's Apprentice probably fits in that I haven't read it though just from looking at its packaging it might actually be a middle grade and that's because you know fantasy bleeds young it also bleeds bleeds old and so back in the the old days when I was growing up my schools that the witch started to cya divisions and around but they hadn't it Nebraska yet and so my library had children's division an adult division there was no why a division why a came about as a division because people started realizing teens didn't want to go into the children's section to get books that can be another thing to divide the two in your mind the middle grade kids don't mind running over into the children's section to get their books they look in the independent reader section they're happy going in the children's section they still you know they may not be as interest in the toys but they don't feel offended that there's still kids because you know they're like yay kids club we're kids kids rule as soon as they say I'm not a kid they're why a for most kids and that's the big one the big dividing lines and so they took all of those teen books and they put them in their own section outside of the kids section and suddenly teens started grabbing them and reading them now during the arrow and I was growing up probably some things such as Sword of Shannara David Eddings some of these novels Tamra Pierce that we that we read as just being in the fantasy section probably would be targeted as y-a books nowadays that's it's a really hard dividing line and in truth epic fantasy because something like sort of Shannon you're not going to set it in school it's going to be more of the whimsical adventure but it's going to be on a more adult-themed whimsical adventure you're losing a bit of the whimsy and adding more of the angst and suddenly you end up with with a why a epic fantasy instead of a middle-grade epic fantasy and that kind of bleeds over into adults um so we do have like like five or ten minutes left so we'll just go ahead and quickly talk about adult divisions and maybe we won't get into it in depth and then save for next week but basically we got going on in science fiction/fantasy someone can tell me if I if I miss one but we've got kind of what we call epic fantasy right we have what I will call her relic this isn't the only definition okay we have we have urban those are the three big divisions of fantasy right now am I missing one I mean we've got some little sub ones but that's that's kind of the big big three steampunk would be the one of minor divisions there there's there's like five people publishing steampunk novel so it's not I mean it's it's cool but it's not it's it's it's not a major literary division if anywhere it probably goes in urban but alright and science fiction we have I'll go ahead and do it down here so I don't have to a week in science fiction we have military we have space off from and we have hard those your basic ones over here we'll put this topia this is more of a of a sub-genre nya right now Hunger Games uglies Maze Runner oh no it's the future and everything sucked and by the way the kids have to do everything that's kind of dystopian right now the trend but it's it's it's got a grand tradition 1984 is dystopian so but let's say oh we'll talk about these epic fantasy epic fantasy is the large cast world building focused and real building focus that's what that says um uh larger then life meaning um world's at stake you basically all know what epic fantasy is I don't have to tell you that but this is this is kind of the core of what epic fantasy is um as a new writer shoot for 120 through 150 K words okay that may seem short launch horse was 250 um people who are not willing to read a launch risk because it was too big okay it was really hard for me to get published if your book is naturally 250 thousand words right at that leg if you can get it to 150 instead do it I promise you you will be much better for you in the long run you can get longer later on once you have an established track record the rate one of the reasons big reasons for this is they can't charge any more for your book at double the length then they can charge for someone else's book if they've got a book at 120 K and a book at 250 K on the shelves those are both basically particularly from a new author going to have the same price but it's going to cost them way more to produce the big one so you can see why they're hesitant to take the chances new readers also are more handsome to take chances on the bigger books because even though that if they like epic fantasy you're making a big commitment and that leads to the second thing the suggestion for you writers is write it as a stand alone with sequel potential qul meaning for your first book um don't try and do what grandpa Tolkien did unless you really have to don't stop in the middle okay he wrote that as one book and they split it so it's unfair to him but you don't want to have a book that just kind of ends you can do that when you're established where it's really just part one but as a newer writer you want that book to have a smash tie-up ending which resolves all of your major plot threads where then you can go on and you can see where it would go more if people wanted to read more that's going to be really helpful were you and getting published okay and for in getting readers so um heroic fantasy is dudes with swords I say that I say that amusingly um this is the UH this is the kind of gritty fantasy it's usually as a smaller cast this is Conan or on modern examples the blade itself Joe Abercrombie's books or our Scott Baker um David Gemmell this is still a very viable genre but Conan is kind of the granddaddy of this tolking is the granddaddy over here and CS Lewis is the granddaddy of the middle grade whimsical fantasy Conan is the granddaddy here though you may also say Edgar Rice Burroughs was the granddaddy because this these are adverse Burroughs books to George are Mardin is actually a hybrid between these two okay other people have tried it no one's really pulled it off like he has I would definitely call him a hybrid but I'd actually say is closer on the epic fantasy scale he's just borrowing a few of the tropes over here um but but yeah more talk Michael Moorcock is a great heroic fantasy writer Ella Rick meant things like that these are shorter you're looking for 80 to 100 K um you're looking for a smaller cast you're looking for for lots of action even if it's a thoughtful book like Ella rink books are you're generally looking for um for lots more motion and action movement that is necessarily mean every chapter has to be about hacking someone's head off but every chapter should be moving somewhere you aren't standing around having political conversations like you are in epic fantasy every fan series will forgive you for that Erik fantasy not so much this is kind of like our a style towards like trans RA Salvatore is heroic fantasy definitely yeah right there's going to be blending between these but these are kind of your basic your basic genres urban is uh chicks and leather kill Dean's okay sometimes they don't wear leather such as Buffy those you hit sometimes so there's an entire genre of this the why a version of this is kind of Twilight but not really that's its own thing that's more paranormal romance urban fantasy also called dark urban or paranormal is basically yeah Dresden Files even though he's not a chick King taking takes and leather there's a lot of chicks in leather in this genre but Dresden Files is a good example of this this is our world with a dark underworld it's very popular right now there lot there's a lot of wide spectrum what's going on here you've got things they're a little bit more humorous like Kitty in the midnight hour I anyone read those they're very fun books it's about a woman who runs a a radio show she happens to be a werewolf and it's for paranormal people to call in and stuff but they're they're often mystery style plots and they tend to be really fast-paced we're talking like 7vk with riller pacing meaning an explosion at the end of every chapter kind of stuff okay um so that's that's that's urban we had some people who are writing urban didn't wait anybody nobody's writing urban okay it's not really as much a BYU thing but you know Dresden Files anyone red dress coupons dozen files are kind of fun they get a little bit too graphic for me but but they're really well-written so uh military is what it sounds like Space Marines yeah if you could read the book and say Space Marines yeah that's military science fiction they can be also very thoughtful books they but they tend to revolve around big space battles that are realistic they tend to skew more realistic Jack Campbell's written a fantastic series on books like this and you know these are the books where you'll have these big space battles and you know they have to like wait for the wait like 15 minutes for their torpedoes to hit because they're crossing such massive space and then they have to wait 15 minutes you know are like five minutes to find out if they did hit for the life to travel back and stuff like that like whatever it's it's things like that but it's it's lots of cool Space Marines honor Harrington anyone read on the Harrington oh you guys you guys haven't read widely in the genres what are you doing in this class go free books yes um I haven't read James White tell me about James White what is that oh c'mon enter Harrington is the number one best-selling um military science fiction books in in the world right now okay housed in space but less drama is it's it's gonna depend there's the thing about there there's so much bleeding I don't know where I'm staying I'm just trying to give you like the general things yeah where would you put first born first born is is fo military science fiction it's really space opera masquerading as military SF on one things about military I have to pull it off well you kind of have to have a military background or a lot of familiarity with military a good story about this is Lizabeth moon was wanting to write a military SF and her books weren't selling until they put she's an ex-marine on the back of her books and suddenly they started taking off that may be the reason but it may not be the reason that may just be an apocryphal story but it's pretty realistic in military SF space opera adventures in space the thing is putting this online now everything like read how terrible my spelling is and stuff Adventures of space space opera is your your kind of catch-all it's not really military because military you know what type of gun they're using is really important to military okay in space your operates a phaser and we just shoot it and people die um space opera is all of your Battlestar Galactica Star Wars um you know you're fun space adventures it's kind of your catch-all if you're not worried about the hard science fiction and you're not really worried about what type of gun you're shooting it's probably space opera space opera is a very marginal genre that not a lot of people are writing right now um I don't know um well I mean I can I can theorize on it there's the science fiction tends to sell worse than um than fantasy and so a lot of people jump to fantasy the one reason might be people I've heard people say that during the 90s all the really serious science fiction writers all moved to writing a hard SF and a lot of the readers then didn't like the hard SF and so they jump to fantasy because there wasn't a lot of space opera but there still is some Simon Greene right some Timothy Zahn yeah yeah and you know what you see a lot of right now is kind of this space opera that masquerades that puts on a serious mask and kind of pretends to be military old man's war is this he says it's military SF it's really space opera and first-born my novella you can read online it's really space opera masquerading as military SF it's you know Ender's Game is is a hard one to define I don't know if I would put it anywhere specifically in here what Ender's Game really is is a is Hoosiers in space it took no really it took a me took the underdog sports team story and then he what we were talking about you taking plot archetypes they put it in space which is brilliant made a great underdog sports team story in space and then put around at this framework of this this nice twist plot with of a military science fiction book so it's kind of like an underdog sports story nestled in a military SF okay hard SF um this is written by people with PhDs I'm joking but this is up this is kind of what the I'm talking about the archetypes I'm giving the silly at Seelye asthma yeah Isaac as mom um Arthur Clark Kim Stanley Robinson rum red Mars yeah yeah rub anyway AB Robinson a lot of the big the modern SF writers I mean there's still plenty of space off for writers too and I I think it's under explored but a lot of them are doing this kind of stuff hard SF they sometimes are branching out a little bit more there's a big argument of whether social hard SF is really hard SF or not but you know you're getting into just the science is important the science is very important it should be accurate it's an extrapolation of what happens if this scientific thing happens where would we go arthur c clarke you know invented the the geosynchronous orbit in his books and you know this is the sort of stuff that hard SF people are doing okay yeah oh yeah i should actually be putting that up um usually in almost all this SF you really should be shooting for this kind of 80 to 100 k range for pretty much everything okay anything can go longer if you have a good justification for it military I've rarely seen go longer space upper I have but I think it's a mistake every space hopper I've read it longer than that has been a bad idea I'm except unless it's something like a fire upon the deep which is kind of like more space epic fantasy or dune and hard SF you know I don't even know what those people are doing because you know sometimes they'll be so thick I mean the red Mars books they're mind-blowing but they're so thick um and so yeah um sf is probably the one that can go the longest but it's more like it has a range of like 60 K to like 200 K it's just basically whatever the story demands there's not as much of a of a market force upon that okay so the finding where your book is the nice thing about this is mostly this is for considering your audience because all of these things get shelved Oh dystopian you know a dystopian is in adult it's like philip k dick type stuff or it's you know 1984 it's still very popular and then we have like little things like steampunk and cyberpunk and stuff like that but really everything gets shelved together um and so what understanding what your genre is is going to help with who are you writing it for are you writing this for my friend Ethan when he reads the books really wants to know what kind of gun they're shooting and if you get the what type of gun they're shooting wrong it ruins the book for it if you're writing military except there are a lot of people who read military SF that that's really important or if you know you get the way the officer interaction with um with enlisted men thing wrong it's gonna ruin the whole book for them space opera doesn't care about that Star Trek they're like everybody's an officer well just do that separate she fo Brian's sorry gee you're like the only enlisted man in all of Starfleet um you know but there's like no rules about fraternization he's just called cheap because it's fun and they want to come up with a reason why they keep calling chief I mean you know that sort of stuff does not fly military SF because it's trying to extrapolate real military people in space but same time military SF has this undertone of Space Marines yeah you know this like we're going in with guns blazing and we may all get cut to pieces but yeah you know um and and so you've got this kind of weird mix in military SF of be really accurate trying to have some of these little hard SF things but only when applying to the specific tropes you're working on and have the focus be on the characters going into battle or whatnot or if you're Heinlein going to school really starts at rivers weird book fun but weird book it's not about Starship Troopers it's about Starship Troopers school so you know knowing what these kind of tropes are are going to help you target it to your audience if you're going to be writing you know heroic fantasy um and knowing what the trends the knowing of the trends are in heroic fantasy right now it's going to be really helpful helpful for you for selling when you go to that edginess and what's your books like you can say oh it's it's kind of you know Joe Abercrombie Asst fish you can read those authors and say it's kind of like this but it has this cool element of my own rather than saying well I'm going to reinvent the wheel and start explaining from the beginning you've already lost them when you could have just said you know it's like such and such thing or it's you know it's it's just heroic fantasy that's got really good sense of greediness and it's about you know ten people you know standing on a wall defending against 4000 million troops or it's like three hundred by the way David Gemmell made an entire career of writing like books they're like three hundred with you know dark gritty men you know who have hearts of gold standing on the wall defending against people who are also dark gritty men who have hearts of gold and they all fight and kill each other that's you know that's like it's like every one of his books they're awesome but it's like every fact that's how he wrote his book so knowing these things are going to help you and this is why I kind of try to split you up into the divisions I did when I put you in your in your writing groups

Channel: zmunk

Views: 31,358

Rating: 4.8884759 out of 5

Keywords: brandon sanderson, BYU, creative writing, sci-fi, fantasy, genres, plotting, what makes a good plot

Id: OT4lttEspnk

Length: 89min 9sec (5349 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 22 2016