Brandon Sanderon's plot framework and 5 tips for developing the plot of your first novel
Brando Sando 2025 Lecture Series: Promise, Progress, and Payoff
Are you an aspiring novelist but are having trouble understanding where to begin?
In this article, we dive into Brandon Sanderson's lecture on his framework exploring the fundamental components of plot. You'll learn how to play on readers' expectations and deliver a satisfying narrative experience.
But that's not all. We'll also reveal five invaluable tips for developing the plot of your first novel, including:
Why you should rewrite your book's beginning
How to start your book
M\astering pacing by defining your plot type early on
Whether you're a planner or a discovery writer, these strategies will help you refine your storytelling skills and create a novel that stands out in the crowded literary landscape.
Join us as we uncover the secrets to writing a compelling novel that resonates with readers and leaves a lasting impression.
The 3 fundamental components of the story.
Brandon Sanderon breaks stories down in 3 components: Plot, Character, and Setting.
At the intersection is the conflict of your story, conflict creates tension and keeps the reader going. Plot will do most of the work when it comes to generating conflict. For this reason, it's a good place to start because you build everything else around it, also you're likely to use an existing archetype.
Brandon likes to discover his characters as he's writing. When you lock in your characters too early you are at risk of making everything too neat and presupposed, rather than allowing the character and story to react to each other organically.
The 3 components of story ranked by importance:
Character
Plot
Setting (Worldbuilding)
Notice how you can have a great story with weak worldbuilding. A common mistake I see people make is spending way too much time on their worldbuilding.
The 3 components of story ranked by difficulty to innovate:
Plot
Character
Setting (Worldbuilding)
The lesson here is you can go crazy with your worldbuilding, but character and plot are more challenging to innovate. It makes sense when you think about it, story has been around for thousands of years. When you analyze stories, it becomes apparent there are these recurring plot and character archetypes.
For example, the book Dune uses the same plot as Hamlet. Both stories are about an uncle killing the king and seizing the throne and a prince avenging his father. Yet, the setting in Dune makes the story seem different. Like Brandon, Dune is my favorite fantasy novel of all time.
Promise, Progress, and Payoff the theory of plot.
Stories work by playing on the expectations of the reader.
First, the author makes promises to the reader about what kind of story they're reading. It could be a character arc, a humorous tone, or even the packaging itself. For example, a long fantasy book suggests an epic adventure. In genre fiction these promises can be specific tropes. Another example is how Romance novels always end happily ever after.
Progress are the incremental steps made against the promise. Progress is by far the most important of the 3 and it's what keeps reading turning the page.
Finally, payoff is the ending that resolves the promise. The payoff is what the audience is most likely to remember and tell their friends about. Ironically though, it's not what keeps people reading, that's progress.
For further reading, check out my other article where I go more in depth on the topic.
Tip #1: You'll probably need to rewrite the beginning of your book.
People online (including myself) like to talk about pantsing (writing by the seat of your pants) and planning as two different styles of writing. Everyone is on a spectrum between the two. It changes between projects too, different projects require different approaches.
Really, we are all discovery writers, because we discover the book as we write it, even when you create an outline. Think about it, an outline is much shorter than the book. When you are filling in the gaps between your bullet points in your outline you are discovery writing.
A result of discovery writing is the book goes in a new direction as you write than you originally planned. As a result, the promises made at the beginning of the book don't cleanly match the progress being made. That's why it's common in the industry to rewrite the beginning of your book after finishing your first draft.
It's easier to write a perfect promise once you know your ending and how you get there. In fact, you will likely delete much of your early chapters. That's why it's important not to obsess over your opening and focus on moving forward.
Tip #2: How to write the early chapters of your book.
The beginning of your book is the most important part, it's where readers decide whether or not they want to read the whole book.
For a longer book, readers are willing to read further before deciding. Even so, you need to give readers a reason to keep going. In the lecture, two strategies are discussed for how to open your book.
The first is the cold open. You basically tell a miniversion of the whole book in microcosm. Instead of 300 pages, you tell it in 15 pages, with a beginning, middle, and end. The Indiana Jones movies are really good at this. These help give the reader an idea of exactly what kind of experience they are in for.
The cold open prologue has become commonplace in epic fantasy. Epic Fantasy novels tend to have a power fantasy progression element to them where the main character starts out weak (boy on a farm) then becomes a space wizard by the end (Star Wars). This progression is done explicitly in LitRPG novels like Dungeon Crawler Carl. The prologue creates an opportunity for an exciting beginning before we cut to the kid on the farm.
When you want to introduce your main plot at the end of Act 1 or reveal the real enemy at the end of Act 3, a cold open won't always work. The second kind of opening is the character intro. In the character intro the goal is to create a compelling character the reader will want to continue learning about.
The character intro consists of teasing a character's arc:
What do they want?
What do they need?
Why can't they have what they want or need?
Tip #3: Innovation is hard to pull off, but has a higher upside.
Readers of genre fiction have very specific expectations when it comes to how a story will unfold.
Every time you deviate from the convention you earn a figurative red mark. Your goal isn't to get rid of the red marks because they are what makes your story unique. Instead, figure out which red marks are essential to your story, then build everything else around them, ruthlessly cut the rest.
Red marks are how your story differentiates itself from others on the market. Use them deliberately in service of the story you are trying to tell.
For genre fiction readers who tear through novels on Kindle Unlimited, novels that play it safe don't leave a deep impression. When a book innovates in an interesting way, it makes people want to share it with their friends.
When you create a differentiated story it has a higher upside. Meaning when it does well, it has the potential to become a bestseller or go viral. It's the difference between getting fans and superfans.
Don't be afraid to be different, but do so with intention.
Tip #4: The Pacing of your story is closely connected to your tone, plot, and writing style.
Bad pacing is the #1 reason readers put down a book.
What makes pacing difficult to get right is it depends so much on the story and writing style. Stories more focused on a character's internal journey tend to be paced slower. While stories focused on external conflict, like thrillers, are more fast paced. The problem is when the pacing does not match the story.
It's one of those things you need to learn by writing. The kind of pacing you are capable of depends heavily on your writing style and the kind of story you're telling. If something feels off, it could be the pacing does not match your story.
Tip #5: Figure out what kind of plots you are writing as early as possible.
This piece of advice completely changed the way I think about writing: start with the end and work backwards.
When you know where you're going it's easier to make sure everything is relevant. You want to signpost progress to your payoff like bread crumbs along the way. Otherwise, it can feel like things are going nowhere.
More specifically, you need to think deeply about what emotion your ending is meant to evoke. The progress in the book should resonate with the same target emotion. In his podcast Writing Excuses, he breaks down stories by emotion and describes each one in greater detail. I will do a series of posts on this topic at some point.
The same technique works in nonfiction writing. Tell the reader what they'll learn in the title and then make sure each paragraph makes progress on that promise.