hey everyone Brandon here somewhat sick uh to present to you my writing lecture my first one on World building this is sanderson's laws it's one of my favorite lectures I hope that you enjoy it welcome to science fiction fantasy class yay I'm back so you may notice a certain ruggedness to my voice um I during my trip to Hawaii managed to get sick um yay yeah um and then that sickness managed to um give me a an infection in my sinuses that burst my eardrum yeah uh never had that happen before unique experience um I have been on antibiotics now uh long enough for that to no longer be an issue but I'm going to keep my distance back here just in case um so if I look a little redyed and sound a little rugged uh that is why so today oh also that ear doesn't hear so well so I may have to ask you to repeat questions we'll see this year here's uh still here is uh just fine um so uh today we're doing sanderson's laws um so this is a fun lecture I always enjoy giving this one uh not just because I named these things after myself um but uh I do think magic systems have become one of my things as I may have told you before um I did this somewhat deliberately when I was breaking in um to the business one of the things I'd noticed in the books that I really like to read was when they had a pretty well-defined what we would call hard magic system um I didn't coin that phrase um but it definitely is something that I've helped popularize the idea of a hard magic um and I think both hard and soft magic are perfectly viable methods of Storytelling um they do different things they're both Tools in your toolbox uh but I noticed I was I really enjoyed them and uh I liked uh reading them and I liked writing them so I started talking about magic systems and kind of really digging into what a lot of different authors had done and experimenting during those early days particularly before I got published with different types of magic systems and really trying to zero in on what I love in a magic system and um over time I develop these laws uh now these are not laws that everyone needs to follow they're not that kind of law uh these are rules I made for myself usually when I did something wrong in a book and I'll share some of those things I did wrong and I came up with a rule of thumb to help myself to avoid doing that um that said I do think these are three very important principles not just for World building but for storytelling in general um for you to kind of focus on and just to use in helping you learn how to not just create magism but in how to plot and how to World build and how to do characters this one is mostly a plotting one this one is mostly a character one this one is mostly a World building one and as I've said I feel like stories are plot setting character glued together with conflict now let's go ahead and make the um the the point that in a story World building is usually the least important of those three which is odd to say when you're here to hear me talk about science fiction fantasy specifically right uh in fact I am the magic system guy and here I'm telling you magic systems are the least important of the three now ideally you'll do all three really well you want to have really strong characters you want to have really strong plots you want to have excellent World building but it behooves you to recognize that a story with a strong plot and strong characters but weak World building is still usually a strong story but a story that has really great world building and even good of one or the other but really weak in one of the other tends to be a weak story and one that has great world building and is weak in the other two tends to just be an encyclopedia entry you might as well be writing a uh an RPG guide at that point and so we want to make sure that our world building is done in service to story The this the there is a you know a a rule Above This which is whatever you enjoy whatever makes you write whatever reason you're here um that's totally valid uh but if you want to treat writing as a career like we pretend everyone in the room wants to do if you want to be selling books then your world building should be in service of the other two rather than necessarily a good unto itself this is in maybe direct contrast to Grandpa tolken which is why there has to be kind of a a rule above this he kind of wrote his books to show off the cool philology um the cool uh what yeah cool philology cool poems cool mythology that he come up with um and that's okay right then again uh Grandpa tolken didn't have to try to sell books in today's environment and indeed he worked as a professor the whole time uh because you know books as a as a career particularly fantasy books well writing Epic Fantasy for career career didn't exist when Grandpa tolken uh invented the job so um so just keep in mind you can do it for whatever reason you want but these days I strongly recommend World building and service of narrative and hopefully this will help you uh and I'm going to go through the laws and we'll do a a Q&A uh on each one after each one and I'll also talk hopefully about some of my other kind of philosophies on World building as we we go through this so let's talk about rule number one uh sanderson's first law um so sanderson's first law arose because I was sitting on a panel at worldcon worldcon is one of the major science fiction fantasy conventions out there um I had been attending a number of years as just a fan before I sold something I finally did and I they um so I am I went in and typed in you they have this form you could fill in saying hey do you want to be on paneling and I said I just sold my first book to t tour um I'd love to be on paneling and they you know in the uh the form said what are you good at talking about what will you be interested in and I wrote magic systems I'd already started thinking this is my thing and lo and behold they made the um they put the paneling together and they put me on how do you write magic systems the panel which I thought was really excellent I'm to this day grateful that they they did that I think this was was Boston um world Con in Boston early 2000s um and so I got to this panel all prepared ready to talk about magic systems and they sat us all in a row as happens and the person running the the panel they asked the question like let's just start with your Basics what what are the basics of do designing a uh a magic system and we'll just go down and have every person on the panel uh talk about their philosophy on this and just start with the basics and they went to me first and I thought okay I got a home run here it's my first panel the first question I've ever been asked as a pro I'm going to just you know I'm going to be really do something that I'm sure everyone's going to agree with and is not going to be um controversial at all and I said well um obviously to have a good magic system you need to have rules I thought non-controversial right um this like ba basic stuff everyone else on the panel looked to me and said no if you have rules for your magic you ruin it um you ruin the storytelling and I'm like suddenly I'm like I have no idea what I'm doing now all these other Pros I thought I where what's happening um what's going on well uh we had a really good discussion and turns out that I was the only only one writing Epic Fantasy on that panel and the others were writing urban fantasy urban fantasy being a genre that is more focused has one foot in horror a lot of the urban fantasy does um and a lot of horror you don't want to show necessarily what the monster is capable of doing you don't want to give all the rules because if you give all the rules you put the Power in the hands of the protagonists and in a lot of Horror Stories the horror is about lacking control the horror is I can't do anything about this the rules of society can't do anything about this um and indeed the types of stories they were telling didn't need to rely on the rules of the magic they were writing soft magic systems with good reason so what is a hard magic system what is a soft magic system let's talk about this for a minute because it's easy to mistake EX external Logic for internal logic when it comes to Magic systems when I say A Hard magic system this is a magic system where the reader understands the rules maybe not the beginning but can learn the rules of the magic and they are internally consistent and the story revolves in some way around the characters mastering those rules using those rules to their advantage um and um you know turning Magic magic into kind of another branch of science a soft magic system was a magic system where the reader does not know all the rules and they can't know all the rules it is a magic system where um a sense of wonder or horror accompanies the the use of something magical it's a magic system where um it seems to have no internal logic and you can't necessarily anticipate what is going to happen um with the magic now a lot fall in between right uh this is a spectrum you can have something in between indeed some of the ways you can have something in between is I would say as an example Harry Potter is a hard magic system for a given book in general but soft for the whole series you never knew what the series can do and indeed JK Rowling was pretty bad at at um at taking the consequences of something she invented for one book and a it to another book um this does create problems where she has to like destroy all the time Turners um to get people to stop complaining about them but it also has the advantage of adding a sense of Whimsy and wonder to the Harry Potter Universe you never know what crazy thing is going to happen and that can be an advantage to a story let's make sure that you understand that internal logic is different from external logic let me explain external logic is often accompanying often accompanies a hard magic system I do this a lot where you use our realworld understanding of science to try to lend credibility to a magic system and or to give it some sense of uh immediate what we say in the business grock ability you can understand it a little bit better because um that's an old term term from Highline yeah an old Highline term for being able to understand something um its rockability goes up if you can anticipate a little bit of it acting like you would expect it to in our real world this is for instance um when X-Men says oh there's a gene that causes the mutation which gives people powers that is an attempt to apply some external logic to a magic system okay that doesn't mean that it is a harder magic system than for instance Superman who gets his powers from the Sun why who cares as long as they're consistent that's a hard magic system so don't don't make this mistake don't look at something and say oh because it's completely Whimsical in what happens it's a soft magic system no as long as as you the reader can anticipate it if the rules are set out for you and you can anticipate what's happening it's a hard magic system external logic can be fun I use a lot of quantum physics I use a lot of things like fundamental forces I play with a whole bunch of these things in my books but I would recommend you separate that one is there to just kind of help lend a veneer of respectability so to speak and to have some fun with the way that physics works the other is there as a narrative tool meaning the internal logic is a narrative tool all right so as I started to think about this and started to focus on different magic systems um I I realize that there are great examples of soft magic and they're usually trying to do something different uh one of the quintessential examples of the difference between these two is in Lord of the Rings the one ring is a generally hard magic system we can list the rules right here right what are the rules of the One Ring you put it on you turn invisible but it corrupts you and when you're wearing the ring s and his minions can see you it'll betray you too it doesn't make you invisible it accentuates your powers that you already have okay there you are that is true but as presented to the reader see you're using you're using appendix information which is not in the the the uh the stories and we usually throw that out for narrative terms but it is true for instance I'll get like yeah but good job we know the actual tolken scholar um it accentuates your your your the the attributes you have so Hobbits turn invisible because they are small easy to to look over um but in narrative terms for the story turns you invisible but saaron can see you and if it gets to saaron the world basically ends right we have our narrative rules for the uh for the One Ring what can Gandalf do no speaking tolken nerd whatever he wants for the plot whatever the plot needs Gandalf to do Gandalf can do lots of sparkles yes lots of sparkles in in the movies it has always to do with like light in some way oh the tolken nerd is just shaking her head oh no if you read all the supplemental material you'll start to get some of this but for narrative turns in the book Gandalf is a soft magic system we and indeed the hobbits who are generally the lens through which we see the story don't know what Gandalf can do it's kind of mystical he's very powerful he might be some like he's really old is he a god what is he is he an angel like if in the story like if you read the supplemental material you know but if you read the story what is Gandalf he's a friend and he can do stuff um and these two magic systems work very well to show the advantages and disadvantages of both hard and soft magic with the One Ring froto can use it to escape problems and to solve problems if he's willing to pay the cost with Gandalf he exists to indicate that the hobbits are very small people literally and metaphorically in a very large world that they don't understand and there are forces moving that are completely Beyond them and their current ability to understand Gandalf adds a sense of wonder and magic and mythology to the world when he uses his powers it is generally you can't understand the ramifications or what he's doing and the narrative purposes that him using his powers um does is usually to either complicate issues in some way for instance he saves them from the bog but then he's no longer there to keep the fellowship together so the fellowship shatters Gandalf saving them from the balog is a bigger complication um than it is a Salvation um this is the real power of a soft magic system particularly one that's like has you understand a little bit about it but you don't understand the full ramifications for instance the famous story of the mon monkey paw this is a kind of hybrid magic system that's really leaning into the soft side like you know you can make a wish but you don't know the consequences that gives you one foot in hard magic but mostly in soft magic and that not knowing the consequences that soft side of the magic lends a great deal of horror and mystery and even wonder to the use of the monkeys paw to the point that you are horrified as the hard side happens which is you know you get three uh three wishes and you see the escalating danger um so sanderson's first law sanderson's first law is a plotting law the idea is that your ability to solve problems in a satisfying way with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic one of the biggest complaints that people make about fantasy from the outside not uh being part of our world not enjoying is they're like I don't like fantasy because anything can happen that removes the stakes and the tension um in their opinion well you've been in this class we've already talked about this stakes and tension are something any story can fix with the snap of a finger if they want to doesn't matter what kind of story it is it doesn't even matter if it's historical fiction uh you can probably name um some tarantino-esque stories that they just break break what happened in the uh in history uh and say either oh it was recorded wrong or you know like you don't have to follow history uh you as the author can do whatever you want you have that power your job is generally to solve problems in a satisfying way but not always sometimes you solve problems in a way that leaves a lingering hint of discomfort or dissatis isfaction I would say Gandalf saving them from the bog and dying is an excellent example of the cure being worse than the disease narratively I mean not actually because if they've all died to the balog saon wins but you know what I'm saying um and so the idea is you want to control with proper foreshadowing how you are solving problems in your story this is why it's a larger than just magic systms though magic Syms offer a great example because people point at us and say oh you can just you know wave a wand and solve the problems well no not if we want the story to be satisfying and the Art of a writer is to make it satisfying uh another example though of why you might not want to make it satisfying um just so you understand uh there I don't believe I've talked about this yet this class if I have you know throw something at me uh something soft um so you will often see oh Scar's like don't throw anything at him I'll tackle you um you've often seen in Stories the sequence where a character shows up out of nowhere to save the protagonists from a big problem that they're having right um this happens all the time in stories this sort of story this sort of sequence is very different when it happens in the first third of a story than in the last third in the first third you may want the characters to be like oh yeah my friend you know George he's just amazing with a bow uh if we only we had George to help us and then lo and behold they get trapped by thieves and then a bunch of arrows come out of nowhere and George saves them is that a satisfying resolution no but the purpose of that scene is to let us see firsthand how great George is so that George can join the crew and then be later used in a more interesting way the purpose that scene is not to have a satisfying resolution it's to introduce a character if you do this at the end of a story you have a very different reaction and in fact I'm going to use the Lord of the Rings films as my example of this going well and this going poorly um my favorite of The Lord of the Rings films is the second right I absolutely love the second film I love Helms Deep and Helms Deep is a wonderful example of how to use something like sanderson's uh first law we don't know what Gandalf can can do he is a soft magic but you can set up a hard magic structure for using Gandalf and Peter Jackson does that what does he do in the films day on the look for me on the morning of the fifth day right they're going to this terrible fight that they can't possibly win Gandalf says look to me on the morning of the fifth day um and survive that long it's the plot setup is if you can last five days therefore I will save you and we trust the Gand can save him right like save them um you know he's going to go find bones he's going to bring him back and uh you know it's it's not in the books but it works really really really well as a plot structure and that whole sequence where Peter Jackson makes you forget the gals had said that makes you forget that it makes the characters feel like there's no Hope they've forgotten when the morning of the fifth day comes and Gandalf Crest the rise and and and there's bones with uh with his whole team um then you're like oh yeah and then you know you'll you'll have the little voice over look for me on the morning of the fifth day boom wonderful plot cycle right it it's a setup and payoff the setup is last 5 days you win they last 5 days and Gandalf comes and save them and it's beautiful it's my favorite moment in all three films um they then don't manage to do the same setup with the ghosts and Aragorn um and again this is some deviations from The Source material uh in large part I agree with Peter Jackson's decisions uh this one just doesn't quite land right we are not set up as an audience or as characters to be like we need to last until uh until the ghosts arrive um to save us instead set up this is our last stand we must defeat and Conquer otherwise you know um Gondor will fall they fight they fight they fight they lose Aragorn shows up with ghosts and saves them and you're left as a reader or as a viewer just being like why did we fight shouldn't we have just run and let Aragorn show up with the ghosts right like can we send those ghosts to midor yeah they say they have to be let go but come on just one more ride guys um and it ends up being kind of a a weaker plot cycle um very you know uh it's still there there it's it's a great film Trilogy probably the best um but that is one flaw and you can kind of see why we are wanting the problems to be solved in the way promised to us we don't want a deox Machina we kind of get one all right um so Sanders's first law is to encourage you when you're building a magic system to think about these things if you're doing a soft magic don't have the magic save the day in the end instead you need to focus on characters and what they can do and what they they want to solve unless you want a different kind of resolution you can tell a different type of story War of the Worlds ends with simply the humankind has been destroyed and would have lost except the common cold uh coincidental um saves them by killing all the all the Martians um this is in many ways an unsettling UNS satisfying ending that's the point we are not the apex predator we are not as powerful as we thought um it's a warning that you know um we could be destroyed and wiped out um if you want to have a Sanderson esque ending generally what I'm trying to do is to seed pieces of the magic system that the characters can use as tools and usually I'll put one step into soft and be like there's things we don't understand yet which allow me then to explore new parts of the Magic in later stories um and then characters will put together the pieces figure out how to manipulate these things um and you end up with stories that lean into science fiction sort of plotting um using the magic as a new brand of Science and Sanders's first law is kind of the way to do that questions yeah um kind of already touching on it but is can you have like a hard magic system that can swing all the way back to soft or soft goes to oh yeah yeah you like you can start completely soft and then as people find the rules they end up it becomes a hard magic system and you can go the other way we thought we had the rules we don't have the rules everything we thought is a lie uh those are harder to do but if you build your story around it uh you absolutely can the key to keep in mind is what's the emotion that you want to have specifically at the ending or in the conflict resolutions of your stories and how are you shooting for that emotion and how is the magic enhancing that emotion rather than kind of getting in your way here and then back there how can you seed enough details about your magic system that they understand it but it doesn't completely give away what they're going to do with it in the end how can you see it enough that they the reader understands it but doesn't give away what you're doing at the end um couple tips here number one put in more clues than you think you need and scale back if too many of your beta readers are getting it my experience is that re authors withhold too much and don't seat enough as a general rule um that's obviously not going to apply to every author um but keep that in mind the other thing is be careful about info dumps so um the grand skill of writing science fiction fantasy as I've said I believe before in this class um is to convey information to readers in such a way that they don't realize information is being conveyed to them that they never stop and say oh this is getting boring um because you're going into details on the magic there are lots of ways to get these details across in ways that will not be as feel as much like an infodump one is uh to make sure other things are going on in the scene right it's not just info dumping you're getting across character and things like this breaking up the the lessons so it's not just like all dumped you usually do that by inventing early on scenes that show off one little aspect of the magic system show it off really well and then you build upon that uh in mbor I believe I've mentioned before I purposefully don't show the magic system early on I know it's got a lot of rules to it I want to focus on uh the setting and the characters before I get into the magic and so at the beginning of Mporn ker goes and brings down um like an entire manor house full of guards uh he just goes you know John Wick on the mall um right and I just cut because I'm not going to show all that magic yet I wait until I've seated some scenes where we see a little bit of what Vin can do and then once we get into a training session with kelse here which is really very physical tactile we're out in the world it's not an info dump we're doing things we're experimenting where you know cause and affecting and building kind of the ma uh master and Apprentice relationship all kind of dealing with Vin's issues all at once and you get the training uh scene that's on the wall uh where she's learning about Newton's Laws um and things like this as it applies to uh to alamy I put it off to there and it works in stormland archive I just launched you straight into it um and it's a steeper learning curve I make sure it's an action scene where lots of things are happening uh filtered through the lens of hopefully a very interesting character doing something very interesting and I try to make sure I'm never giving too much at once but the whole thing is much more uh dense in uh in rules and those are just two different ways that I decided to do it back here um how do you write a write a system that you know is a hard magic system that 100% has rules but the characters never really reach the point where they're hitting those character yeah um excellent and this uh arguably is what tolken actually did right um that if you sat tolken down and said what can Gandalf do he'd be like oh this and this and this and this and it has to do with this and this and this and this um and so what you know is different from how you use it narratively and narratively I would recommend that you know if you have a soft magic system knowing all of that is actually still pretty useful to you you don't have to have it but knowing it can be very useful watch for your conflict resolution that's the thing if the characters can't don't know the rules ask yourself what little pieces can they learn and can they make use of them and if not then con uh conflict resolve in different ways um and you can set these up right um You can you can have you know payoffs that don't relate to the reader the characters manipulating the magic system um it's kind of not completely there but it's the idea that came to me while I'm saying this if you think about Wizard of Oz the movie at the end the Cowardly Lion is given a heart right like it's just a symbol but it shows like and it it really doesn't relate to the magic system they don't know what the wizard can do he probably can't do anything um right but you still get a payoff because the Cowardly Lion showed courage completely unrelated to the magic he showed courage and he gets uh you know uh he gets a medal right isn't that what he gets he you know he he yeah I guess the Tin man wants a heart and the lion wants courage so the Tin man gets like a heart but anyway the lion gets gets his his courage reward um boy it's been a while when I was a kid you watched that show like every couple of weeks cuz there were three channels right and you just turn on and you're like oh it's Wizard of Oz again I guess we'll watch that like you basically you're basically watching Wizard of Oz or die hard because they're on 24 hours a day uh on different channels but now I realize I haven't seen Wizard of Oz in like 30 years so um but you can look everyone gets their reward at the end and it doesn't really matter that the ruby slippers can teleport or what the rules of the ruby slippers teleporting are it's the fact that Dorothy showed the gumption to go do the thing she needed to do and that's what the plot set up for her to do so she can get a magical reward with it still being a soft magic system and still be satisfying because she achieved what she needed to achieve as an individual that's what I mean by making sure that the ending is character focused rather than magic system resolution ution focused um right over here yeah um I'm ask without giv any spoilers for this form yes appreciate that yeah would you would you say that ending a story where a character overcomes something using powers they didn't know they had oh yeah is that oh I'm glad you brought this up yes so uh minor spoils for missp one I said each of these rules came from me learning something by doing it wrong um you're bringing up at the end of mistborn book one I violate sanderson's first law a character discovers a power they didn't know they had and they use it to solve problems how did this happen well number one I hadn't devised sanderson's first law yet um I was just trying to tell a great story and the ending of Miss born one lacked impact my uh editor said can you do something to just heighten the power and the impact of the ending and I said yeah I've got this whole thing I'm planning for book we'll just start seeding it right now right um and you can see how the stuff that happens is very relevant to book two I pulled it for it I used it then the book comes out and people are like wow I really like that book it's a bit of a deox mocky at the end isn't there and I'm like oh yeah there is now CU I didn't see or foreshadow that at all um and it becomes really relevant to book two that's when I started to be like I did something wrong there what did I do what's the difference how can I avoid doing that again um and you will find other places where I do similar things uh in books intentionally because I want a different emotional reaction than oh wow it all came together now I understand um you want to be doing these things deliberately rather than accidentally and there I did it accidentally and I think it was a mistake um I think it is one of the one of the weaknesses of mbor the first book um is that uh that I I relied on that instead of finding a better solution that really more relied on characters and or I should have gone back and seated this so excellent question you're on the ball I'm glad you noticed that all right I got to go to the middle here I'll come back here if we we've got time so go ahead and then we'll come to you so I was just wondering how feasible is it to be able to have like that sort of ending like the day but like not in a way that it's something that nobody knows what just happened it's like hinted that like it is written in rules you just don't know why yet is that yeah can you have an ending where it is written in the rules you just don't know why yet yes right you can do anything uh just make sure your emotional payoffs are something different for example ending of the first book TW of Twilight what happens in the end first book of Twilight Bella gets knocked unconscious and the main uh kind of conflict gets resolved while she's unconscious people still love this book why because it doesn't matter if the good vampires can beat the bad bad vampires it's not what the book's about book's about is can this romance work right and the romance working still is the main conflict uh some people are like no uh we won't get into we won't get into that but as a novel it's been very successful and you could argue how can you have a successful novel when your main character is unconscious for the main resolution well that's not the main resolution that's just the end of the the quote unquote small P plot or you know uh evil vampires whatever um and so if your your resolution is something else and then you have this big event you're like we don't understand this something big just happened um you're satisfied for this reason but you're disturbed for this other reason uh we need to now go and investigate why this thing we anticipated happening didn't happen or where this thing happened that we didn't anticipate because it has huge ramification you'll see me doing that all the time uh in books uh just make sure you have you know it's what is your promises and what are your payoffs and are you balancing what's unsatisfying and what's satisfying and you're making sure what's unsatisfying is there for another emotional purpose um especially when part of the plot is about characters learning uh new things or like uh re uh reanalyzing rules how do you you know lie about rules in a satisfying way without having readers just feel like not yeah how do you lie about rules in a satisfying way I recommend very early on indicating um hanging a lantern on it in some way saying okay this is how we think it works but here's three historical examples of something that happened that don't seem to conform to this and we don't know why and that does scare us but we can learn this part and do it that sort of thing is really handy for you as a writer uh and there's lots of different ways to do this for instance you can have your character learning and they're like teaching you know blah blah blah and have them say well what about this and the teacher's like uh don't think about that we don't know or that's beyond you right and then they're like ah that sounds like it's really important H don't worry about it never comes up right those sorts of things you'll see all the time in fiction and that's kind of the purpose okay back here so I get that rule one applies to solving problems in a satisfying way but what about creating problems with magic that you may or may not understand awesome good question so um what about creating problems you may not may may or may not understand I think I quoted this once already but if not um uh Bryce Moore uh writer friend of mine uh he's a librarian up in Maine he was in the graduate program with me at BYU he coined a term that I still use which is called deex wrench which does not work at all in the uh in the Original Latin Latin D no Greek um what's now deos is is Latin right yeah but it's applied to Greek plays that's confusing we should go back and time and tell them you should write this in Greek um right um but deox wrench does not work at all um but the idea is that he says readers will be they will they will take a little bit of you messing with things hand of the author to make things harder on the the characters um but if you it too much they'll start to see the hand of the author in the same way that they see the hand of the author solving problems and readers do want the complications to come from choices that somebody has made for instance if you've got a soft magic system you you know you can do X but you do not know the the consequences why but they decide to do X anyway you can make Y is bad as you want as long as it's kind of force out of uh you know how big these complications can be uh if it's the middle of a story you treat it differently than the end of a story um but readers want decisions and consequences not just and decisions can be someone else you can have those moments where the everything seems to be going well and then something goes wrong and you realize that flaw was there all along and it was just waiting to explode um you can have that the same way at the end of 6 cents you have the moment of realization where the uh the clues were all there you can have the clues all be there for something going wrong be careful about deox wrench it is worth thinking about the inverse of this is also true making things more hard for no reason on the characters Works to an extent but readers will get tired of it there are exceptions to this rule right like there are entire stories built around how awful things are for certain characters and how things constantly go wrong George Martin made an entire career out of you know sometimes people can take a take an arrow to the knee uh and instead of retiring to a nice job in Skyrim they just die um and you know uh that's realistic um you know infection happening because you took an arrow to the knee readers will take that um to an extent particularly if it's the right type of you've given the right type of tone promise now you had a a comment here where does the name for this come from which one de French de wrench yeah not French uh sorry this is probably the whole voice problem yeah the French are always causing problems uh no he called it Dex wrench yeah uh glad you said that I'm not sure how uh how articulate I am with uh with my current ailment all right any questions over here all right I'm going to go back to the this person over here I told I couldn't get back to yeah how would you present a magic system you want to have come across as hard but it's like really complex and confusing and and based off something most people wouldn't know about um I would present it that way meaning I would have a reader a character start to get involved and then you know um I would technobabble them to the point where their characters like all right I understand that you understand it wizard person right this is basically how St does all of its magic system it's like you know parkcard calls down and says Jordy I need you to do X and Y and jordy's like all right me and data will do you know a b c d and then Picard's like okay I trust you tack on something reflector dish something solve it uh how long will it take three days do it in two right um we get the sense that Jordi and data know all kinds of stuff we don't need to know it cuz Bard doesn't need to know it all Bard needs to know is that he has to stall for two days uh and then if you actually have all that stuff worked out um which you know Star Trek sometimes did um then you can use it to Great advantage through to make your story have internal logic and things like that but you don't have to you don't have to throw it all at the reader be careful about using the cliches right like oh man how many of you are tired of the in English please um right phrase that always gets shown you go to nerd nerd talks for a second they say in English please when the nerd didn't say anything that confusing um maybe I'm speaking to the to to a crowd that is self- selecting into that not being confusing but yeah all right we're going to do these two questions then we're going to be done okay so first here and then up there how is this uh you know this first rule apply in a story where one of the main conflicts is kind of uh man versus nature where magic is the nature right yeah so uh how does it apply in person versus nature where the magic is nature um I would say it does apply very well some of the strongest fantasy stories out there uh dragon Riders of per um is an excellent example um where like because nature is the magic generally these lean very well into hard magic systems characters are figuring out how the science of stopping nature works and it's a kind of a scientific Race Against Time to see can we figure this out can we solve this problem um right and uh if you haven't read dragons Riders of per uh it is basically this sort of thing um there are some person versus person conflicts as well but the idea is like we're all going to die because this certain phenomenon is happening we have a small number of dragons that can protect against it but we need to find out the extra Powers our dragons have and learn to harness and manipulate them rather than just uh going with you know what we've always pretended to understand before and we need to understand the actual why this uh this catastrophe is happening so yeah um my question is about how can you foreshadow things in a way that your reader understands um but your character doesn't look too stupid for not oh boy what an excellent question how can you force out things in a way that the reader understands but the character doesn't look too stupid uh generally You' want the character to be thinking the things that you want the reader to be thinking okay so if the reader is going to guess something you generally want the character to guess it unless they have unless they lack information because you've seen from other viewpoints which is one way to do it or unless they lack information but like because you have external logic that they don't have but that's dangerous even if they there's no reason they should understand that you understand you know germs and they don't so you understand how this thing is spreading and they don't the reader going to have trouble because they get it and the characters don't and that barrier is going to be a problem so generally Your solution is have the characters figure out early on the things that the reader going to guess and have them try and have those fail anyway so that there's a layer Beyond and you do this by having um red herrings um by having cause and effect reversed um like u meaning re like the minor spoilers well kind of more Major Spoilers for elantris elant gets by completely by everybody have M having mixed up cause and effect they think the cause caus an effect well really the effect was the cause and they just have the timeline slightly wrong and because of that uh the conventional wisdom doesn't work and the magic is broken and when they figure out cause and effect was reversed then it comes together right um and so things like that where you can have the reader the character be intelligent and it still not work out um and then slowly get them the information particularly if you're using a red herring to distract the reader um uh this works really really well uh getting good at red herrings red herrings being the the reader expects it to be this because they've read a lot of books you make that thing sound like it's going to the case but not too obvious so the reader like I've got this figured out then the reader will stop trying to guess because they have their Theory and then near to where the climax is going to happen the real is going to happen you show them that they were wrong because the readers characters think of that and then it's not true and then the reader's like wait this thing I've been assuming all along that I knew who the killer was isn't the case I'm Suddenly at C and then they have the reader asked to scramble to try to figure out a new Theory while the reader characters are doing the same thing it works really well so all right let's go on to sanderson's Second Law um I touched on this one already uh but I want to dig into it a little deeper and this is that flaws are more interesting than Powers themselves I spent this one came about uh because I spent a long time trying to think of really unique and interesting powers for my Magics right um when M borne came out I think I've told you the guys this story before um but I'll I'll reiterate because you know I'm the teacher and I can do that um I thought about how cool this like M the alaman the pushing and pulling came from watching uh films like Star Wars and reading books um where people have telekinesis and thinking about well where's the Leverage coming from right did do Newton's laws apply um when when Darth Maul points and then points and something Zips across I'm like wait a minute have I ever seen the force do you just point and it zips across the room and hits the wall where what's going on here um and it works just fine for Star Wars but I'm like what if you built a telekinesis around Vector physics and uh cause and effect and things like this and I designed this whole cool magic and I thought wow this is so original and then I released the book and people love it they're like wow it's so cool it's such a great magic uh and someone comes through my line um early on uh it couldn't have been too early cuz no one read mbor one um but uh I told you that story haven't I U Miss born one kind of flopped a little bit all right I'll go on tangent mode um I'll finish my story then I'll go in Tangent mode uh someone came through my line and said wow I love I love Miss born um it I magnino is my favorite super villain and you just did a wonderful job of having Magneto powers and I went I created Magneto just with more steps um it's not that original he's even my favorite super villain I love Magneto and I just created Magneto um and I'm like what made it so interest like why was it so much fun to write if it was just copying somebody else and I realized it was in the limitations the the flaws uh and by flaws I mean uh limitations and hindrances and uh costs uh and flaws themselves um and I realized what made it interesting was because because you couldn't just move anything anywhere which magnito kind of can the characters had to position themselves in in specific ways and they had to account for the the uh the costs um the limitations of the magic only being able to push directly away from you or pull directly towards you having to take into account the various weights uh and it sounds all very finically when you explain it but in the story it makes the characters have to be strategic in their application of the of the magic and it turned out to be a lot of fun to write and it turned out to be a lot of fun to read so because of this um I realized that flaws are more interesting than Powers rather than racking my brain for new and original Powers I found that if I focused on new and original limitations to a magic um that the characters had to use in interesting ways the magic just got way more interesting um like kaladin can basically just fly poorly right he he's got the superpower of flight but bad yet it's so much more interesting to write than just a character can fly um because he's having to make certain decisions and apply certain skills to being able to use his bad flight and because of that the reader can anticipate what it can do and what its limitations are and it becomes way more interesting to read because of that this is a large scale rule that we're going to get into in a second but I'm going to tell you my tangent um so oh boy I gotta be careful we'll run out of time um so miss born one came out and elantas did pretty well uh alant sold 10,000 copies in hard cover um which is really solid it's not um it's not you know breaking down any doors uh bu breaking any records I should say it's not uh it's not you know no one's no one's breaking down my door to get me to sign for more books there's the mixed metaphor I was looking for um but solid Publishers encouraged they paid me $10,000 for it I earned maybe 20 to 30,000 in royalties that's what they like to see um right they they got a good deal they didn't overprint uh so M borne comes along they're like we're going to print a little extra on this right um but I made the decision to not publish um a sequel to launchess but do a new book series and when you're a new writer you have a little extra shine on you and people pay attention particularly back in the day the bookstore days it's less so now when they get Bri's new shelf and be like Oh Brett first book by new author people would buy it um Miss borne didn't uh it sold like 8,000 copies then the paperback of Miss borne came out a really bad cover um love my color illustrator he did wonderful work on on the others but that paperback just didn't land and then it just sank like a stone and so that's the closest my uh career came to just completely uh completely dying um and it recovered because I convinced them to put a new p uh cover on uh misbourne to release a $5 Edition uh and we pushed really hard for a package and that paperback took off and sold really well to the point that mistborn 2 see back in the day the bookstores they would look and they say well this first book sold 10,000 second book sold 8,000 just to be sure we'll order 6,000 of mbor 2 and that's what they did but then it instantly sold out and they had to reprint until it ended up selling like 12 or 14 uh and so that's when that's when my career that's when things started to take off and then mbor 3 became a bestseller so um so yeah that's the close I've ever come to my career completely flopping oh you don't have to clap for me um I got lucky um part of it was having a really good Agent who was like uh yeah this is probably the cover the book is really solid people who are reading it love it uh we need to get this book into the right hands and we need to recover this and then him going and fighting to get a new cover on that and the $5 addition was my idea um Robert Jordan had done that once uh with eye of the world and so uh I guess it was his idea uh yeah so don't applaud uh just uh it's it's it's scary those are those first few books sorry Rachel are scary uh they are scary all right flaws versus Powers uh this is this is a larger than just um magic system thing as well I said this is a character thing your characters will generally be more interesting in what they can't do or won't let themselves do than in what they can do uh super Superman is the classic example of this Superman has like three different stories that people tell about Superman that are really good what are they centered around someone has Kryptonite there's a monster stronger than Superman holy cow or ah slow Lane's not in love with me and my Powers most of the time depending on who's writing me don't let me have anything to do with that I have to interact as a normal human being and I don't know how to do that with Lois Lane my Powers don't help me um this is not a coincidence right most of the most powerful stories told hit characters where they're weak Lord of the Rings Works in part because it's not Aragorn or Gandalf who have to carry the ring it's Frodo who has to carry the ring right what happens Gandalf has to go up against someone stronger than Gandalf in Saron who's been in anced you know through the powers of evil um and who was always Gandalf Superior and then the balog who's like equally matched to him right like Gandalf has to face uh challenges bigger than him um Aragorn gimble and leg Los they just got to fight armies you know um and those are barely a challenge to them by the way Lord of the Rings meme of the week for those who love it uh in the movies uh there's that great standoff where Aragorn and everybody's like drawing the forces of Mordor you know and they've chopped the head off the mouth of s for some reason um um and you know they're there and Aragorn yells for froo and starts running I saw a meme that then cuts to the soldiers behind them and they're like for who dressing the audience a little bit there Aragorn yeah nobody knows who froto is they're not supposed to you shouldn't be yelling his name dramatic moment though um when you're building your magic systems asking yourself what the magic cannot do or you know splitting up so what are the costs of the magic your cost of your magic is going to have a deep influence on your magic system it can be like Dune and mistborn an economic cost on one hand uh it is expensive there's a material cost you have to do this it can be have a physical cost it can just be hard to use you can have an intellectual cost you have to learn to use it um it can have other kind of mystical costs like but those will how big the costs are will influence how you use the magic the one I always joke with is like if you have a magic that's really powerful but each time you use it one of your grandparents has to die you can use that magic as limited number of times and it's a very different sort of story than oh no I'm going to run out of metal um do be aware that some of the costs you have to be careful with because um how much metal a character has or how much strength a character has is very similar to how many bullets are in the gun of a gunslinger and an old western the reader kind of understands that they're going to run out of narrative at narratively appropriate uh moments you want to be careful not to show the hand of the author too much by at least having the character say I'm almost out I'm running low I can maybe do a little bit more Let Let the reader be able to gauge how much that is usually that's better than adding a number to it that they have to track but sometimes having a number like you know the I have four bullets left can be really effective okay um I'm going to get through all this before I go questions so costs costs are very useful and help helping limit um but you know um Flaws by my definition flaws are the things that the reader is expected to expect the characters to overcome come so in a magic system a flaw to a magic system might be the things that we're talking about where we highlight early on hey the magic can't do this except sometimes it can well we're going to have to figure out and overcome and fix that flaw in the magic um aess is a flawed magic system story The Magic used to work it no longer does we have to figure out how to make it work narratively for me a flaw is we you expect the characters to fix this and they um whereas you have limitations on a magic are just what the magic can and can't do you know alaman pushes directly away from you pulls directly towards you you're not expecting the reader the characters to figure out a way around that or to you know to to fix that that just exists and they're going to use that and have to manipulate it and uh it's part of the magic system and then there's the sort of hindrances thing uh which for magic systems is a little bit different um I always think of the hindrances of the you know the lines that you don't want to cross but that you could if you really wanted to and we aren't sure if we want the characters to cross them or not um but these are all different things that you can add to a magic system and generally these will be where your story lies and where the flaws the limitations uh the costs are they will not with what the powers can do what the ring can do is make saaron super powerful what the flaws and limitations are are where the story is it can be destroyed by throwing it in Mount Doom Argo we're going to try to make use of that um that flaw in the one ring that is actually an advantage to us we're going to fix it we're going to break the thing okay questions on flaws being more interesting than Powers you had one yeah I just was actually going to make a comment there is a story called the misenchanted sword that's a really good example of the cost it's about a sword that can only be drawn so many times and once they pass that threshold it turns and kills the wielder and finds a new owner yeah is that oh yeah I've read about I've read that story was that elre the camp who wrote that I can't remember it was from my yeah it's a classic uh we should look that up uh it's a good story yeah um so the story was called the misenchanted sword the misenchanted sword who wrote it lawence Wat okay Lawrence wat Evans okay oh yeah I I know Lawrence um yeah okay I should know that I know Lawrence sorry Lawrence um it's a good story uh reminds me of the uh the saberhagen swords books which had some interesting things back in the 80s um so yeah uh other comments or questions we'll go here and then here differentiate differentiating hindrances from flaws could something maybe start as a flaw where you think it needs to be fixed but then it turns out it's more of a hindrance yes exactly you can change these starts as a flaw then you realize no we want this um the classic example of this is um a lot of stories you'll you'll have the story where they realize if they solve the flaw something worse happens this is here for a reason and then they decide to work around it instead or to keep it or to not take that extra step uh that happens a ton uh no I won't give spoilers but I've done it before and a very large uh and important uh work that I worked on so yeah um do you have any tips on catering your flaw your flaws in your magic system towards the characters or oh yeah flaws in the magic system toward characters um do I have any tips on doing that I say it's generally a good idea um this is often where you pull theme Into Your World building is by matching the magic system in some way to your characters um and to the kind of story at large um and when you start pulling those things in with your world building then it you can really build theme and whatnot like you know Paul at trates Right comes from a land of water he then needs to go to Dune where there is no water except the magical water that he needs to drink in order to become uh you know Lis Al um right and so suddenly the mag like his background and one of the major sources of the magic are intertwined in interesting ways and you start to build theme of Water of Life blood being water what will return water to Dune um should we do this and all of that stuff comes out of just building into the magic system these um these limitations these aspects of it that relate to character um and this is this is you know this is great stuff uh you can do this so yes I would just caution of put too many flaws how do you like how do you how do you make sure not to do too many flaws your uh beta readers will help you with this but yeah you can over you could basically this is where sanderson's thirdd law comes into play you can over complicate your worlds real fast um and you got to be careful about this usually a couple of elegant rules are way more viable than 30 very interesting but finicky rules um and that goes for both flaws and Powers um you know the length of the series depends on how much you can get but I'll tell the story um with sanderson's third law about that in a minute here so all right all right last question on this one I talked way too long on sanderson's first law yeah so you want flawed characters and also flaws in Magic systems would you advise against having a flawed character with the flawed magic system is that like Rel to that too many flaws no uh the question is would you would I avoid having a flawed character with a flawed magic system no uh definitely not every character should have some sort they don't have to be they don't have to be flaw flaws they can be any one of the kind of four things that I'm talking about but the most interesting characters have these uh problems the most interesting magic systems have these problems um I would say that your most interesting stories happen at the intersection of those things um right like um yeah uh name of the wind is partially compelling because quo is a deeply flawed character and he's searching for a magism that he does not understand in a world where he's used to being able to explain the magic using rules because name of the wind has a soft and a hard magic and he's really good at the Hard magic and he wants to learn the soft magic and it's beyond his reach because of the way he his mind um and his desires work but it's like the mythical Muse that he chases and so he spends I'm going to guess all three books but at least two of the books chasing don't laugh Pat is trying he really is um he's chasing this thing that he can't quite have and it's deeply troubling to him and that's part of what makes those books work so um all right we we got a few minutes left so we're going to do sanderson's third law uh after Miss Bourne took off and got um uh started hitting the bestseller list and War breaker came out people started asking me what my next uh book series was going to be and I started telling them about the way of Kings um this is in part because for whatever reason Amazon figured out that I was going to write a book called The Way of Kings I can't get in now when they have five minutes but they put up a listing for it um and so my fans started saying what's the way of Kings I'm like oh it's my giant fantasy epic uh it's going to be my Magnum open they're like oh and then they'd be like mbor had three magic systems how many Magic systems does Stormlight have and I'd be like 30 uh and I got pulled into this hype of bigger is better um and this is really dangerous because you want to be giving people more and more and more uh but if uh movies have taught us super hero movies T us anything more villains don't make for better stories right um and indeed more magism don't necessarily make for better uh stories um and what I realized I was kind of going crazy uh and part of the reason that uh way of King's Prime had failed it's because I tried to do 10 character arcs and way of Kings when I wrote it worked better because I really focused on a couple of character arcs and in the same way I focused on a couple of aspects of the magic uh and I started using this rule uh to tell myself to make sure that instead of adding something new I explore what I already have uh there's lots of depth to explore to changing simple things simple rules uh to physics change you can write entire books about small changes and so it doesn't mean you can't add new things it just means before you do ask yourself can I do more with what I have example of this if you've got a really in um religion in your books and you're going to be adding you know another culture with a different religion often first ask yourself okay can I take what I have the religion I have would it be more interesting if these were two different branches of the same religion such as Judaism and Christianity um does that add to my story and a lot of times the answer will be oh yeah it adds way more interesting sort of interconnective to have these two magic uh these two religions be cousin religions um because it adds kind of this different kind of take on some things that happened and different Phil uh philosophical takes on History um with your magic before you say you know I'm going to add a new complete magic system say if I really explored every aspect of my magic system can I make a character who uses it in a different way and in a different interesting way can I explore that instead what you want to avoid is I referenced Skyrim earlier um in the Elder Scroll series they they tend to be pretty good games but some of the earlier games had this problem where like I remember when I played Daggerfall this is how old I am okay I played Daggerfall um back when like it took yeah I I played Daggerfall and Daggerfall had this uh this thing where it had like 10,000 dungeons it was my first experience with procedural generation it was 10,000 dungeons that repeat the same 50 uh different elements 10,000 different ways so if you went through one the second one was already boring and um early games had this problem they would say it is an ocean an inch deep you want to avoid having your world building be an ocean an inch deep and instead you want to have a handcrafted in the newer you know Skyrim gam is like we put in you know 50 dungeons and make them all really good we have a better game save your questions on this I'll give you a chance to dig into second and third law questions next week um when we get then go into more World building stuff so thank you all very much and I'll see you next week hopefully I'll be better by then