Bradel Bookwork – Creative Writing with Brandon Sanderson (Building Plot) · 7:26am Apr 13th, 2013
Yes, yes, I'm apparently terrible at meeting even self-imposed deadlines. It is a character fault, and I have it in abundance.
So I'm back, for round two of Brandon Sanderson's BYU Creative Writing class. If you missed last week's installment, I blogged about round one here. If you haven't checked out this week's lesson yet, you can find it below:
Here are a couple of my big takeaways from this episode:
1. The Intersection of Plot, Character, and Setting
Most of my writing ideas tend to come about very organically. I get some sort of plot bunny, and I just run with it. This seems to work reasonably well in fanfiction (where you don't have as much of a burden of building interesting characters) and with short stories (where the initial idea can wind up being the entirety of a story), but it's not so great for longer works. When I approach those, I often stumble around looking for a way to build the story. I don't really have a framework to put things in. I just brainstorm ideas and try throwing them together to see what blends interestingly.
I really like this idea of trying to build stories by filling three piles – plot, character, and setting – and looking at where things in those three piles rub against each other and create conflict. For example, one can ask how the social setting of a story interacts with the characters to create interesting situations that need resolution? Although I might not have consciously put it in those terms, Bellbray's tribalist attitudes in the second chapter of "Bell, Book & Candle" is a textbook example of pulling story out of conflicts at the intersection of setting and character. This is definitely a fun thing to think about, and I'll have to try to be much more conscious of these tools in the future.
2. Active Characters
This seems like a bit of a no-brainer. Characters are more interesting when they're taking proactive action toward their own goals. A character that always reacts, that doesn't seem to get immediately involved in the events around them, this isn't a very interesting character. But it's something that I think takes some real conscious effort to deal with, at least for less experienced writers like myself.
Brandon's character in the last three Wheel of Time books, Androl, is a great example of using activity for reader sympathy. Androl isn't very strong from a magical perspective, and his role in the story for a good two books is largely to react to villains doing big things around him. So what does Brandon do? He makes Androl a leatherworker. It really doesn't have a bearing on the plot, but it keeps Androl busy in what might otherwise be pretty dry scenes. It lets us see that he's really talented at some things.
There's some good stuff in here about gardening vs outlining as well, but those two points are the two that stood out to me most clearly. And I think I'm going to have to call it a night after this too-too-brief delve into the subject of plotting, because I'm having a hard time stringing my thoughts together for longer than a few words now. Anyway, there's good stuff in this week's lectures, even if they do run a bit longer than last week's. If you haven't watched them yet, I encourage you to do so, and let me know what you think about the writing tips mentioned in these lectures.
Peace out.
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