Brandon Sanderson’s 2016 Semester at BYU: Creative Writing, Lecture 10: Plotting
This video is a mirror of the materials posted by user camerapanda. The authorized filming is thanks to Brandon's friend Earl Cahill and his assistants from CameraPanda.com (go support them). The lecture was filmed at Brigham Young University.
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
