The Tools to Make Your Worlds Better - Brandon Sanderson's Writing Lecture #8 (2025)

0:00 BRANDON: This is Brandon Sanderson's How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy course. This week we are talking about worldbuilding, week 2. And I also spent a little extra time slipping a conversation of viewpoint and tense. So I think it'll be very useful to you. And we are still planning a Q&A on character, web exclusive. So if you want to get your questions to me on how to write characters, put them in the comments section of the Q&A on character that we've already done with the class. We'll do a web exclusive for you. Try to watch that lecture and make sure you're not repeating the questions. Hey, everybody! Welcome to Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy! CLASS: (cheering and applause) BRANDON: I am your trained lecture monkey, Brandon Sanderson. I am mostly over my cold, so that's good. CLASS: (cheering) BRANDON: I still can't hear worth beans. Went and saw an ENT today and he's like, "Oh, yeah.

0:53 You got over the cold, but there's stuff trapped still in your ears." So I feel like I'm under water. But I can hear, like, at 40%. And so we'll see how well I can take questions. They have a microphone up here in case we need to get to that. But today I want to dig deeper into Sanderson's Third Law and really talk about worldbuilding and this idea of worldbuilding in service of story. We're going to launch into a larger worldbuilding discussion. And then I want to shave a half hour off the end of the worldbuilding lecture to do viewpoint and tense. Because after this we have four weeks left. Next week will be Q&A on worldbuilding. Then we'll do two lectures on the business of writing. And then we'll have our final lecture Q&A on whatever you want to know, kind of maybe focused a little bit on business side, and things like that. So we've got kind of the last writing lecture today with the Q&A after, and then we're going to launch into the business side of things. So today I want to talk about this idea of worldbuilding and why we do it and how you can make it a highlight of your stories and something to necessarily hang your story on if you want to. People often ask me what comes first. A worldbuilding idea? Is it a character? Is it a plot idea? And for me, generally I need to have a couple of good ideas in each of the areas before I feel like a novel is coming together. And I write primarily novels. I think you can write a good short story based on one idea. Most good novels are an intersection of multiple ideas. To speak about this, for instance, sometimes they'll be ideas I've had for a while, and they'll be brewing in my brain. Sometimes they are things I need to design in order to fit the story. When I was coming up with Mistborn I believe that the first idea for Mistborn was the story of what happens if the hero failed. Right? I think I've told you guys this story. Reading Harry Potter and I'm like, " these dark lords never get a break. What if he won? What if Voldemort won? What if Sauron took the Ring and took over?" That was an idea that sat in my brain for a while. I never wrote that book because, man, what a bummer of a book. Right? CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: You know? Like, I'm sure you could do it well with the right promises. But a book where at the end everyone fails and Sauron takes over, you know, I couldn't find the right take on it. That is what I would call a plot idea, kind of a plot hook. But it also is a setting hook, you can see, right? Like, it's a world where the dark lord won. And I took it from plot hook, "Let's tell a story about the dark lord winning," and moved it to setting hook, "What if this is set in a place where the dark lord had won." And then what is my story? Well, my love of heist novels became my new plot hook. I'm going to write a fantasy story that is a heist. And I was on to something because soon after that, right around the time I did Mistborn, right after, we got Lies of Locke Lamora and we got the Grishaverse and things like Six of Crows, which are all kind of approaching this same idea. It felt like the market was ready for heist fantasy and no one had yet done it. and so this idea, that became my plot idea.

4:38 Other setting ideas for Mistborn came separately. Allomancy as a magic system had been designed for a previous book that I had written, and it hadn't turned out very well. And so I repurposed it. I always call it throw the idea into the wood chipper and break it down to its pieces and then rebuild it. The powers in the original version of Mistborn were different. I now had a thieving crew. And this is where we go into worldbuilding in service of story, where I said, "All right. What are the powers that a group of thieves would need that could enhance the different traditional roles of a classic thieving crew?" You've got your sneaky one.

5:19 You've got your fast talking one. You've got your heavy. Let's design powers around this. Another idea was the mist itself. And the mist came along because I was driving to my mother's house in Idaho Falls. I was passing up through that northern part of Utah into Idaho. Anyone who's done that drive, it's right around where you're almost to the city Portage that has, like, a gas station and nothing else. And I know that because that's right where I'm running out of gas, so I always fill up there. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: I hit a fog bank, you know, at speed, highway speeds. And I'm like, "Wow, this looks really cool." It's fading in and out. There's fog, and then there's not fog. And I'm like, "I want to use that in a story." It's kind of odd because one of the best writing adages out there that I believe is a truism is write what you know. You'll hear this often if you take entry level courses in creative writing. Write what you know. And your response as a fantasy novelist might be, "Oh, great, write what I know. I'm writing about worlds that don't exist. How can I know?"

6:29 And my response to you is, dig into why people say write what you know. They say write what you know because you want to be able to lend some authenticity, some excitement, to this story. And really I take that for fantasy novelists saying dig into the things that interest you, that you want to learn, that you see that fascinate you, or that you are already an expert in. Dig into those and find ways to let those inform your plot and especially your worldbuilding. You have fascinations, and unique mixes of fascinations, and unique mixes of life experiences that you can mine just in a mercenary way to write unique settings and stories that no one else could write, and you can lend that authenticity even if you're also at the same time exploring things that you want to know more about as you build your story. I envision worldbuilding, when I sit down to build my world guide, what I generally do is I start with my three pillars: setting, plot, characters.

7:41 Usually setting, character, plot. And I'll make new headings in Microsoft Word. And I'll be like, "All right. I'm going to write down all the ideas I've had over the years as this story has started to build and grow." It's almost like--I describe it sometimes like all the individual ideas are like, you know, atoms bouncing around, and sometimes they slam into each other and stick together. I know that's not how chemistry actually works. But imagine this molecule being formed from these unique ideas. Yeah, it can do that. Sometimes it, you know, creates the power by which all life can exist when it does that. That's when they hybridize, not when they make a molecule. But anyway, you have all these individual ideas bouncing around, and the book starts to grow from them. Like frost growing on a piece of metal, they're just expanding as these ideas intersect.

8:38 Mistborn, the idea of the hero lost, mixed with the idea of what about a story about a thieving crew, made both of those ideas better for me, more exciting. I don't think there's a generically kind of objective better when it comes to ideas. But for me I'm like, I didn't want to write this book. It was a downer. But if that's the world that these characters live in that they could respond against, and then you're pulling a heist, and who better to heist than the dark lord who won?

9:11 Suddenly both ideas were more interesting to me. That's what I'm looking for. And I start writing those down. Setting, character, plot. Everything that I've had for this book. There will be plenty of holes. At that point, I will go to my notes file, which is this day on my phone. It's stored in Gmail. You know, I downloaded a bunch of notes programs, and I never use them. I just found that if I make a new draft in Gmail that I know exactly where it is, and I can get it on all my devices. and Gmail became my notes program.

9:48 CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Kind of silly, but that's where it is. And so the file now--it used to be named "Cool Stuff that Needs to be Used Sometime." That's when it was on my computer. Now it's just called "New Notes." CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Original. But you've got to be able to find it easily. And I go to that and I'm like, "Are there ideas I've had in the past that when I combine it with the things on here make the ideas more interesting?"

10:12 But I'm always focused on that idea of Sanderson's Third Law. It's not about density of ideas. It's about how the ideas influence each other and the depth that you can kind of play with those ideas. The worldbuilding of the hero having failed led me into kind of taking apart the classic epic fantasy and saying, all right, let's deal with prophecy. Let's deal with chosen ones. Let's deal with dark lords. And let's deconstruct all three of those ideas and write a book about each. Right?

10:47 The first one's about, you know, the idea of the dark lord. The second one's about kind of the idea of prophecy. And the third one's about the idea of the chosen one, though they're all kind of about all three ideas. And really trying to deconstruct this and do something new with it. And that idea just had a lot of depth to it. You could see how I can approach the idea of the dark lord won from three different places. It informed who Sazed became, and it informed who Vin became. It informed who Elend and Kelsier were. All about these ideas.

11:22 And so that's what I'm looking for. And that's what I mean by Sanderson's Third Law, this idea of let your worldbuilding go deeper. Explore what you have. Ask yourself the ramifications. Brainstorming sessions with writing groups can be really handy for this. They will give you a lot you can't use, but they might send you in directions you that you can. And then I split my worldbuilding into generally three different portions. I'm going to talk about it kind of as two portions now, but usually for me in my documents, and maybe I should revise this lecture, I have what we call physical setting. I have cultural. And because it's a thing for me, I put magic in its own section, the idea being what's the magic system going to be? It is part of both the physical and cultural setting. But I kind of start here.

12:22 Physical setting, for me, this is all the stuff that would still exist in the world if sapient beings weren't there messing with it. Right? Cultural setting is all the stuff that sapient beings create, all the worldbuilding that has to do with the ways people think and interact and things like this. And the magic is what is my magic system. Right? What is this intersection? It's a big enough bullet point for me that I make it on its own. We talked about magic at length last week, maybe too much. And so we're going to focus a little bit on these two.

13:05 And what I usually like to do here is I like to dig in and show you just how much stuff there is that you could maybe do in a fantasy novel. Right? Those who have been in the class before, you know what this process is. We're not going to spend forever at it, and we'll see--. Let's not yell them out. Let's raise hands, because of my ears. But let's start talking about some of the great things you can brainstorm if you're going to come up with some physical setting items for your worldbuilding. STUDENT: Canyons.

13:37 BRANDON: OK. Topography. Yep. What else? STUDENT: Weather. BRANDON: Weather. STUDENT: Viruses. BRANDON: Viruses. Yeah. And I would say disease. STUDENT: Geology. BRANDON: Geology? Sorry. OK. Let's raise hands. Really. I have to focus and see. What's that? STUDENT: Plants. BRANDON: OK. Flora and fauna. Let's take a deeper dive into these. Like what kinds of things can you ask yourselves about the flora and fauna? STUDENT: Food chain.

14:16 BRANDON: Food chain. Exactly. Anything else you can think of you can ask yourself about this? STUDENT: What animals are domesticated? BRANDON: Yes. Well, that would be--that's right in this middle ground, but you're right. Kind of domestication. I'd say that strays a little bit into cultural, but a little physical. That's great. STUDENT: What weather can they survive in? BRANDON: Yeah. Yeah. What are the biomes, and what lives in what biome. Right? Those are arrows pointing at the biomes. What else do we got?

14:46 STUDENT: Adaptations. BRANDON: Adaptations. How have these creatures evolved to this specific setting and to these biomes? So yeah, adaptation. You see me doing a ton of that in Stormlight. Right? STUDENT: Natural disasters. BRANDON: Oh! Yeah, natural disaster. Yeah, you'll see my handwriting get worse and worse as we go. STUDENT: The astronomy of the area. BRANDON: OK. Yeah. Yeah. Astronomy.

15:17 What would we call that? Cosmology? Right? Because cosmology, that gets into, like, mythology though, doesn't it? No. Cosmology? Where are my scientists? You'd say-- STUDENT: It's like the megamasers. BRANDON: Yeah. Megamasers. We'll just call it cosmology. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: We'll just use that. But pretend cosmology doesn't involve any of the mythology--mythologizing of the cosmology, like, you know--I'm not sure if that word includes the idea of some mythology in it or not. I'm not sure. So yeah.

15:50 STUDENT: How fast the planet rotates. BRANDON: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Rotation. And someone said geography. We'll put geography. But rotation. Tidal lock. Right? You can get, like, forever. Like, I don't want to go on this too much, but the idea that we could probably take flora and fauna, and we could spend probably an hour talking about the various things that you could come up with for unique and interesting ways for your flora and fauna to exist. Like, you know, Speaker for the Dead, just--it's one of the best parts of the worldbuilding in that book is how he approaches the interaction between flora and fauna. And it's so fascinating.

16:39 And science fiction and fantasy is so good at saying, "Yeah, this doesn't exist on Earth, but we can do it in our books, and we can look at the ramifications of what would happen if you have unique biology to alien species." Cultural setting. Oh, boy! Yeah. STUDENT: Anything to do with technology. BRANDON: OK. Tech level. Yeah. And even tech level disparities between different cultures. Yeah. STUDENT: Religion. BRANDON: Religion. Yep. STUDENT: Food.

17:12 BRANDON: Food! Food lore. My thesis chair, well, when I was an undergrad so my, what do you call it? Honors thesis chair was Dr. Thursby, BYU. Food lore was her specialty. And so it was a lot of fun to talk to her about food lore and how it could relate to fantasy novels and things like that. So yeah. STUDENT: Interactions. BRANDON: What do you mean by interactions? Social morays? STUDENT: Yeah. Social morays. BRANDON: Yeah. I always talk about how, you know, in Roshar there's the safe hand. Right? That started because in Korea I sat with my leg up and showed the bottom of my foot to my companion who was Korean. And he was like, "Oh, no! That's a dire insult!" And I'm like, "The bottom of my foot's a dire insult?" He's like, "Yes, dire insult. Never do that." CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: And it turns out it's true. Don't show the bottom of your foot to people. It was just so fascinating to me that it wasn't--like, it was a taboo in a different way that I hadn't ever experienced. And I'm like, "Wow. I need to open my mind to the different kinds of taboos that can exist." STUDENT: Systems of law and government.

18:26 BRANDON: Yeah. Law and government. How does that work? Right? Yeah, back here. STUDENT: Languages and dialects. BRANDON: Languages and dialects. We're going to erase magic for now. And dialects. You can totally read that. Right? Oh, I already asked you for one. We're going to go right here. No, I didn't? OK. Both of you can talk. Wait, you said you weren't going to talk before class. STUDENT: During the 45 minutes. BRANDON: That's right. All right. The time has lapsed. Go ahead.

18:58 STUDENT: Social roles such as gender roles and class roles. BRANDON: Gender and class roles. Yep. Yeah. Fantasy and science fiction never delves into that. STUDENT: Relationship to the natural world. BRANDON: OK. Yeah. Relationship to--woo! That stuff. OK. Over here. STUDENT: Traditions. BRANDON: Traditions. Yeah. That's one that I don't think enough fantasy digs into that is a really big part of a lot of people's lives. Over here and then over there. STUDENT: Educational systems.

19:35 BRANDON: Education. Yeah. Is there an apprenticeship? Is there formalized school? How do people learn things? STUDENT: Fashion. BRANDON: Fashion. Yep. A man after Adolin's heart. CLASS: (laughing) STUDENT: Building techniques and materials. BRANDON: Building techniques and material. Yeah. All right. We're going to do one more. Right here. STUDENT: Festivals and celebrations. BRANDON: Festivals and celebrations. Sorry to all those who raised your hands in the back that had awesome suggestions too. OK. What is the purpose of this? Why did we spend, like, 10 minutes on this? That's overwhelming, and we spent 10 minutes on it. We could spend hours on it. In fact, particularly in cultural setting, I bet we could take some of these, like for instance language and dialects. Grandpa Tolkien spent how many years on languages and dialects for his series? Years, maybe decades, on just one point on the board. And, like, you could do that. You could give yourself worldbuilder's disease. Have we talked about worldbuilder's disease? I don't think we have. Worldbuilder's disease is something that I coined among one of my early writing groups, where we talked about the idea that you could spend so long on this that you get paralyzed by the amount that you have to do. And because each of these elements is a rabbit hole that you could spend months or years on, that when you start on one, you realize how much left there is to world build, and you get daunted by it, and you never actually write. This may have happened to you. It may have happened to your friends. I have friends that I know who are like, "I can't write yet because I haven't finished--like, I don't know what the food lore of my society is. Food lore is enormously important. How can I write my book until I know the food lore?" Right? Like, this sort of thing can paralyze you.

21:58 STUDENT: Has that ever been you? BRANDON: Has what? STUDENT: Have you ever been under that? BRANDON: Have I ever been under this? I have generally had good deadlines. I don't think I've talked about this in class before, but I talk about it often. My secret, if you want to dig deep, why is Brandon as successful as he is? I blame being an artist raised by an accountant. And if you see in my books accountants showing up now and then, it's because my mom is an accountant. She was one of the head accountants for the City of Idaho Falls. I grew up in Nebraska. She did other things in Nebraska, other accounting stuff and things. But she graduated from BYU first in her class when she was one of the only women in her accounting classes. And so my mom--you're an accountant over here? Yeah. Oh. STUDENT: Just the best mom.

22:50 BRANDON: Yeah. Praise to the mom. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: And she deserves it. Right? My mom would say she's not very creative. I think that is a misapplication of the word creativity. I think everything that human beings do requires immense creativity. I think being a parent requires so much creativity. If you've ever had to entertain a four-year-old, you know what I'm talking about. Right? But every job, if you don't think it's creative to figure out systems for accounting when the current systems aren't working, which she would often do, then I think you misunderstand the definition of creative. But she was raised in an era where you were either a creative person or you were not. You were left brained or right brained.

23:40 Right? I see the last 20 years people talking less about that, because it is a false dichotomy. But I think I do lean naturally toward the whimsy, the head in the clouds, and all of these things. I love worldbuilding. I love planning. I hate revisions. Right? This is a very natural sort of--I could have been the person who spent years planning because that's so much fun. But when I got back from my mission and I realized I wanted really to be a novelist, and every other novelist out there, person who wanted to be a novelist, had been spending 10, 15, 20 years working on their books, there were five-year-olds who were writing stories. And I realized I needed to put into place some of these structures my mom had taught me about how to be successful. And so I would give myself deadlines. I would say, "I'm allowed to world build for this amount of time, and then I need to move on to the book." And that was really helpful for me because what I soon discovered is I don't particularly--early in my career I didn't generally know where I needed to put my worldbuilding effort because back then I didn't know how to outline. I didn't have the structure I do now. Now I can kind of know. But back then it was as the story developed I realized, "Oh, I should have spent my worldbuilding time on this." Like, when I wrote my very first book, Whitesand, I spent a ton of time on the languages, because that's what Grandpa Tolkien did. And then I never used it because that was relevant. Everyone was speaking the same language.

25:24 It was a murder mystery taking place in one city, because that's kind of where I gravitate. Instead of the quest fantasy, the kind of social dynamics of people in an urban environment in epic fantasy. And I barely used the language. I'd throw it in for fun because I did all this work on it. Right? What should I have figured out? What their justice system looks like. It's a murder mystery. That's really important. Right? Spent no time on that early on. Like, it was all on what does the planet look like and things like that? What is the magic system? But none on some of the things that were really relevant. And I found that as I started writing I would find those things. And then I trained myself to be like, "All right. I'm either going to go do it now, or I'm going to put a placeholder in, depending on how vital it is." One of the things I want to talk about is this idea that because this is so paralyzing, what you generally want to do is you want to pick a few of these things, and as a new writer pick ones that you already have some expertise in in some way. And then maybe some things that you want to learn, go read some books on and study. But the danger is if you spend so much time worldbuilding, you will do what I wanted to do, which is shove a bunch of linguistics into your book because you spent all that time on it, when it doesn't actually match your book. Let's talk about the iceberg.

26:58 So fancy. I feel like it's so fancy. Even though this is, like, technology that's existed for, you know, 80 years. But it feels so fancy. It's such an upgrade from my other room. The iceberg. People often talk about the worldbuilding of a fantasy novel as best being described using the old iceberg metaphor that you all know. You have to be careful because this stuff that's underneath the waves, if you start putting too much of that in, your book starts reading like an encyclopedia entry. And this is the dreaded info dump. Right? The idea being that if you start--your paragraphs start reading like they're boring entries in a dictionary, you're going to lose your reader, and you're going to have a lot of problems. But you still want them to feel like all of that information is there. That's what evokes the sense that they're in an actual world. The trick, I think, to being a successful fantasy and science fiction novelist in today's environment is to actually have a hollow iceberg. What I mean by this is, this is the stuff that you legitimately know. You have done your research. You have spent the time. This is the stuff that informs who your characters are, the decisions they'll be making, and whatnot. This is super relevant, and I would recommend you do it at some part in the process. You can frontload.

28:41 You can write your book, decide what you need, go do your worldbuilding, and then come back and put it in. Either one is totally fine. You can stop in the middle and do it, as long as you consistently go back to your story and don't then get into worldbuilder's disease and start saying, "Well, I did pick food lore, but that relates to social morays, which, oh no! That relates to building materials because what can they get? Which, oh no! Now I need another architecture, and then I need another tech level." Right? Be careful about that. The rest of this, you want to evoke a sense that it is there, but you don't want to do all that up front. I recommend against it. Unless you really, really like it. That's fine. Once again, you can spend 20 years on a book if you want to. You use these tools how you want. But what I recommend for these is, if you do this very well and people trust you on the things that you have done very well, they will expect a line or two about the other things that have some sort of light story hook to them, that they're like, "Oh, someday I want to hear about that." Which gives you seeds to use in future books. Or they will also accept if in some books you do all this work and then the rest of this work you kind of just rely on what people already know. A lot of stories, science fiction in particular, they're not going to spend a lot of time explaining to you what FTL is because everybody who's reading a science fiction book knows, "All right. In science fiction books you can travel faster than the speed of light."

30:21 And in some books it's just like, "We worm hole from here to here and there are jump gates." And they leave it at that. They don't explain how or why because it's not part of what the story's specifically about. You rely on the fact that people understand what that is. You rely on the fact that people know what a dragon is. You don't explain how dragons can fly in your world, even though the mass-to-wing ratio should not allow it. You just let people accept that they're dragons, and you let it go. Right? And these are the sorts of things that sometimes you want to do.

30:57 Dan Wells, my writer friend, is a really great master of a tool to help with this. He often recommends when you describe a room or a setting, describing one thing in really high detail, and letting that evoke the rest. The classic example he'll use is he's like, "You walk in a room and you describe well the bullet holes in the front window, and that the light is flickering, and that the ceiling fan doesn't work." People fill in the holes to be like, "OK, this is, you know, a room that's not taken care of. You're probably in the slums." They will fill in the dust. They will fill in that the door probably squeaks. They will do these. So rather than a paragraph like this, you put a paragraph like this and hope you can evoke the rest. That doesn't mean that paragraphs like this aren't useful, and some writers really like them. But if you are putting paragraphs of description like this, make sure they sing, and you are really good at it, is what I would recommend.

32:04 Yeah. STUDENT: So with this in mind, how often should you include something in your story and then have your solution or answer be, "Well, it's a fantasy story so I can do what I want to do"? BRANDON: It really depends on the type of fantasy story you're telling, how hard and soft your magic systems are, whether you're going to get into it. Like, for instance, if it's not going to be plot relevant. For instance, the jump gates. Whether the jump gates work or not, if those are not relevant to your story, all that's relevant is that we can get from this planet to this planet, then you don't need to explain. You say, it's a science fiction story. They have jump gate technology. Let's move on to what our story is actually about and let people accept it. People will swallow things like that. And sometimes by opening the can of worms of explaining it, if it's not plot relevant then this gets you into the trouble of, number one, they're going to want to know more; number two, you might start boring people. So half your audience will want to know more, and half your audience will be bored. And you end up with all this stuff that isn't story relevant.

33:14 You may want that in your story. There are valid reasons to want that. Lord of the Rings is not a bad story for wanting to spend time on the songs. But it depends on your personal goals. And as I've said, we're pretending that you want to make a living writing science fiction and fantasy, which is generally going to mean a book a year. So you've got limited time for this. So dig into the things that you are passionate about and start there. Make them relevant to your characters in some way. If you are really fascinated in the differences between religions, have that plot and character relevant. Make character decisions informed by who they are in their religious choices. Make things harder and easier, depending on--don't just have it there.

34:08 Spend your time worldbuilding the things that are going to influence the decisions your characters make and the challenges they face is my kind of general recommendation that encompasses this. Let's talk just a little bit about the pyramid of abstraction, and then we'll do some questions on this and maybe dig into it a little bit more. Pyramid of abstraction. So this is how I like to talk about grounding a scene. We've got a problem in fantasy novels in that we like to deal with very abstract topics. All writing does. Right? At the same time, the whole book is an abstraction.

34:57 And beyond that, no rule or law of our world can be taken for granted in your fantasy world. This presents a unique challenge to the writer of a fantasy novel. My mentor, Dave Wolverton, introduced this once by saying he once wrote in a manuscript early in a book, "He flew across the room," to mean he went across--he jumped, you know, ran across the room really fast, because he'd been writing some contemporary things. And his editor said, "Can the character actually fly or not?" And Dave realized, "Oh, this is the opening of a fantasy novel. My character could be flying." Using metaphoric language is kind of dangerous in that situation. I've always remembered that introduction. I learned this thing called the pyramid of abstraction from another student in my graduate program, where he taught it to me.

35:51 And if you've seen me do this before, stay quiet for now. I kind of want to lead you through the experience I had. He said, "Everything you're going to describe in your book, some of it's going to be concrete, and you want to have a foundation of concrete ideas to earn the abstractions that you're going to be using in your story." And he said, "Let me give you a few things, and you tell me where between concrete and abstract this concept might lie." Right? And so he started me and said, "Love. Where is love?" STUDENT: Abstract.

36:30 BRANDON: Abstract? Would you put it like up here at the top? STUDENT: Right there. BRANDON: Yeah. Yeah. OK. Where would you put a dog? STUDENTS: Concrete. BRANDON: Concrete? You'd put a dog down here. That's exactly what I did. Let's talk about this. If I say dog, how many people in this room imagine the same dog? STUDENT: Zero. BRANDON: Zero, probably. Right? We all have a different image of a dog in our head. If I say love, how many people in here know what love is and how it actually feels, and how similar will that be to how other people feel? Pretty similar, in general. We do have our different things. Actually, love is more concrete, and a dog is more abstract when it comes to writing a novel. This is hard for us to grasp because we've thought of love as an abstract thing because you can't hold it. But when you're describing it in a book, it's easier--well, they both can be described. You say a dog; they're going to picture a dog.

37:38 But that's an abstract concept to them. We're getting into very kind of Platonic sort of things, you know. What is a dog? And whatnot. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: And what he said is you can pull things down on the pyramid of abstraction by using words. If I describe a small, wet, dachshund--is that how you say it? Weiner dog.

38:11 CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: My grandma had one. How do you say it? STUDENT: Dachshund. BRANDON: Dach--. I can't hear. Why am I asking for your help? CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: I can't even hear. I'm going to say a poodle. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: I can say poodle. A small, wet poodle in the rain, huddled in an alleyway, whimpering and watching the people walk by, hoping that one of them will stop and give it some comfort. You now are picturing about the same dog. Right? Maybe not 100%, but I have pulled that concept down on the pyramid of abstraction. Right?

38:50 And the idea is that you can almost always use words to do that, to pull things down. But then your story gets longer. And there's a push and a pull between how much is too much, becoming an info dump, or lingering outside the character. You know? And how much do you want inside the character? The most abstract things that we want to put in the book are the things we call navel gazing. These things get pulled up on the pyramid of abstraction. Love we understand.

39:25 But a character ruminating on their love will help you understand them. But it'll start to pull you off the page. You'll start to see a white room rather than a story, and it'll stray into the author telling you things rather than characters experiencing things. And so the idea is that you pull things down on the pyramid of abstraction to earn the actual abstract things you want, which is spending time in the characters' heads, or explaining magic systems to a world that doesn't exist, or things like this. And that is where you want to spend your abstraction points.

40:04 Sometimes you need to just say it's a dog. Sometimes that image isn't relevant to you, and you don't worry about it. I'm not saying everything needs a thousand modifiers. What I am saying it, when you set a scene, anchoring us in that scene, thinking of the pyramid of abstraction, making us feel what the characters feel, hear what the characters hear, using more senses than just sight, you will cement the scene for someone. And then when it goes into the character thinking about, you know, "Oh, do I do this or do I not?" The navel gazing, as we call it, looking inward, you slowly are drifting upward, but the reader stays in the scene. And oftentimes you want to decide how often you're going to anchor people, how you're going to anchor them in the scene, and things like that. Often I like to have big stretches of dialogue with an anchor at the beginning, occasional beats through the middle--a beat is where a character does something--but not too many beats, leaving as much to the dialogue as I can and then anchoring at the end of the dialogue, so that the dialogue "speaks for itself." That is the style that I prefer. That is not a style that everyone has to use, but it works very well for me. STUDENT: Does that become subconscious as you practice it? BRANDON: Yeah.

41:25 STUDENT: Or is it always in the forefront? BRANDON: No. It really becomes subconscious. As you're going, you'll get a sense for "Oh, man. We're getting out of scene. We're getting out of viewpoint." And my writing group is pretty good at this, because this is something, you know, they'll be like, "I feel like I lost viewpoint. I feel like we've been talking so much about this plan to pull off a heist I forget. Is this Vin's viewpoint? Is it Kelsier's viewpoint? And are they still in the room?" You know, stuff like that. But the more you write, the more you'll be like, "I need to keep grounding people in the character, in the scene." You want it to be the character thinking about their plan, not just you presenting the piece from the outline for the reader to have in their back pocket. And you use character, and you use the pyramid of abstraction to anchor that. All right? This is how you start to get this worldbuilding across. You think of those anchoring scenes, the thing you're going to describe. If you can describe and aspect, not how the magic works but the visuals of the magic, or of the interesting setting, if you can feel what it's like to get the sand between your teeth and in your eyes on Arrakis and see the shimmer of the spice as the wind blows it, then you're on Arrakis and you're pulled into this concrete sense of being there. And then when it talks about prophecy and, you know, Paul is struggling with if he wants to follow prophecy because he knows it's not actually legit, but there might be a legit one too, then you're still on Arrakis because you've had this--you can see the spice. Too many times from new authors I can't see the spice. They describe their cool magic system, but I can't see the spice shimmering in the air as the wind blows the sand, and I can't feel the heat beating upon me and feel how much I want a drink. That's what will make it a book instead of a dictionary. And that's what I recommend you learn to do, and that is so much more important than the giant paragraph on the cosmology of your world, you know, how the gods made it. Way more important is what it feels like to be in that chapel and hear, you know, participate--not just hear, participate, in whatever rituals, and be part of it. And that's how you do this in a way that doesn't feel--this is what I call the grand skill of writing science fiction and fantasy. It doesn't feel like you are info dumping. It feels like a character is in a scene and you're there with them.

44:01 And that's what I want you to take away from this worldbuilding is, there's so much you can do. You can't do it all. Pick a couple of things that together make your story more interesting and make each other more interesting. Then devise scenes to concretely pull us in so we see the spice shimmering, and we know what this feels and looks like, and let that launch your fantasy story, rather than something more abstract like, "Once upon a time the gods did this."

44:34 Used to be that's how you started a fantasy novel. Back in the '80s every one of them started with a long prologue about the gods. I'm exaggerating, but there were a ton of those. And they don't pull you into the story. They don't give you characters. They don't give you a scene. It feels like reading Isaiah. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: I mean, we all love Isaiah. Right? But it feels like reading the Silmarillion. We all love the Silmarillion too, but you know what I mean. Silmarillion’s what you read after you love Lord of the Rings. Right, Tolkien fan? STUDENT: Yes.

45:05 BRANDON: Are you our Tolkien fan? No. Who was it? There was someone who corrected me on my Tolkien. STUDENT: Right here. BRANDON: Yeah. There's my Tolkien fan. OK. Yeah. STUDENT: There's only one. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Yeah. There might be multiple. I might be in real trouble. I might get my Meier and my Salvador Dalis mixed up. I don't know. STUDENT: (laughing) BRANDON: I know Meier now because everyone talks about it. I don't know the rest of them. So, all right. Questions on that. We can do, like, a couple questions, then I want to do viewpoint and tense. OK? We will do a whole week on worldbuilding next week. So you can hold questions. Let's do one here, and then we'll do one more, and then we'll save the rest of them for next week. So we'll do you two, and then we're going to do viewpoint and tense.

45:50 STUDENT: When we were talking about characters, you said the worst thing a character can do is stand in the way of plot. BRANDON: Yeah. STUDENT: Would you say that same thing applies with worldbuilding? BRANDON: Yes, absolutely. STUDENT: Where it stands in the way? BRANDON: Now, don't get me wrong. When I say worst, it's a tool you can use. But if your main character is interfering with the story progressing, or some worldbuilding element is slowing down what we want to read, you've got problems. And sometimes you need to do it anyway. Sometimes that's the spinach that the reader needs to eat. But you want to make sure that you're not dumping it all on them at once, and you're splitting it up, and you're making it fun and interesting, and when you can, weaving into the stuff they want to see. If they're there for a romance, make sure that you're doing one of a couple things. Either the worldbuilding is super relevant to getting to know the other person, or it's done kind of more sparely, sparsely I shall say, and you're just going to let it be there and you don't have to dig too much into it because people are there for the romance. Now do understand, people come to books for different reasons. You can have a fantastic romance in a book that has a ton of worldbuilding. You've just got to make sure that worldbuilding isn't standing in the way, and that your romance scenes are able to do their romance really well, and that your worldbuilding scenes are interesting for their own reason. And do understand people read for different reasons. If you're writing a giant epic fantasy book, you're going to have viewpoints that some readers will like more, and other viewpoints that other readers like more, and they will pick favorites. And I think I talked about this more. And some people really want the deep worldbuilding where Navani discovers the nature of sound and investiture. And other people don't really want that. And that's OK. The bigger your book, the more divisive pieces of it will be. But understand--. Peter, my Editorial VP, says, "Make sure every chapter in your book has a chance to be someone's favorite chapter." And that's been really good advice for me, is why would this specific chapter be someone's. It doesn't have to be everyone's, but why would it be someone's favorite chapter? STUDENT: So when it comes to worldbuilding, how do you come up with names for things and people in the world?

48:11 BRANDON: Naming. I'm going to give you the quick answer for this. STUDENT: Quick answer? BRANDON: I've got three tools for you. Quick. I couldn't hear--. You could make all sorts of peanut gallery comments about me, and I can't get you back for them. Enjoy this until the antibiotics clear up my--that one's already done. Until the steroid sprays open the tubes in my ears as the ENT said will happen when I start snuffing them. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Legally! CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: All right. So naming things. Three different ways.

48:52 The easiest way that also risks some danger--so I'll warn you of the danger--is to get yourself an atlas, pick a region in the world, look at those words, and try to devise words that are somewhat matching. This is best if it's a region that you have some familiarity with already and that matches the cultural identity of the characters you're writing about. Right? So when I was working on Mistborn is was like, "I'm going to use French inspired names." I took French in high school.

49:27 I have French in my ancestry. I'm going to--I think I can safely go to France and just pick a region, and I can be like, all right, this word. I'm going to play with this until it works really well and it's cool. It's probably the easiest way. One of the dangers is you might accidentally create words in that language. I didn't know Elend was an actual word in German. I was just using Germanic kind of sounds in order to create his name, because Elend's from the Germanic area, and things like that. One other danger you can do in this is you--so where fantasy comes, there is conversation to be had about what you're taking from which cultures and how you're using it. Right? And I do not think that the conversation is finished in this, and I don't think there are complete answers. But I do think as an author writing fantasy that the entire kind of cultural heritage of the earth is something that is open as an option to you. But there are risks associated. For instance, I try to stay away from using too much Native American in mine. That is because my specific culture has had a fraught history, shall we say, of, you know, partial genocide of a people. And it feels like if I then went and took these things that it would feel wrong to me. I have no problem reaching to Korea or Japan. Part of this is because I have lived in Korea. But part of it is because both of these cultures are exporting their entertainment to me and offering it up. Right? K dramas are now kind of part of the general cultural zeitgeist, as are Japanese video games. When I'm looking to a culture, I also try to be very specific. Like, I can go with French inspired names, no problem. But when I was going to Roshar I was like, "I'm going to pick a specific dynasty in Chinese history, and I'm going to start using that."

51:46 Because instead of then conflating entire cultures as a monolith, I can be like this is the dynasty--. I always forget. It's the dynasty where the Mongols took over China. And this idea of warlords taking over and having to learn to be bureaucrats was a seed idea. So I'm going to use that. And then I'm going to reach to some of those ideas and things like that, and even in some of my naming now and then. But, you know, you want to be careful, and you want to watch for pitfalls, and I can't get into them all right here. I said this would be brief. So that's one way.

52:27 Another way is to become a kind of student of linguistics and learn what makes languages and why certain languages work. And a few books on linguistics will get you most of the way there, where you can say, "This language is going to be using this kind of nuance." Like for instance, I think I mentioned to you before why do I like using Hawaiian for the Horneaters. It's a really fascinating language because they have fewer sounds, so the words have to be really long in order to be unique. I find that really cool. I researched here's why it is and what happens in Hawaiian. So I used that as a basis because that actual aspect of the language was fun to me.

53:10 And learning about what aspects of different languages, learning how different languages, you know, use conjugation stuff, you can come up with cool things. You don't have to be Grandpa Tolkien to have a cool naming system. And the last one is just pick a linguistic trick. I've done this one a lot. Symmetrical names are holy. Well, let's make names that are symmetrical. Repeated consonant sounds at the beginning of names. Those are ways to do it. These all are just about a vibe. Does it feel right? I can't go too much more into this. Is it quick?

53:44 STUDENT: It's quick. BRANDON: Yeah. STUDENT: Do you have Rock's name memorized? BRANDON: I--. Humanukumakia'alakialunamor. I think I get one of the-- STUDENT: I definitely don't know it. BRANDON: Aalunamor. I get one of the things wrong in there. Yeah. STUDENT: How do, when you create a name, how do you check to make sure it's not something that already exists? BRANDON: Yeah. Google, be sure to google your names. I'll just say that. I haven't run afoul of this too much, but you can't, you know, you got to watch out. Sometimes you will accidentally make, like, a slur.

54:20 CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Or a swear word, or things like that. Just, you know, be careful. Have readers who can read and, you know, who can warn you about these things. Have readers who can read. Yeah. You're laughing at that. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: I just thought about what I'd said. Have readers who can read closely and maybe are familiar with the linguistic region that you're writing from. All right. Viewpoint and tense.

54:51 One of the main ways you're going to present your story to readers is through a certain viewpoint and a certain tense. What do I mean by this? Well, we're talking about the stuff from high school, but we're going to dig into it deeper. We're talking about third person, first person, and second person. All right? So we got third person, we got first, and we got second. Right? These are our viewpoint styles. We also have tense: past tense, present tense, future tense. So you're going to choose between past, present--present, that's what that says--and future. You are almost never going to use this one, and you're almost never going to use this one, unless you want to win a Hugo Award. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Actually, Fifth Season is fantastic, and it does second person really well. If you want to see how to do second person really well, Nora Jemison's Fifth Season is an excellent example of that. And there's plenty of future tense things out there. They read really experimental.

56:02 What I'll say about present and past is in adult science fiction and fantasy, past tense is generally the rule of thumb. Present is fine but looks a little out of place. And in contemporary YA, present tense is the rule of thumb. Past reads just as well. I would say that they default to this. So sci-fi/fantasy I'd say is, like 80% to 90% past tense and 20% to 10% present.

56:36 And YA I've seen is more like 60% to 70% present tense, maybe 40% to 30% past tense. And there are different kinds of past tense and things. But really we'll dig into that in the viewpoints. Right? Because this is the big decision. Because each of these has certain nuances to them and certain ways of doing it. So I'm going to erase these for right now. Because third has its own branch off. Right? You have third limited and third omniscient. OK? So the thing about that is these also have branches. Right? Third limited is generally the standard rule of thumb. Third limited is where you are in one person's head for a given scene, and you will line break or chapter break if you're going to be in someone else's head. And as soon as you establish viewpoint, you stick with it through the rest of the chapter. Where there's some nuance to limited is a lot of writers like to start in omniscient for a paragraph or two and ease into limited and then stay there, usually to the end of the chapter. Sometimes like one or two paragraphs before the end they phase back out into an omniscient. If you like Robert Jordan, if you've read him, this is what he would do often, particularly at the beginning of the books. The wind scene is in omniscient. The wind is flying through and seeing the world. And then it settles on a character, and you're limited for the rest of that chapter. And you'll see other people doing this.

58:17 Omniscient has its own branches where there's what I call true omniscient, and then there's like storyteller omniscient. So true omniscient, the classic example is Dune. Dune uses omniscient by saying every paragraph is a different viewpoint and I won't generally change heads that I'm in in a paragraph. But any new paragraph can be in a different viewpoint, and indeed, the narrative itself is not in any viewpoint. It is being told by some omniscient, impartial observer who's describing what's happening to you. Storyteller omniscient is generally this sort of hybrid first person/third person, where you have some storyteller who's gathered the full story and is now telling it to you piece by piece. The Hobbit is a classic example of this. But if you read Tress of the Emerald Sea, it is also in storyteller omniscient. Hoid can know anything that I need him to know and can tell you anything that I need him to tell you. He is an omniscient for purposes of this narrative. He's not actually omniscient in the stories. But for the narrative an omniscient storyteller who is occasionally pretending to be limited but he can switch heads whenever he wants to, and he maintains it kind of in his storyteller's narrative instead. The Alcatraz books were also written in this sort of format. We'll talk about strengths and weaknesses of these in a second. First has a bunch of different branches as well.

59:59 Over here is what we call epistolary. Epistolary first person is a--if you've read Dracula, it's Dracula. Epistolary is found footage novel. Illuminae, which got a lot of buzz maybe eight years ago in YA, was written like this. It was all redacted documents and texts and things like that. So Dracula, if you haven't read it, it's found footage. It's all letters and people's journals and things like that telling a story. A very interesting way to tell a story. It's called epistolary because an epistle, so all told through letters.

60:47 We have what I will call true or close, maybe intimate, first person. This is the vast majority of current YA. This is a first person where someone is not telling you the story, but it's narrated as if in their head. It's almost like you have a chip that's in their brain that is projecting to you everything that they're experiencing as they experience it. But no one is telling you the story. The character isn't aware that they're a storyteller. It is basically third limited done in the first person. And then the last one of these is indeed the kind of--the same sort of hybrid that we have here with this one, where a person is writing their story after the fact. This is actually what Alcatraz is, I guess.

61:46 And these two kind of blend together. You could say that The Hobbit's this, but he pretends to be omniscient. He doesn't use "I" in The Hobbit, Bilbo doesn't. And so the idea here is that when you're someone after the fact writing the story down, if you've read Assassin's Apprentice, that is this. Name of the Wind is this, but with third limited frame story. So basically it is what you kind of classically assume is first person. "When I was a young man--" blah, blah, blah. OK?

62:21 So these are kind of your main tools, and they do different things, which is why it's important to talk about them. You probably were taught most of this in school. But what they don't talk about is some of these distinctions and why you might use one versus another. The main distinction I find between third and first person is that third is way better at large casts. This is because you either have an omniscient narrator smoothing everything together and giving you basically one perspective that splits into many to hold kind of thematic cohesion and narrative cohesion. Or you know you're in one person's viewpoint at a time and it is constantly repeating their name rather than I and cementing in your head who they are and what their motives are and things like this.

63:15 Generally first person is really strong for one or two viewpoints. This is why I think it's become the standard in YA. If you're going to pick up a YA novel right now, it'll most likely, statistically, be first person in the true/intimate first person, and it'll be present tense. If you're going to pick up a fantasy novel from the fantasy section, it's almost certainly going to be third limited in past tense. And these are just because of traditions. Right? Like, third limited became this default, I would say probably because of people like Robert Jordan doing a really good job with it. I mean, it was settling into it before. But it's kind of weird. You can watch, if you read the old books, like for instance Ender's Game, Ender's Game slips into Bean's viewpoint randomly at one part at the end of a chapter.

64:16 CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Because these whole things hadn't really been settled on yet, and people weren't paying attention to is this third limited? Is it what? What are reader expectations now? Readers have different expectations. The first Recluce novel by Lee Modesitt halfway through goes from, like, past tense to present tense for no good reason. And I've asked him. He's like he doesn't even remember why. It just did. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: It was not a stylistic choice. However, you can use contrast for stylistic choices. Elizabeth Moon's Speed of Dark, which is about a science fiction novel, I may have mentioned it before, where a cure to autism is discovered in the future and it's about an autistic man who's trying to decide if he takes this "cure," because basically it will transform him to a completely different person. And do you take a cure for something that you're not sure is a disease or not. And this was written back, you know, when that was a novel idea. I think generally right now the discourse has gone that direction of autism's a different way of thinking rather than a disease. But back then she won the Nebula Award for it. It's a fantastic book. And in order to contrast viewpoints, his viewpoint is in present tense, and everyone else's viewpoint is in past tense. And this just helps you when you transition to his viewpoint to be like--skip a beat and be like, "OK, we're seeing through the eyes of someone who processes the world differently." Or maybe we all process the world differently, but it's at least contrasting the differences between the viewpoints. So you can switch. I would say, honestly, truthfully, the difference between present and past is negligible except for reader preference. And you may prefer one or the other, but I don't think people read present tense and imagine it--I don't think people read past tense and imagine it happening in the past. They just imagine this is happening. Right? They both act like present tense. Past tense is just the standard, and that's what I use for a lot of my books.

66:19 So first person, really good with digging into a viewpoint. First person can also cheat. Let's see. How much time do I have left? OK. It can cheat on info dumps, which is why I like to bring this up during the info dump discussion. If you write a really interesting narrative in first person, your info dumps become characterization moments. And indeed, the best of them are fun, funny, and clever. And so suddenly it doesn't matter what the first person narrator is writing. You're there for it. And it's kind of the power of humor to make an info dump just go down easier. I mean, Douglas Adams coasted on this. I won't say coasted. It was very hard. He wrote very well. But, like, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in part works because he can info dump and have you love it. You don't want him to ever stop info dumping. Often your favorite parts of those books are where you're reading a literal encyclopedia entry. Right?

67:21 CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: And they're the most fun. And that's kind of the cheat code that first person has, is you can info dump a little easier. Third person can do this, third limited. But generally in third limited you let the character's voice color the narrative, but not completely infuse it. Part of the reason you use third limited is it does add this sort of moderating force--moderating's the wrong term.

67:51 It blends all these disparate viewpoints together and makes them feel like one complete story. When you're writing in third limited and you write from a 4-year-old's viewpoint, you don't write like an actual 4-year-old would talk. In first person you would, and it would be aggravating. Right? CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: In third person you let that view of a child change the sentence structure to be simpler. You occasionally put interjections that feel very childlike, and the motives are very childlike. But there's a sense that they're, even in third, even though it's not omniscient, is the hand of the author there smoothing things out and making it feel like a cohesive story, even if the viewpoints are distinctive. This is part of why I think it works very well for large casts. Just a few other things. First person, storyteller and epistolary give away that somebody survived to--at least long enough to get you that ending. Now epistolary they can die halfway through and someone else can take over and things like that. But particularly this first storyteller, why I think it moved to this, because it used to be like this. All the old classic books were, you know, were like Bilbo.

69:11 He's telling you the story of his life. But then you know that they survive long enough, and no, the twist that they were ghosts all along is not new and original. You can still do things that aren't new and original. But it has been done quite a bit. It's like, "Oh, it's a first person narrative. Ha ha! I did die at the end and I'm a ghost telling this to people in heaven." CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: You can probably think of some stories that do that. So there is this sort of inherent first person weakness. Cue this idea of "Well, I know they live." But that's why the intimate happened. The intimate is not supposed to actually be recorded anywhere, and it kind of makes up for some of those weaknesses. Oftentimes I can see a first person where you'll have two different first person viewpoints that contrast each other a great deal, and those can make for fantastic books. If you do more than two, it starts to get rough. Everyone's named I, and the transition between them can be really jarring, and it can be hard to keep track of. Those are just a few things on why you might choose one of these or the other. True omniscient, super hard, and you don't get a lot out of it. But it can be really cool. In true omniscient you generally don't want to hide things from the reader. You want to give them all the information. Meaning, in true omniscient, you depend on suspense and not mystery. You know that Doctor Yueh is going to betray them.

70:43 You are in suspense of what that's going to do to everyone because as soon as you see Doctor Yueh, you know his motivations, what he's planning to do, and what's going on. And that's how a true omniscient generally works. So yeah. STUDENT: I feel like obviously in Dune that works super well. BRANDON: Mm hmm. STUDENT: But what's kind of like--I feel like you can just do that in limited too. You just have different chapters do that. BRANDON: What's that?

71:07 STUDENT: Like, I feel like you can do that in a limited perspective. BRANDON: Yeah. STUDENT: You can have different chapters. BRANDON: You can. You can totally do that. I'm just saying in omniscient people will feel you're cheating if you don't do it. STUDENT: OK. BRANDON: Does that make sense? You can go to storyteller instead, and then the storyteller can cheat, and they can be mad at the storyteller, and that works. But if you're in true omniscient and they feel the author isn't giving them the information--. In limited, you get the choice. In omniscient, you need to lean on suspense rather than mystery.

71:36 Yeah. STUDENT: What kind of switching between, like, tenses or viewpoint, like first or third, can you get away with? BRANDON: You can get away with a lot. And it really depends. And if the reader says, "Oh, I see why you're doing this." You want them to understand why. For instance, I mentioned Name of the Wind. Name of the Wind starts from the viewpoint of this person who's collecting, trying to find the story of this great hero who is now retired. And it starts in limited. You get to know who this guy is. He finds the hero who's washed up as an innkeeper. He's like, "I need to know your story and how you ended up as an innkeeper." And he's like, "All right. I'm going to tell it to you." And then it switches to first person. And then occasionally you probably--it's The Princess Bride structure. Right? Oh, yeah. Name of the Wind is Princess Bride. Occasionally they interrupt and, you know, like, "Is this a kissing book?" More it's like, "No, tell me more about this."

72:26 And it'll jump into, like, an interstitial where you'll be in third limited again, and it'll be in one of the viewpoints of the character who's listening to the main character tell the story and offering some commentary on it. And then he'll start into it again, and then it goes back into first person. That's just one example. And I showed you with Speed of Dark she switches tenses. You can do all kinds of things. Just the reader has to buy into it.

72:50 STUDENT: How about unreliable narrators? BRANDON: Yeah. STUDENT: Or like, deliberately deceptive narrator? BRANDON: Yeah. Yeah. Unreliable narrators will generally work in all of these except for kind of the true omniscient. And it's actually--it's possible in any of them. So you just want to approach it differently. So, in third limited is the one where you'll feel like you're cheating the most. OK? Unless the reader has significant signifiers that they're unreliable. A classic example of it working really well is Mat from The Wheel of Time, where what he says and thinks is different than what he does. And he consistently does this, and you as a reader pick up on it by Robert Jordan using just a little bit of hyperbole in the way Mat thinks to draw a contrast to his actions, so you understand he's unreliable.

73:47 Where people will think you're cheating is, like, something I flirted with in Mistborn where Kelsier has a secret plan. We've been in his viewpoint a lot. I have to acknowledge he has a secret plan, but I'm not telling you what it is. And so I do the classic third limited. "I can't think about that right now. I've got to be focused." It is a bend, and it feels like a bit of a cheat every time you do it. But it is kind of the sort of thing you have to do. Maybe you can find another way. But that's one of the ways you make that character unreliable, is you let the reader know.

74:21 Over in this world, storyteller world and epistolary and things, even in this true thing, you can be truly unreliable. It's harder in that middle one because you feel like you're with them in the story all along. And you can be presenting the wrong story all along. Usually in the true, you want to have those same sort of limited signifiers that say, "Everything this character's saying may not be true." For instance, the storyteller first person works very well for this.

74:57 A lot of people confront Pat Rothfuss about Name of the Wind. Oh, we're almost out of time. This is my last story. And be like, "This isn't possible." And his answer will be like, "You thought Quoth was telling you the truth about this thing that would have made him seem really bad if he'd told you the truth? Quoth was lying." And indeed, he's a very untrustworthy narrator. The more you indicate that to readers the better, unless you want to have your twist ending, and then you can kind of pull off the deck you in the face. All right, guys. Thank you. More questions next week, all right? CLASS: (cheering and applause)