Sanderson 2012.7 - Archetypes, Try-Fail, and 3-Act Format

I had a fun experience was last fall right at BYU I was doing a signing or something anyway Peggy came through so he's one of my former students and I do my normal thing where I'm like Oh how's your writing going former students should actually it's going really well um I have an agent and you have a sale right yeah and so that's always nice to hear so she joined the group of the small group who have gone on to actually publish professionally from the class and so I invited her in to speak to you guys about how she went about doing it and how her experience differed from mine because as I've said my experience heating publishes now almost a decade old and yours happened last year November right right then so um so you can get kind of a quick view of how it goes for someone in today's market so I'm actually going to just let Peggy cool just take me over right now and and going at it okay let's turn the lights for you up here at the front my name is Peggy lemon I first came to this class three years ago where is the artist those are not very intuitive but I leave something off it was like a second second one okay all right um so I first came to run this past three years ago and I was just auditing the class and I was so glad to come to this class because I knew that that was the step that I needed to take to become published it's not the only step obviously but I knew that that was what was going to get me absolute next platform so so grateful be able to come to this class because really I how are you guys been in those fastest few weeks right yeah yeah yeah about a month and a half I guess his most authors even really good ones cannot tell you how they do it they just taken all that knowledge and then they they go but the amazing thing about Brennan is because he can tell you exactly breaking everything down I learned so much I would say I've learned more than branding they have from everybody else combined as far as ready goes John the mailbag do I check their mail thank you okay and then he divides us up into reading groups um and that went really well forced because we got to try out the people are writing group and see who we worked well with and see who we didn't there were three of us in my writing group that we found work really well together and so we decided to get together to group afterwards along with the TA in the class Rob who's hiding outside writes that we're all mother yeah ESO and we thought along well so we decide to get together as with a writing group and we're still meeting every week four years later and still submitting a chapter a week just like we did when we were brown this class and um this is a great chance for you guys to know people in your group and see how well you work together because if you don't have a writing group your chances I've heard these this once it's something like ten percent to get published and if you stay with a writing group it goes that's something crazy like ninety percent so get with a writing group and stay with it because not only will they keep you motivated but they can keep you on track too um so anyway our our groups when meeting very nicely and then I after I finished the book that I was writing when I started this class by the time I got to the end of it it was the end was so much better written than the beginning because I learned so much during the course of that book that I it was a little daunting to even deal with it so I just by the way went on to the next idea finish that but really is where it made a big difference was in revisions and I know that revisions are a pain but I don't there's so many things you have to focus on when you're doing a book like making your characters likable working on character arcs the plot arcs all of the the subplots everything there's so many things you have to keep in your mind I don't think there's anyone that you keep all those in mind the first time through so every time you go through a revision it's going to get better and better and more layered and the more layer that gets the more real the world is going to be so I just kept on going through and figuring out more things with everything I read and everything I heard I do it in the context of my own book and figure out what I needed to change and it's gone through 12 revisions now and it feels really good so then I was ready to go to the next step um I my query queries are another huge thing because some agents think they can tell everything from a query they probably can and so yeah huh no thank you not everything but they can tell a lot about your writing style how much of a Rambler you are or how much you can get to a concise point how good you are with language a lot that they can and some of them think they can tell everything so they will not even look at anything else if they don't think they can't get past your query so a lot of agents though if they don't say on their website only send me the query you can still paste five pages below your query into the body of your game I'll never do it as an attachment unless they say not to you can and so it's a really helpful way for them to get a look at your writing it's tough because queries are hard they're really really hard but they're also worth the time to spend getting them right um last May I went the story makers and conferences are a really really good way to go and went storymakers I got a pitch session with Sarah Crowe and I wasn't going to even do a pitch session because I will not go to pitching and I've got a much better just writing it and sending it to her than I am fumbling in a pitch but then someone talked me into it's like on the waiting list of that into her there Crowe is Dan wells his agent as well as several their local authors agent mm-hmm I can't remember who else she has to write it's Rob yeah Bruce Ashley Marian Jenson okay right um and which is a really good agent but I have learned how the pitch in a conference and they say get it down to like a two sentence or even three sentence pitches and they go in there give your pitch and then they'll ask you questions so that's exactly what I did I went in at town with her said my pitch and she's like oh that sounds really good and then there was this really long awkward silence mm-hmm and then she said uh uh why don't you send me your phone and so then I said well okay what was your training do you have a pitch on every remember I don't remember that one it's it's a post-apocalyptic adventure about a twelve-year-old girl hope who live with our town lives and one of the burnt-out craters left behind there when the massive green bombs that destroyed mph its most of the Earth's population and it's coming in beige just to save Tama for friends anyway um so it was really awkward and it was over in by the minute in half and then I'm like alright see you then and left okay where do you sign up for a pitch session you bought ten minutes with that agent and you can spend them however you want and I wish I had known that before I was on in there um Aaron who's also in our group who we've what was in this class she took an her first few pages of her book and said tell me when you would stop reading us and so then she read until she got to that point and then talked about what had stopped her and Kylie go from there people taking in their queries and asked for a query critique I heard somebody else who had gone in with story ideas and pitched the story ideas to see which one's most interested her and which ones most actually thought would help sell the best so use that time however you want and don't go in unprepared like me and humble and do you have a minute um Sarah had requested full so I think from pretty much everyone who pitched so I didn't leave they're thinking yeah I made it so I work on my my query for five months before I sent it out and then um the first year I sent it out to were agents that I and really think we're a good match because sometimes it's really hard to send off those first queries and to get to figure out how to personalize it and to get all the wording right so it's nice to be able to query somebody that if they don't say yes you're not pressed about and that's the trick to is every agent knows you're querying a bunch of other people but they want to feel like they are the only one like you hand-picked them out of everybody and you just think the two of you are the perfect match because you've got a chance to research them beforehand and they haven't had a chance to research you if so if you include in that first paragraph something that personalizes why you chose them as an agent why you think they're going to be a good fit because this is somebody about it they have to work with so it needs to be somebody that you could work well with so letting them know what it is that you that made you think that they would be a good match with you is what you need to put in that beginning I got an offer from an agent to do exclusive revisions she's an agent that was really really heavy there she used to be an ED there before she was me she really likes to revise heavily with her authors and and it's her normal thing to want to do exclusive envisions first so basically it meant that it would come off the table for everyone else and I would work with her for a few months to get the booklet where she wanted it and then would then she would offer representation and then go it's a machine so the thing she was not she was a really good agent really good and on paper it was a match made in heaven but it was talking to her on the phone I could tell that it was anything but and it was not a good idea to be with her and really it matters I know when you want an agent you're pretty much willing to take anybody who wants to to work with you but it is not and really got to find someone I have a friend who her agent was Nathan Bradford you guys know it was real the agent and he quit the business and so she just got handed over to another agency and their agency so they never picked each other and it was an awful awful thing is she just broke up with her agent yesterday after a really long hard she also Don Valentine statement I guess she decide to buy time but it was it was a hard thing that set her back by a couple of years so it is really really important so if you're getting a feeling that this might not be a good matchup listen to those feelings but um at first I was just excited because she wanted two exclusive revisions and so she said so think about it you've got let any other agents that have it now and get back with me so then I sent Sarah and email because she had my fault because she requested it and um I just sent her a message saying I haven't offered to do exclusive revisions are you I'm interested before I commit and so then she just emailed back and said can I have the weekend and so I gave her the weekend she called on Monday and and offered to represent me Sarah gets a ton just like really good agents she gets a ton and does a ton of requests for full so it takes her forever to get a full or to go through and read a full um but it was that offer from the other agent that lit that fire that got me bumped up to the top spot so it helps a lot to meet somebody because and to pitch to somebody because a lot of times it will get you past that querying stage and into them requesting the first two chapters are requesting the full and that is a huge thing because then when somebody else requests it you can say another agent already has this and once they know that if there's going to be competition then they know that they need to act quicker and they need to figure out that something they want a lot faster and so that it mine was kind of a combination of going through meeting somebody and then going through cold querying because the first agent I was just called query I knew nothing about her besides what I found online so um both I think are really effective ways that can help you either way can get you in just as well um since tonight agents no remember what it's going to be someone have any questions anything she some agents will sorry um have you revised a lot some agents will not sarah was not one that had me revise a lot through the bombs breath um so the first agent wanted to devise a lot sir I did not in fact when I asked out some of the revisions she said now I think that's the wrong way to go and then so okay one more thing about getting your manuscript ready I know there's a lot of times you think I'll wait and see what they think about this or I'm going to copy a dural fix on my grammar problems or you think some of these things are going to be fixed along the way so you can ignore them now but when someone is reading your manuscripts anything that you know how when you're reading a book and it's fine until you hit that one little spot and just kind of ignore it shove it off to the side because it's just some little thing that led you but the more things that bump you as you go the more and you're just like I don't care about this book anymore we don't want an agent or an editor doing that same thing and the thing is is all those things that you think oh they'll fix it when they get to this point it's not any day in there it's you so eventually they're going to say Kate you need to fix these things and it's then you're doing it on a deadline instead of doing it on your own terms so get your manuscript as best as you can possibly get it and go listen to all the critiques that you get because it will really make a difference in what goes on later down the road I just got my editorial letter while we were at LTE which it's kind of hard when you come home brain fried to an editorial letter it was nine pages this talked about sale okay so what who did you sell it to Random House it was a preempt which it went a little faster than what is normal yeah you got the offer that you got offer for representation win October 16th and you got the offer from a publisher win November 19th yeah that's a little bit that I really assumed that I would revise during November do nothing during December because you know nobody's worse yeah and it would go on submission in January so Sarah had sent me her revisions which took two hours to do and I just assumed that um it assumed that I'd do it that I have talked to her in November first and told her my plan and she's like no I think I think right now isn't the best time as soon as you can get it to me and really it's got to be by the night if we don't do it by the night we're gonna have to wait so like oh my gosh so I spent days just getting it absolutely perfect sent it to her on a Monday which our Sunday night just like the six the Monday morning when I woke up there was a couple more things converted to change little things they sent to her and Tuesday morning she said kay it's in the hands of there so she gave you a list of who she was submitted to and then Friday the end of from around the house called her and said I'm interested in still available and she's like it's not as much as the Tuesday ins to him and then on Monday she said oh yeah remember that synopsis for book two that I told you you had weeks to do I'm gonna do that now and so it's good okay well can I take it to my Ren group Tuesday night and get it to you Wednesday and she said the other side and then she called on Tuesday a lot was it work like repeatedly until I got away where I can answer the phone she said Random House wants to make an offer um I need it today so I went like anyway so I did a three-page synopsis in the query um all on that night 16 hours from when she told me tell when I had to have it and sleeping time included and I got the three page to her that night and I'm like ah squares broken I knew the conflicts with my brains too tired can it wait till morning and she said yes so I sent it to her at 7:03 the next morning she called her emailed at 7:20 saying it was in the house around the house and by 9 o'clock she called me with a deal so it went that it was you hard getting of that done that fast but um you have contracts yet okay okay Wow they're on the ball takes like eight months for contracts hi certificate with you announced because some some it is don't like you to announce Intel college you have to keep that information quiet Sarah's like hey how about we announced Monday um so I sound on it for like three days or something ridiculous but anyway it was a pre-emptive is what that means is Random House came in quick with an offer so that other people wouldn't come in and then it gets sent to auction so because it's adoption then it drives the advances up stuff like that so a preamp is when they're coming in saying we want it right now and if you will take the chance of going with us then um you know whatever we'll make you the deal right now um and Sarah had said I think it's like before you make a decision on whether to you know let it go to auction or take the branch don't want you to talk to the editor and so I got to talk to her on the phone and I could tell by talking to her that the vision they had for the book and what they were they wanted to push it and what they were going to do for marketing and stuff like that that it was a perfect fit she was somebody that I could work with really well and not just somebody could talk to like a normal person because when it's your editor and you're dealing with so many things you don't want to be afraid of your editor and they offered lead title to which can turn that down we titled around us so um anyway that was no Fidel and you know Russians how well I just got my editorial letter Friday so it was a lot she gave me nine pages and it goes through telling a bunch of things and dirt they could be difficult there was a lot of things like deeper into this character motivation and look at relationship parallels here it wasn't like go to page 57 and make this transition smoother you know it isn't things like that at first my others been great because she said if you even fix nothing at all I'll still be proud publish this book so fix whatever resonates with you some others are not that easygoing and some can go through rounds and rounds and rounds of edits and some are on a tighter schedule I am luckily not on a tight schedule because it's a fall release and so since we're already past fall it's not till a year from September before it comes out so I don't know I don't know how many will go through sure Shana Cory I've heard of some situations where there are pseudo agents out there agents that you wouldn't want to be with there any things that you know can you advise keeping an eye out for at agents or people that are posing as agents that well first off if they ask you to um for any money then do not run away to be run away from those because that's not a religion ask them about their cells because you want people who have sold in your genre in your age group because just because they're a good agent for there's no girl I know who agent is really good at selling adult romance but she is a ye a contemporary and she's having a really hard time selling it because that agent doesn't have the contacts for her for her story so you want to make sure that they've sold in yours there's a lot of ways to go out and search for agents I took the cheaters way and went through publishers marketplace it's a $20 a month fee but I got the first side days free I'm guessing that's normal just to get Chara signing up and speaking at first five days free but um it has a thing there where you can with steelmakers so I just went in list all the deal makers though we're agents for middle grade and it showed me the top 100 so I just started researching Mary to start from the top and went down and researched every one of them um I if you're not sure about your query I would say maybe not even start with your number one dream age at first because you want to see how your query works I had reworked and reworked my query for five months and I knew I'd gone to the point where there was no way I could make it any better if it wasn't good enough then I wasn't good enough yet and my book wasn't good enough so I was pretty confident that it was the best I could get it so I just started from the top and went down so figure out where you're out with your query and where your comfort level is because it will determine where you're at some people like to do like send out five at a time do like two from their top two from the middle two and one from their bottom or something like that I just went through agents and as I read about them and what they liked and what kind of person alert I just gave them right to one and ten and so then after you know I just move their names their ranks to see who I wanted to query but um literary rambles is an excellent blog to get to because they um have have information on all the top agents and pretty much all the really really good ones they have and they have everything gathered in the one place like all their interviews like things they spend about what kinds of things they're looking for and lots of links to go to feel like a be about Marie rambles is by the communal great wine focus oh so if you would do other stuff but very good that's good to know though because most the resources are giving fuller not middle-grade and why is that I don't I'm not familiar though so it's good most brilliant resource you could use if you're writing play or really great everyday you've really gotten everything together so if you're use now um are you actively blogging and things like that yes I started a blog right after storm makers last year so I questioned and um I blog five days a week because I wanted to grow my blog audience as quickly as possible and everyone I've seen go bag because it's hosted five days a week but you really don't have to the key is consistency and if you decide you want to do once a week or three times a week or two times a week just as long as you're doing it consistently and then going out to other blogs is how you build your audiences when you create a blog and put down there the world doesn't know there's no big sign going that says hey my blog sir come check it out so really the only way for you that advertise your blog is just by going to other vlogs that are similar to yours because if you like them chances are they don't like you and so if you just comment and become a follower of that Bob it's very likely they're going to follow you back to yours and then you know if they're liking what you do but you know they might just become a follower and never see you again we might just keep on coming back because they like what you've done sorry I'm a little bit confused on the whole idea of logging I mean what is I mean do you just talk about whatever you want to or it depends some people just talk about really random things I keep it writing focused so pretty much everybody who follows my blog are writers and find what works for you it takes a bit to find your blogging voice we'll talk about blogging in the class but I'll tell you it has made a difference for me it is not a big deal to Sarah but it was to Shannon in my editor it gave her a chance to come out and see what I'm like so she could tell if it was a personality she would get along with before she ever made the offer and they came out in fact when I went on submission I had tons of New York's and tons that showed like Simon and Schuster HarperCollins things like that coming to my blog it makes a difference and then I'll sudden I start getting like HarperCollins in the UK and so I asked the agent like what is up with that secondly I've been talking to them they come and look they really do and if you don't have a blog they will google you and find wherever you are it doesn't have to be a blog it can be Twitter Facebook whatever social networking you are but they they will come and find you get a sense of who you are how professional you are how much they think that they can I don't know just to get a sense of you what is your like it's my name Peggy Ellen would you like to write a little more calm yes my name is hardware fair spell and your handwriting and then yesterday posted a have a picture rather than what oh I was on Jeopardy two days ago two guys see me I was one of the one of the clues oh yeah because the release date yeah I managed to bring down for calm and Dragon Mountain that was fun they released Eve the release date they posted it so the last one I should give you the workaround bring the other sentence right have you quit your job yet I'd like two weeks ago because it gets really busy once you get a sale it's a hard decision but most authors I've known have said that they wish they would have quit a little sooner so quitting you need is probably a good idea it depends on how big the advances and things like that but if you absolutely if you can survive on it then you probably should because it gets really busy really fast and really the more you put in to your book yeah and promotion everything the more you will get out of it so you can put in as little as you want but if you're not putting in much your publisher is not going to fit in much either because they're like ah something taken too far they're not helping out it makes a huge difference on what you do you're better off putting your job if you can survive in blogging five days a week and getting to work on the next book and trying to make school contacts so you can do school visits when your book comes out all those sorts of writing conferences writing conferences and going to classes like that and you get tons more emails of people asking for things and and just general keeping relationships with people in the business case by the way when Peggy's book comes out if you're riding middle grade you probably want to buy and read it because that will tell you what type of book sells in one week in today's literary market I am a slow writer um I'm trying to not be but it took me 10 months to draft it and then I probably spend another ten revising so um well do you know what it wasn't ten revising because a lot of that I just stopped to work a hundred percent of my time they had to spend on that on blog building going out to other blogs getting my blog looking professional and nice and stuff like that and that was probably three months episode probably like seven months quantitatively visually visualize it how much in a day would you usually produce needed to get to the finished product you're talking like hours writing I don't ride every day I realized that I am a chunk writer and if I don't have too long the time like I only have an hour a day I can't get in it and be very effective in that hour so I lumped together like while blogging in one day and I lump together all other types of stuff ended up together writing now it's more like probably 15 hours a week writing before it it was no I was more doing a chapter a week is that's what my writing wrote gifts and that's kind of a speed I went because I probably been slower than that if they hadn't been wanting it every weekend meaning it which is another good thing about writing group I would have gotten to this point when I did if they hadn't been questioning when you got with your writer originally when you guys come up with us did you all know that we're going to stick around we we were in it totally we were all completely dedicated to staying with it and we all knew that if we stayed as a group together that you would rise up together and be celebrating each other's successes and writings so the nice thing about staying with a group for a long time is you do all get on the same level and and so and you do bring each other up as you go because everybody's learning as they go so it really helps to bring them up so yeah we were all we were all in it it's not a coincidence that CS Lewis and j.r.r tolkien weren't writing group together a lot of writing cards form little enclaves it's also not a coincidence that in my writing group we now have three published writers because you do help each other out bring each other up and make contacts through one another all right thanks Peggy give her hand have you teaching this class thank you very much I grew say that okay I'm putting up with my scatterbrain this you're awesome we are going to talk about plotting today yay plotting boy Wow how often do you go into a classroom say we're going to talk about plotting and people say oh yeah boy excitement enjoy it's time for the plot lecture um so I'm going to talk to you about three or four different ways that writers I know construct their stories the thing you have to understand about this is none of these are in it by any means all inclusive then these are the be-all and end-all these are all tools as I always say that you can use her to start I always worry that writers will look too much at these sort of tools and think this is what I have to do and for some writers that will be useful to have that framework for other writers the this is what I have to do could ruin your writing there is no half to do but these are good ways to look at writing particularly plotting if you're having issues with it the first one we're going to talk about is a very simple one we call the three-act format three-act format is a came out of screenwriting it's primarily a Hollywood methodology of storytelling and three-act focuses on just lumping your book into three parts your story in three parts you have these beautiful squares which are completely all the same size um you have Act one it's often said this is the introduction the act to escalation and Act three climax all right another way of looking at this often is Act one chase you're here up at react to throw rocks at them Act three cut the tree down that's a that's how that's how some screenwriters talk about the concept what this one is basically that you're looking at these big transitions as ways to to view your story generally your introduction is your act one is the reaction Act two is the hero tries and makes things worse and then Act three is pulls it out by the skin of the teeth or fails that does not happen very often in the Hollywood structure of this and so you usually look at that transition from act one to Act two as trip Act one is your reaction chapter we've talked about passive characters and things like this in the three act format usually your act when your character is being chased you can see this really well and in the Lord of the Rings films right act one is a lot of Frodo getting chased Act two kind of right here is the um the eye Frodo steps up and says I will take the ring I'll do it which we call the called action Act two is they struggle and try and things get worse it kind of breaks down a little bit with laraine's because that you're not sure if it's one film or three films but at three is okay you know we survive this horrible thing you know whatever Gandalf is that again I'll step back to but we pull through and we're going to continue on that would be your three act structure for um for the Lord of the Rings films right for the first one hard to say on that one because of the whole the whole three movies which one is a film which one is which film but you can see it for Star Wars someone break this down for the first Star Wars film for me once Act one is Luke's on Tatooine running away act 2 they go to the Death Star and they actively go and get the princess right there is no more you know we're not being chased now we are but we are actually doing something but lo and behold we get the princess but what happens Ben Kenobi dies everything's awful and we're about to get blown up at 3 we somehow pull it out right this is your your basic structure for this type of story there's usually a transition right here as well which is the this is kind of the point of everything is awful it's like the this point can't possibly get worse I think where's the belly of the whale right the belly of the whale is um this is um we will talk about that one more with the monomyth which is another one these story structures these are all visualizations but in this one this would be where it is right here though usually in the hollywood format this is actually the shortest and then this one is is mid-length and this was the longest usually okay and so often you will get to this thing and then it depends on you know Hollywood formula you'll see the act 3 is kind of the the big set piece whatever your big ending set pieces is your act 3 particularly in the um in the action movie but yeah this is this is your belly the whale right here um so that's one method of looking at it it there is a whole ton written about this formula because of the the sort of screenwriting they try to break it down they try to be very structured in screenwriting say on this page because the page correlates to a minute and screenwriting usually so on page nine you want this on page fifteen you want this on page thirty you want this on if you're writing a 90-minute movie then you know this will be a page 20 and this will be page 70 because kind of break it down that way I'm not sure if those actual numbers are correct but you can find things that will do that for you it's simply one way of looking at it another way of looking at the same thing is the the little scaling scaling the mountain thing that you were taught in grade school this guy okay some people visualize their storytelling this way though really as you become a better writer the writers I've seen do it actually view it like this like that and what this one kind of equates to is what we call the try fail cycle model a try fail cycle is you know you've got you've got this monumental problem that we're trying to to overcome and we're going to try a number of times to overcome that and each time we try something is going to go wrong usually outside of our own our own power though sometimes it's because of our fatal flaw it depends on the type of story you're writing and then when that happens you know our progress is setback things get worse and we ramp up the tension to where we try again and then again we fail progress is set back and this sort of thing then Mary once described this to me this this sort of method as the um the the way you say okay your character gets up in the morning and then what well and then something goes wrong do they solve it if you ask yourself you say yes they solve it but it's yes but or no and it's the yes but no and method yes they solve it but something even worse happens no they don't solve it and it gets even worse very simple story writing structure but it is something that they keep in mind a good writing exercise is to try writing a short story with the the yes and no and yes but method where you you have you cleared to get out and introduce a problem and then just keep escalating it everything they try you know they got what she described I mean she got they got into bed and slipped on the fourth floor did they catch them yes but you know in doing so you know they kicked the table and knocked off the thousand-dollar Ming Vaz or something like that or no they didn't and when they fell they hit their heads and saw stars and we're now in deep pain and maybe dying you know something like this in the you asked the next question and the next question that's this method Dave when he taught his class said that for his plot structures he liked to have someone fail twice for everything they attempt before they finally succeed I don't have spell success there's like C's and s is in there and I never forget how many of each one you fail two times for every one time you succeed and you also foreshadow three times before something becomes important that's Dave some of Dave's little rules so you can kind of see that these are different ways of visualizing the same thing this one is more elementary but sometimes that's what you need for a story both of these are focused on keeping the tension high you want things to escalate this is a basic plotting methodology is that things get worse all right you guys got these two because I'm going to throw another one at you for Shadow three times before an element becomes important for instance if a person's fantastic memory is going to be a plot point you want to foreshadow or show them using their memory in interesting ways at least three times before you actually make it a plot point that's Dave's rule of thumb all right and what about failed two times they fail times before they succeed at any given thing they attempt they fail twice before they succeed and once again remember often times overlapping the characters fatal flaw with these fail points is a good way to go about it you want to avoid making your character look hopeless however you'll notice that if you read Pat Rothfuss is writing it feels a lot like he's doing something like this because quote we'll manage some great success but then his fatal flaw which is his arrogance or his temper will then cost him most of what he's achieved and land him in equally deep water for his next adventure he does this in the second one where he you know he saves the the Maharajah's life from the assassin that everyone thought was him and then he goes and insults the Maharajah's new wife because she she doesn't like the being whatever they are they yeah I didn't notice it the gypsies and she just goes off on her and so of course instead of being lavished with wealth his fatal flaw has meant that he's only gained a little bit he now has a little bit of a picture but this guy can't you know in order to not offend his new wife has to kind of kick clothes out and say okay you've got to go like solve this other problem for me and get out of here before she forces me to have you executed and so fatal flaw is therefore costing him it's like you know three steps forward two steps back in this sort of method that's very much a yes but sort of plotting structure if you think about it yes he succeeds but he does something that thing goes makes it go horribly wrong and it's not all these clothes fault so the next one as has been mentioned is the monomyth how many of you guys are familiar at the monomyth let's call also caught the hero's journey more hands went up on that hero's journey is a circular storytelling methodology in which this was described by many writers Joseph Campbell as the most famous but certainly not the first or even really the best who talked about this it goes back to Greek times in the concept for this one is viewing a a story as a circle this one you start off with the hero in a place of ignorance someone else is probably gonna be able to do this better than I am because my hero's journey I'm gonna need refreshers but somewhere along the way he meets the impact carrier character impact character is the one who usually extends the call arms and then the impact character leaves usually they they're killed so Judith Campbell was not necessarily the best is there another book I you would have to go to the folklorist they just tell me Campbell isn't the best because Campbell wasn't good at citing resources suffice doing citations and things a lot of my folklore teachers didn't really like Campbell because of that because he would he would he did a good job describing but he didn't credit other people and he he then became like the big famous one for this when it was more of a body of work as what I've been told I don't know that I read here with a thousand faces and I thought it was a very useful book well we'll talk about proposals with it but someone might be able to google this and find out what I'm missing by impact character called arms impact character leaves things go wrong and we have what we call the belly of the well or the descendants either were underworld anybody had this up on the hero's journey as the circle so this is the low point for your character you envision as you know they have the call to arms and all this stuff and in this one I believe this is them you have the moment of decision where you really kind of take life into your own hands you have the defeat evil and then back up here you have the return in wisdom to where you began I'm sure I forgot something in there um but the idea is with the hero's journey you always end up where you began for a true hero's journey yes yeah oh yeah these are always visualizing the same concepts however there are going to be slight differences for instance in the hero's journey type of archetype usually the hero is making their decision much later um and this kind of harkens back to the ancient Greek structure where there's a whole lot of whoa is me going on for the for a big part of the story until kind of the you know you have the call to arms which is kind of a half call where you're like kind of accepting but then it's then you kind of take destiny in your hands and then you return with wisdom having become a new person having experienced the the depths of the absolute depths of despair you've got it up yeah the atonement that's right the transformation after you right right transformation okay and then that first section there we're like the impacted character yes the hero passes through challenges and temptations and have helpers along the way uh-huh um sometimes supernaturally okay supernaturally this is that the gods are helping then there's like a line across the top at that whole top section is the no intersection oh yeah no no no no okay so I basically did get it that I'm impressed by that but it's because it's basically trying to describe the same sort of story but the hero's journey actually had some very specific things to it that a lot of people didn't adapt and whatnot and it depends I mean if you like this storytelling archetype the one thing that I warn you about is a lot of people get into the journey hero's journey get into it so much that they start looking at as a checklist for things to do in their story George Lucas did this Joseph Campbell was a mentor of George Lucas's and George Lucas actually did a series of PBS specials talking about the hero's journey Joseph Campbell did one and then George Lucas did like the follow up very deeply his student like he talks about this a lot and the original Star Wars movies kept left out some of the things for the hero's journey and so you'll notice in the prequels him trying to better align himself to the hero's journey for instance the virgin birth is a big part of the hero's journey and didn't exist in Star Wars until the new Star Wars movies came out where he wanted it and I felt it was shoehorned in it didn't fit the story he was telling but he felt like I need this because this is part of the true hero's journey and he so he putted it and that's where you kind of run in trouble with any of these things and when you're like oh I have to put this in because it's part of the archetype I'm working from where these are really describing stories you get that concept that Joseph Campbell described what a lot of stories had and brought together all the elements that were popular and a lot of them but none of those stories have each of these elements and so if you try to write a story making sure you hit each point on these elements instead your framework becomes too rigid and you can in your using something that was used to describe a story to then write your own story and so you're making a copy of a copy rather than using this to inform you and help you develop your own story more fully and that's a thin line to walk but I think it's important one to be aware of anyway let's have anything to say on the hero's journey or any questions it can be really useful yeah sorry yeah first one that you talked about yes some but it's a little harder to describe like when I'm thinking of introducing my characters well you should have most of your characters introduced is probably at one yeah oh you can still introduce some characters in act 2 but you basically made most of them by act 1 and this certainly by the descent you should have all of your all of your main players in place can you go into a little bit more detail with the known and the unknown and how ignorant at the beginning I mean oh wait these are yours I can tear you in any way that was not bad ah um well the concept of the hero's journey is really a is about information it's about the growth of a hero from innocent to wise to the point that there's almost an invocation that the impact character that the hero is becoming the impact character the impact character by the way is a screenwriting term of you usually have a when you tell a story you'll often have an ignorant um character beginning your story and someone will come into it who is kind of the one who's who changes that person's life dramatically yes transparence example of this works all keys to seeing right the hero's journey yeah um and there there are a lot I mean there's nothing wrong with that but yeah that is uh the hero's journey is pretty pretty pretty visible but that's you know so is it in Star Wars Star Wars it's really quite obvious with them with the hero's journey and he makes it more and more obvious as the series goes along to its detriment I think yeah also one thing that I just remember hearing about this and the end of f2 is usually yes I call it okay is that like the heroes will sit like think they're actually going to win like right before right that's that's common um yeah be it yeah you you don't have to do that but it certainly is a good plot archetype date yes we've got this it's kind of the the calm before the storm everything seems to be going all right we're doing okay I do these often in my books because it feels like a natural breather to take and then bam bam everything goes crazy wrong my question is you know how did you talk to us we don't follow these strictly because often as I read a story yeah I get bothered when it's like oh he's a poor orphan farm boy raised by some not been a member who bad things happen he goes off on mystical adventure happens and like so many devils that he gets boring I'm just kind of curious as to do you purposely try to deviate from this I duty and like in what sort of ways do you try to do that um I try sometimes I do I do the whole postmodern thing like in Mistborn postmodern by the way not meaning post mana but really modernist where it's self-aware that it says okay I'm building upon this framework and so I'm therefore going to deviate from step one you know the framework I'm going to evoke it in early scenes and then I'm going to go horribly wrong um that's something I do mostly though I just go on instinct we haven't gotten to the way I story tell yet I don't use any of these these are these are academic ways that I think are useful for describing it and they are very useful first Howard uses three-act very religiously Dave uses that the the try fail cycle thing very religiously it tells good stories for him we haven't hit what I do yet and maybe when I explained you what I do it'll help you maybe I should just wait for you can explain but I mean I'm really looking like how do you know when you've got this great plot does it just really enjoy reading it years yeah will that I'll tell you about that I'll tell you how I view it and that might help you but all right well I'm will go on and then maybe at the end we'll have more questions after I've kind of described mine by the way Orson Scott Card has a great one called the mice quotient have any of you guys read my Scotian I will just send you to do it mice is milieu um idea character event am i right um and his you can read his essays on it he does I can't do it justice since amount time that we did it right excuses where Mary explained it quite well but mice quotient is you decide for a given scene or novel or short story whether it's a milieu which is his word to make it fit the acronym which means means setting a setting story a character story an event story or an idea story and you then begin by leading with that character if it's a character story and then you end with that characters change that's what the the hero's journey basically is but for science fiction you lead with an idea and you end the story when the idea has what is it I don't even know mice that well but anyway go go read it it's worth looking at I should be better at mice than I am but I've never it took me a long time to wrap my head around mice and I still don't quite have it if i sat down with that I can figure it out what I do is I look for a sense of progression my experience has been in storytelling that what keeps people moving through a story is that progression and what stops people is when they lose the sense of progression and this is an interesting revelation for me to have because these things are actually all fairly arbitrary they come into your storytelling skill as a writer however as a writer you can make you could write a thousand-page book that takes place in one minute you're good or you can take write a thousand-page book that crosses 30,000 years you can write a 15 page story the crosses 30 thousand years so progression in any of these things is all in your hands as a writer your job is to give the reader the the clues that the story is progressing so they feel like there is motion through the story and this is my main goal is to make sure that there is always a sense of motion that things are progressing through the story that we're building we're moving towards something and in order to do that I divide my stories in my head up into different types of plots and I then when I'm doing my outlining I look at these plots and I decide what is going to make an effective sense of progression for these plots as an aside one thing that that gave me an understanding of this was reading larry niven and jerry Parnell's book and Ferno inferno is about a science fiction writer who gets drunk and falls out of window dies and wakes up in Dante's Inferno in the hell as described by Dante right and there is a map in the front of this book and I thought why does the inferno need a map that's just like a cliched he's a fantasy and science fiction writer so they put a map in and yet as I read this book the book was basically a series of vignettes happening in the different places in Dante's Inferno it was with the same character but it almost read like it read very episodically you get to this new area you kind of have an adventure there and then you leave that play area and enter the new adventure a new area is very episodic and yet I felt a strange cohesion to the whole novel despite that and I realized that was because I was feeling like there was a good sense of progression because I could follow along on the map where they were and where they were going I'm so I began to study this and see that the great travelogue there might be two L's and then let's pretend there are but the travelogue is a plot spot type and if you identify that you have a travel log which is character starts in point a and across the story is going to go to point B Lord of the Rings has very much has a travelogue plot structure to it now we'll get to the fact that most books are going to have multiple plot structures but one of the plot structures lower the rates is a travelogue David Eddings wrote enormous travel logs ok the first few books of The Wheel time were travel logs and what happens in travelogue is you do have a lot of episodic adventures and it seemed to me that that map was therefore a way to give us a sense of progression while we were having episodic adventures along the way and often it seems to me that a book just full of that beside the adventures could feel somewhat boring and yet if you feel you have this in this main goal and you can look at that map and you see oh here's the kingdom of Ramesh our Amish great and we're starting here and look where we're going and it's right there where we have to get there you know throw the the magical earring into the the pit of of something the pit of slime that's right totally not a Lord of the Rings ripoff if you can see this progression this gets lessened the fact that its episodic and you can enjoy each episode along the way because they are points along this map getting you where you're wanting to go and it therefore creates this sense of progression is one type of plot archetype so I started to look in trying to identify major plot archetypes and decide what methodologies people were using in order to in order to create that sense of progression so you've got these are just some identified you guys might be able to identify more but I sent I tend to look at travelogue I don't really write these because I think they have been used quite a bit in fantasy and epic fantasy and so I stayed away from them intentionally because I felt they just were used so much and also episodic adventures don't interest me as a writer as much as the staying in one place and build to an enormous climax which though cost me this sense of progression there so I have to use other methods to get a sense of progression so mystery plots the mystery seemed to be that often I was in defying and stories so that there would be something that needed to be discovered and the sense of progression along the way was clues Blue's Clues that if you say you know blue sluice is pretty obvious about it but if you say we need to discover this and along the way you then break down in your plot these are what our clues are going to be and you start doling them out through the course of the story then suddenly you have a sense of progression happening for your reader as they feel you're they're getting closer and closer to discovering this big event The Da Vinci Code has one of these and it really annoys me because I think it does a bad job with it but he does also do he's a lot of dirty tricks that make it effective despite me not really enjoying it so the mystery clues along the way for this to work you have to look at it and say this is a mystery I must identify to my reader upfront that this is our goal this is what we're trying to discover in screenwriting terms would call that hanging a lantern on it that's where you say pay attention to this it's important you often hang a lantern on something that your reader might think wait a minute I think that's an error if you then have your character say wow that's weird that shouldn't be then the room says aha it's not an error it's a plot point that's a very useful tool to know but a mystery you got to hang a lantern on the fact that there is a mystery make it a central focus your plot most to doughnuts are this someone has been killed we don't know who the murderer is therefore we are going to go through and investigate and slowly find out and eliminate the possibilities until we end up with the person who actually did it right and so sense of progression there other ones are the relationship subplot this can be romantic or non romantic they actually play out very similarly which the relationship is based on two characters becoming friends and or more than friends depending on the story you're telling and in that again you have to give a sense of progression it doesn't always have to be forward progression let's keep that in mind but when I am building a story early on I'll say okay looks like we have a relationship plot here what kinds of things can I put in the story that would be conducive to giving a sense that this is progressing right and I actually build those things in some of these ones or have to work a little more organically for the way I do my writing so I'll I'll come up with these things but I'm not a specific on relationship issues because it is so character intensive and for me I have to know the characters before I can figure out how the don't react some of these things but it is still very useful to say okay I am going to for instance for relationship plot to work the characters have to be stuck together for one reason or another and so you can build into your plot points where they are stuck together for one reason or another and you can show that motion of them getting along better and better or hating each other more and more until they then kill each other at the end of the story all right um yeah I like wasn't writing excuses once and I'm kind of member there was one like I don't know if that okay it's not that but like it's like the time yeah we're into the time huh oh yeah nope we're getting to it um big problem is another one where you just introduced your big problem and we need to figure this out most heist plots are actually big problem plots if you look at it if you go watch you watch inception again or the sting or something like this they introduce a big problem we have to achieve this almost impossible thing and then they show you them we're breaking it down and working on the pieces breaking it down and working on the pieces gives us a sense of progression we in order to to to rob this place we first need to acquire an EMP how are we going to get it well let's go send these guys to pull out that part of the heist and get the EMP and bring it back and then we have this one piece of the plot which we have told the viewer this is Ocean's eleven by the way up front that we are going to need and now they will get a sense we are moving inexorably toward our goal okay and they get it right they burn his hand yes they get it but he hurts his hand you're right nice job so the other thing that I'll mention is is the time bomb um which is actually I've come to decide not a plot archetype but is one of the things you can use to inspire a sense of progression on your story with if none of these other things are working and if it's appropriate this is the oh I used to the laundress not even really knowing what I was doing at that point but you have you know 100 days to achieve this otherwise this horrible thing is going to happen if you're having troubles getting a sense of progression to your stories you can always do this something like unto this it doesn't have to be you know but it's a time bomb you have to you have to spend all of your money by the end of this certain period and if you do you'll get even more money and if you don't you'll be left Brooke that's Brewster's Millions which is using a time bomb plot with a big problem basically but it's really more of just a time bomb because they don't even you know there's no breaking it up it's just we have a million dollars we have to get rid of it and then you watch the million dollars slowly tick away as they move toward the ending timewise so I guess it is really a big problem is just an easy one we have a million dollars we have to get rid of it let's keep count um is it a million in Brewster's Millions it's probably thirty he has to get rid of thirty and then he wins more yeah something like that what's that yeah I have stipulations on what you can do with it and stop it's a fun movie it's Richard Pryor you guys haven't seen Brewster's Millions yeah this generation the classic movies but know that the time bomb works very well for certain on storytelling archetypes is anyone seen 24 every episode ended with a ticking clock or even every every commercial break had a ticking clock and in 24 hours you knew something horrible and awful was going to happen and we were just trying to keep it from happening I'm and it works very well so the whole concept with this is this progression and this is what I look at I identify what types of these archetypes usually I have some of all of these not as many on the travel log and there are other ones to identify you can split break big problem into subsets just how you want to look at it but then I break it down and say let's come up with ten steps that's arbitrary whatever works for you that this can be divided up into let's come up with ten steps that you know we can see in this relationship and I will actually make four of them steps backward and six of them steps forward this sort of thing so we get a sense that the book is moving along when you pick up a thousand page novel it's really important that you give people a sense that things are moving along and it was really hard to do this in way of Kings because I forced upon myself a lot of big external boundaries and and things like that but anyway there's what it is if you want to do it easily just pick one of them say this is the main plot of my book break it down introduce it in chapter one or two then introduce the pieces that your character is going to work on and then slowly achieve them but add in the yes buts and let things escalate now questions yeah I'm fine with it I mean it's another way of describing things but I don't use any of these things I just use this one of mine basically I like how all of them describe the way things work but I feel even though I'm an outliner I feel too locked in by a lot of those types of plots plot things like the seven-point or things like that and I feel that I don't necessarily want my plots to fit into these archetypes quite as easily as they sometimes do in other books which was mentioned over here the worry of that happening to you you can find your own way of approaching this people say that there are only a certain number of plots and I suppose that's true but part of writing part of what we're doing is try to explore things in new ways and add something to the dialogue and not just tell the same stories have happened before so I do get a little apprehensive when people follow any one of these things too much but at the same time you know everyone has their own process and these things help people write good stories so therefore they can't do that it's good to use them they just don't work for me that well because they it makes me feel like I'm coming up with things they're a little too generic but if I were writing screenplay I would use three at format straight down the line because Hollywood likes its screenplays very tight and ordinary and then you just hope for a good director to add that life into it which you know some of them can Dark Knight does not really follow this any of these archetypes really well it certainly uses some of the principles the yes but and no sort of stuff that uses it but at the same time when you think the story is done it's not which is great so why I like one of the reasons I like that film so much

Channel: zmunk

Views: 17,815

Keywords: brandon sanderson, creative writing, BYU, hero's journey, try-fail cycles, three act format, peggy eddleman

Id: WmqcvG5OkqA

Length: 71min 23sec (4283 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 22 2016