The Busy Writer's Guide to Plotting: How to Build Your Story in 10-Minute Chunks
Brando Sando Lecture Series: Plot Part 2 (2020 Lectures)
Does staring at outline feel like trying to solve a Rubik's cube blindfolded?
You know all the pieces need to fit together, but where do you begin? Especially when you only have small pockets of time to work on your novel. Here's the good news: You don't need long, uninterrupted writing sessions to craft a compelling plot. By breaking your story into smaller, manageable pieces, you can make meaningful progress even if you only have 10 minutes a day.
Brandon Sanderson in Part 2 of his 2020 lecture series provides a wealth of practical tips on how to break your plot down into bit-sized pieces you can work on during your lunch break.
Start with how you want the reader to feel.
Bookstore genres exist for the purpose of marketing, or selling books.
A better way to categorize books would be on how they make you feel. While the bookstore genre gets people through the door, the subgenre keeps asses in the seats.
The Writing Excuses podcast team breaks it down into 11 Elemental Genres. A good rule of thumb is the more elemental genres you include, the longer your book will be. Nearly every book has an element of mystery. Most books will feature some kind of "relationship" plot as the main plot or subplot. By choosing your elemental genres upfront you are forced to make hard decisions about what kind of story you are writing.
New writers often think it'd be cool to start a story with one elemental genre, only to dramatically pull the rug out from under the reader to a different elemental genre. Let’s say we start as Romance and then suddenly switch to Horror.
It's actually the worst thing you can do and will inevitably lead to reader remorse. If you read read Plot Part 1, you should know that staying good on the promises of your genre is essential to making a story satisfying to read.
Start with your elemental genres, everything follows from there.
Develop each plot thread independently.
In his lecture series, Brandon Sanderson lets us in on a little secret: each of his 4,000 page Stormlight Archives books is actually a trilogy packaged as one book. He makes an outline for 3 interconnected books and then combines them together under one cover.
Brandon manages the complexity of his books by breaking everything into smaller pieces and then combining them incrementally as he's writing. In his outline, he creates a header for each elemental genre. Then he focuses on developing the plot beats for the plot thread for that genre in isolation, without having to worry about how it will fit together with everything else.
Writing is an extremely incremental process, the elemental genres are your load bearing beams you'll use to build your story.
Outline backwards so your plot goes somewhere.
Every story I've written has gone absolutely nowhere.
A bunch of cool things happen (at least I think they're cool), but it never culminates into a meaningful finale. It can be demotivating because it feels like the story isn't getting better the more I work on it. So I keep pushing forward, hoping some meaningful conclusion will eventually appear, yet it never does.
That's why it was a revelation hearing that Brandon outlines backwards, starting with the final climactic moment. It makes so much sense, by starting with the end, you know the story is going somewhere. Now, the problem becomes how to create incremental steps of progress towards the finale. Creating incremental steps is a much more tractable problem you can work on, for even just 10 minutes a day.
Be warned, finding your finale will take time and you cannot rush it. A good finale should feel exciting and evoke the target emotion of the elemental genre. Outlines need to develop at a natural pace. You can create fairly accurate timelines when it comes to drafting a completed outline, but there's no knowing how long an outline will take.
In his lecture, Brandon said one outline took him 7 years to get right. In the author's note at the end of Tress of the Emerald Sea, Brandon says he first had the idea for a non-liquid ocean over 15 years ago.
Give yourself the time and space to find your awesome ending.
Plot Archetypes as template for story.
As Shakespeare said, "there is nothing new under the sun."
The stories that have survived the test of time survived because they work. Don't waste your time trying to reinvent the wheel, use what's out there.
Brandon calls these forms "plot archetypes." In his lecture, he uses the example of the Heist plot archetype, where a group of specialists steal a thing, as in the movies "The Italian Job" and "Ocean's 11." He recommends choosing a plot archetype from a different bookstore genre as your book. He used the heist archetype in his epic fantasy novel “Mistborn: The Final Empire.”
The plot archetype functions as a template for your story.
I'd recommend you check out "Romancing the Beat" by Gwen Hayes, a deep dive into the romance plot archetype and how it works. (Writing Excuses uses the broader term of relationship plot, instead of romance, because the same structure applies to buddy cop and master-apprentice plots.)
A story is fresh when it blends existing elements in new and surprising ways. That's why Brandon recommends studying your plot archetype. Watch movies and read books, take notes on what has been done, and how they pulled it off. Now try combining it together in a way that serves the plot thread you're developing. You are a chef, experimenting in the kitchen with different story recipes.
When working on a plot thread, ask yourself, what plot archetype is this?
Plot Types are scaffolding to help organize your story.
If a plot archetype is for developing a thread of a story, the plot type is a container to hold your entire story.
An example of a plot type is the 3 Act structure. My favorite plot type is The Heroine's Journey by Maureen Murdock, I would highly recommend you give this one a try. The goal of the plot type is to work as a global organizing principle to ensure the main character undergoes change and tension. Brandon recommends deploying a plot type in your outline as a way to help you bring everything together.
Use the tools available to you as a writer to make it easier to formulate your outline.
Brandon Sanderson, today as I am writing this, posted the first video in his new 2025 lecture series. This effectively makes my posts on his 2020 lecture obsolete. Facepalm.
So, I have decided to start over at the beginning and write about the 2025 lecture series. Having watched the first video in the 2025 series, I can already say it’s going to be really great. Every lecture is packed with insights and actionable advice. I can’t wait to condense it down into articles.