Sanderson 2016.10 - Plotting

Brandon Sanderson’s 2016 Semester at BYU: Creative Writing, Lecture 10: Plotting

I've color corrected the original shots, transcribed the whiteboard, and taken some notes w/ timestamps to help you follow along.

** LECTURE NOTES **

1:31 / Plot
- What is plot?
- - Hard to define because plot contains everything
- - Plot describes the pacing
- - Plot describes the twists & turns

1:55 / The First Third: Promises
- All stories make promises; a story can make the wrong promises
- The first third of the story should setup promises
- Example promises
- - Interesting characters
- - - Promise: this story will show important moments for this character
- - Engaging banter
- - - Promise: the tone of this story will have some comic relief
- - Interesting premise
- - - Promise: this story will dig into the premise

10:10/ Keeping Promises
- If you break promises, readers will be put off
- How do you have surprises while keeping promises?
- Surprising yet inevitable
- Foreshadow
- Small surprises given up front
- Use a prologue to set a tone
- Epigraph

23:20 / The Middle Third
- The questions you raise need to have good answers too; give out some answers
- The longer you hold off answers, the higher reader expectations become that the answers will be awesome

28:55 / Bracketing
- Introduce elements
- Make sure to close out those elements before the end
- Why are they going to turn the page?
- - You can embed sub-plots to help move through the middle

36:50 / Earn Endings
- The middle is important because you need to earn your ending
- Foreshadowing to establish progress; you can’t brush this off and expect a cool ending to carry the day

43:05 / Change
- Making things change is important in storytelling
- At the end of every chapter you should be able to answer, “what changed?”
- Continuous changes give the reader a sense of progress through the middle
- Middles take a lot of practice, no way around it

49:36 / Endings
- Fulfill your promises
- Surprising can be handy, but satisfying is the goal
- Watch out for writing yourself into a situation with no satisfying situation
- - Example: a love triangle without a clear winner by the end will not satisfy anyone who doesn’t like your choice
- You can’t satisfy everyone, but if you tie off your promises you will do well

54:14 / Prose
- Writers worry about finding their “voice”
- Don’t worry about this. It will emerge on its own
- What styles of prose do you like? How do they enhance the story?
- Orwell’s “pane of glass”
- - The writing can be transparent so you see through to the story
- - The writing can be stained-glass so you see the story but you can also step back and see the writing itself
- Stained glass can distract from the story, but it adds something of its own; a matter of preference

[howardkoor]

“Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

[redreignss]

Just wanna say that I’m super grateful to live in a time where I can watch college level lectures from home! This is smeswome

[howardkoor]

“Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.”
― Khaled Hosseini

[howardkoor]

“Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an action
is through. That is all Plot ever should be. It is human desire let
run, running, and reaching a goal. It cannot be mechanical. It can
only be dynamic. So, stand aside, forget targets, let the characters, your fingers, body, blood, and heart do.”
― Ray Bradbury

[DadBodSwagGod]

I know he misspoke around 50:00

But I really like the idea of the same person reading different copies of the same book and getting angry that the story didn’t change from one to the next

[howardkoor]

“Stories start in all sorts of places. Where they begin often tells the reader of what to expect as they progress. Castles often lead to dragons, country estates to deeds of deepest love (or of hate), and ambiguously presented settings usually lead to equally as ambiguous characters and plot, leaving a reader with an ambiguous feeling of disappointment. That's one of the worst kinds.”
― Rebecca McKinsey, Sydney West

[howardkoor]

“Story is honorable and trustworthy; plot is shifty, and best kept under house arrest.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

[Thenoobestgirl]

Tahereh Mafi is also really good at writing in stained glass.

Throughout the Shatter Me series she gave her characters very distinctive character voices and you can really witness it when she begins adding more POVs into the story other than Juliette's.

For example, she wrote Juliette's POV in a very metaphorical and flowery prose, then for Warner she wrote his POVs in a really stiff and orderly fashion which fit his military oriented character, and Kenji also got some POVs towards the end of the series and his train of thought was very comedic and felt like how a typical 20 something year old man-child would act.

Idk if that makes sense, but that's the best way I could describe it lol.

[howardkoor]

“But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.”
― George R.R. Martin

[tidyheidi]

I wish I could remember the book but I remember this one hilarious book where a wizard or something puts a curse on the main character, and the curse is that their relatives will die one by one. But then at the end of the book, it’s revealed that there never was any magic and there never was a curse, the “wizard” was just a normal dude and he was breaking into his relative’s homes and killing them himself.

[howardkoor]

The story is primitive, it reaches back to the origins of literature, before reading was discovered, and it appeals to what is primitive in us. That is why we are so unreasonable over the stories we like, and so ready to bully those who like something else. Intolerance is the atmosphere stories generate.”
― E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel

[shady.passionate]

Life is beautiful is italian and set in italy, not germany. 🇮🇹

[howardkoor]

Does Anybody know more about Story than Sanderson??