3 fundamentals for crafting plot according to Brandon Sanderson
Brando Sando Lecture Series: Plot Part 1
Creating a coherent plot while balancing a full-time career feels like solving a Rubik's cube in the dark.
Science Fiction and Fantasy writers tend to prefer outlines to plan their novels. Without a solid framework for building your outline, you risk losing precious writing time to plot holes and dead ends. This is the first post in my series covering Brandon Sanderon's 2020 lectures at BYU, today we will be covering Plot Part 1.
Today, we're exploring Brandon Sanderson's three plotting fundamentals that will help you write an outline that will save you time in writing your novel.
Fundamental #1: Promises
Where do you begin an outline?
Brandon Sanderson recommends figuring out your promises first. Your story promises are the expectations you place in the reader's mind to play off later.
George Saunders uses the analogy of juggling. When you introduce an element to the story it's like a juggler throwing a bowling pin in the air. Now the reader is eagerly waiting to see when it will come down. The tension in a story comes down to how you treat these expectations.
That's why Brandon likes to begin his outlines by placing story beats underneath the corresponding promise to make sure we are always making progress, more on that later. The main reason readers lose interest in a story, even when exciting things are happening, is because they feel like progress is not being made on the promises. After he's gotten his beats by promise, he will move his story beats in chronological order organized by sections. More information can be found on his outline for the novel Skyward (provided on the writing advice page on his website). I will also go more in depth in Part 2 of plotting.
Figuring out your promise first is useful as a unifying organizing principle, once you know your promise it's easier to tell what does or does not belong in your story. You can simply ask yourself, is this making progress on one of my promises?
You can also start with your progress beats and then figure out your promise. He organizes his promises into a few different categories we will go through below.
Most of the time, a book is not one idea. This is where newer authors sometimes have problems. They pick one really good idea and they try to write a book on it. You can write a short story on one idea pretty well. A book generally needs a mashing together of multiple ideas.
— Brandon Sanderson
Tone Promises
The tone of the writing is the vibe it gives off to the reader.
Changes in tone in the same story can be jarring. You wouldn't want to start with romance then all of a sudden it's horror, these are very different reading experiences.
The tone promise shows the reader the kind of experience they can expect the story to be. So be consistent with your tone by starting with a scene that sets the mood for the kind of story you're telling. In Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope, the movie starts with the clone soldiers breaching a spaceship and capturing the princess. The scene conveys we are in for an exciting adventure in space with life and death stakes.
I find it interesting how you can manipulate tone simply by choosing words associated with your target emotion.
Character Arc Promises
The character arc teases the transformation the character will experience over the course of the story.
I will do posts on character later, as there is a lot to be said, but let's summarize. A character's arc has two fundamental components:
The Want: Internal and External wants that keep the character actively progressing through their story.
The Flaw: The internal flaw preventing the character from getting what they want.
The character arc promise would convey the want and flaw. Progress is made by the character getting closer to what they want and being forced to confront their flaws.
Luke Skywalker in A New Hope is introduced as a kid on a farm who wants to be a pilot. When he meets his mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi, we learn he will learn how to use the force and become a jedi. Luke's flaw is foreshadowed by his uncle Owen, who says Luke has "too much of his father in him."
By the end of the story the character will have confronted their flaw, and they will have succeeded or failed in achieving their goal.
Plot Promises
Writers like George Saunders don't like to use the word plot. For literary fiction writers, plot is more often than not an emerging property of character conflict.
For Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers, it's a useful concept to think about on its own. Because the story can have multiple subplots, POV characters, planets, and even span multiple books, it's a helpful organizing principle. Plot involves all of the characters working together, especially if it's an ensemble story (a story about the power of friendship). The scope is broader than just individual characters.
The difficult part is everything must be weaved together in the end. Characters must constantly be making progress on their arcs and the plot simultaneously, in fact the two must feed into each other to make a satisfying story.
A memorable finale will often have a climax across multiple character and plot arcs at the same time.
Umbrella Plot
A useful way to think about plot is the concept of nesting. (A concept that should be familiar to programmers.)
The Umbrella plot is the broadest overarching plot which ties everything together. The subplots exist nested inside of the umbrella plot. We cannot resolve the umbrella plot until the nested subplots are resolved first, in fact the subplots are defined by their nesting.
(The analogous concept in programming would be how local scope can read from global scope, but global scope can’t read from local. Also, we cannot exit the global stack until we exit the local stack.)
A useful example here is the Lord of the Rings franchise. The Umbrella plot is to destroy the one ring to rule them all. Nested inside we have the character arcs of the adventuring party, we have the quests tin the cities they go to along the way. It's not until the very end of the story the ring is destroyed.
Writers should create tension by making the umbrella plot a different genre from the nested plots creating what's called a "Strange Attractor." A strange attractor is something familiar yet different. Brandon describes his book Mistborn: The Final Empire as My Fair Lady crossed with Ocean's 11. With Ocean’s being the umbrella plot and My Fair Lady taking up a good deal of the screentime. Since readers have never seen these things combined before, but the stories are familiar, this makes it a strange attractor.
(Here in the lecture Brandon mentions he covers this in more detail in Season 11 of Writing Excuses. Well, now I’m bingeing these episodes and will write a post about it later.)
The hosts of Writing Excuses mention that writing a sequel usually involves switching up your umbrella and core plot from the previous installation. It allows you to retain the core of the story while adding a new plot archetype (more on this in part 2) to keep things fresh.
Core Plot
The core plot is what keeps the reader turning the page.
It's the questions on the reader's mind they want answered. A common example is how romance is often used to drive forward Urban Fantasy books. The Umbrella Plot may be to defeat the invading aliens, but the question of "will they or won't they get together?" is what keeps the reader engaged.
Making progress on your core plot is the key to getting through the middle section of your book, where you are most likely to lose your readers.
Fundamental #2: Progress
Great authors excel at creating a sense of progress. Exceptional authors find ways to give readers more than they wanted on every page.
A novel is a sort of organized system where every component is interconnected. Every chapter gives the audience a sense of momentum towards a goal, the realization of the character's ambitions and goals.
A common mistake made by beginners in Science Fiction and Fantasy is having info dumps on their magic systems and world building. You need to make the reader interested in your magic system as a way to make progress on your promises.
Let's say your story involves a character learning how to use magic. Then the magic needs to be connected to your core plot or character arc. If you introduce a potential love interest then suddenly start dropping lore about a completely unrelated topic, you are guaranteed you lose your reader.
That’s why Brandon’s entire outlining system is designed around progress. Every plot beat in your novel should be giving the reader progress towards the finale.
Brandon suggests the key to being a successful writer is to master the ability to make progress on your promises.
What you do as an author, if you're building an outline, if you want to outline, is you look at what your plot is, and you say, what are small increments I can make along this path that will be really interesting to the reader, that will show we're making progress, or occasionally backsliding.
— Brandon Sanderson
Fundamental #3: Payoff
Finally we arrive at the realization of the promise, the payoff.
If you fail to properly address the reader's expectations they will leave your story feeling disappointed. But if you fulfill their expectations too neatly then your ending will come off as trite.
In his lecture Brandon uses the example of a boy who is promised a toy car for his birthday. A straightforward telling of the story would have the boy receiving a toy car on his birthday. It's not an interesting story, the thing we said would happen happened.
That's why we need to have twists. A twist is a subtle inversion of a reader's expectation, or, a familiar trope of the genre.
Be warned, use twists when they add value, not for the sake of having a twist.
The truth is, almost every plot that has been done, obviously every plot that you conceive has been done. Most of the ways to buck the trend in those plots involves doing something so unexpected that it breaks your promises. Now that can become a feature of your story. But most of the time, you want to do subtle inversions of the promises.
— Brandon Sanderson
The Plot Expansion Twist
In the plot expansion twist the character gets more than they were expecting.
Going back to our story of a boy being promised a toy car for his birthday. A plot expansion could be the boy receives a car instead. It's especially useful in epic fantasy novels where the goal is to keep increasing the scope of the story after each novel.
If you end up reading Skyward by Brandon Sanderson, or the outline, it has a really great epic fantasy ending that gives you way more than you’re expecting.
The plot expansion is about under promising and over delivering.
The Plot Substitution Twist
The substitution works by giving the character something else than they were expecting, but just as good.
It's harder to pull off than a plot substitution because the reader can become disappointed when the payoff doesn't match the promise. The key to pulling it off is to make the substitution be even better and what the character really needs (even if they don’t want it). To do so you have to convince the reader that the substitution is in fact cooler and good for the main character.
In the toy car example, this could be the kid receiving a different but equally loved toy for his birthday.
Bring it all together
Ideally, the ending is both an expansion and a substitution.
For an example, let's look at Star Wars: A New Hope. The plot promise in the beginning is that Luke will deliver a message from the princess to Alderaan, which gets blown up later in the movie. In the end he rescues the princess and blows up the death star. Rescuing the princess is both an expansion and a substitution of our originally promised ending, delivering a message for the princess. While blowing up the death star expands the plot of the whole series. Luke is now fighting the evil republic as a member of the rebel alliance.
There you have it, the 3 fundamentals of plot. Think of these as a troubleshooting guide to creating your outline. If you notice an issue, maybe there's a problem with your promise? Maybe the beat is not helping to create progress? Keep in mind these tools are designed to help you spot problems in your outline to save you time on revision.