Frequently Asked Questions on Writing Plot - Brandon Sanderson's Writing Lecture #4.5 (2025)

0:00 BRANDON: Welcome to our Bonus Q&A on Plot—Web Exclusive. You have some excellent questions. We touch on digging deeper into plot archetypes and frameworks. We touch on video games and writing for video games kind of briefly. We talk about layering conflicts. And we dig into why does Dune work when Paul Atreides really never fails at anything he tries. So enjoy this companion Q&A session on plot to my lecture series. I hope you enjoy it. This is our Q&A on plot with questions from YouTube right here in my hand as our bonus for you. Thank you for including all these questions for us. I've got eight of them here that I'm going to go through, and we'll see where we are at that point. "My question is, how do you effectively write a betrayal arc? How do you make it hit hard and resonate with the audience?

1:00 And how do you make the falling out feel realistic without drawing too much attention to it? I'd like my main character to not realize it's happening until it's too late." So, making a betrayal arc work really well is probably going to involve writing a relationship plot but then having it go wrong. And I maybe didn't emphasize this enough in my original lectures. All of the different sort of plot arcs can go wrong. They can turn sour in some way.

1:34 For instance, you can have an arc that is built around an information arc, a mystery, where the characters come to the wrong conclusion, and then there are problems after the fact. You can have a relationship arc where people start off really well matched to each other. And if it's not a romance, it's a betrayal arc between two friends, you show how these characters work well together. And then instead of braiding the roses, you have those roses keep stabbing each other. You show how their motivations are diverging. Right? And how it's turning sour because they keep running afoul of each other instead of helping each other. And if it's going to be a character kind of turning on the protagonist, you show that they're getting more and more disgruntled. You really want the early part, therefore, to show how good they are together. Like in this sort of arc, you've maybe even skipped some of the getting to know each other so that they are already--you're starting the book with these are two friends and you hit hard why they work well together. You can coast a long ways on that. If you do it well, readers will assume that they're best friends and will, even as those cracks start to appear, will ignore them because they are such good best friends.

2:59 Particularly remember your reader will follow the character's attention. So if the primary character is still thinking about their friend as a very good friend, it will cover up the actual actions, which are the show that these things are going worse and worse until that betrayal happens. And then just make sure that your motivations really make sense. The reason that someone, they would turn against each other, that they've got a solid reason that you're like, "I should have seen that." It works like basically any other twist. You're foreshadowing that it's a relationship plot, that they're getting along. But then behind the scenes you are actually breaking that, so when it happens it's surprising yet inevitable. That is my recommendation on that one.

3:42 "Question. How do you balance and promise bittersweet endings?" I would recommend that if you're shooting for bittersweet that your story makes it clear early on that this is the sort of world where things don't always turn out exactly as you want them to, as the reader might. And you do this in a lot of different ways. You show that life is pretty hard in this place. You show that friends have died in the past, or that there are casualties in the middle of the book. You make sure that, you know, you're focused on some accomplishments and some failures so that it feels very realistic when these sorts of things happen. I think that the balance really comes down to, for me, oftentimes I'm watching my beta readers a lot with this. I'm watching and saying, "All right. How much of the bitter is coming through and how much of the sweet is coming through? Do I need to change that balance in any way, or am I pleased with how that balance is?" I find that as long as the personal accomplishment of the characters have happened, like they have achieved something personally, that they've made progress, people tend to take those as more sweet than bitter. Meaning if they fail in the main capital P Plot, but in the lowercase p they've grown and become a better person, we tend to be pretty cool with that. The reverse still can work, but those tend to feel more bitter than sweet when the character has accomplished the big P Plot, but it has cost them personally. So an example of this, Lord of the Rings ending is bittersweet. The capital P Plot has been accomplished, but Frodo is basically destroyed as a person. And that, really the bitter comes out really powerfully in that, particularly in the films where they cut things like the scouring and things like that, so you're just left with Frodo can't live a normal life anymore. And you'll notice how that feels triumphant but very bitter. The reverse in the sort of Hollywood thing where it's like, "I accomplished my own personal goals, but I die achieving the capital P," those tend to feel very triumphant. Even though the character has died, because they have fulfilled their kind of personal motives and things like that, their character arc has come to fruition, those feel much more triumphant than bitter, just in my experience. So that might help you with balancing how those work. You can, of course, make either of those types of endings have more bitter or more sweet, depending. "Can I talk about layering conflict more?

6:27 Which is to say giving the POV character both internal and external conflict in a scene and blending those conflicts to create something even more dynamic and satisfying." Sure. This is one of my favorite things to do, so I am happy to talk about this one. I love it when stories do this. I love doing it in my own stories. This comes with good signposting. Right? Early on making the promises and showing this is what the character is doing and then making sure you're showing that progress along the way. And often with a good character arc, you're going to have some serious failures in there. And we'll talk about characters in coming weeks. But the idea with a good, you know, character arc is you need to show why this is legitimately a flaw, why it's legitimately something that they need to work on or work around, why the handicap, the flaw, or the problems that they're dealing with. And you want to make sure that we understand what is supposed to be triumphant about that. Going back to Star Wars, which is the kind of Ur example that I use a lot because so many people have seen it. We do get to see Luke get zapped by the thing, unable to trust in the Force quite yet before we see him be triumphantly accepting and embracing his destiny. We get to see Obi-wan say, "You need to learn the ways of the Force," just at the beginning as your promise. Luke is going to learn the ways of the Force, and this is relevant to his story. You get to see that Luke isn't enough to face Darth Vader yet, and that Obi-wan is going to have to die in order to protect him because he's not ready for that challenge yet. All of these things build to Luke taking that first step to become a Jedi at the end of the first movie. And what makes that really satisfying is we have already set up in that same scene with your promises that shooting, you know, down the tube without the Force is really, really difficult. And oh, it didn't go in. It didn't work. You need that extra boost.

8:42 I always like to make sure that I'm doing a little bit of each of these things periodically through my story, that I'm not just batching it all and being like, here we're doing all the character stuff, and then we're done with that. We're moving on. I like to move it through and seed it. And one of the nice things you can do with this is the character flaw, the character handicap, the things they're working on, the internal conflict, whether, again, it's something that they need to change, or something they just need to learn to work with, is causing the conflict through the middle of the story. The challenge in this is we don't want to make us dislike the character. And that's, I would say, your big challenge in this. Sometimes that happens where you get really frustrated with the character because they have this flaw that seems like you know like, "Just deal with it!" And this comes down to making sure that we understand and like the character and understand why this flaw exists, and we relate it to something very human that we all have, and so that when this character, you know, is too shy to do what they need to do and that's, you know, the thing that they're working on, or whatever it is, when that moment happens and there is failure because of it causing further complication and conflict, that as an author we are quick to have them acknowledge, "I need to get over this. I can't keep letting this stand in my way." Or at least having the narrative recognize that. To let us know, to hang that lantern on, yes, this character's working on this. This is really important. You should be a little frustrated but do try to be understanding. So that when it does kind of come to fruition at the end it's a stand-up-and-cheer moment. That said, once again, you can have them just never get over it.

10:34 People will get frustrated with the character, but in that case you kind of lean into other reasons that people would like the character, because a little frustration can be a good thing. Watch my character lecture that's coming up very soon. We'll talk about those ideas. And really try to hit those beats and try to give us a one-two punch at the end where your plot structure comes together. And oftentimes you kind of want to set it up so that some big problem that the character's flaw caused is going to happen again, and it'll be an even bigger problem.

11:09 And this time they get over it. Luke, not being able to, you know, block the light saber thing, the little bolts of light saber, he gets stung on the ankle. But now he doesn't trust the Force. The entire Rebel faction is going to get blown up. The stakes are bigger. He can't afford to fail this time. But fortunately, he's been learning and paying attention, and he gets that little push from Obi-wan, and he decides to trust. For Luke it's that step into the darkness, being willing to hope that he will be able to walk forward through darkness and find his way anyway.

11:43 "In your lectures on plot you use a lot of good examples, but I noticed a lot of them come from movies. Hey! My question is what plot elements should we as writers take into account that maybe movies don't? What are the benefits of the written word when it comes specifically to plotting?" Yeah, what an excellent question. I do use movies a lot because they tend to be--people have watched them more. You know, you can count on people watching them. They take two hours instead of 10 to 50 hours. And beyond that, they do have to condense all of the stuff, so they tend to hit the beats in more clear ways. Books have a lot more space. But that is to your advantage.

12:20 So a couple of things that books do better than film. Number one, being inside a character's head, either through a first person or a third person limited or even an omniscient gives you so many advantages. You can use it too much. You can do what we call navel gazing, where pages and pages pass of just the character ruminating on things. And we're all guilty of this in writing because it is one of the strengths of writing that you immediately get to see what the character feels and thinks about a situation. That immediately helps us connect to the character in ways, you know--. In film they have to--Luke has to look wistfully up at the suns and think that "Man, I wish that I could go out in the stars." You can't hear him think that. In Dune you can hear Paul Atreides thinking about, you know, the dangers of Dune and how he misses his home planet and all of these things. You're right there in his head and you can see it. And that can create an instant sort of connection there. Books, we have a lot more space to play with, and this allows us to do more of this, or to have more scenes reinforcing the same ideas. in film, you have three hours at most, most films two hours, some 90 minutes. So you've got to hit those beats hard, and you've got to him them kind of obviously. In books, you can slow burn on some of these things. You can have more failures. You can have more steps backward, when you do the one step forward two steps backward sort of things. There is so much that you can do that doesn't have to relate directly to any of these things. You can use more time on side characters if you want. So space and viewpoint are two big ones that are advantages to books. And then I would say an advantage to books is also a disadvantage wrapped up in one. That is that there aren't visuals to go along with it. and so you can count on the reader to fill in blanks for you. in fact, you have to. That makes the reader participatory in the practice in a way that film, they're more of an observer. In a book they're more of a participant. And you can, in your stories, make use of this by using broad brush strokes to paint characters and say, give one identifying feature and let the reader fill in the rest if that's the way that you want to tell your stories. You just have a lot of flexibility in the way you use voice and things like that. So we will try to get a lecture on voice.

15:05 But there's two things. You asked specifically what the benefits are when it comes to plotting. Specifically, it is that you can do more. You can have more failures. You can have more successes. You can meander more and get there. It lets you have more red herrings, and it lets you have twists, be in some ways more spectacular, because there's just so much more going on in a book. "How does what is being taught translate to writing for video games? What to look out for when watching your lectures? What are some good examples of writing that can be found in video games?" So video games are such a huge topic.

15:42 It is difficult to talk about in reference to plot specifically because plot is one of the places where video games are, by necessity, putting the player in control. A lot of the best examples of storytelling in video games are when the player gets to make some big decision that has huge ramifications on the story. Otherwise, a lot of the best storytelling in video games, there's like a continuum. Right? On one side you have only doing environmental storytelling. Right?

16:18 Like Elden Ring likes to do, where the story is only how you piece it together and engage with it as you're getting it through little bits of lore. And then all the way over here, we have the genre affectionately called walking simulators, where you're walking through a movie that is happening. The interactive elements are kind of moved to the back seat. And really, a lot of walking simulators, your ability to influence the plot is really kind of minimal. What you get to influence is how quickly you move through it, and things like that. Like the famous one, which isn't walking, the famous VR one where the story plays out every time you blink it changes scenes. And so you keep your eyes open long enough to experience a scene, but occasionally you blink, and that scene ends. You know, that's something that no other genre could do. But you can see how your control as a player over that is only minimal in how you blink. But that becomes the whole mechanic. It's really brilliant. So how does what I'm talking about translate to video games? I would focus on what are your payoffs for your story? Like, what kind of experiences. Your payoff in the video game, something like in Mass Effect, where you have this huge payoff in that you're going to make a decision at the end of the story that is going to have deep ramifications for this team of people that you've come to love, that you've built over time, is that your big moment where the player volition has an effect.

17:56 And how can you then earn that in Mass Effect? They earn it by making sure that you love all the side characters, so that when you're making big decisions about how their lives might play out, then you care because you like them all. And so interweaving narrative, plot, and game mechanics would be my number one recommendation for how you make a video game plot work and interesting. I like how a lot of video games kind of start with game mechanics and then design storytelling to match the game mechanics. This is just something that you would think is not very cool. You're not putting the story in the forefront. But I think it actually is really cool for video games. An example of this would be where video games make your death diegetic, such as in Borderlands.

18:56 Right? Borderlands, they have a machine that brings people back to life. And this machine brings you back to life and charges you money for resurrecting you. And it becomes a way that jokes are really fun. The second game, which is the strongest, has a scene where the bad guy pays you to go jump off a cliff, knowing you'll come back to life, but he just wants to see if you'll do it, and he makes fun of you the whole way. You get a quest to jump off a cliff. And then he's like, "I can't believe you did that. Here's your money." It's really funny. It's really morbid.

19:34 It plays into the game mechanics, and things like that. and so I like when that happens. Of course, the big problem Borderlands then has is, the same problem that Final Fantasy has, which is it sometimes likes to kill characters and cut scenes in a world where death has been proven to be not a permanent thing, and then suddenly it is in this one instance, for reasons that are just narrative. And that always bugs me in video games. So there you are. There's some rants on video games and plot. If you are going to make a big, important cut scene where a character dies permanently, you know, come up with a reason why they can't just be resurrected by a Phoenix down that you have 99 of in your--. You can tell? It's only been how many years? It's only been 20-plus years since that happened and I'm like, "I've got 99 of these things. This is the character I leveled up the most. You are totally ruining my party. Yes, they got stabbed, but, I mean, I have healing potions. I'm standing right there." So yeah. "You've been talking a lot about plot structure, and I like what you said about tragedies often using the hero's journey, but the hero never takes the final step. I was also thinking about tragedies. But this applies to any story. Is there a case where you want to use try-succeed cycles instead of try-fail cycles?"

20:56 So when I say try-fail cycles, yeah, I think you get it. "If so, in what stories do they work? For example, in Dune, especially in the movie Part 2, Paul succeeds at every attempt he makes to get what he wants. Somehow the plot continues to build." Yes. Excellent. So why does Dune work? Let's analyze this. Why does Dune work? Paul succeeds at every point except the big one at the beginning. Spoilers for Dune. At the beginning, Paul is incapable of saving his father and gets exiled out among the Fremen. He then has a series of huge successes until he succeeds at the end. So there's a couple things going on with Paul. And you are playing into exactly, you've noticed--. Spoilers. Dune is a tragedy. Not. Right? The story of Dune is Paul resisting becoming like the Harkonnen in order to bring down the Harkonnen, and he fails. Right? He leaves, you know, the life that he thinks that he wants, being a good person, and he instead builds an army bent on vengeance and unleashes them upon the galaxy in order to get his revenge. The story of Dune is the story of Paul's downfall. So on one hand we have, plot-wise, he is succeeding. But we learn that we don't want to. It's that whole promising someone a car but giving them an airplane. Right? At the end we realize we didn't want Paul to succeed in all this. He's become a villain through doing this. And he's more complex than that. That's why Dune is so great. But you have this huge failure at the beginning. You give us what you think you want, which is revenge. and then you show us through the course of the rest of the story that we probably shouldn't have wanted that, that the Fremen are overly brutal. And unleashing them as you have is a terrible solution to a terrible problem. And maybe there was no better solution, but it's still terrible. And that's heartbreaking. And so why Dune, I think, works is because of that.

23:24 You are slowly coming to realize that you are not watching the hero's origin story. You're watching a villain's origin story. And it's just really subtle and brilliantly accomplished. And, you know, showing him resist trying to use the Bene Gesserit's manipulation of the Fremen and eventually deciding, "I am going to be their prophet, even though I know that I'm not actually the prophet. This is all made up. I am still going to manipulate their religion in order to get what I want." It's really a kind of a master class in how to do this specific thing. And it's very dangerous to attempt. But if you do it well, it makes you stand out very well. So yes, you would say the try-succeed cycle. In this case it works because Paul is trying and succeeding. But the kind of hidden plot is you realize that you don't want him to by the end of it. But let's point out that you can do it in other ways. Another common example, I would say, of a try-succeed cycle is, let's use Dirk Pitt. Let's use a book example. Dirk Pitt the book series, if you haven't read it, there was one movie. It was called Sahara. It was actually a really good movie, but it came out at the wrong time, right around 9/11. And so I do recommend you watch it. It has as the riff tracks people say, the world's most shirtless man, Matthew McConaughey, in a very good role. And it's a good adaptation of the Dirk Pitt novels. What are the Dirk Pitt novels? The Dirk Pitt novels are all about watching competent people be extra competent. We as readers, competence is one of the things that draws us to people. And you'll see in my lectures coming up on character that there is a danger in this, in that we sometimes bond to villains because they are so competent, when the heroes are kind of, you know, meandering their way through learning to be competent. But we really like competence. And sometimes some books are built around the idea of a highly competent character facing only external conflicts and largely succeeding on them. Why does this work?

25:41 Well, if you make the problem big enough and the threats dangerous enough, if at any point failure leads to death and destruction, and the stakes are high intense, and the competence is played very competently-- Dune does this as well--you won't mind that they're succeeding at every point because the author is making the stakes and the dangers and the difficulty of what's being accomplished so very dire at all turns, that you're on the edge of your seat wondering if this is the time that the person will fall. You know, when you're watching trapeze, you know, the high wire act, they will play it up. Because you know they're not going to fall. They never fall. But you always wonder if they will. And that's the question for some of these acts. And that works very well. Dirk Pitt is all about Dirk Pitt being awesome. He is awesome at every turn, and he rarely fails in anything. And they're very readable. And so it is a good question to ask. Those are two very good book examples of how you can have something that is try-succeed rather than try-fail. You will often find in these books that a character will succeed but realize that the scope of what they need to succeed in has now gotten greater. I've done this thing.

27:00 Frodo has gotten the ring to Rivendell. But then realizes, "No, I need to go further. This was only the prelude." And, you know, Frodo does succeed in that. There's not a failure. There's a bunch of near failures, but there's no failures in getting that ring to Rivendell. But then he realizes it needs to go much, much further. And that expansion of scope is another way to help with the kind of try-succeed cycle. What an excellent question. Really some great analysis on that one.

27:31 "Can Brandon talk about plot archetypes? He mentioned how Mistborn is an interplay of heist, master apprentice, mystery, and romance. how do you use plot archetypes, and how to pick original combinations?" Excellent question. This is only one of the ways that you can tell a story. But I would often say that what works best for plot archetypes is to watch or read a bunch of them and distill them down to different types and subtypes and what you like about them. You know, Mistborn is a heist. But I identified when I was working on Mistborn two very different structures of heists. There is the type of heist where the characters are working hard on this big problem, pulling off this heist, and they get to the end, and then everything gets thrown out the window by a giant disruption. The Italian Job, if you want to watch the new one, excellent heist movie that follows this. And then the characters use the resources that they've done through the first part of the heist in order to solve the problem. So none of this middle space is wasted. You're just using it again. But there is another type of heist. Oceans Eleven is one of these, where they plot a really difficult problem, and then they execute excellently on their plan at the end. Even if there's a few little problems in it, mostly it's just there are complications in what they've planned, and they pull it off brilliantly. And in that you just get to watch the plan unfold and how much fun it is. You'll notice in Oceans Eleven they make sure to use a character who’s not completely in the know to help create some tension in the climax, where you think things are going wrong, but it was the plan all along. But identifying the different types, the different elements, what works best for your story and what doesn't, is one thing that I would do.

29:25 Novels should generally have multiples of these. Deciding which one relates more to your character arcs, which one relates more to your capital P, what is the big stakes of this story. Spoilers for Mistborn, but Mistborn turns from a heist into one of your classic sort of revolution narratives by the end. And the big thing that makes--it's using kind of the structure of The Italian Job, but when things go wrong, it changes to a new plot. It expands the scope and says, "No, we're not here to just rob the world. We're here to save the world." And that transition between tropes is also what makes Knives Out so brilliant, where it transitions from whodunit to cat and mouse mystery, which are two different types of mystery. Knives Out is another excellent example. Whodunit is the mystery where it's like you're trying to figure out who was behind this. Cat and mouse is where you have a protagonist who is the villain, who is trying to stay away from the cat who is chasing them. And it can be told either way. But The Fugitive is the classic example of cat and mouse, where it is a kind of whodunit mystery with a cat and mouse on top of it, where he's trying to figure out who the one-armed man is, but really the story, the capital P Plot is can he stay away from Tommy Lee Jones. And Knives Out does the same thing. Not giving spoilers, but midway through you find out who did it, and then we shift to their perspective as they try to stay ahead of the detective. Being able to modulate and switch between these things is what a chef does. Right?

31:09 Knowing that you can take some elements, and you can build toward another, and you can layer them underneath each other. You can take a relationship plot, and you can twist it into a betrayal plot, as another question asked. This is the sort of things that I would like you as students to be practicing and learning and paying attention to. And so how do you find the combinations? Try them. Swapping genres helps a lot. Mixing and matching and just trying and seeing what works. You know, Mistborn is my second attempt at Mistborn, the one that you have read, and the first one didn't work so well. And so sometimes you just need to fail a few times. You need to have your own try-fail cycles before you can have your succeed cycles. "I have a question about the scale of plot. Almost any story can be expanded or shrunk massively by removing or adding characters, plot lines, mini arcs, and so on. For example, without the use of Saruman, it might be possible to take a few hundred pages less time for the good guys to win. This also especially extends to how many POVs you tell in your story. So how do I know how much I should expand my story, or more importantly, how much should I shrink it? How do I know what scale my story should be for the best end result?"

32:25 Excellent question. So part of this is based on how much space you have. Are you writing a short story, a novella, or a novel? As a newer writer, your answer might be, "I don't know, Brandon." Well, practice will get you there. You'll start to learn how long it will take you to tell a story. Usually, professional writers, myself included, can tell from our outline. Sometimes as we're writing the book and we get a certain way through the outline or a certain way through the gut instinct, if you're writing as a discovery writer, we're like, "No, it's going to take me longer. I'm going to have to expand the scope of what I'm doing."

33:04 Here's some rules of thumb for you. If you're going over around 120,000 words, the reader is going to expect an escalation in scope. It's hard to go over 120,000 words and make it feel like it's still a small-scale story. That's why most thrillers, most romances, these things, they stay sometimes in the 80,000 to 100,000 word. Not saying you can't do it. But you'll notice as Harry Potter gets longer and longer, the scope expands. It's no longer, "Can I get good enough grades to remain a wizard?" It is, "Can I save the world?" And long books, people tend to expect long scope.

33:47 Now that can be scope in saving the world. It can instead be a lot of historicals instead make the scope about following an entire family across generations or an entire lifetime. That type of scope of just, you know, generational or one person's entire life. But you want to give that weight to some of it if you're going to be going longer than about 120,000, particularly 150,000. Some rules of thumb, like Dune is, I think, like 170,000 to 180,000. Lord of the Rings all together is, like, 300,000-something. So Lord of the Rings,” we just looked it up, around 480,000. So 150,000 per book is giving you kind of that sort of epic scope. But on contrast, technically Christmas Carol is a novella. It's not even a full novel. It's about one person's life hit very quickly. It's just going to depend on what--if you can give the weight that people are expecting for that length of a sit-down. Do understand one of the big shifts that happens here, and why this happens to people, is that a book in the 80,000 to 100,000 range, a person can conceivably read in one day. A lot of the faster readers, they'll read that in five to eight hours. And the fast readers, like, they'll sit down and that's one sitting. It's why a lot of thrillers are in that range where it's just like you can pull someone through kind of by their, you know, their teeth. Grab them and just yank them through this story to the end that they're like gasping. And a lot of romance novels are doing that. The gasps are just a different variety. And they're just pulling you through the story real fast. Right? Whereas an epic story, people are putting this book down. And so it's a--they have to digest this book across days, or sometimes months. And you have to build your plot based around the idea that this is going to have break points. People are going to sit down. They're going to enjoy and immerse themselves in the world. But they are not going to read it in one sitting. And that changes how people experience the stories. And it changes how you should be plotting and pacing. I shoot for big, long chapters in Stormlight that when they're done you have had a complete sort of story be told, and you feel fine putting that book down for a while, unless it's at a climactic moment where I'm cutting faster with shorter chapters so that it's pulling you through because short chapters actually pull people through faster than long chapters do.

36:24 So there's some of that. Excellent questions. Very well done. I'm going to do another one of these for you with character, so be preparing your questions. Watch the upcoming lectures on character, then then we'll do another web exclusive. I hope this was useful to you. Thank you so much. Let us know in the comments if this format works for you.