this is Brandon sanderson's how to write Science Fiction and Fantasy lecture Series today we are doing the Q&A on World building so we are going to listen to the students and do all of their questions and I'm going to hopefully be very eloquent now if you want to get one of your questions answered we will do a web exclusive Q&A for World building just like we've done here and with our other things so leave your questions for me in the comments of this video we will aggregate them and I will do a special video just for you let's do class yay science F fantasy writing class [Applause] woo uh this is how to write science fiction fantasy this is a World building Q&A uh you can also hit me with uh questions about Viewpoint intense since we stealthily snuck um we pork bellied that uh that one into the the last lecture um so we're going to I've got your questions that you've asked here I'm going to start with a few of those and then I'm going to go to the crowd as a reminder uh next next week's business of writing um so business of writing if you want to know I'm going to focus on traditional publishing uh I will have thoughts on self-publishing and Indie publishing if you want to ask me about it but uh I will be focusing on agents I'll be focusing on contracts and I'll be focusing on how the publishing industry works I why it works why it sometimes doesn't all right so uh that's an important one particular if you you know have friends who are wanting to publish that might be one for them to visit and listen or if you have significant others that you want to be doing this as a business in the future and they might uh they might do to understand some of the business side uh we do have extra seats um by the end of the semester we always do so feel free to bring um bring a significant other next time or someone like that uh if you think it'll help him out just make sure that everyone who's registered for the class gets seats first all right so question number one which is an excellent question how do you handle World building when you're in a real world setting not writing a fantasy world um I'm going to take this from the perspective of you mean it's an urban fantasy there are Fantastical elements to the world um though you know if you want to read an excellent World building book that is um not fantasy in any way you can look to the great historical novels uh lay is um Moby Dick Moby Dick tends to be the go-to point to this feels like a fantasy world um and things like that the trick is those books were written during an era where the tropes that you Ed and the ways that you tell stories were different uh their pacing is very very different um Moby Dick and L both actually have some very different kinds of pacing let's just say um how do I approach this um so there is um there's some advantages you can shortcut whenever you're using our world um even if it's a science fiction World which is Handy there are certain things that readers established in a genre will just accept I think we talked maybe it was last week maybe it was a small group about how you can just say my uh future Society uses wormholes to get around you don't have to explain how the wormholes work as long as like you go in this thing they're stable you come out the next one science fiction people are just like okay I get wormholes you don't have to explain what wormholes are um even easier you don't have to explain what American football is right um You don't have to explain all of these things but like any book fantasy or not you are going to have to pick where you spend your effort bringing people up to speed um every book has a learning curve regardless um of what kind of story you're writing and in every book you can manipulate your learning curve to make it steeper or shallower uh steeper if you want to make the book feel more challenging in that regard and to promise that you're going to throwing a lot at them shallower to make it an easier on rope on-ramp into a story um there are pitfalls to this day Jim Butcher gets complaints from people in Chicago because he got the lay out of Chicago wrong in the Dresden Files because he wasn't living there um at the time uh he swears that uh you know some of the things that happened he experienced in Chicago like the way the fog worked and stuff but he says he gets he get super amounts of complaints getting things wrong is way easier in the real world and the chances that there's an expert reading your book who knows more than you go up dramatically this is why World War II books are uh famously hard to write because the number of armchair experts about World War II are very high and in a lot of novels you depend on getting some small details right in order to convey a larger sense of of respectability to your story very easy in the fantasy world in some ways to give us these small details so that you trust and um and have authority over it but if you get the small details wrong you can collapse the entire uh the entire uh aesthetic the entire U Mystique for a reader scar does this happen to you when people uh write about the military and don't know how to write about the military it makes me so angry yeah uh it makes him so angry uh and you can't really engage with the book anymore because you notice they get something fundamental wrong no longer can you trust that they're getting the character arcs right because they don't understand fundamental things about what it is and so um your research on these things needs to go up and or you need to make liberal use of Bon head characters which we are all boneheads in some way meaning uh there is a reason why kaladan doesn't like horses because I know there's a large number of fantasy fans who are horse people and they know their horses in and out and I don't my wife knows horses I could get there I could do the research but by having a main character is like I don't do horses then if the main character gets some stuff wrong about horses and can be taught in later books so that it brings it back people people forgive kaladan for not knowing about horses because he doesn't like horses um that sort of thing can be very handy um this is where really good Alpha and beta readers come in uh the other thing that you want to be careful of in real world world building is the potential to be even to be damaging uh the classic example of this I would say is how much fantasy writers like to take things like genuine Navajo beliefs and imply that they're part of some magic system um which if it were any other religion would be instantly recognizable as um as very condescending right um but for some culture things that pop culture has decided it can appropriate for for whatever reason um it can be very damaging and so being careful about these things I recommend being respectful remember kind of my cardinal rule is I want to be depicting I want people to depict me well and do the research for me um and so I want to make sure that I'm depicting them well um I'm depicting all people well not to other um everyone else but I'm you know do your research do things consciously don't do them accidentally is what I would recommend um you can absolutely make decisions in your books that other people in in this room would not make and would say you shouldn't do that if you do them consciously the ground you're standing on is much stronger than if you just do them accidentally um this wasn't real world U but this was mistborn um when I wrote the original mistborn trilogy one of the things I did is I wanted to build Vin as this dynamic character uh partially because you know I was writing the book in part for my 14-year-old sister that I was drawing some Vin out of and things like that it was after the book that I realized the entire rest of the thieving crew was men um you can write like Bridge 4 did not have any women in it it is a battlefield situation where people have been recruited to carry Bridges I would not have put any women in Bridge 4 you could make a different argument and do it totally valid when I did it in misbourne I did it because all the heist movies I'd seen were all guys I Didn't Do It consciously um and this is you know the theme of uh of my class do things consciously pick it because you think it matches the story you're wanting to do whatever it is um and then own it um do your research think about it so for real real world things I would say that uh remember for real world last little piece of advice contrast is your friend contrast is your friend in all kinds of World building I talked about with Sanderson Third Law sometimes if you're going to build uh two religions having them be contrasting parts of a same religion or have different views on something that's very important to the World building plot will help the reader understand the contrast same thing with the fantasy world um it's instantly recognizable say the movie yesterday where the Beatles don't exist that's a contrast between our world you can explain that in one term guy wakes up no one's heard the Beatles he remembers them no one else does boom you have a pitch um using contrast like that what is different between your fantasy world in our fantasy world what is the same and build from there all right uh other World building questions before I pull another one over here um in a video one time you said that Robert Jordan was one of kind of like the great examples of viewpoint yes what does he do do you think that makes him great yeah um so Robert Jordan and George R Martin are two of the very best um and what they both do is they make sure every character's description every description that you get in a chapter is from a character's Viewpoint the descriptions are really key um and Robert Jordan is a master of um I used the cup of water um you know he one of the things that he uh was inspired by Dune by is that different people treat water differently and so the descriptions of how a hill full of grass looks from the eyes of different people is going to be different um and you know as uh you find the best passages in Wheel of Time you don't need a name to tell you whose viewpoints you're in from line one it's by how they describ the people around them and uh how they describe the setting uh again George relies on this a ton George Martin switches viewpoints really fast and lots of viewpoints uh so many that even though he's using third limited he names the chapters after the character because he knows he's switching fast enough that he has uh uh danger of losing people and he makes sure to hit particularly his opening paragraphs solidly in view Point um so that you know whose view you're in and that means that the Busy work you do of describing a scene is actually characterization and is often as also foreshadowing right um and it gives you that strength for a third limited that first often has so that's what I recommend uh specifically those two authors uh to of the thing one of the things that they're very good at and there's a reason why those two dominated uh the 90s and early 2000s um and I think it's because Epic Fantasy in particular one of the emotions you're looking for in reading it is a sense of immersion and characters pull youu into that world it's uh extremely important aspect whereas some other sub Jers like a lot of urban fantasy it's not the emersion it's the excitement it's the and the the little spice of horror the the world that I knew has The Uncanny Valley to it as well is a lot of what drives urban fantasy and that's the emotion that they're looking for so you know kind of identifying what kind of these emotions so you can set your tone promises is a good idea um do you have a recommendation for how to get into the character's Viewpoint like if you're switching between writing different characters yes um so so just some quick tips number one is as a rule of thumb as you're starting try to have the first name mentioned in a scene or chapter be the character whose Viewpoint you're in you can obviously break this the more fluent you become with this the more you'll get a feel for it but readers do naturally start to scan to see which name it is and they will settle you in that head um it's not as artsy and so sometimes if you want to have more of a flourish often times uh authors will have like I think I talked about sometimes an omnition sentence or paragraph at the start of something and then into um but what you want to do is you want to make sure it's not vague if you're mentioning someone else first make sure the action verb is referring to the Viewpoint character um or that the Viewpoint character watch this person you know something like this cement Us in uh in this is third limited again cement Us in that scene and then give us a Zinger of a description um even you don't want when I say a Zinger don't give me three paragraphs give me one line right when you jump into Matt's Viewpoint in Wheel of Time he says men she was so tough she looked like she could chew uh steel and spit out Nails right that's in his voice um it's a metaphor that no other character would make and he said it actually better than that um you know um uh and suddenly you're like I am locked into this character voice and then do your things treat each scene like you are writing an essay from the like you learned in high school give us thesises cccs what what are we doing in this scene how is it how are we what's our progress going to be in this scene what's our tone in this scene you often use it in paragraphs if you need to get something across there's a thesis line in the paragraph and then you explain it and you pull us out with a transition uh all of these things will keep us in Viewpoint as long as the character is the one doing it not you ruminating upon it for us okay uh this is a writing fluency thing uh the more meaning the more you practice it and the more you notice it in other people's writing the more you will be able to deliberately decide how you want to do it because what I just described is kind of the Robert Jordan uh Brandon Sanderson George Martin sort of way there are perfectly valid other ways to go about doing this um so one thing you say is like to make World building interesting to make it interesting to a character if you have World building that is important for the plot but that characters are not interested in how do you communicate that in a way that's still interesting what an excellent question so the question is what if you have World building that is really important to the plot but it's not important to the characters how do you convey that uh excellent excellent um so I'm I'll give you a couple strategies which is what I do in these q&as and then maybe from that we can derive a theme in how you're approaching this um one strategy that is often very uh successful is you through narrative indicate to the reader that this is important even if the characters not necessarily paying attention that can be as obvious as the teacher smacking the table while the kid is daydreaming and being like you're going to need this someday the a monster's going to have their jaws on your neck and you're not going to remember how to get out of it and then wise crack from character follows right like there's a scene you've seen many times the purpose of that scene is to say a character Act of our character is that they are not interested in the world building however the World building is important and you can construct scenes that do that um you know you can cut away to other viewpoints to where it is important um you can make an aspect of it very important for instance the character may not care about the magical security systems of such and such thing but the character May care about going to a display about their favorite thing uh that's kept in one of these security things accidentally run a foul of it so they have to learn building your scenes so that they have to learn and indicating to the reader somehow that it is relevant um is really important otherwise maybe cut it until it is relevant or hint at it and dance around it uh by having the character be like yeah not interested and like all right um and then later on it comes up there are all sorts of ways to do this uh rule of thumb for you a of readers I have no way of knowing how many but I do know it's significant Skip epigraphs and Skip prologues yeah skip epigraphs epigraphs are the things that you put in the front of chapters like uh the the the emails in Enders Game or the biographies in Dune or uh things like this a a percentage of your audience skips both so if you're embedding absolutely a essential information in those be aware that there are some percentage of your audience that won't do it uh they're just not going to engage with that part of the book um do you understand that a larger percentage of your audience than that percentage will read the ending first deal with it and statistically I think I mentioned that in this class they will enjoy the book better for having done so not true not true they will you might not but they will so true okay yeah so um so be careful about being like I'm going to get this information across in the epigraphs because um the character doesn't care the as long as it's um information that for the Deep reader is still relevant they will read it uh but you you got to be aware uh there is there is that danger and people will read them and forget the epigraphs easier because they are not cemented into a moment in time um and so all right uh other questions I got this here so maybe we'll pull we'll do yours and then I'll pull this one next um so I guess in the process of writing a story when do you stop introducing like elements like right yeah one vers halfway through act um I'm not sure that I have a rule on this um part of it depends on how big a series I'm doing um I always want to be careful about gorillas in the phone booth I think I told you guys about that um where you're introducing something new and it becomes more interesting I can tell you a failure case um so um and fortunately I fixed this but the initial draft of aess was 250,000 words my first novel published in 2005 um and in aess you know I like twists and turns and surprises no big surprise for people who enjoy reading my books and so there was a foreshadowed son of the uh of the king um brother to raoden who showed up at the 3/4 Mark who had been said that he was he was going to come and he just threw chaos into the whole thing for 20,000 words in order to shake up the status quo and I could cut him entirely without the book uh losing anything and in fact it made the climax stronger so that was about the 34 Mark too late even for a foreshadowed element um that turned into the yeah we're not interested in this because you've been building toward this great climax with these other characters we don't want a deox wrench if you remember the phrase we don't want a new problem thrown at us out of nowhere but once in a while these big foreshadowed looming problems that people are expecting and worried about come and it's like all right this means we're at final Act uh you know the Death Star is finally here to blow up you know the the rebel base uh we have to go into overdrive so it's not I you know don't have something new but it is dangerous to be adding things new at that point um and I'm not sure that I have you know any basic rules for you on this all right let me do a question from here and then you'll be next up so question from here what tools do you use to World build do you research online read books ask people uh the answer to the last one is yes um so um I do read books I do ask people I do research online um and it depends on the thing how much uh where the balance of the three is uh asking people and having beta readers has become my go-to main reason for this is uh again we're approaching this as if you want to be writing a book a year um you can spend six years becoming an expert in something and then write a book about it um and you some of you in this class might do it and they might be fantastic books the thing is that the first few months of researching something or even few weeks is when you learn the most you can get yourself a significant part of the way if the 100% is Grandmaster and zero is novice you can eat up a lot of that ground uh and get yourself like 50% of the way there with not that much effort um then the uh the next you know getting from 50 to 75% takes 10 times as long and then you get micro increments of improvement from then on and this is just how learning skills works it's how your writing skill is going to improve and is improving um as you write your early books therefore getting yourself to a place where you feel comfortable that the mistakes you make will be fixable without undermining the entire narrative and then writing your story and finding an expert to tell you uh yeah you've got a problem here you've got a problem here um and fixing according to demand is often uh the way that I go that said um it has bitten me twice uh one is disassociative identity disorder um you know I thought I was 70 80% and I was more like 40% in understanding and so um like I'm trying to remember which one it was book four I think it was is where I had to do some significant rewrites that changed plot structures uh that it would if I would have done more research upfront it which would have saved me uh time on the back end uh the other one is um is uh g-forces uh for skyro which I thought I understood and I was like at 10% and I thought it was like 60% uh I really needed to be in a um a situation that flung me around with those kinds of forces um fortunately I managed to get the the people who uh who were jet Pilots to read the book um and that required significant revisions also to get my g-forces right um and so those are two times where I thought I was I had handled it and I hadn't so um people can be your best resource you don't need to read 17 novels generally on a topic uh or novels uh research books you know uh in order to get there but I would do your research um and I would try to find primary sources to help you out with it uh and again the more you do this the more you'll know where you need to be and again you will make mistakes and the mistakes can be can you know require a lot of work on the back end and it does happen um what tools do I use um we still use oh is Karen now Karen here I think we moved Wiki softwares didn't we I'm looking at you as if you as if you would know Sor um we did you know okay what's the Wiki software we use now I don't know you don't know that I know we switch we switched for the longest time we used Wicked pad Wiki dpad it's an open- Source um uh you know so you can host your own um Wiki just locally so you can access it out of basically just folders on your computer um saved as text files um that was really handy but it's you know one of these uh these Wiki softwares that's maintained by uh in part-time by some people on the internet who just wanted to make it um and so the documentation is not amazing what it can do is great and I'm really grateful for them but I think we eventually found one that we might be paying for uh yeah um so that we have something that just got a little bit more documentation and whatnot but we like a Wiki um meaning that it has the wiki words that link that I can open up and be like all right take me to bridge 4 all right I'm on the bridge four page now scan Bridge 4 who do I need a description of click on that and I go in I'm like all right here's the the first places I ruce Len in each book and what I Des how I described him let's make sure I'm not repeating myself um let's make sure you know that I I have the vibe on that and it's you know I'm not going to miss on lowen but um on you know Side characters uh going back and reading the paragraph you wrote where you introduced them very nice and all the World building elements are in there as well um it started primarily as a World building document um that was a giant binder that I used uh for The Stormlight Archive then I put it into a Wiki and then Karen took it over and now it's a Wiki for the whole cosmere you cannot tunnel into it it's stored locally not you know so so there you are um so that's what we use otherwise I write in Microsoft Word um I do not have any other special tools I know there are people who swear by scrier um and some of the other tools uh that's great um you're just I just consider myself very techsavvy because un likee a lot of my colleagues I didn't just pick one program that I started writing on in 200 whatever and keep going in it um Ray Bradbury wrote on a typewriter till the day he died George Martin still writes in word star for dos they do not but he still writes in it this is really really common for writers they pick a setup and a computer and whatever they do and they write in that for the rest of their life because they don't want the program to get between them and what they're doing and indeed every time they they update word they change things so that there's frustration um like I still can't get over the fact that you have to manually change in every document I mean I have a I have a template but any other document that it will add space between paragraphs of the same kind as if you're formatting for the web it isn't like how is that default this is a word processor this is not a you know HTM editor like it is baffling to me that that is default um so you know I could rant all day about the things they've added to word uh but it it it is the program I use I just use word 365 so uh you had a question back here yeah I just wanted to know how to maintain I don't know talking to not introduce things generally in the mar want to leave the door right how can you introduce things you don't want to introduce the three quter Mark how can you still introduce them epilogues are fantastic for this um if you want to introduce things for the next book so basically the best thing that you could probably do was start seating these things for the next book at that 3 quarter Mark but making sure they aren't so distracting that they pull attention and then sometime in the danim W bring those to their own kind of head and climax right um think of Thanos okay from the MCU post credit scenes post credit scenes then finally I fine I'll do it myself to bring you to the next the movie where he does do it himself uh those sorts of things work very well for epilogues and whatnot um just a little bit of seating and then bring it to a conclusion um but one of the other things you can do is you can I I think I talked about this you can early on in your books indicate there's a whole world but the character for some reason is like I can't you know I can't deal with that I I deal with my world uh and it comes somewhat very naturally like you might have a book where the whole book is about you know Escaping The Maze and then at the end of the book oh great now what we're out of the maze the questions will follow um naturally if you build it correctly uh I would stress this Less in your early drafts than you might be stressing it make that first book excellent then say okay what can I do to see the next book once I you know that your first book is landing and you're not distracting people with things you know all right question um when you have when you have like only one limited uh point of view but the character the POV character they're notably very different distinct from the rest of the cast how do you descri like thinking their description without making it weird or like right so your Viewpoint character is distinctive in some way in personality visually from the rest of the cast but you're only describing from their Viewpoint how can you make the this get this across um I'm glad you're asking this question um because the novice answer which uh we'll often get an eye roll from editors is they just look at themselves in the mirror and describe themselves in the first page uh that said I've had characters described themselves in mirrors before you can totally do it uh just do it because you have decided in this story that's the actual appropriate way to do it and be aware that it is a cliche um so contrast is your friend right um as I talked about you have a character who's from a different culture than the others for instance well how they do things and how your character do does things and showing multiple people around them being fascinated by the differences will begin to indicate that for you um you know it is is okay to just say I'm you know I always feel out of place because I look different than the people around me and here is why um you don't have to dance around it you can just say it sometimes again um we we oh I didn't even get into this let me get into this uh you've all heard the added show don't tell right uh This Is A good rule of thumb for those who don't understand show don't tell it's a storytelling and screenwriting um adage that goes back probably decades maybe longer where the idea is that a scene where a character takes an action to express an attribute or whatnot um is more memorable to a reader than a scene where a character tells you an attribute or tells you something saying you know in this world you know frogs explode if you poke them is less powerful than opening scene character pokes a frog and it explodes okay uh this allows you to apply all of your word smithing skills in your pyramid exraction to really show something off likewise if a character uh tends to be kind of nervous having the character often you know sitting and tapping their uh their uh their toes rather than the character who's describing them saying they were such a nervous type um is generally more powerful showing takes more words almost always and you have a word budget for scenes and descriptions telling takes fewer words The Apprentice level is show don't tell the journeyman level is where you start to learn no when to show and no when to tell no when to use a tell because shoehorning in a show is actually just way more awkward and takes more words than saying hey you know I'm Caucasian and I'm living in Asia everybody else has a different ethnic Heritage than me you can just say that um do you want to it depends on the story you're telling right um do you want to indicate that your Viewpoint character is in some way uh neurotypical um or things like this do you want to show that that might be something you spend more time showing that over time people come to understand in some cases you might want to just talk about it or invent a scene that shows how this character interacts with the world differently from the characters around them and from what expectations might be um so how do you do it it really depends on your goals uh it really depends on on what type of scene it is how important the character is spending paragraphs to delicately introduce some really in descrip interesting description of a character who's never going to appear again may not be worth all the time as opposed to just saying oh man that guard's super nervous um I wonder what makes that guard super nervous I should be nervous right that does something different um and maybe that's how you want to say it rather than doing the show um gain fluency with this and learn when to do which for your given story like it is not a weakness in books that sometimes um authors summarize right um you know Harry Potter novels have all kinds of issues uh but I one of them that I don't think is an issue is sometimes she will just say and three months passed and we didn't learn anything except one time you know Ron blew himself up um right that's that's tell not show but you know what she's covering a year in each of those books and therefore taking three months and passing them like that um can be the narratively right choice okay other questions yeah go ahead uh so what is your favorite example of a world build gorilla in a oh my favorite example of a gorilla in the phone booth oh boy um can I think of one um so I get them all the time in student works I'm trying to see if I can remember one and something that might be for more familiar to you um where I think oh that was a bit of a grill in the phone booth um for me and I'm trying to figure like um I mean I it's not quite there but the whole Last Jedi um missing plot Arc where we want a character to go find his friend Ray uh and we are focused on like that's the emotion you want to avoid for girl in the phone booth right character we've been told he's going to find his friend Ray he goes on a wacky side Adventure that we have trouble bonding to because we've been told about this cooler thing that we want to have happen and that's the problem right like for instance The Wheel of Time starts with a very Dynamic use of the magic uh in really cool ways that is uh thousands of years or thousand years ago um and then we jump to a kid on a farm it's not actually a grill in the phone booth right because this is a promise of what we're going to get we are kind of told by the structure of a prologue this is done you will find more out about this the nature of it being a prologue and that's jumping to a farm boy indicates okay you can let go of this for a little bit and you'll be able to experience it people like the video game Symphony of the Night Castlevania any any experts oh there's there's a few gamer uh true Gamers um here uh this is a game that does a brilliant thing where it starts the game with all the powerups that you are going to get through the game and you get to be awesome for a very short period of time before the villain steals them all from you right that's a promise and that's what Wheel of Time Is Right you are going to get to have all these Powers eventually here you get to experiment with them for like 10 seconds and then they're all gone it's it's actually pretty brilliant a grill in the phone booth might be um you know what the biggest problem um that people had with Dan's initial book during uh reads was that he had trouble figuring out how to indicate that I'm not a serial killer has a monster a magical monster as the killer people read it as true crime and then the monster but if introduced the monster too early it became a grill in the foone booth no one cared about the main character's problems at school when they knew there was a cool monster coming up and he getting that balance right to this day he will say he's not sure if he got the balance right between Grill and the foam booth and waiting so long that people expected it to be two True Crime so when the monster showed up they were annoyed at him um and you get both of those if you go read uh his his reviews people didn't like it a lot of them are like I thought it was a great True Crime novel and then boom it's a monster and other people are like tell me more about the monsters tell me more about this world I don't care about this kid so um I'm not sure if I can find a really good one I'll watch for them um because if I see one that make a good Tik Tok and be like hey I got gorilla in the phone booth than this uh this particular movie go ahead sorry thanks a question right now Fire and Blood okay what do you think is the benefits ands of giant history books oh benefits and pitfalls to Giant history books okay um I've never gotten this question before what an interesting one uh I will say that uh that a lot of them demand a lot of art assets and I think the people making them are not aware of how hard it is to get a lot of art art assets uh I know for uh the world of Wheel of Time uh that was one of the things that really like getting that much art um was was difficult um what are the the pitfalls um well I don't know if there's pitfalls other than you're working on this instead of writing and also they tend to sell about on10th as well as the actual book series does because they're very to a very Niche audience of people who like the books but also want to read an encyclopedia I've never written any of these for mine um I've it it feels like a lot of lot of work unless you're passionate about it and the two you uh talked about uh the one for George and the one for um for tolken obviously this is a huge passion of theirs right George is a historian George loves History George loves all the little details of Westeros that are analoges to Earth history uh and that's like one of the main things he loves it's not an accident that westros is like um Great Britain turned upside down with like Ireland stuck uh on it um like he was very much doing something in tolken obviously he loves his mythology his lore and his philology um for me I love the stories the stories are why I write the stories about the characters the World building is a means to get there and I do love the world building but I'm not writing for the World building not writing for any of those things I am writing for that story and so writing the um the epema is what we might call that um and things has never been as interesting to me uh the only time we jumped on it was with the uh RPG which kind of doubles for that with us because I had Dan full-time on staff who was a professional GM U um that I could just be like you're in charge of this project on our end um work with the game designers and um you know the whole everyone got together but art assets um the art Department uh even though brotherwise was doing a lot of it there's so much to to put together you're like well suddenly we need World Bibles with all of the different you know clothing styles and things drawn from multiple angles so that people can be on model if they're all doing all of these clothing models whereas before what we could do is and we still do this we get an artist they draw something and then someone in house Ben mcweeny mostly goes and draws how the costume should look because he just knows CU he designed them all and so we don't have to have a guide for those we just have Ben redraw The Shard plate and then they go when they paint over it and make it uh match our Shard plate um so like that's how we got the the co the cover no it's the inside um uh pages to Words of Radiance the one that have Shalon sitting on the thing and painting right um Michael whan who did that called Ben and had Ben come in and do sketches of the plants for him to paint over so it it match uh the rock buds from book one so yeah we can do things like that but suddenly when you have a team of like 40 artist building an RPG or a world book really quickly the art is going to become the big um the big uh clog in the pipes yeah so there you go uh and I know uh yeah anyway we will we we won't talk about the big white book uh but I know fans of The Wheel of Time have talked about the art in that book and the people who made it did a excellent job there's just there's so much art yeah we'll go up here and then we'll come down to you yeah so I guess kind of on that top yes how does my process of wrri writing differ when I'm doing a graphic novel I write graphic novels as movie scripts because I'm more familiar with screenplay format um and so far that is worked having me no screenwriting and being able to write a script and then having somebody on staff who knows paneling and layout uh and is a able to to transfer that that's my process um I don't know if that would work for other people I just have access again it is again Ben mcweeney um uh if you don't know who Ben is uh Ben is uh what's what's his title uh he's an art director is he what's that director director um Ben was one of my the the person I hired to do concept art for the uh Stormlight Archive back in 200 like 8 7 uh and then we eventually hired in full time he does all of Shalon Sketchbook Pages he did the art for arithmetick and Morty he was one of the animators on Rick and Morty and he's worked in graphic novels and animation um and things like that so he just loves graphic novels and so I can be like here's a script Ben make panels out of this and he will they just magically come out um and I get to see them and look over the sketches before we finalize I'm like move this line here and these sorts of things so uh works really well for me but that's just because uh I am familiar with screenplays and not with you know I haven't written Comics I've only done screenplays all right you're up okay do you have any like tips tools or like strategies for coming up with original like particularly like Geographic areas original Geographic areas like aren't really analogous aren't really analogous oh boy tips and tricks I mean it really depends on um it is one of the things I would recommend that a fantasy writer do is while you're at college get some basic geology and some basic psychology um like those are just two of the things that'll help you and if you can this is for your students here take a drawing class um you know take a class where you have to go and actually draw things so you start paying attention to light and Shadow uh and these sorts of things uh those are just three things that'll do do you a lot of good I also happen to be lucky in that um in the English Department when I was there uh one of the best teachers was a linguist and you can take all your kind of sub uh things like you have to have this many credits I took the L CL Linguistics classic classes because he was hilarious and by side effect I learned enough about Linguistics that I could do some of these things but knowing how you know continental divides work and how rain Shadows work with mountains and where a lake is likely to be and why it's likely to be there and why biomes work gives you some rules to break and play with but the the the thing to remember is you're if you're writing fantasy you can always follow xanders sanderson's zeroth law which we didn't get into Sanderson zero law um is air on the side of what's awesome um I always say the difference between me and a science fiction writer as a science fiction writer starts with what we have now and extrapolates to a plausible future I start with the cool thing I want to have in a book and I work backwards justifying it through internal and external logic depending on the the story um and sometimes I can't justify it enough and I change it until it starts to work um but you know why are there why does Shard plate exists Shard plate exists in world because they needed it for fighting these certain forces and whatnot those forces exist because I wanted Shard plate to exist I wanted to tell a story about knights in power armor right magical power armor and how that would change a battlefield so I justify it backwards as opposed to justify it Forward uh at like a science fiction writer might um but tips and tricks reading um non fiction particularly you know um science articles uh science books good survey books uh Guns Germs and Steel is kind of one of the go-to for this where you just kind of you want the honestly for this you want the kind of Pop Culture ones right uh because what you're looking for is not the Deep science you should eventually if you're interested digging into deep science but the Malcolm Gladwell and things are fine for this because they're you're looking for things that are going to spark you into an inspiration for what's a visual I haven't seen before what's a story I haven't uh seen before shattered Plaines came because my friend Micah who's a photography major at BYU uh needed a lovely assistant for helping him do photography trips what he called them lovely assistant um what he meant was Pac mule right but he would talk about how beautiful these things are so I lovely assistant for him a lot uh where we would go down to Southern Utah and then I carried all his camera equipment while he took cool pictures of things um but you know he took me to the slot canyons uh and um I'm in the slot canyons I'm like this is like there could be an alien ecology living just in these canyons and that's where roshar came from um right uh mistborn came because I I think I told you guys I was driving on the freeway and hit a fog bank and it went boom boom and I was getting the fog like there were patches in between it and it moved in such an interesting way that I'm like this is a visual I want to use and I built uh a world around it I am looking for those I'm looking for the sense of awe uh because often I use in my magic systems my magic systems are often very structured so there's a sense of Engagement and interest in those but the sense of awe I try to get from the vistas and the being in an alien world that just feels different uh that's how I do it uh I'm sure there are lots of different ways to do it and a lot of it I get from visiting places or from Reading non-fiction articles yeah okay back here oh yeah uh do you have any like books you recommend to help us become better writers yeah do I have books that you can read to become better writers I mean there are a lot of good writing books out there um and uh I do think on writing by Stephen King is a is a is a great book it approaches writing very differently for me I often recommend it because it offers some contrast to some of the things I teach in a good way um Scott Meredith's writing to sell is my agent's favorite it's a little agenty meaning it's a little uh it it misses a bit of the heart of writing like it's kind of hard to teach in this class because there is so much wonder and um and art to telling a story um and breaking it down into its structures like nothing is less funny than a joke that you break down and explain why it's funny you know nothing is less wondrous than here's how you make a wonderful fantasy so writing to cell does tend to be a little too uh you know Brick by Brick uh for me um people swar swear by save the cat I like save the cat uh that's a screenwriting one but um you know all of Scott card's books are really good on writing um the thing about it is it's way too easy to read too many books on how to write um and uh it's way too easy to take too many classes and workshops on how to write this is the great conundrum of my life what I can teach you here in the class is the bare fraction of what you will learn by teaching Yourself by writing and indeed a lot of what they're talking about in those those books won't be relevant to you until you have the basis of practice of having finished a significant amount of work on your own so you can see how someone else did it and try it out and know if it has a better effect on your writing right and so just like it's like playing the piano how good can you get at playing the piano by reading books on piano playing um you can do a little bit better with writing because there's strategies to try but 95% 90% of what you learn maybe more uh in writing is all based on you building good habits and writing regularly and so only read the books on writing if you're already doing that um otherwise like you shouldn't even be in this class if you haven't been doing the writing it's okay if you're here and you're not but that's what I mean right I can't teach you basically anything until you're trying out the things that I do to find out the ones that are totally broken for you and were terrible at viice and you need to throw out and iterate on and find something different yeah uh we'll go here and then here and then we'll work our way back that way so what you just say you're probably hate me but um the so like we're talking a lot about like kind of um not over describing things and like moving things forward yeah but but also like padding is important for like pacing right like to not just have one uhuh what's what's like your kind of preferred preferred method for both getting keeping things moving and having time to breathe with those scenes um so um one of the things that helped me understand this uh is when um Mary Robinette uh started talking about what she calls what she learned from other people scene sequel meaning um to every scene there is a sequel a next scene that is in some way giving us a chance to respond to the new status quo whatever it may be large or small and books tend to be a back and forth between scene sequel not necessarily so rigidly sometimes within a given chapter you'll have seen sequel um part of it depends on how big your book is so one thing that I found is do I intend them to read the whole book in one sitting or not uh I don't intend people to read a Stormlight book in one sitting right takes depends on how fast you are but the audiobook 60 hours um right um a lot of Thrillers audio books are 9 hours people tend to read it about double speed depending so you can finish one of those in four or 5 hours a lot of people that's you sit down and you read that book um it's one to two reading sessions in the short ones then you can keep the Pace High the whole time and you can have very short sequel with that that ends with an explosion and keeps you going if you want to have that type of book that's what uh generally page Turner refers to um they're kind of minimizing the response and kind of keeping the characters hopping even in those I do recommend the moments um where the characters have a little bit of time to to just catch up um you know they um I did this in wax and Wayne Uh the last book uh on the billboard if you've read that um they do it in the middle of Avengers 2 where they go to a farm um if your story is high octane meaning you're giving less chance for sequel in the middle having some big sort of mpoint or near the end chance to just slow down before you can ramp it up uh is a good idea understand that ramp up of tension um In A Book Like gets diminishing returns the longer you stay at that that tension level um and so when I'm writing a Stormlight book what I look for is rising action through a scene or sequence that then comes to a conclusion and then has a solid sequel meaning lot of times time to respond to that as we spin something up uh up new I in a book like uh like Skyward I give much you know I I se section off these sequels after I have boom boom boom boom boom okay relax a little bit boom boom boom boom boom relax a little bit um so uh it depends on this this is how one of the way main ways you control pacing um is by how much time the characters have to respond to what's going on around them yeah you were next Okay so my question is on World building and battles okay um what are some guidelines or principles you could give that um for World building to create um riveting great battles great battles when you're going World building wise uh that's an excellent question um so my theory for myself is generally I'm a pretty good strategist uh one of the areas is where you will look at that I've spent the time to learn uh to get myself beyond that 50% up until you know like I would put myself in the 80% there uh maybe a little bit more is understanding how historical battlefields worked how different parts of an army work and even I am afraid to be too real world in my battles because I don't want the small details of how that plays out wrong to get the people who are even better than me kicked out of the story and so one what I generally try to do if there's going to be a lot of battles in a book I try to create a Fantastical battlefield of some sort either with technology or setting or the way the magic or the ecology interferes and you see me doing this so that I control what does a fight between two misbourne look like it does not look like X Y or Z real world fights I control the rules what is about battle on the shattered planes look like well I control the rules um and even if I'm not going on the shattered planes there's a reason why I built into the magic system the ability to resupply with food um via Soul casters so that I could move large armies on the scale that people expect them to move on not on the way that Logistics actually move them uh in the real world um and this is just a cheat um that knowing enough about real world Logistics and the actual numbers of uh troops you could field and reading knowing what people expect and the P the speed I want to move the pacing at meant that they had to have more mobile forms they had they have MREs right uh scar smiling at that um yeah uh those those were our food storage on my mission uh MREs yeah uhhuh um and so I'm like okay they need to be able to carry all their food with them and create it magically um this allows me to have certain things but then I took away horses um so that we're uh we're going back to like more late modern tactics and Technology minus Cavalry which propels you back into the Antiquity and this allows me to play with these rules in such a way that I can leverage my knowledge so that people can't come to me and say you got this wrong I can be like well you didn't consider this Factor plus if I got it wrong like these are legit Pro mistakes that historical people have made in things so that helps me um that is a lot of work it's one of the places I put a lot of um of effort into understanding if you that's not a place where you're going to focus but you know you're going to have to have some large scale battles um go ahead and pick a real world battle is this on the same thing okay pick a real world battle turn the map uh 90° or upside down and the Beats By beat have it be aenor have it be waterl have it be depending on what your tech level is right um and kind of figure out why those beats were there and use those as kind of your broad story Strokes that you're setting your character in they're not making the big decisions they're you know or they are but those aren't the relevant part people aren't reading your book to see the brilliant tactics they're reading your book for your character who happens to be on a battlefield where the tactics need to be realistic yeah go read about Hannibal Invasion and uh be like all right what tricky tricksy things did he do uh let's do something like that so that I can indicate this is a character that's leading them that is Hannibal esque and then let's focus on the drama of the character that I've created that's a really easy short well it's not that easy but it is an easier shortcut to having your uh your battles work uh realistically um and I know a lot of authors who do this um and so yeah uh does that answer your question question gives you the two ends of the spectrum at least and I'm sure you can find things in between that will uh yeah all right I promise someone i' come back over here yeah can you tell us a little bit about what you do in your 15 person class what I do in my 15 person class so in my 15 person class um we split everyone up into writing groups so we've got four writing groups this year yeah four writing groups um no five four four four four writing groups um and in the past what I did for for a number of years is I sat with one group a week and gave feedback as if I was part of the writing group to model it uh what I found was that I was not able to dig in as deeply I ended up playing um uh like school teacher more than Professor meaning I had to model how to writing group rather than dig into the person's writing so a couple years ago we changed it so I have Tas run the writing groups and then I do a 20 to 30 minute Q&A with that group like I do in here but kind of a little more in depth and then they they break into the writing groups my Tas um uh you've got a group this Scar's got one uh this this year we roped him in um uh and they because we we had three last year and we have four this year um we have them kind of model how to writing group and teach good writing group and also give good feedback scars you know been in my writing group for 20 plus years 20 plus years and has finished how many novels three novels um Scar's got good advice then during that time I do a one-on-one with two with two different people for like 30 to 40 minutes each week where I've read a larger chunk of their writing and I read their writing I give them back um that writing with all my notes on it and we talk about it and then we talk about their writing goals so that's what my my class is um the 15 person it works a lot better I think people get a better experience out of it and then I read a final from that person which is either the same chunk of writing revised to my notes or something new they want me to look at and that usually takes me the rest of the year once I'm done with the class I've read so many student works and I've the like the class is kind of exhausting um and so it's like I used to try to do all the finals before I had to turn in the the grades and I'm like I'm not giving them good feedback um so we changed it so that the grade in the 15 person class is just based on did you get the work done and then over the course of the next year I go through the 15 or 16 uh submissions and I read one every couple of weeks and I dig into it deeply and I give it about an hour of of working on it and then send them kind of that same sheet but with more explanation at the end um of what I thought of that piece so this is this is the thing I can do uh I can't I get invited to read other people's work all the time and things and I just can't do it right I can't uh and so it's the starfish metaphor I can help 15 to 16 students a year uh that's that's the max I can really do um and so that's what we do yeah are there any tips that you can give us that can help us helping you get into the 15 so that you actually look at our work yeah so getting into the 15 but they actually work so um oh the like final elimination pass the lottery pass the the lottery yeah um so Karen is in charge of this she uses multiple assistants um Karen is an excellent editor um and the the real secret is the one you don't want to hear it's the same thing I say all the time and I'll get you next okay um is that if we brought a two pianos in here and we had someone who'd been playing for a couple of months maybe even a year or two and someone who had been practicing for 20 years start playing it would take you that long to know which was which Karen can tell which is which like that right now we generally get more that are uh like we want in the 15 person class people who are ready to get the high level advice so we can usually tell um so we generally sort them we did this this year by number of books finished right and start she starts reading at those who have who have done the most work um we give uh preferential treatment to people who are in the major at BYU um the department is asked they make sure that there's slots for actual students of BYU because the 15 person class can occasionally be no BYU students uh they have to you know come and take an evening class to do it but they want this to be available for their Majors as well so we do give some preferential treatment there um and we um tend to just read the writing sample she does uh and judge it based on how close is this to to professional quality work all the writing submitted uh so she starts and what you do is you go until you hit uh no you cut it down for her so Karen reads half and then I read whatever's left okay Karen reads half you reads what left you recommend the other half yeah of the ones and then she takes whatever's left and she does Final Cuts to get to the 15 um so uh I will here's here's a little tip Karen doesn't like vampires she will pass on a vampire book if it's good but she doesn't like them so don't submit your vampire book um you know um she does like you know like the things I've talked about strong character who wants something um it can be dark it can be light uh she doesn't mind but uh for some reason has a thing about vampires uh we all have our things right um yeah do you want to hear my pet peeve let me talk about my pet peeve this has nothing to do with anything um but I will get to you uh the person I pointed at um all right here's my pet peeve my pet peeve is that um I like when authors control their dialogue and paragraphing fluency meaning I like when um we have paragraph of dialogue and then um if we start a new paragraph It's a new person and then if there's a new um thing if this person's talking I like to put the dialogue on that not here because new paragraph means new person a lot of writers and this is this is probably still correct enough because it gets published okay but a lot of them will do they'll be like talk then this person who did something has a beat then another person talks and then they have a beat beat meaning they move um and then it it's all muddle like who is talking you know if you change paragraphs so uh it gets complicated when you've got a big long description paragraph and then you have that same person talking and I will cut there but I'll always put the attribution as close to the beginning as I can to control so you know who's talking so you don't have to read to the end and find out he said and be like oh I've been in the wrong head all the time so I shut um change paragraphs um I love the past perfect drives me up the wall when people don't use the past perfect but enough publishing doesn't use it that I can't strictly tell my students you have to use the past perfect you write in past tense but it's so much better guys even if you have to deal with had had you can write around that right you don't have you can you yeah you can you can write around uh he' had you can write that it's okay um or you can just write so it doesn't past perfect is is so handy um and paragraph fluency with dialogue just keeps things so much clearer and straighter even if it's the wild west these days no one follows manuscript format and they you know they ignore all this stuff so there you go that was that was extra nerdy right half of you in this room have been writing for years and you have no idea what the past perfect means and I only know it because I took French and I had to learn what the parts of speech were so I could name and I named them in English not the parts of speech but the types of tenses um so anyway there you are you're next we got uh we got 7 minutes left and will come down to you Asom okay how much do you have to get astronomy right and how much can you count with weirdness uh it's something to do with the magic uh you can get away with anything with the it has something to do with the magic the it depends on what your goal is right like if you you can I won't even say you can get away with it if you want part of the reason to create fantasy to write fantasy is to create world that cannot exist by our laws of physics Ergo magic did it is not just and get away with it is a perfectly viable answer so long as your internal logic is solid right the moons of roshar could not exist on a geologic scale around roshar why are they there a god did it like literally they buil it and stuck it there they'll degrade in 10,000 years he planned to be there um to make sure it didn't happen right like um you can do things like that uh and in fact it's one of the advantages to Fantasy um now if the why did it work like this is supposed to lead to a satisfying Climax and the answer is just oh it happened because uh uh the magic decided and then the reader's like I would have liked to see why then you've done something wrong right so yes get away with anything how how accurate do you have to be if I'm an example astrophysics how should I say this got uh two physicists in my runting group and a whole team of arcanists one of whom is a physics Professor um I make them really frustrated like when um so like when you do uh speed bubbles in uh wax and Wayne books uh you should be red shifting that light and IR radiating people they said why not and I said it just doesn't right at some point you're creating you're breaking the laws of physics at some points the laws of thermodynamics and things break down I'm writing fantasy we're not going to have the magic system radiate people I want to have the magic system it's part of the rules of the magic system that it doesn't red shift the light um right um if you're really good at this though if you know your astronomy and stuff it can be the external logic of that can be a source of offens city and authority to you I think the expanse just gets enormous points uh for the amount of work that uh that Ty and Dan did um who are the two authors that are the the pen name there um in writing the expanse they just really G I like I feel like if I had any physics questions I could go to them and they would just know it you know you call them or you call Andy Weir um but I don't know if that's because they're just good at explaining it or it's real or it's the ver similitude but there you are all right the last question here um so how should you handle it if the power source your magic system has a similar or identical name to another power source another novel how what do you do if you have a power source that uh some some term this just bring it broader what do you do if you learn that a term that you have built your entire story around and the identity of your story is used in something else uh the answer is how big is the something else and how generic is the term right I don't think you can get away with calling something the force right because Star Wars is so enormous um But like after I wrote uh mbor like you know I found out Janny wartz had written a book uh called some the curse of the mistra uh you don't worry about those things they will happen um and things like that so uh basically do your readers read it and get kicked out because the other term is so cemented in pop culture and you have to be careful with your writing group because often times you'll submit a book you'll be workshopping it and one person has a bad reaction to a name because of something else half my writing group are teachers so it's a student that they had a bad time with teachers know it's like you cannot name our child X Y or Z don't ask um right uh and so in those cases I'm like sorry you're just going to have to deal with this but if when when I accidentally named aess I was building the aons and I had this really cool one called Ado and I called the book adoness which reads Adonis that was a big problem for the first people I gave the book to and I had never seen it and I'm like I have to change the name of this book because everyone's like what does it have to do with grief mythology right so you know there is the the rules of thumb Vibes things like that all right guys if you did I didn't get your question remember we have another Q&A in three times next week business of writing thank you for coming [Applause]