Sanderson 2014.4 - Plot

we Perdue an entire lecture on conventions and for this isn't science fiction and fantasy it is harder to find them in yaa and middle grade sci-fi fantasy has great tradition of these conventions that you can go to LT UE is coming up that's one of those they are fan run grassroots sort of things they are great but they're also very eclectic and they're all volunteer run step up for that from that is something like Rite of Spring readers which is more what we call a conference which is you pay a certain amount of money to enter and you get usually um I would say higher quality content I will say less variance to the quality of the content and hey you're every sci-fi fantasy con you will do it to some panels it's like that is the most amazing awesome thing I've ever seen and help you in town with my writing and then you'll go to other ones where Jerry Pournelle who yells at people you're not really sure you know I'm using Jerry is an example of what could happen Jerry's Terry's awesome but you know the panel is just kind of don't stay on topic and you get nothing brightening your yours will never be like that you will get a very focused high-quality environment with professional lectures and oftentimes there are agents and editors there that the authors are encouraged to pass up be better pieces to the agent or editor there's a seat right here by the way open anyone else got a seat by them yeah okay there's more you know and then there are also what we call up the neocons like which is go and see the extravaganza but it's not really usable providers in the same way you can do a whole lecture on that too so let's go ahead and start off and let me ask you guys how things are going with your writing particularly those of you who are not in the workshop series are you running into any problems with your writing this semester are the things you would like to know about today we're going to talk about plot and depth let me first start throwing to you guys what do you want to know for me any problems running here it's all going really great everything's okay perfect you're riding in baby the next great American oh yeah where'd you come up with wild original ideas this is a typical one for me to answer because idea generation is not something I've generally had much of a problem with where you hear the day when we did the on the board we generate some stories I would suggest to you that you watch that lecture who said the first week watch we're going to post these we have the DVDs yeah but we're going to will be posting we have the DVDs I kind of post them on my website you got him now but we're gonna post a moment website if you watch that this is how I go with the class definitely brainstorming and I would suggest you can try and use a bottom like that with some friends or a lot of times for me ideas generally come from or the number one places I've read something or watch a movie and I'm disappointed with how they handle a plot element or a character lovin and I say how could I take that and build a story built around that idea that they failed to accomplish then I would want to do in a way that's satisfying to me because my writing is a growth out of meat-loving stories when I was when I was a teenager loving fantasy novels and coming to want to be able to do that myself and so when I see something that works I say that's awesome I like to do something like that I see something that doesn't works I say work I say that could have been awesome how can I make it awesome I just come from all over so watch that lecture see if that helps yeah okay all right any other questions yes too much right you say to your angers directly or are you saying in your vision and then that's okay if people are asking that a lot you just connected soon we'll do these two nights then we'll go to the lecture okay usually what that means is you are not adequately explaining character motivations this sounds like a character motivation problem to me not having the fiction in front of me it's hard to diagnose and so I can be wildly wrong on this but just when I hear that complaint usually they don't understand why the character is doing what they're doing or why other characters are doing what they're doing to these characters sometimes it when they explain you've got hidden motivations but I would say that it's very important particularly early in a book the character motivations be made clear to the reader which is why we hide behind that lecture we talked about the idea give the character something to want find out why they can't have it and put that obstacle and make very clear I want this and I can't have it even if the motivation is something very simple like Bilbo's desire to stay home and you know and have a peaceful life and it's he's thrown into all this stuff you can see how as the story progresses you know surgeon taxi patients are motivated by wanting to just get out of there not get killed you can also see that he grows to have a different innovation the enjoyment of the of the quest and that's where you run into as a rider into the dangerous area where the character starts not acting like themselves at that point you need to make his transition say here is the new motivation reader hint they are learning to it and you need to leave those clues so that they understand this is what the character is motivated by even when sometimes the character doesn't know and this is very hard particularly when it's when it's something the character doesn't know and it is just a matter of getting across your strong use of viewpoint the idea of character motivations we'll talk more during the character lecture next week about doing this right right so you you're getting a little on Rails and so now they are conversing about you know main about this stuff their conversations starting to move the plot instead of just being natural that's I'm I'm very impressed pick out that's what's happening and why it's happening I would say that maybe this is the point where you want to practice doing things more consciously you've got this natural instinct for dialogue you listen to people's dialogue go watch the movies with great dialogue and analyze why is this dialogue working why is it not when I've had trouble with dialogue I go watch a movie that I feel has really solid dialogue of the style I'm shooting for really saw the dialogue in a in you know an ideal husband is very different from really solid dialogue with a different type of film you know Oscar Wilde is shooting for something different from what someone else might be shooting for but then sit and say why does this feel natural how is it advancing the plot while feeling natural and houses expressing character with what they're doing and it could give me a problem with motivation if they're advancing the plot but the dialogue is the kids to the dardanelles can begin to cross then you've got a problem with why would the character even say this or if it just feels stilted maybe you need to rewrite some dialogue from these characters to get their voices in your head and then transition into the conversation you need to have I've done that before as well we're just like I'm just going to let them talk just let them talk to each other say the things they would be say I'm not gonna put any of this in the book and then I will transition their conversation hopefully naturally into the discussion topic pan and I can slice that part out instead of just I'm trying to get usable things you can try to improve you know to find the answer rather than trying to fix the problem for you does that make sense I search for tools or things you can try all right oh boy and an accident question this is actually something that personally I've had some issues with if I stop writing a book part of the way through because I have to do something else which never used to happen to me and now it happens all the time right I'm halfway through a book and then you know my editor from tor calls me and says you need to do these revisions that you've been sitting on for the last three months Brandon because if we don't turn them in we don't have a book come out on publication I'm like all right fine I'm gonna go do the revision I stopped her from writing the first book bill do the revisions on the other one by the time I get back and like all my momentum is done and this is a serious issue for me working on it I've tried a number of different strategies something with very unsafe sex this is something I would ask other authors as well because I'm not really aware of what other people are doing one thing I do is I start with a revision don't revised to be well but it's Stewart vision on what I've written already and I dig into it and sometimes that will get my momentum going I will sometimes do something which I very rarely do which is I will skip chapters to find a point in the book where I'm excited about the coming that is coming up near like something that's a more climactic moment rather than set up moment and I will write that chapter and continue forward with none of the set up in place and three or four chapters miss this works for me really well most of the time though it often creates a book that has some measure of disjointedness not just because of this chapter to mission but because if I would have written those other chapters and I think I've written something different and so at that point I have to count on the revisions to smooth out and make the book feel like one book as opposed to two slightly different books happening with the same characters at the same time but this one tends to work very lonely I did this on firefight I skipped a chapter I've been working I'm just like I need to get you know beyond this chapter set up because jumping right back into the setup is like choking right back into the molasses and I just start with the experiment so I added a new scene that hadn't been in my outline that felt I you know just imagined I was really excited about and I took that as my new starting point as if I were starting a new book but it was a tactic the size and went forward with it and that has worked very well for me adding a new character and writing a scene from their eyes can really revitalize the story for me writing a short piece in that world and then that can revitalize for me you've got suggestions any other suggestions from the audience okay try to do those things see if they help it is a big deal to me to try to avoid stopping my momentum or the way through the ball it isn't a big deal for some riders oh you have okay it's not a big deal for some riders Ray Bradbury's famous for having a filing cabinet of half-finished stories and every day we would sit down and be like what's what am I gonna work on today and hold on out yeah this one they know pipe a little ways on that story and then put it away and it's time to pick out a different one and write on that one for a little while something I do never do I have to have this momentum all right look go ahead like this other question you talked earlier about avoiding cliches in your work is there a way to use cliches properly and if so how do you how do you do that depends I would say that there are multiple ways to use cliches properly it it really depends on what you mean by a cliche in the type of cliche I would avoid the cliched turns of phrase like you avoid using set book isms let's talk about use this an example you want to set focus miss this is the for yada yada yada yada yada and then you have a word right here and natural writer instinct is to change that word why because we are creative people and we are working with our prose were like that word we're using the same word over and over again I can come up with a hundred different things to put here he explained he postulated etcetera etcetera etcetera you can come up with so many different ones that problem is that usually when someone is reading as I've said before they read only the dialogue and ignore a lot of the stuff around it particularly this part they'll look to see who's that saying it and they'll ignore what you say if you put another word here it will draw attention to itself and you will the reader will be kind of thrown a little bit out of the dialogue sometimes that's very helpful you want to make that point usually you don't most writers writing advice is avoid these use them very infrequently Jacob Ehrlich Rowling uses it like every other time so some great writers use a lot so cliches as as well as have to do with cliches if they're cliche terms and phrases the more of these you use it's going to have kind of reverse effect it's going to make your writing a little more bland and a little more skippable as opposed to this when you use one of these things that's going to draw attention itself the cliched undraw is attention to itself which makes your your turn a phrase in your writing a little more bling I could see the argument for using a bland phrase if you don't want it to pull attention to itself usually you are trying to avoid both of you having some middle ground then it subconsciously powerful yet on the page unobtrusive this is kind of like the holy grail of prose where your crows is creating this great vision of the story in their head because it is so amok you t'v detailed and concrete and yet you are never using the wrong word or a word that draws so much attention to itself then it becomes the star of the paragraph and everyone focuses on that word as opposed to what's going on but I could see an argument for hey a cliche is a lot more invisible so maybe we will use it at this point if you're talking about a cliche more of an archetype for instance the cliche I mentioned JK Rowling it is when she really scary Potter boy goes to wizard school was kind of a cliche already in the fantasy genre why is it not a cliche for her to do it well she made it very much her own she embraced it she said I'm gonna write a really great story about this and cliches of our onra are things like you know the farm boy who saves the world they you know the the grizzled veteran of the heart of gold all of these different things are archetypes that strange cliche you can't avoid using some of them in your fiction the question is is it going to be yours or is it going to feel like every other one on the elemental magic system is one of the biggest clichés and fantasy and science fiction and yet avatar the Airbender the television show did a fantastic job with it and people loved it and in that case it transitioned into archetype that's very understandable instead of cliche just like every other story uses these same magics and so you know Robert Sherman wrote in elemental magic system as well it's very hard to see that when you read them to you like this was his own thing so what is the cliche and then the kind of lacks another way to do these is the whole subversion of jokes that's when you're like when you say I'm going to use these cliche but then I'm going to turn it on its head be very careful about that one the reason for this bank that if you if you if you dally too long with this cliche you are going to what let me share a story with you I broke that into fiction in 2005 with a laundress and another writer um an LDS guy though very nice guy came out at about the same time along Church really took off and his book did not really take off and we years later Matt Burch I name is like yeah I could never really figure it out what happened why did my book not take off yours did it wasn't sour and as far as great guy we were just talking about it and I had actually read part of his book and I'm like your book felt really cliched honestly I'm sorry but it felt like it was the same old tropes he's like oh you didn't get far enough and he started explaining it to me how he subverts all those tropes by the end of the book and turns them on their head that's all these cool things with them lint that's really awesome but you've got a problem and I thought about that for a long time and I realized you know personally a take on that idea not to say you can't do this but the problem is all the people who are looking for a standard classic fantasy with all the tropes what happens when they read that book they get disappointed by the ending because the ending ruins it all in their opinion because they've had this nice very familiar book that then gets gets destroyed what happens if you do not like familiar fantasies and you're looking for something a little more out there you put it down before you get to the cool parts and so subverting tropes is dangerous because you have to rely on those tropes and order to subvert them and you can walk this line very well you have to have strong characters and you have to have promises to your reader that these subversions are going to coming or that's something they're enjoy or you have to do it really quickly which is dangerous even if itself because a lot of people will put it down after one or two chapters and it's like oh yeah I've read this book before I've read it too many times so I'm gonna put it down so anyway I have to move away from questions and I move on to the lecture for today and it does kind of relate into this topic a little bit because we're going to talk about blocks and how various authors construct their plus really the essence of what time 5:30 okay so a lot what is a plot I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out in my head what makes someone readable I wear multiple hats one of my hat is the writing academic the student of fantasy and Purdue the epic fantasy as a literature form I love thinking about it and talking about it and and all of these things I don't wear a lot of do a lot of this when I'm writing my fiction I take off that hat and I put on the artist hat and the artist doesn't analyze as much in the moments as you might become the artist would the artist creates by instinct whereas the academic analyzes what those instincts are trying to get so today I'm going to talk more about what the academic has come up with as explanations for why certain art works and it seems to come down to two primary concepts to me one is this idea of promises and the second is the idea of a sense of progress so promises I spoke about this in an earlier week a book is really about this idea of I am going to make some promises too and the book is going to be be me fulfilling those promises with a measure of on results unexpected results now the balance between how expected and unexpected Astoria's really depends on the genre and your own goals as a writer let's talk about a book type of book that makes a lot of promises and fulfills them very effectively the Regency fan of romance I would assume that most of us here have read or experienced one of Jane Austen's work or similar companion books they are still written today people like writing these books people like reading these books and in Regency romance is going to very quickly in the first few pages make a promise to you about the style of book this is what promises does a Jane Austen book make to you as you are reading along yes what's that end with the wedding yeah there will be a strong romantic plot with resolution okay okay so we're doing Jam what other promises okay okay um most of them are one viewpoint I wouldn't say necessarily I would say that it is going to be when the promises is is going to have a strong its gonna focus on the female beautiful about that so we'll do that in here all right any other promises yes you often know who the main character is you know who is going to have the strong romantic resolution I'm gonna add one up here that's not coming out it is going to be witty from usually from from paragraph one you are promised that you're going to smile as long as it's your type of thing if it's not it's not going to be your pick your type of look but very early on you're getting these promises and I would say these are these are three very important core promises of this region see this region see romance and so as your reader reads along they're going to expect these things and honestly they don't often read this book they don't want or at least the book is not promising them a lack of resolution they want it to be resolved they want in fact in a lot of these genres the romance genre particular the promises they will hook up I promise it's like my six-year-old who used to get really scared watching certain television shows even once made for his age and then they suddenly was okay with it and I'm like what's wrong you're not scared anymore it's like Oh someone told me that that man always wins I'm like oh you didn't know that back when all this was like no now I know if you wanted to try the showing instead of saying it's okay daddy I know that that and always for him to watch before he knew that Batman always won and now he enjoys them quite a bit and so for my son who is six it is a very big deal to him that he know that good guys are going to win that is not as big a deal for some other reason readers in certain genres I would say that there is a promise inherent and for instance things like the game thrown series the think of guys might not win and you're not sure who the good guys are and that promise is a part of why people enjoy those blocks all right so this is gonna vary very much I mean you can look at things like mysteries where the promise is going to be the myth you're gonna know who did this by the end and it's going to surprise you which makes a very difficult task for mystery writers as they write these books and their fans get used to their storytelling style finding out ways to still surprise and interest the readers so making promises is about this move talk about how you make these promises in your book but you want to start making these promises on page one paragraph one impossible okay let's talk about the concept on a sense of progress sense of progress why do I write cents up there isn't it real progress well no here's the thing and you're writing a book you have absolute control over everything in the book you can make one second last 500 pages if you want and you went doubt that they could do this it may not be fun to read but you could do it you could do that or you can pass a million years and three words millions you can squeeze or expand basically anything in your book and this I we joke about the time thing and can happen with any plot resolution as well you can compress that plot resolution into a tiny little thing you like boom and it happened or you can make it take hundreds of pages and so what they are reading for is a sense of progress toward the goals and promises that you have made and your job to make an exciting plot is to give them this sense that things are progressing or away from this goal motion is happening and we are making steps the book is moving forward if you do not give them this sense they will say that your book is boring or they will say that it's not going in there well every book and you know you can make anything boring and anything not go anywhere that's actually not a flaw of the book not having interesting things in it is it flaw of the reader failing to give the author feeling to the reader the right promises and the right sense of progress for instance you may have been promised a book with a really great action component or a really powerful mystery and when you're writing by about the first quarter you can enter into this awesome romance and spend a lot of time with it no matter how well that's that is written if you are making progress on the promises you made your reader will say the book is meandering no matter how tight that center plot is and this happens in a lot of very great books the people reading they're like yeah this part was just me and Ernie if you took that part on its own and ready to be like wow this is tightly plotted this is wonderful and all these things but the reader has made the wrong are the authors made the run promises and suddenly and feels like my post meandering so send the progress and promises there are various tools lots of tools the different writers have used through the ages in order to kind of break up their plots and give these concepts across the reader you may have heard of three act format the reason three act format works is done one has some sort of intrinsic sense of motion to it has it's going to force you if you're using it the right way you have things change and so long as you've done your setup correctly as you have things change according to your setup then you will get a sense of progress three act format so create image screenwriters in here yeah okay we've got a couple of you go ahead oh yes of course filming person someone want to explain in quick words to us what three act format is you feel capable of doing this is from that low note anyway and usually often there's also some sort of call up here in some sort of decision point right here so but not always but that's kind of how it is so like what's the tree one you remember the tree when someone says three our format is what and get them down the tree yeah so the first ones like introduced there's a tree and then get them up it or have them really since hey we've got to go find the tree here's a tree we're gonna climb the tree oh no rocks are getting thrown at us we get down on the tree I don't know there's also given place to talk about it the idea between three act formats breaking the story up to three pieces in your mind all your setup they try things and it gets really bad low notes and then a new trunk triumphant resolution so how is this gonna help with the idea of a sense of progress yes right okay it's kind of restricting you at least to spending one-third of your book and set up instead of two-thirds if you split this down the line usually this is the biggest course part of the story by the way I broke them up here the same size but I would actually say 1/4 2/4 plus 1/4 - is what your book is gonna fall into most stories Hollywood loves this this set up we are very conditioned to enjoy it and so particularly Western culture we read these things and we like it you will find that if you watch films from other cultures they don't follow this they don't have the same traditions and they make different promises inherent in their genre that we don't get and we get to the end were like my promises weren't fulfilled he jumped off the mountain and fell into the clouds I don't know what that means well that is I mean whereas they culturally have different expectations and genre is making inherent promises to them that isn't art made that so hey so three acts format I don't use three act for that I like what it does I think it's a great tool I don't use it just because it's not natural to me a lot of the books that I'm writing are not falling is neatly into this package as they would and as normally I could film what this works really well for a film because the film is two hours it's really more of a short story and whereas I'm often trying to write a big active fantasy three acts don't work for me I thought I'm working on some weird thing where I've got like 20 things like that but it is a very nice model to practice let's talk about plotting using a very similar thing to this called the hero's journey a lot of people use the hero's journey as they plot sight sight new and no heroes dream all right explain to me the hero's journey I'm going to do it as a circle there was starting at the top we see you start with the heroes just like at home doing guessing like Newton's for long object at rest right the hero receives a coal which is refused call number one and he receives a second call she accepts to usually often he's forced but yes okay so call number two happens right here what sagging zone right there there is the lots of mentorship so treating wheels come off somewhere around here obi-wan dies or whatever it's different depending on where it is the sense into the underworld right so this is a kind of analogous to the low point but it's more often when once following the hero's journey there's an actual place George Lucas logs this thing look at the sense into the underworld and meets Darth Vader right yeah this is um he did the whole trilogy has a hero's journey by the way it's not that the original trilogy so instead at the moment where Luke is down with Yoda and he's passing through this is uh Lucas is the sentence at the underworld but Darius is based off the idea of the class of Greek archetype often they will go to the underworld and they will often meet evil version of self of some sorts they have to confront the evil within them it can be external or it can simply be some sort of sort of sort of AI confused as for evil whatever you come out there's another thing here what's it called apoptosis I can't remember it's like this then it's like though everything comes together yeah pappa theosis yes the force is within you whatever it is you know overcome and then return home with new knowledge okay so this is the hero's journey how is this going to help you with your idea of a sense of progress I would do this to help I mean how would this tool being able to help a lot of riders like you using do you see anything that works for you you're stuck with what you're next yeah this story beats the year aiming for our on this list in fact so much it's been drinking on this and on three AK format you can call them all up and go reading be like oh this will help me oh this will help me I'm getting psychological this theory is developed as like an archetype this is how we expect stories to be so you've done correctly this kind of regression feels natural and easy to vote relatively easy to anyone yes I think also because it's used so often a reader will recognize it's happening happening even if they don't realize they're recognizing yeah so they'll feel the progress even if they don't know why yeah no let's go over here Romero I was going to get to next by glad you brought that out you know what I'm doing that you and I do so thank you for the awesome segue into the next portion of this lecture which is these things that were talking about I like fun about the username it also works for three act structure is this a checklist and my issue is though it should not be a checklist these the the problem that we've run into when we use formats like this is that we are looking at something that scholars have described about stories in general and they're looking for common themes and any given example will not follow it exactly however when they look at a hundred different stories or a thousand different stories across cultures suddenly this format comes about the problem comes when you are then retrofitting your story if you take your story and say well this is what Mayson Drake hero's journey I must hit every beat on the list in the order that they are here you have turned what was the description of human nature into a checklist and you risk creating something that really writes the soul out of your story or the two words and things that don't work I like to often we use these the virgin birth the Virgin Mary virgin birth is a big part of a lot of the hero's journey stories throughout myth and so what did Lucas do when he created the original the new three movies they made anakin subject of the virgin birth that is so weird it's not middle florida mythology he's created it doesn't mean the story it's bizarre you're like and it has no point or any place in his entire mythology and this story it's just shoo mourned in there and once you start to say I need to hit all of these things and you run the risk of that now at the same time it's hard to be too hard it's wrong to be too hard on Lucas because he was telling these stories from want to tell he was a big student of Joseph Campbell he's done lecture series on Joseph Campbell he loves this sort of stuff and I doubt he was really actually sure running in he was just like I love the stuff let's put that in dude let's put this into and he wrote the stories he wanted to write as a reader I had a batter as a viewer I had a bad response to some of these things to be forced into the hero's journey instead of building the story he wanted that it was natural for his story okay so one of these tools were using don't make them a checklist use them as a way to help you construct the plot particularly if you're not naturally an outliner this could be something that you sit down to say okay I can hit these major beats they work really well for the person I'm telling I brainstormed this character I know who they are what their their emotional conflicts are and I can overlay them really well with some of these attributes I'm going to create a story that balls us or the three after more night this is helping me compartmentalize the sections of my book I think now would be like part one I've got to be done with introducing every important element by this page number I'll get them all in I'll have the call and the except in the call I'll have you know the the decision I've got to talk about the decision in that one between part acts 1 & 2 is kind of for the moment usually at some point in Act one the protagonist goes from everything but from being forced to do things to deciding they want to do that and this again is sort of the idea behind behind Bilbo being forced to go on a quest and then deciding he really doesn't want to be on the quest that sort of thing is what we're looking at for that and there that doesn't point is somewhere in that first act second act transition not really as hard that's the point of the line I've been there but you can use that say okay I need to transition my character from being inactive to proactive we talked about the nd of character we'll talk about it more what makes up a really exciting character and so proactivity is one of them you want to ensure you're starting with them having one of the other two at least but you can then transition correctly these things hopefully will help you if you are trying to construct the plot but now when I'm doing this one of the things I like to do particularly because I am creating large-scale clause is I'd like to divide up my blocks into lots of different stuff let's stop that one for a minute there's one more I want to talk about I want to talk about seeing people before we get on they're a very simple plotting method because then we're gonna get to the complicated laws so if this sort of stuff you look in this you're like okay I can understand that but how do I make things happen chapter 2 chapter you use what is called since equal stories um we talked about it on write excuses may have heard this a very simplified version of it is the Mary gave this to me yes but no and this is a very simple plotting method you can use this as your writing or you can use it to create and structure plot yes no but yes but no and the idea is you start with a problem and you have the truck what's simple my cat's missing okay great my cats missing all right you're gonna write a story about my cat is missing all right what are we gonna do so what to try and find our cat we come up with something what's that go to the pound okay we go to the Browse all right we go to the pound do we find their cat yes or no no no okay it's a no and what else goes wrong okay what do we do to try and stop that solve this problem come on octave what do you do higher animal catcher okay we hire an animal capture [Laughter] yes yes they capture all the animals not free but what bigger problem this is great they sell them to a food market [Laughter] you see how this is going now if you're doing this really well you're gonna weed this dreaded they you know yes they found a bucket even cap Holly Hunter and they've already sold your catchment to the food market then you know you trying to solve that problem the things like this the concept between this is to force yourself to have an escalation of problems and you keep doing this until you finally say yes and then there is no mutt and that's the end of your story very simple plotting method the concept behind this is to force you to create more conflict and to have a sense of progression you gotta throw some yeses in there all right now a lot of great books you will read Miles Vorkosigan books are like this you can kind of see this about anyone read where's apprentice Lois Bujold it's a great book you have read it and it is kind of this style and this game is a little bit to an extent to where you keep doing things and ever every problem you solved it creates two new problems and you keep trying and doing things but they don't work or they do work Indiana Jones movies are all like this right it's just like a C series of everything getting worse and worse with occasionally you're thinking you saw so immediately gets even worse and then finally they pulled it out that is how you kind of use back it's a very simple plotting method the idea behind it being conflict and progress all right so let's do some of some more complicated plotting methods and before we do this I want to dig into the idea really deeply of the of the promises and in progress because what I like to do is I like to find out from the types of plots that I often included in my stories and I'm dividing it up by the way I'm going to separate a sense of progress for example one of these is the mystery this doesn't mean that I'm writing a mystery book this is a type of plot that is sometimes of loot as a subplot a mystery for me is a plot about information okay and plot about information now why I'm saying this this way is when I'm going to create a sense of progress the way to create a sense of progress have you crazy sense of progress when equipped with if information is your key you give out information equal clues or research or information being found and so if you have setup and promise up there is a mystery you fulfill that promise by creating Clues along the way and end discovery so you have your steps and you have your resolution this is where some officers can give mixed signals by accidentally promising something at the beginning of their story and then fulfilling a different type of plot or having the discovery often it is really bad they do something like this they know the other mystery they set out the mystery they make the big climax of discovery but they have not given a sense of address in the middle working toward that discovery and this is when a plot really misfires and so the idea is to match your your the way your progress in your plot with your Hulk at the beginning and your big rebel resolution yet but these are in a lot of books you're going to have a number of these what I try to do sometimes is this idea of brackets I talked about this before the brackets are we introduced problem one problem two and problem three and they might all be different types of plots problem one um is well let's let's break this down for something like like what's a good show we don't see them so we do start finalizing that has episode so it's a little bit difficult pretty let's do so we do that we want to do like I just got did you start up Harry Potter okay let's do both one and Harry Potter okay so we introduced a problem right what is our problem hey let's go to the stairs so this is kind of our initial one is life-sized right so we've kind of introduced the sort of life sucks problem what's problem number two I was in adaptive school maybe you could give different arguments here but is it this whole guy idea of The Apprentice story right a problem is I am not very good at this I'm gonna do you think and then problem number three is Baltimore right and we do it as sort of a little sort of thing like this now in Harry Potter I would say that that as the book progresses we kind of we don't get this one solved which is kind of interesting right the livestock's we get a little bit help with it but this one is almost solved right here as a middle thing of life sucks by the way you're a wizard we've got this big school life problem but the idea is you kind of start bracketing these things then we find out this mystery and then the mystery gets solved in the middle right or near the end and then so really it's kind of like mystery and Voldemort's and other problems oh there's Baltimore oh there's this mystery about the first one that awesome right we saw all the mystery then we fight Baltimore then we have been we win the school Cup right we have solved the school life problem we solved the mystery we beat Baltimore ins and we kind of break them back outward now this may look maybe it look like your story is gonna follow you know that you're doing evil times really when you're bracketing you're doing it like this here's your brackets and then you have your big story and you might have little brackets of small conflicts and then these three brackets are right on top of each other again in a sequence you can kind of see you with Harry Potter right it kind of follows the exact thing mystery solved bully more feet we AMA we win the cup school life is great and so the idea is if you kind of identify what your little subplots are and resolve them basically in the same order you're able to create these little a next bin flaws all right so let's talk about other style of plus we've got the mystery what other type of plots can you imagine the romance okay I'm going to put I'm going to call that not romance I'm going to call that because it works between the two non romantically involved characters to its big relationship why would I say they call it relationship want well I would tell you go watch a buddy cop movie and a romance and you will find that the beats and the plot resolutions are exactly the same on the other side that is action so there's going to be explosion most of your movie is this follow they don't do it sometimes you will see that they have the exact same sort of beats that happen in the romance plot so what is how do we give what is our equivalent to flawed about information but this plot about what's it about what is it in one like what is the squad without people get learning to like each other right becoming friends / romantic falling in love or falling in friendship whatever you want to call it so you know about this so how you sent you have a sense of progress okay that's that's a that's a red shoe to throw fit that's not the sense of progress what what is the sense of progress moments together right you need to be finding just like over here to give the sense of progress you need to be delivering times where closure discovered and thought about you need to be giving time for these two characters together and as as you said sometimes they're gonna at the beginning particular you need to set up a problem over here the mission the problem is we don't know this over here it is we drive each other crazy often right it doesn't have to be but the most archetypal version of this is you know we hate each other this is um this is mr. Darcy he is the most acceptable than ever right or this is your new this is your new partner he's completely insane and he might shoot himself let's make the weapon right you put two characters together who are forced to be together for some reason if the unit is just visiting the story and you then give them moments together and your sense of progress is changes in the relationship now you can throw wrenches into any entities in fact you probably want to any plot that we're going to be talking about you want to have red herrings you want to have things go wrong you discover information but then you find out that the important engage of this information was lying to you to manipulate you or you know whatever yada yada yada usually it depends on if you use the three heck format you look for the third act crisis right this is well it's a good one hitch but it's a third act crisis someone's knee reverencing ditch the Will Smith romantic comedy third M crisis she finds out he's a relationship doctor and she pinches and played he's been playing her all along but in crisis our relationship was going real loud now boom it's all right and these sorts of things you can find in all sorts of stories if you I mean they do this a lot in comic books to the fantastic or that every comic book you worried by that if they break up near the end of the comic you know the the thing does Johnny are pounding on each other and they break apart the whole team's dissolve nothing's working anymore because those are used those are basically relationship comic books with this sort of action veneer which is different from for instance something like a like a Batman coming these days usually isn't involving any sort of relationship hate second Bruce Wayne's relationship with his psychosis right relationship block does that make sense to you guys now again you want to be careful not to cross your wires that doesn't mean you can't do multiple things in fact I want you to be doing multiple things but if you want to have this great ending where they get together you're going to have to have tad time together where you give clues to the reader that this is progressing a sense of progression one of the best examples of a book that had sort of a argot or a sense of regression that worked for me I like to often bring out is the idea of a book called inferno by larry niven and jerry cornell i really like this book a fantastic classic science fiction literature I might love it so much because it's about a science fiction writer who gets drunk in a science fiction party only party of sight so she caught it falls out the window nice he then gets sent to Dante's Inferno wakes up like on the outskirts like in a fog or whatever it is that happens in the inferno and what her happens will follows is a sequence of sometimes unrelated episodic quests right this is the question how do you do with something at the Sun because these to make fine stories you will read some books that are like this for you like Brandon there are no big brackets or if there are is one there very loose and everything is this this this this and that book is very much this this this this even if his general goal is you know get out of hell how do you give a sense of progression on that well Jerry Cornell and Larry Niven very wisely did something very simple they'd put him back in front of their book max have become very common cut sort of synonymous with the fantasy novel this one's a science fiction ish I don't know we call this one which was a circle with a center point and him starting on the outside and it went like that in each of these episodes you were able to look and say hey I see on the map where he is suddenly this book is given despite being really episodic a sense of progression because we are targeting toward the central thing and this is a sort of plot archetype that we usually call travelogue and so this is a travel plot very easy one to imagine the travel launched what is your your progress places yes point A to point B and this has a great tradition and fantasy partially because it spoken if you read Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit they're fairly episodic we don't hear we meet this we go here we meet this we go here to leave meet this and it gives a sense of progress by at the beginning very giving us a very clear delineation of what our goal is yes it's going to be a lot of this but Frodo you don't throw that ring in that hole then everything ends so go get to that hole [Music] [Applause] so you get this Center for a rest by having adventures along the way and the end is where you arrive where you're going let's stop for a minute and talk about this unexpected result because Lord the Rings has a fantastic example of an unexpected result I've talked before about the idea that in the storytelling we are blending the familiar of the strange would be expected in the unexpected it's a great essay about this called a strange attractor by teller Terry Rozier frosty oh not sure how to say his name is a screenwriter for a bunch of pretty cool movies Aladdin was one of his with this supreme writing partner and so were the Pirates of Caribbean movies and things like that and he has a big series of essays this one's now so I'm ten years old or something but it's a great essay about the idea of mixing the unfamiliar and the familiar and you're going to have to decide what your necks of the familiar and unfamiliar it is for a given book we read fantasy because we in science fiction we generally like this idea of the steep learning curve and we like a lot of unfamiliar in our setting that you can take to say well that means I can be very standard in my plots and you really can if you want to I was talking with one of my friends and writing group one my riding river and she said I feel like my books are terrible because I read your books Brandon and your brokes kind of you know you have these mini characters and you have these made clots and then your book goes like this and then they all come together and boom there's this big thing in the ending where it's like oh it's all related and she said and my thoughts are I really wish that I were married oh one dairy which her boots are way more complex than that but it's really more like you know this and this like that okay and she said and she said so I feel like I've been a writer the thing about it is revokes are fantastic they're the light free I loved every moment of them um and my explanation to her this was the idea that if you are making promises and fulfilling them one of the promises that you get when you pick up the way of Kings is that promises you have four different characters in four different scenes in four different places at the start of the book involving crazy magic you are being promised this book is going to involve lots of characters it's going to involve a steep learning curve and it's going to be a little bit like this particular at the beginning when you you know you're having to be like where is this all going that's a promise on it which makes a substantial portion of people who pick it up put the book down okay that's what I expected it is what I did intentionally I wouldn't say the majority but there is a significant portion of people who do not want to read this and I understand that completely that's why I wrote the book the way I did these books there is nothing at all wrong with this in fact what is not better than the other their different storytelling archetypes and if your promise is it's they're going to get together and then they don't I'm going to feel like that I was let down by your book because I'm loving this book in these characters and I wanted to get together there's nothing at all wrong with that and we have this sort of sense sometimes as writers the deeper we dig into this that for some reason we have to do things unexpected just to be unexpected well no not necessarily at the same time if you are making promises like your mystery if you're making interesting promises with your mystery the more interesting your mystery is the more all of a mystery the more awesome the questions are the more awesome - Reza we're going to want in order to feel satisfied does anyone watch the TV show Lost okay TV look so lost was very well-put-together show it did some awesome things with character but the biggest complaint if you read online is that people felt that the mystery Revell resolutions at any given point in the show were really bad and they had big problems with this I'm just going by I'm not making value judgments going by what to read the response was but still a wildly popular show people love to read and I think it's because they really were not a mystery they were a character relationship show with a bracket and mystery thing inside of it and they were really good at asking questions but really bad at giving unexpected answers in that the answers were either too unexpected so they weren't poor shadows so you didn't have that sense of progress to them or they were just more questions and so to if you run into this problem this doesn't run into that problem this puck says here's what's gonna happen it's gonna we're gonna have some unexpected things happen but the end you're getting what you signed up for and there's something very very important to understand about that and you to be aware of all right what times we have 616 so we got about 10 minutes left all right that's good we're right on target so so just be aware you're gonna have to decide unexpected results Lords of things is the one I used as an example because I think it has a fantastic mix of this when you get to the end and Frodo keeps the ring that's an unexpected result you've been promised he's a hero all along and yet you have Drac he is bracketed a different type of plot what is the plot that is distracted inside Lord of the Rings involving race it's an eternal conflict it's a current eternal personality comma the character or characters right so you have bracketed in this sort of thing you have this we introduced we need to get to this part and then as slow and at times not so subtle corruption of Frodo as a sense of progress from which at the end your climax is he keeps three and this works wonderfully because as you're focused on the main plot of get from point A to point B you can kind of ignore this one not really you're paying attention to it but there's this thing and right where we are a lot more like stage magicians than you might have assumed one of the things we're trying to do is hold up an idea over here and say look at the monkey here's the monkey while we're pausing something else in our hand is slipping in their pocket that's what we call four seven we are doing foreshadowing in the way we're meaning distractions we do it and when we talked about plot number two we will talk about poor shadow guys it me write that down make sure I get to it because that's kind of what our we're going to talk about when we get back to this now we're never going to do a rotation next within the character and then the week after that we'll be setting and then we'll go back and do another prose week and now their plot week another character week another sending way and that's basically how the class is going to play out so but you are a stage magician you are trying to distract people and one of the ways you do that is by bracketing these these plots very very consciously now you can probably come up with a ton of doing the character chronically one is there's there's an internal thing that I need to come over come I'm too shot I'm too rash I'm not crashing up whatever it is you have a character crumbling inside you know buildings tilled my parents and now I'm a vigilant ready whatever your internal conflict is and you are going to give a sense of progress through showing that issue affect other parts of the plot in negative ways and then the character is going to your interests of the working life and you're gonna come to resolution ready to ease it or not that's a character country or things very intrinsically tied to character you can probably come up with a ton of these right I'm not going to go over all the different types that there are today the goal right now is to have you start thinking about this and start identifying what is by plot promise what promise do I need to make in the beginning if I can in the first chapter or two what promises am I going to make about the style of story this dish and the main plot the first of the brackets and then how am I going to give a sense of progression through the course of my book and then how's my my resolution going to fulfill that promise and make use of all these things these groundwork that I believe that's what I want to date thinking about now what I actually use all this stuff to construct the plot I use a method where I have opened up my document that is my notes document right about the book doctor I call the top guy and I will have put the heading of the clump and then underneath that heading I will start identifying such lots I'll say a relationship here with these characters relationship ERA with these characters we have the you know the big problem as I said before it's my catch-all we need to accomplish this big goal we get robbed Lord which is really a much is what that is we've got this high spot you want to sub Darren yeah we've got an apprentice plot you know training you know we've got training plot is then needs to learn how to use magic we have what's another big one in miss Warren what's that we have the relationship yeah I've been knowing we have a relationship been in tells you're building your rebellion yeah big problem we need rebellion so I'm identifying all of these things right Oh mystery yeah mystery how they took look root right mystery then these are kind of my bigger ones there will be little tiny ones right chapter that I'm not plotting on the same way but I'm doing all these things and because I am a an outliner I have to have an ending in mind before I start if I don't I I don't write my books the same way and sometimes I'll do it but most frequently I need an ending not everyone does this but I need endings so I decide how these things are gonna play out I can change this as I'm writing the book but I decide what my cool endings are and I'm usually just starting the first couple ideas I kept up with I spend a lot of time brainstorming what would be what we're looking for this idea of I love the surprising but inevitable right it's a great phrase that people use in screenwriting when that ending comes you say I can't believe that happened but it was there all along Frodo keeping the ring is a great example I can't believe that happened but yes it was obvious all along in fact if that mounting sense of for right at the end things like this I look for ideas they're gonna be like this and then underneath this pot I will brain smart my steps things I construct scenes and say okay my name is relationship I need scenes with these characters together what are great scenes that will interplay these characters and interesting ways oftentimes by the time I'm doing this I will rip the chapter to to get the character who they are under my belt not always but often I'll write his chakra be like who is this person I know this scene I know who the how they think sometimes other than end of the book usually I make them chapter 1 and I cut them anyway I'm doing all these bullet points underneath all of these things and so my outline is a six out list of bolts and ways that I've been fulfilled those goals wrench is that I'm going to throw in and then I kind of build a plot by using these things and kind ordering them in a big long list of both points taken from over here and I will combine three of them and say in this one we are going to have Danny kelsier have some time together we are going to have then learn to use the magic and we are going to ask questions about the mystery and maybe try and Nick on that what can I do to make these big things turn into a chapter I will then write chapter come up with the scene I was with with a setting and start writing and that's how I build books take a bunch of those both points build a tsunami my method is it doesn't have to be your nothing I'm just showing how I am personally taken all this stuff and applied it into an actual plotting methodology you may want to use the points than that that do we talked about before were you like I know everyone here I know I'm going here I don't know it's not what I'm gonna get between but I do now that I've know what my goal is I can write underneath it okay I'm gonna travel along this way and here's some things that happen along the way at some point in my discovered writing I have to accomplish this goal go and giving yourself a few goals as a discovery writers and probably help you have more powerful endings we'll talk about characters next week specifically about making sure that your characters are vibrant alive and sympathetic alright 6:25 we're good

Channel: zmunk

Views: 18,372

Keywords: brandon sanderson, BYU, creative writing, plot types, hero's journey, try fail cycle, pacing, story structure, fantasy

Id: IMZacAxQ8Mw

Length: 71min 45sec (4305 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 29 2017