this is Brandon sanderson's how to write Science Fiction and Fantasy course this week we are talking about World building week two and I also spent a little extra time slipping in a conversation of viewpoint intense so I think it'll be very useful to you and we are still planning a Q&A on character web exclusive so if you want to get your questions to me on how to write characters put them in the comment section of the Q&A on character that we've already done with the class we'll do a web exclusive for you try to watch that lecture and make sure you're not repeating the questions hey everybody Welcome to riding SCI fiction [Applause] fantasy I am your trained lecture monkey Brandon Sanderson um I am mostly over my cold so that's good I still can't hear wor beans um went and saw an ENT today and he's like oh yeah you got over the cold but there's stuff trapped still in your ears so I feel like I'm underwater um but I can hear like at 40% and so we'll see if how well I can take questions they have a microphone up here in case we need to get to that um but today I want to dig deeper into sanderson's thirdd law um and really talk about World building uh and this idea of World building and service of story we're going to launch into a larger World building discussion and then I want to shave a half hour off the end of the world building lecture to do Viewpoint intense um because after this we have four weeks left next week will be Q&A on World building then we'll do two lectures on the business of writing and then we'll have our final lecture Q&A on whatever you want to know uh kind of maybe focus a little bit on business side and things like that so we've got kind of the last um writing lecture today with the Q&A after and then we're going to launch into the business side of things um so today I want to talk about this idea of World building and why we do it um and how we you can make it a highlight of your stories and something to necessarily hang your story on if you want to people often ask me what comes first uh a World building idea is it a character um is it a plot idea and for me generally I need to have a couple of good ideas in each of the are is before I feel like a novel is coming together and I write primarily novels I think you can write a good short story based on one idea most good novels are an intersection of multiple ideas um to speak about this for instance sometimes there'll be ideas I've had for a while and they'll be brewing in my brain sometimes they are things I need to design in order to fit the story when I was coming up with misbourne I believe that the first idea for Mporn was the story of what happens if the hero failed right uh I think I told you guys this story reading Harry Potter and I'm like ah these dark Lords never get a break what if you know he won um what what if what if Voldemort won what if Sauron uh took the ring and took over um that was an idea that sat in my brain for a while I never wrote that book because man what a bummer of a book right you know like I'm sure you could do it well with the right promises but a book where at the end everyone fails and saaron takes over you know I I couldn't find the right take on it um that is what I would call a plot idea kind of a plot hook but it also is a setting hook you can see right like it's a world where the dark lord won and I took it from plot hook let's tell a story about the dark lord winning and moved it to setting hook what if this is set in a place place where the dark lord had won and then what is my story well my love of heist novels became my new plot hook I'm going to write um a fantasy story uh that is a heist um and I was on to something because soon after that right around the time I did Mporn right after we got Liza Lura and um we got the gisher um and things like six of crows which are all kind of approaching the same idea it felt like the market was ready for heist fantasy and no one had had yet done it um and so this idea that became my plot idea other setting ideas for misbourne came separately alaman as a magic system had been designed for a previous book that I had written and it hadn't turned out very well and so I repurposed it I always call it throw the idea into the wood chipper and break it down to its uh its its pieces and then rebuild it the powers in the original vers of mbor were different I now Had A thieving crew and this is where we go into World building and service of story where I said all right what are the powers that a group of Thieves would need that could enhance the different traditional roles of a of a classic thieving crew you've got your sneaky one you've got your fast talking one you've got your heavy let's design Powers around this um another idea was the Mist itself and the Mist came along cuz I was driving to my mother's house in Idaho Falls I was passing up through that Northern Port part of Utah into Idaho anyone who's done that drive it's right around where you're almost to to the city Portage um that has like a gas station and nothing else and I know that because that's right where I'm running out of gas so I always fill up there um I hit a fog bank at uh you know at at speed on highway speeds and I'm like wow this looks really cool it's fading in and out there's fog and then there's not fog and I'm like I want to use that in a story it's kind of odd because one of the be best writing adages out there that I believe is uh is a truism is write what you know you'll hear this often if you take entry-level courses in creative writing write what you know and your response as a fantasy novelist might be oh great uh write what I know I'm writing about worlds that don't exist how can I know uh and my response to you is dig into why people say write what you know they say write what you know because um you want to be able to lend some authenticity some excitement to this story and really I take that for Fantasy novel as saying dig into the things that interest you that you want to learn that you see that Fascinate You or that you are already an expert in dig into those and find ways to let those inform your plot and especially your world building you have Fascinations and unique mixes of Fascinations and unique mixes of life experiences that you can mine just in a mercenary way to write unique settings and stories that no one else could write and you can lend that authenticity even if you're also at the same time exploring things that you want to know more about uh as you build your story I envision um world building when I sit down to to build my uh World guide what I generally do is I start with my three pillars setting plot uh characters usually setting character plot and I'll make new headings in Microsoft Word and I'll be like all right I'm going to write down all the ideas I've had over the years as this story has started to build and grow um it's almost like I describe it sometimes like all the individual ideas are like you know atoms bouncing around and sometimes they slam into each other and stick together I know that's not how chemistry actually works but imagine this molecule being formed from these UniQue Ideas yeah it can do that sometimes it you know creates uh the power by which all life uh can exist when it does that but it does that's that's when they hybridize not when they make a molecule but anyway um you have all these individual ideas bouncing around and the book starts to grow from them like frost growing on uh a piece of metal they're just expanding um as these ideas intersect Miss born the idea of the hero lost mixed with the idea of what about a story about a thieving crew made both of those ideas better for me more exciting I don't think there's a generically kind of um objective better when it comes to ideas but for me I'm like I didn't want to write this book it was a downer but if that's the world that these characters live in that they can respond against and then you're pulling a heist and who better to Heist than the dark lord who won suddenly both ideas were more interesting to me that's what I'm looking for and I start writing those down setting character plot everything that I've had for this book there will be plenty of holes at that point I will go to my notes file which is this day on my phone I store in Gmail um you know I downloaded a bunch of notes programs and I never used them I just found that if I make a new draft in Gmail that I know exactly where it is and I can get it on all my devices and Gmail became my notes program kind of silly but that's where it is and so the file now it used to be named cool stuff that needs to be used sometime that's when was on my computer now it's just called new notes original but you got to be able to find it easily so um and I go to that and I'm like are there ideas I've had in the past that when I combine it with the things on here make the ideas more interesting but I'm always focused on that idea of sanderson's Third Law it's not about density of ideas it's about how the ideas influence each other and the depth that you can kind of play with those ideas um the the World building of the hero having failed led me into kind of taking a apart the classic Epic Fantasy and saying all right let's deal with prophecy let's deal with chosen ones let's deal with dark Lords and let's deconstruct all three of those ideas and write a book about each right the first one's about you know the idea of the dark lord the second one's about uh kind of the um the idea of Prophecy and the third one's about the idea of the chosen one though they're all kind of about all three ideas and really trying to deconstruct this um and do something new with it and that idea just had a lot of depth to it you could see how I can approach the idea of the Dark Lord one from three different places it informed who seed become became and it informed who Vin became it informed uh who Ellen and kelsier were all about these ideas and so that's what I'm looking for and that's what I mean by sanderson's thirdd law this idea of Let Your World building go deeper explore what you have ask yourself the ramifications brainstorming sessions with writing groups can be really handy for this uh they will give you a lot you can't use but they might uh send you in directions that you can and then I split my world building into generally three different portions um I'm going to talk about it kind of as two portions now but usually for me in my document so maybe I should revise this lecture I have what we call physical setting I have cultural and because it's a thing for me I put magic in its own setting um its own section I mean the idea being what's the magic system going to be it is part of both the physical and cultural setting um but I kind of start here physical setting for me this is all the stuff that would still exist in the world if Sapient beings weren't there messing with it right um cultural setting is all the stuff that Sapient beings create um all the all the World building that has to do with the ways people think and interact and things like this and the magic is what is my magic system right how what is this intersection it's a big enough bullet point for me that I make it U on its own we talked about magic at length last week maybe too much um and so we're going to focus a little bit on these two and what I usually like to do here is I like to dig in and show you just how much stuff there is that you could maybe do in a fantasy novel right those who have been in the class before you you know what this process is we're just we're not going to spend forever at it uh and we'll see let not yell them out that's raiseed hands because of my ears um but let's start talking about some of the great things you can you can brainstorm if you're going to come up with some physical setting atams for your world building Canyons okay topography yep what else weather weather viruses viruses yeah um and I would say disease geology G geology sorry okay let's raise hands really I I I have to focus and see what's that okay flora and fauna um let's take a deeper dive into these like what kinds of things can you ask yourselves about the Flora and Fauna food chain food chain exactly um anything else you can think of you can ask yourself about those what what animals are domesticated yes well that would be that's right in this middle ground but you're right kind of domestication I'd say that Strays a little bit in the cultural but a little phys physical that's great what weather can they survive in yeah yeah what's what what are the biomes um and what lives in what biome right those are arrows pointing at the biomes what else do we got adaptations adaptations how have these creatures evolved to this specific setting and to these biomes so yeah adaptation you see me doing a ton of that in Stormlight right natural disasters oh yeah natural disaster yeah you'll see my handwriting get worse and worse as we go um uh the the astronomy of the area okay yeah yeah astronomy what would we call that Co cosmology um the right because cosmology that gets into like mythology though doesn't it well no cosmology where are the where where are the where are my scientist you'd say you'd say it's like the makeup yeah makeup we'll just call it cosmology we'll just use that but pretend cosmology doesn't involve any of the mythology U mythologizing of the cosmology like the you know I'm not sure if that word includes the idea of some mythology in it or not not sure um so yeah how fast planet rotates oh yeah yeah yeah um rotation um and someone said geography we'll put geography uh but rotation title lock right you can get like forever like I don't want to go on this too much but the idea that we could probably take flora and fauna and we could spend probably an hour talking about the various things that you could come up with for unique and interesting ways uh for your Flor and fauna to exist um like you know Speaker for the Dead just it's one of the best parts of the world building in that book is how he approaches the the interaction between flora and fauna and it's so fascinating and science fiction fantasy is so good at saying yeah this doesn't exist on Earth but we can do it in our books and we can look at the ramifications of what would happen if you have unique biology to alien species um cultural setting oh boy yeah um anything to do with technology okay tech level yeah and even tech level disparities between different cultures yeah religion religion yep food food food lore um my uh my my um thesis chair well when I was in undergrad so my my um what do you call it honors thesis chair was Dr Thurby BYU food lore was her specialty um and so it was a lot of fun to talk to her about food lore and how how it could relate to fantasy novels and things like that so yeah interactions what do you mean by interactions social moras yeah social yeah uh I always talk about um how you know in rashar there's the safe hand right that started because in Korea I asked I sat with my leg up and showed the bottom of my foot to my companion who was Korean he was like oh no that's a dire insult I'm like the bottom of my foot's a dire insult he's like yes dire insult never do that uh and it turns out it's true don't show the bottom of your foot to people um was just so fascinating to me that it wasn't um like it was a taboo in a different way that I hadn't ever experienced I'm like wow I need to open my mind to the different kinds of tabos that can exist yeah systems of Law and government yeah law and government how how does that work right yeah back here um languages and dialects languages and dialects we're going to erase magic for now and dialects you can totally read that right oh I already asked you for what we're gonna go right here no I didn't okay both of you can talk wait you said you weren't going to talk before class during the 4 that's right all right the time is lapsed go ahead um social like social roles such as gender roles and class roles gender and class roles yep yeah fantasy and science fiction never delves into that relationship to the Natural World okay yeah ship to woo that stuff okay over here Traditions Traditions yeah that's one that I don't think enough fantasy digs into that is a really big part of a lot of people's lives here and then over there Educational Systems education yeah has there apprenticeship um is there formalized school how do people learn things fashion fashion yep a man after adelyn's Hearts building techniques and material to building techniques material yeah um all right we're going to do one more right here festivals and celebrations festivals and celebrations sorry to all those who rais your hands in the back they had awesome suggestions too um um okay what is the purpose of this why do we spend like 10 minutes on this um that's overwhelming and we spent 10 minutes on it we could spend hours on it in fact particularly in cultural setting I bet we could take some of these like for instance language and dialects Grandpa tolken spent how many years on languages and dialects for his series years maybe decades on just one point on the board right um and like you could do that you could give yourself World Builder disease we talked about World Builder disease I don't think we have uh World Builder disease is something that uh that I coined uh among one of my early writing group where we talked about the idea that you could spend so long on this that you get paralized by the amount that you have to do and because each of these elements is a rabbit hole that you could spend months or years on that when you start on one you realize how much left there is to World bu and you get daunted by it and you never actually write this may have happened to you it may have happened to your friends I have uh friends that I know who are like I can't write yet because I haven't finished like I don't know what the food lore of my Society is food lore is enormously important how can I write my book until I know the food lore um right like this sort of thing can paralyze you yeah has that ever been you has what have you ever been under that have I ever been under this I have generally had uh good deadlines so um I don't know if I don't think I've talked about this in class before but I talk about it often my secret if you want to dig deep why is Brandon as successful as he is I blame being an artist raised by an accountant and if you see in my books accountants showing up now and then it's CU my mom an accountant um she was the one of the head accountants for the city of Idaho Falls I grew up in Nebraska uh she did other things in Nebraska other accounting stuff and things but she graduated from BYU uh first in her class when she was one of the only women in her accounting classes um and so my mom your accountant over here yeah oh just aad Mom yeah yeah praise to the mom um and um she deserves it right my mom would say she's not very creative I think that is um a misapplication of the word creativity I think everything that human beings do requires immense creativity I think being a parent requires so much creativity uh if you've ever had to entertain a four-year-old you know what I'm talking about right um but every job if you don't think it's creative to figure out systems for accounting when the systems current systems aren't working which she would all often do then I think you misunderstand the definition creative but she was raised in an era where you were either a creative person or you were not you were left brained or right brained right um I see you know the last 20 years people talking less about that because it is a false dichotomy um but I think I do lean naturally toward the Whimsy the head in the clouds and all of these things uh I love World building I love planning I hate revisions right this is a very natural sort of um I could have been the person who spent years planning because that's so much fun um but when I got back from my mission and I realized I wanted really to be a novelist um and every other novelist out there who person who wanted to be a novelist had been spending 10 15 20 years working on their books they're 5-year-olds who you know who are writing stories um and I realized I needed to put into place some of these structures my uh mom had taught me about how to be successful and so I would give myself deadlines I would say I'm allowed to World build for this amount of time and then I need to move on to the book and that was really helpful for me because what I soon discovered is I don't particularly early in my career I didn't generally know where I needed to put my world building effort because back then I didn't know how to outline I didn't have the structure I do now now I can kind of know but back then it was as the story developed I realized oh I Should Have Spent My World building time on this like when I wrote my very first book white sand I spent a t ton of time on the languages because that's what Grandpa tolken did and then I never used it because that wasn't relevant everyone was speaking the same language it was a murder mystery taking place in one city cuz that's kind of where I gravitate instead of the quest fantasy the kind of social dynamics um of people in an urban environment uh in Epic Fantasy and I barely used the language I'd throw it in for fun because I did all this work on it right what should I have figured out what their justice system looks like it's a murder mystery that's really important right um spent no time on that early on like it was all on what is the what does the planet look like and things like that what is the magic system but on some of the things that were really relevant and I found that as I started writing I would find those things and then I trained myself to be like all right I'm either going to go do it now or I'm going to put a placeholder in depending on how vital it is um one of the things I want to talk about is this idea that because this is so paralyzing what you generally want to do is you want to pick a few of these things and as a new writer pick ones that you already have some expertise in in some way and then maybe some things that you want to learn go read some books on and study but the danger is if you spend so much time Ro building you will end up doing what I wanted to do which is shove a bunch of linguistics into your book because you spend all that time on it when it doesn't actually match your book um let's talk about the iceberg so fancy I feel like it's so fancy even though this is like technology that's exist for you know 80 years but it feels so fancy it's such an upgrade for my other room um the iceberg people often talk about the World building of a fantasy novel as best being described using the old Iceberg metaphor that you all know right um You have to be careful because this stuff that's underneath the waves if you start putting too much of that in your book starts reading like an encyclopedia entry and this is the dreaded info dump right the idea being that if you start your paragraphs start reading like their boring entries in a dictionary you're going to lose your reader and you're going to have a lot of problems but you still want them to feel like all of that information is there um that's what evokes the sense that they're in an actual world the trick I think to being a successful fantasy and science fiction novelist in today's um environment is to actually have a hollow Iceberg what I mean by this is this is the stuff that you legitimately know you have done your research you have spent the time this is the stuff that informs who your characters are the decisions they'll be making um and whatnot this is super relevant and I would recommend you do it at some part in the process you can frontload you can write your book decide what you need go do your world building and then come back and put it in either one is totally fine you can stop in the middle and do it as long as you consistently go back to your story and don't then get into World Builder disease and start saying well I did pick food lore but that relates to social Mor which oh no that relates to building materials because what can they get which oh no now I need to know their architecture and then I need to know their tech level right be careful about that um the rest of this you want to evoke a sense that it is there but you don't want to do all that uh upfront I recommend against it unless you really really like it that's fine once again you can spend 20 years on a book if you want to um you you use these tools how you want but what I recommend for these is if you do this very well and people trust you on the things that you have done very well they will expect a line or two about the other things that have some sort of light story hook to them um that they're like oh someday I want to hear about that which gives you seeds to use in future books um or they will also accept if in some books you do all this work and then the rest of this you kind of just rely on what people already know the and a lot of uh stories science fiction in particular you know they're they're not going to spend a lot of time explaining to you what FTL is because everybody who's reading a science fiction book knows all right in science fiction books you can f travel faster than speed of light and in some books it's like we Wormhole from here to here and there are jump Gates and they leave it at that you they don't explain how or why because it's not part of what the story is specifically about you rely on the fact that people understand what that is you rely on the fact that people know what a dragon is you don't explain how dragons can fly in your world even though the mass to uh Wing ratio should not allow it you just let people accept that they're dragons um and you you let it go right um and these are the sorts of things that sometimes you want to do uh Dan Wells um my writer friend is is a really great master of a tool to help with this he often recommends when you describe a room or a setting describing one thing in really high detail and letting that evoke the rest uh the classic example he'll use is he's like you walk in a room and you describe well the bullet holes in the front window and that the light is flickering and that the ceiling fan doesn't work people fill in the holes to be like okay this is you know a room that's not taken care of you're probably in the slums they will fill in the dust they will fill in that the the door probably squeaks they will do these so rather than a paragraph like this you put a paragraph like this and hope you can evoke the rest that doesn't mean that paragraphs like this aren't useful and some writers really like them um but if you are putting paragraphs description like this make sure they sing and you are really good at it is what I would recommend yeah so with with this in mind how often should you include something in your story and then have your solution or answer being to it well it's a fantasy story so I can do what I want to do uh it really depends on the type of fantasy story you're telling how hard and soft your magic systems are whether you're going to get into it like for instance if it's not going to be plot relevant for instance the jump Gates whether the jump gates work or not if those are not relevant to your story all that's relevant is that we can get from this planet to this planet then you don't need to explain you say it's a science fiction story they have jumpgate technology let's move on to what our story is actually about and let people accept it uh people will swallow things like that and sometimes by opening the can of worms of explaining it if it's not plot relevant then this gets you into the trouble of number one they're going to want to know more number two you might start boring people so half your audience will want to know more and half your audience will be bored and you end up with with all this stuff that isn't story relevant you may want that in your story there are valid reasons to want that um Lord of the Rings is not a bad story for wanting to spend time um on the the songs but it depends on your personal goals and as I said we're pretending that you want to make a living writing science fiction fantasy which is generally going to mean a book a year so you've got limited time for this um so dig into the things that you are passionate about and start there make them relevant to your characters in some way if you are really fascinated in the differences between religions have that plot and character relevant make character decisions informed by who they are and their religious choices make things harder and easier depending on you know don't just have it there spend your time worldbuilding the things that are going to influence the decisions your characters make and the challenges they face is my kind of General recommendation uh that encompasses this let's talk just a little bit about uh the Pyramid of abstraction uh and then we'll do some questions on this and maybe dig into it a little bit more pyramid of distraction so this is um this is how I like to talk about grounding a scene we got a problem in fantasy novels in that we like to deal with very abstract topics all writing does right um at the same time the whole book is an abstraction and beyond that no rule or law of our world can be taken for granted in your fantasy world this presents a unique challenge to the writer of a fantasy novel my mentor Dave uh Wolverton uh introduced this once by saying he once wrote uh in a manuscript early in a book he flew across the room to mean he went across he jump you know ran across the room really fast because he'd been writing some contemporary things and his editor said can the character actually fly or not and Dave realized oh this is the opening of a fantasy novel my character could be flying using metaphoric language is kind of dangerous in that situation I've always remembered that introduction um I learned this thing called The Pyramid distraction um from another student in my graduate program um where he taught it to me and if you've seen me do this before uh stay quiet for now um I kind of want to lead you through the experience I had and he said everything you're going to describe in your book some of it's going to be concrete and you want to have a foundation of of concrete ideas to earn the abstractions that you're going to be using in your story and he said let me give you a few things and you tell me where between concrete and Abstract this concept might lie right and so he started me said love where is love abstract abstract would you put it like up here at the top where yeah yeah okay where would you put a dogr concrete you'd put a dog down here okay that's exactly what I did let's talk about this if I say dog how many people in this room imagine the same dog zero probably right we all have a different image of a dog in our head if I say love how many people in here know what love is and how it actually feels and how similar will that be to how other people feel pretty similar in general we do have our different things actually love is more concrete and a dog is more abstract when it comes to writing a novel this is hard for us to grasp because we thought of love as an abstract thing because you can't hold it but when you're describing it in a book it's easier well they both can be described you say a dog someone's they're going to picture a dog but that's an abstract concept to them we're getting into very kind of platonic sort of things you know you know what is a dog and whatnot um and what he said is you can pull things down on the period of abstraction by using words if I describe a small wet um you know doah Hunt is that how you say it doc doc no doc weener dog my Grandma had one what do you how do you say it do doc doc I can't hear why am I asking for your help I can't even hear I'm gonna say h a poodle I can say poodle a small wet poodle in the rain huddled in an Alleyway whimpering and watching the people walk by hoping that one of them will stop and give it some comfort you now are picturing about the same dog right maybe not 100% but I have pulled that concept down on the Pyramid of abstraction right um and the idea is that you can almost always use words to do that to pull things things down but then your story gets longer and there's a push and a pull between how much is too much becoming an info dump or lingering outside the character you know and how much do you want inside the character the most uh abstract things that um that we want to put in the book are the things we call Naval gazing these things get pulled up on the um the pyam distraction love we understand but a character ruminate on their love will help you understand them but it'll start to pull you off the page you'll start to see a white room rather than a story and it'll stray into the author telling you things rather than characters experiencing things and so the idea is that you pull things down on the pyramid abstraction to earn the actual abstract things you want which is spending time in the character's heads or explaining magic systems to a world that doesn't exist or things like this and that is where you want to spend your abstraction points sometimes you need to just say it's a dog sometimes that image isn't relevant to you and you don't worry about it I'm not saying everything needs a thousand modifiers what I am saying is when you set a scene anchoring Us in that scene thinking of the pyramid abstraction making us feel what the characters feel hear what the characters feel using more senses than just site you will cement the scene for someone and then when it goes into the character thinking about you know oh do I do I do this or do I not the naval gazing as we call it looking inward you slowly are drifting upward but the reader stays in the scene and often times you want to decide how often you're going to Anchor people how you're going to Anchor them in the scene and things like that um often I like to have big stretches of dialogue with an anchor at the beginning occasional beats through the middle a beat is where a character does something but not too many beats leaving as much to the dialogue as I can and then anchoring at the end of the dialogue so the dialogue you know quote unquote speaks for itself that is the style that I prefer uh that is not a style that everyone has to use um but it works very well for me does that become subconscious as you're as you practice it or always in the no it really become subconscious as you're going you'll get a sense for oh man we're getting out of scene we're getting out of viewpoint and right my writing group is pretty good at this because this is something you know it'll be like I feel like I lost Viewpoint I feel like you know we've been talking so much about this plan to pull off a heist I forget is this Vin's Viewpoint is it Kel's Viewpoint and are they still in the room you know stuff like that but the more you write the more you'll be like I need to keep grounding people in the character in the scene you want it to be the character thinking about their plan not just you presenting the piece from the outline for the reader to have in their back pocket um and you you use character and you use the pyramid abstraction to Anchor that all right this is how you start to get this world building across you think of those anchoring scenes the thing you're going to describe if you can describe an aspect not how the magic works but the visuals of the magic or of the interesting setting if you can feel what it's like to get the sand between your teeth and in your eyes on a racus and see the Shimmer of the spice as the wind blows it then you're on oracus and you're pulled into this concrete sense of being there and then when it talks about prophecy and and and you know Paul is struggling with if he wants to follow prophecy because he knows it's not actually legit but there might be a legit one too then you're still on a racus because you've had this you can see the spice too many times from new Authors I can't see the spice they describe their cool magic system but I can't see the spice shimmering in the air As the Wind Blows the sand and I can't feel the heat beating upon me and feel how much I want to drink that's what will make it a book instead of a dictionary and that's what I recommend you learn to do and that is so much more important than the giant paragraph on the cosmology of your world you know how the gods made it way more important is what it feels like to be in that chapel and hear and um you know participate not just here participate in whatever rituals and be part of it um and that's how you you do this in a way that doesn't feel this is what I call the Grand skill of writing science fiction fantasy that doesn't feel like you are in ding it feels like a character is in a scene and you're there with them and that's what I want you to take away from this world building is there's so much you can do you can't do it all pick a couple of things that together make your story more interesting and make each other more interesting then devise scenes to concretely pull us in so we see the spice shimmering and we know what this feels and looks like and let that launch your fantasy story rather than something more abstract like Once Upon a Time the gods did this um used to be that's how you started a fantasy novel um back in the 80s every one of them started with a long prologue about the gods I'm exaggerating but there were a ton of those and there they're they don't pull you into the story they don't give you characters they don't give you a scene um that feels like reading Isaiah um I mean we all love Isaiah right but feels like reading the s melan um we all love the sil melan too but you know what I mean Sil melan is what you read after you love the Lord of the Rings right tolken fan are you are a tolken fan no who was it there was some there's someone who corrected me on my tolken yeah there's my tolken fan okay yeah so there's only one yeah there's there might be multiple I might be in real trouble I might get my my Mayar and my uh Salvador dollies mixed up I don't know I know are now because everyone talks about it I don't know the rest of them um so all right um questions on that we can do like a couple questions then I want to do Viewpoint in tense okay we will do a whole week on World building next week so you can uh questions so let's do one here and then we'll do one more and then we'll save the rest of them for next week so we'll do you two and then we're going to do Viewpoint intense so when we were talking about characters you said the worst thing a character can do is stand in the way of plot yeah would you say that same thing applies with World building yes absolutely now don't get me wrong when I say worst it's a tool you can use with but if your main character is interfering with the story progressing or some World building element is slowing down what we want to read you've got problems and sometimes you need to do it anyway sometimes that's the spinach that the reader needs to eat but you want to make sure that you're not dumping it all on them at once and you're splitting it up and you're making it fun and interesting and when you can weaving it into the stuff they want to see if they're there for a romance make sure that you're doing one of a couple things either the World building is super relevant to getting to know the other person or it's done kind of uh more sparely um sparsely I shall say uh and you're just going to let it be there and you don't have to dig too much into it because people are there for the romance now do understand people come to books for different reasons you can have a fantastic romance in a book that has a ton of World building you just got to make sure that World building isn't standing in the way and that your romance scenes are able to do their romance really well and that your world building scenes are interesting for their own reason and do understand people read for different reasons if you're writing a giant epic fantasy book you're going to have viewpoints that some readers will like more and other viewpoints that other readers like more and they will pick favorites uh and I think talked about this before and some people really want the Deep World building where navani discovers the nature of sound and investure and other people don't really want that um and that's okay um the bigger your book The more divisive pieces of it will be but understand Peter my uh editorial VP says make sure every chapter in your book has a chance to be someone's favorite chapter and that's been really good advice for me is why would this specific chapter be someone's and doesn't have to be everyone's but why would it be someone's favorite chapter so when it comes to World building how do you come up with names for things and people in the world naming I'm G to give you the quick answer for this um I got three tools for you quick you I couldn't hear you can make all sorts of peanut gallery comments about me and I can't get you back for them enjoy this until the antibiotics clear up my that one's already done until the the steroid sprays open the tubes in my ears as the anent said will happen when I start uh snuffing them um legally all right so naming things three different ways um the easiest way uh that also risk some danger so I'll warn you of the danger is to get yourself an atlas pick a region in the world look at those words and try to devise words that are somewhat matching this is best if it's a region that you have some familiarity with already and that matches the cultural identity of the characters you're writing about right the so when I was when I was working on uh mistborn I'm like I'm going to use French inspired names I took French in high school I have French in my ancestry um I'm going to I think I can safely go to France and just pick a region and I can be like all right this word I'm going to play with this until it works really well and it's cool it's the probably the easiest way one of the dangers is you might accidentally create words in that language I didn't know Ellen was an actual word in German I was just using Germanic um Germanic uh kind of sounds in order to create his name because L is from the dramatic area um and things like that um one other danger you can do in this is you so where fantasy comes there is conversation to be had about what you're taking from which cultures and how you're using it right and I do not think that the conversation is finished in this and I don't think there are uh complete answers um but I do think as an author writing fantasy um that the entire kind of cultural heritage of the earth is is something that is open as an option to you but there are risks Associated um for instance I try to stay away from using too much Native American in mind uh that is because my specific culture has had has had a fraught history shall we say of you know partial genocide of a people and it feels like if I then went and took these things that it would feel wrong to me um I have no problem reaching to Korea or Japan part of this is because I've lived in Korea but part of it is because both of these cultures are exporting their entertainment to me um and offering it up right you K dramas are now kind of part of the general cultural um Zeitgeist um as our Japanese video games um when I'm looking to um a culture I also try to be very specific like I can go with French inspired names no problem but when I was um going to RAR I'm like I'm going to pick a specific Dynasty in Chinese history and I'm going to start using that because instead of then conflating entire cultures as a uh monolith I can be like this is the dynasty um I had had uh I always forget it's a dynasty where um where the the Mongols took over China um and the idea of this idea of Warlords taking over and having to learn to be bureaucrats was a seed idea so I'm going to use that and then I'm going to reach to some of those ideas and things like that and even in some of my naming now and then um but you know you want to be careful and you want to um to watch for pitfalls and I can't get into them all right here I said this would be brief so that's one way another way is to become a kind of student of linguistics and learn what makes languages uh and why certain languages work and a few books on Linguistics will get you most of the way there where you can say this language is going to be using this kind of um of nuance like for instance I think I mentioned you before why you know why do I like uh using uh Hawaiian for the horn eaters it's a really fascinating language because they have fewer sounds so the words have to be really long in order to be unique I find that really cool um I researched here's why it is and what happens with why so I use that as a basis because that actual aspect of the language was fun to me um and learning about what aspects of different languages learning how different languages you know use conjugation stuff you can come up with cool things you don't have to be Grandpa tolken to have a cool naming system and then the last one is just pick a linguistic trick I've done this one a lot symmetrical names are holy well let's make names that are symmetrical repeated consonant sounds at the beginning of names those are ways to do it these all are just about a Vibe does it feel right um I can't go too much more into this is it quick it's quick yeah do you have Rock's name memorized uh I huku makak Al lunam more I think I get one of the a a alamore I get one of the things um wrong in there yeah how do you when you create a how do you check to make sure it's not something that already exists yeah Google be sure to Google your names I'll just say that I haven't run a foul this too much but you can't you know you got to watch out sometimes you will accidentally make like a slur or a swear word or things like that just just you know be careful have have readers who can can read and um you know who can warn you about these things and then have readers who can to read yeah you're laughing at that uh I just thought about what I said um have readers who can read closely and maybe are familiar with the linguistic uh region that you're writing from all right Viewpoint intents one of the main ways you're going to present your story to readers is through a certain View point in a certain tense what do I mean by this well we're talking about the stuff from high school but we're going to dig into it deeper we're talking about third person first person and second person all right so we got third person we got first and we got second right these are our Viewpoint meth uh Styles we also have tense past tense present tense future tense um so you're going to choose between past present present that's what that says and future you are almost never going to use this one and you're almost never going to use this one unless you want to win a Hugo award uh actually fifth season is fantastic and it does second person really well if you want to see how to do second person very well uh Nora Jameson's fifth season is is an excellent example of that uh and there's plenty of future tense things out there they read really experimental what I'll say about present and past is in adult science fiction fantasy past tense is generally the rule of thumb present is fine but looks a little out of place and in contemporary ya present tense is the rule of thumb past reads just as well um I I would say that they default to this so like sci-fi fantasy I'd say is like 80 to 90% past tense and 20 to 10% present and ya I've seen is more like 60 to 70% present tense maybe 40 to 30% past tense um and there are different kinds of um past tense and things but really we'll dig into that in the viewpoints right because this is the big decision because each each of these has certain nuances to them and certain ways of doing it so I'm going to erase these for right now because third has its own Branch off right you have third limited and third omnicient okay so the thing about that is these also have branches right third limited uh is generally the standard rule of thumb uh third limited is where you are in one person's head for a given scene and you will line break or chapter break if you're going to be in someone else's head and as soon as you establish Viewpoint you stick with it through the rest of the chapter where there's some Nuance to limited is a lot of writers like to start an omniscient for a paragraph or two and ease and delimited and then stay there usually to the end of the chapter sometimes s like one or two paragraphs before the end they phase back out into an omniscient uh if you like Robert Jordan if you read him this is what he would do often particularly the beginning of the books the wind scene is in omniscient the wind is flying through and seeing the world and then it settles on a character and you're limited uh for the rest of that chapter and you'll see other people uh doing this omniscient has its own branches where there's white I call true omniscient um and then there's like um Storyteller omniscient so true omniscient is the the classic example is Dune uh Dune uses omnicient by saying uh every paragraph is a different Viewpoint and I won't generally change heads that I'm in in a paragraph but any new paragraph can be in a different Viewpoint and indeed The Narrative itself is not in any Viewpoint it is being told by some omniscient impartial Observer who's describing what's happening to you Storyteller omniscient is generally this sort of hybrid first person third person where you have some Storyteller who's gathered the full story and is now telling it to you piece by piece The Hobbit is a classic example of this but if you read Tres in the emerald sea uh Trust of the emerald C it is also in Storyteller omniscient Hoy can know anything that I need him to know and can tell you anything that I need him to tell you he is an omniscient for purposes of this narrative he's not actually omnicient stories but for the narrative an omnicient Storyteller who is occasionally pretending to be limited but he can switch heads whenever he wants to and he maintains it kind of in his storyteller's narrative instead the alcatra books were also written in this uh sort of format um and we'll talk about strength and weaknesses of these in a second first has a bunch of different branches as well um over here is what we call a pistol uh a pistol first person um is a um if you've read Dracula it's Dracula epistolary is found footage novel um alumina uh which got a lot of uh Buzz um maybe eight years ago uh in ya was written like this it is all redacted documents and texts and things like that so uh Dracula if you haven't read it it's found footage it's all letters and um and people's journals and things like that telling a story uh very interesting way to tell a story it's called epistolary because an epistle so all told through letters um we have what I would call true or close maybe intimate um uh uh first person this is the vast majority of current ya this is a first person where someone is not telling you the story but it's narrated as if in their head it's almost like you have a chip that's in their brain that is projecting to you everything that they're experiencing as they experience it but no one is telling you the story The Character isn't aware that they're a Storyteller it is basically third Limited done in the first person and then the last one of these is indeed the kind of the same sort of hybrid that we have here with this one where a person is writing their story after the fact this is actually what Alcatraz is I guess um and these two kind of blend together you could say that the hobbit's this but he pretends to be anti he doesn't use I and The Hobbit um Bilbo doesn't and so the idea here is that when you're someone after the fact writing their story down um if you've read um Assassin's Apprentice that is this um name of the wind is this um but with a third limited um frame story um so basically uh it is what you kind of classically assume as first person when I was a young man blah blah blah okay so these are kind of your main tools and they do different things which is why it's important to talk about them you probably were taught most of this in school but what they don't talk about is some of these distinctions and why you might use one versus another the main distinction I find between third and first person is that third is way better at large casts this is because you either have an omniscient narrator smoothing everything together and giving you basically one perspective perspective that splits into many to hold to give kind of thematic cohesion and narrative cohesion or you know you're in one person's Viewpoint at a time and it is constantly repeting their name rather than I and cementing in your head who they are and what their motives are in things like this generally first person is really strong for one or two viewpoints um this is why I think it's become the standard in ya if you're going to pick up a ya novel right now it'll most likely statistically be first person in the true SL intimate first p uh first person and it'll be present tense if you're going to pick up a fantasy um novel and it from the uh from the fantasy section it's almost certainly going to be third Limited in past tense uh and these are just these are just because of traditions right like third Limited became this default I would say probably because of people like Robert Jordan doing a really good job with it I mean it was settling into it before but it's kind of weird you can watch if you read the old books like for instance Enders Game um Enders Game slips into into Bean Viewpoint randomly at one part at the end of a chapter uh because these whole things hadn't really been settled on yet and people weren't paying attention to is this third limited is it what what are redirect expectations now readers have different expectations the first recluse novel by Lee modit uh halfway through goes from like past tense to present tense for no good reason and I've asked him he's like he doesn't even remember why it just did it was not a stylistic choice however you can use contrast for stylistic choices uh Elizabeth Moon speed of dark which is about a science fiction novel I may have mentioned it before where a cure to autism is discovered in the future and it's about an autistic man who's trying decide if he takes this quote unquote cure because basically it will transform into a completely different person and do you take a cure for something that you're not sure is a disease or not um and uh this was written back you know when that was a novel idea I think generally right now the discourse has gone that direction of autism is a different way of thinking rather than uh than a disease but back then uh she won the the nebula award for it it's fantastic book and in order to contrast viewpoints uh his Viewpoint is in present tense and everyone else's Viewpoint is in past tense and this just helps you when you transition to his Viewpoint to be like skip a beat and be like okay we're seeing Through The Eyes to someone who processes the world differently um and or maybe we all process the world differently but it's least contrasting um the the differences between the viewpoints so you can switch I would say honestly truthfully the difference between present and past is negligible except for reader preference and you may prefer one or the other but I don't think people read present tense and imagine it I don't think people read past tense and imagine it happening in the past they just imagine as it's happening right they both act like present tense third person or past tense is just the standard uh and that's what I use uh for a lot of my books so first person really good with digging into a Viewpoint first person can also cheat see how much time do I have left okay it can cheat on info dumps which is why I like to bring this up during the info dump discussion if you write a really interesting narrative in first person your infodumps become characterization moments and indeed the best of them are fun funny and clever and so suddenly it doesn't matter what the first person narrator is writing you're there for it and it can it's kind of the power of humor to make an info dump uh just go down easier I mean Douglas Adams coasted on this I won't say Coast it was very hard he wrote very well but like Hitcher Sky of the Galaxy in part works because he can infodump and have you love it you don't want him to ever stop info dumping the your often your favorite parts of those books are where you're reading a literal encyclopedia entry right and they're the most fun um and that's kind of the the the cheat code that first person has is you can info dump a little easier third person can do this third limited um but generally in third limited you let the character's voice color The Narrative but not completely Infuse it part of the reason to use third limited is it does add this sort of moderating force this um moderating is the wrong term kind of it Blends all these disparate viewpoints together and makes them feel like one complete story when you're writing in third limited and you write from a four-year-old's Viewpoint you don't write like an actual four-year-old would talk in first person you would and it would be aggravating right in third person you let that view of a child change the sense structure to be simpler you occasional put occasionally put interjections that feel very childlike and they're motiv very childlike but there's a sense that there even in third even though it's not omnicient is the hand of the author there smoothing things out and making it feel like a cohesive story even if the viewpoints are distinctive this is part of why I think it works very well for large casts uh just a few other things um first person Storyteller and epistolary give away that somebody survived to at least long enough to get you that ending now epistolary they can die halfway through and someone else can take over and things like that but particularly this first Storyteller why I think it moved to this because it used to be like this you used to all the old classic books were you know were like bbo he's telling you the story of his life but then you know that they surviv long enough and know the twist that they were a ghost all along is not new and original you can still do things that aren't new and original but it has been done quite a bit it's like oh it's a first person narrative haha I did die at the end and I'm a ghost telling this you know to people in heaven um so you can probably think of some stories that do that um so there is this sort of inherent firstperson weakness to this idea that well I know they live but that's why the intimate happened the intimate is not supposed to actually be recorded anywhere uh and it kind of makes up for some of those weaknesses uh often times I can see a first person where you will have two different first person viewpoints that contrast each other a great deal and those can make for fantastic books if you do more than two it starts to get rough everyone's named I and the transition between them can be really jarring and it be can be hard to keep track of so uh those are just a few things on why you might choose one of is the other true omnition super hard and you don't get a lot out of it but it is it can be really cool um in true omniscient you generally don't want to hide things from the reader you want to give them all the information meaning in true omniscient you depend on suspense and not mystery you know who the the that Dr UA is going to betray them you are in suspense of what that's going to do to everyone because as soon as you see Dr UA you know his motivations what he's planning to do and what's going on and that's how a true omniscient generally Works um so yeah I feel like obviously in doing that works super well but what's kind of like I feel like you just do that limited too you just have different chapters what's that like I feel like you can do that in a limited perspective have different chapters you can you can totally do that I'm just saying in omniscient people will feel you're cheating if you don't do it does that make sense um you can go to Storyteller instead and then the Storyteller can cheat and they can be mad at the Storyteller and that works but if you're true omniscient and they feel the the the author isn't giving them the information and limited you get the choice in omniscient you need to lean on suspense rather than mystery yeah what kind of switching between like tenses or view like like first or third yeah can you get away with you can get away with a lot um and it really depends and if the reader says oh I see why you're doing this you want them to understand why for instance I mentioned Name of the Wind Name of the Wind starts from this uh Viewpoint of this person who's collecting trying to find the story of this great hero from who is now retired and it starts un limited you get to know who this guy is he finds the hero who's washed up as an inkeeper he's like I need to know your story and how you ended up as an inkeeper he's like all right I'm going to tell it to you and then it switches to first person and then occasionally you probably it's it's The Princess Bride structure right oh yeah name of the wi is Princess Bride occasionally they interrupt and you know like is this a kissing book more it's like no tell me more about this and it'll jump into like an interstitial where you'll be in third limited again and it'll be in one of the viewpoints of the characters who's listening to the main character tell his story and offering some commentary on it and then he'll start into it again and then it goes back into first person that's just one example you and I showed you um with uh speed of dark she switches tenses uh you can do all kinds of things just the reader has to buy into it um how about unreliable narrators or like deliberately Nar yeah yeah unreliable narrators will generally work in all of these except for kind of the true omniscient and it's it's actually it's it's possible in any of them um so you just want to approach it differently so in third limited is the one where you'll feel like you're cheating the most okay unless the reader has significant signifiers that they're unreliable a classic example of working really well is is uh Matt from uh The Wheel of Time where what he says and thinks is different than what he does and he consistently does this and you as a reader pick up on it by Robert Jordan using just a little bit of hyperbole in the way Matt thinks to draw contrast to his actions so you understand he's unreliable uh where people will think you're cheating is like something I flirted with in mistborn where keler has a secret plan we've been in as you point a lot I have to acknowledge he has a secret plan but I'm not telling you what it is and so I do the the classic third limited I can't think about that right now I've got to be focused it it is a bend and it feels like a bit of a cheat every time you do it but it is kind of the sort of thing you have to do maybe you can find another way but that's one of the ways you make that character unreliable as you let the reader know in over in this world Storyteller world and epistolary um and things um even in this uh true um uh thing you can be truly unreliable it's harder in that middle one because you feel like you're with them in the story all along um and you can be presenting the wrong story all along usually in the the true you want to have those same sort of limited signifiers that say everything this character saying may not be true uh for instance the Storyteller first person works very well for this a lot of people will confront uh Pat rothus about Name of the Wind oh we're almost out of time this is May last story and be like uh this isn't possible and he'll his answer will be like you thought qu was telling you the truth about this thing that would have made him seem really bad if he hadn't if he told you the truth clo was lying and indeed he's a very untrustworthy narrator the more you indicate that to readers the better unless you want to have your twist ending um and then you can kind of pull off the deck in the face all right guys thank you um more questions next week all right