Story Structures - Plot Theory: Brandon Sanderson's Writing Lecture #3 (2025)

Hey, this is the Brandon Sanderson 2025 Writing Lecture Series. We are on plot

Week two here. So today, this is more of a survey class, meaning I'm going to go across a bunch of different methods people use for plotting their stories. I'm going to talk briefly about each one. These are tools for you to do further investigation on and to try it yourself. I'm not going to go too in-depth in any of them, but hopefully something in here sparks with you in a way to help you make your stories have a stronger plot.

All right, welcome to Writing Science Fiction Fantasy. That was some only moderately enthusiastic applause. I sense that the semester is well underway. And it's still January. And you're like, man, this is getting, wait, it's still January?

That's kind of like the theme of January in Utah. It's still January. And then February arrives, and you're like, it's still January. We're going to talk about plot today, our second one. So the idea this week is, last week we kind of talked about philosophy of plot, the idea of progression and payoffs and, of course, promises. Today we're going to look at some models that people use for plot.

Each of which being ones I have tried in the past when I've been working on stories so I can talk about them in an educated way. We can't spend a lot of time on any one of them. Because of this, this is, ooh, ooh, was that a, no, it wasn't a phone call. Sometimes I answer it if it's a phone call. Yeah.

It doesn't happen as often anymore. Everyone's phones are on silent. For the longest time, I could go and do all sorts of pranks on my wife by changing her ringtones. But nobody uses ringtones anymore. So we can't delve deeply into any of these. I can give you a survey of different types of plot structures and why they might work for you.

As we talked about on the first day, you need to be doing this yourself. I would recommend trying some of these, particularly if you're having problems in this area. If you're not, maybe you don't need to try them. Maybe you've already figured out your own thing. So there's a smattering of these that are dealing with more discovery writing activities.

ideas and some that are structured to hang a story on. Neither, once again, is necessarily a better method than another to write a story. The best method to write a story is the one that makes you consistently

Produce the type of thing that you want to be producing up to your current skill level. This first point on here is just to give you a reminder of what you're looking for in a plot. A plot is there to provide conflict. I don't know if you heard this adage back in...

In school, you know, back in your high school days, I did. The whole adage of the king died is not a story. It's a fact. The king died and then the queen died of grief is a story. Neither of them, neither of them are actually stories. But the idea is that the conflict and the struggle is what makes a story, not the sequence of facts. Events aren't a story. The struggle grows.

and what's happening to the characters emotionally and through their character arcs as they work with that struggle, that is what makes a story. So you are looking for conflict,

You're looking for ways to show progress to the reader through your plot, that things are happening. Progress can be regressive. The status quo is changing. Facts are being learned. Characters can be backsliding, and that counts as progress for a story. Breaking Bad is all about some backwards progress.

That works very well, it's just a kind of inverse, but we would consider that story progress, because your goal as an author is to show this slide backwards. So you're going forward in the story as the character is sliding backward. There's a little adage that I have that can help you with figuring out how you can kind of turn events

into plot, lowercase p plot as we're talking about it. And that's the, think of when you're coming up with obstacles, your obstacles should force, reinforce, or show failure in growth in some way, right? Growth of the character, growth of the story. If an obstacle doesn't do those things, then what you might have added to your story is just...

An event to have happen. And too many of those, it stops feeling like a story. You want them, again, I'll go through that again. You want them to force growth in some way in the character or in the plot. You want them to reinforce something that's been learned, perhaps.

You have had a little bit of a downtime where character's talking and character had a breakthrough. And then you have an obstacle that can reinforce that this character has actually learned something or that this clue actually matters and is relevant. Or you want the obstacle to show failure, that a character is not yet ready to overcome their problem, to highlight what is going on with that problem. Or the characters are not yet ready to

to face Darth Vader. And so the obstacle is Darth Vader has showed up. But the way you overcome it in the story is Obi-Wan Kenobi steps in and stops him. But then the characters aren't ready to face him, so Obi-Wan Kenobi dies. And so it's an escalation. Growth is being forced upon the characters because they no longer have the wise mentor.

Same thing happens in Lord of the Rings. Face something they're not ready for, wise mentor dies, you've gotten through it, but it's going to force growth on the characters because now the person that's kind of been keeping them all together isn't there to keep them together anymore. So, think of obstacles as having a purpose in your story other than just being entertaining in themselves, and maybe that will help you to start to use events to become plot.

The first one we'll talk about on here is, I've started using Dan Harmon's story circle instead of the monomyth. Dan Harmon, famous writer, it is just a simpler way to look at the monomyth. The monomyth, you guys, I should say, Joseph Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Faces, the hero's journey, right?

And Dan Harmon, I found a few years ago, has boiled this down really well into simple principles that make sense. And so you can just Google Dan Harmon's story circle and you will get the same image that I like to reference when going with this. And so the idea, let's talk about the hero's journey.

So there's this famous book, Here with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell. I learned in my folklore classes that folklorists do not like Here with a Thousand Faces very much. Or at least, they're more critical of it than pop culture is. Folklorists look at Joseph Campbell and say, going back to Dr. Thursby, who taught my senior course, she's like,

This is great in some ways, but it doesn't reference its sources. It tends to use other people's work without saying that it did.

It works way too hard to prove its point and ignores counterpoints to it. And it pretends women don't exist. Not odd for books written during that period. But they're just-- I mean, Cinderella follows the hero's journey, but it sure doesn't talk about that very often in things like this. I think of those for this class's purpose, because we're not a folklore class,

Knowing that "Hero of a Thousand Faces" tries too hard is a really useful thing to know. I have read the book and I agree. Lots of interesting things in there, but the idea that every story, or almost every story, can be put in this same rubric, I think is going too far. And in fact, I think that for writers,

Anything I talk about today could potentially be destructive because if you treat any of these frameworks as sacrosanct, if you start to become a cook instead of a chef, if you look at each piece of this and say, well, I have to have that,

then you can actually do things that don't match your story very well. And my classic example, those who have watched these lectures before know that I go back to this well because it's such a perfect one, is George Lucas.

George Lucas is a legit genius. Star Wars to this day is just like, we will probably reference it today. I often do. And he was an amazing, he is, but when he was working on Star Wars, he's kind of passed on that along. Amazing world builder, uh,

Really good leader, innovative in technology, and all of these things. He also loved Here with a Thousand Faces. Loves Here with a Thousand Faces. I shouldn't speak of Mr. Lucas in the past tense. It's just, it feels like he's gone more into his retirement and has let other people take his thing, so it feels more like he's this benevolent patriarch who's like, go off and tell your own stories now, kids. Yeah.

And so, but he loves Here With a Thousand Faces. You can find lectures he's given on it, PBS specials, where he's talked about it. And, you know, he obviously really was deeply influenced by that book, and he used it to great effect in his storytelling. But then he also turned it into a checklist. This is my opinion, but

I was there. I was there. I was there. Suddenly we're bouncing between Lord of the Rings and When Men Fail. I was there. Hey, guys. I was there opening night.

for Phantom Menace. I am old. Opening night. I didn't have to wait in line because my dumb friends waited in line for me and I got to show up last minute and they'd gotten a seat for me. That was Dan and Peter, both who now work for me. Yeah. Yeah.

And Ben, if you know Ben. So my friends waited in line, we went opening night, people were... I mean, basically everybody had a lightsaber but me. I like Star Wars, but I wasn't where I'll bring a lightsaber to Star Wars level of like Star Wars. And so I know that Phantom Menace went over pretty well for that audience that day. The...

"Man, did this secretly suck all along?" It didn't happen until after "Little Ways." And then the internet reevaluated and decided it was awesome, and that's still baffling to me. But I was also there, if you haven't seen this movie, when Luke Skywalker, or Darth Vader's mom says-- spoiler alert, it's Darth Vader's mom-- says, "Oh, there was no dad."

He was just born of the force. And I watched the entire audience go, oh, that's a thing. The entire audience that otherwise was swinging their lightsabers and enjoying things, like at that moment, they're like, wait, Anakin space Jesus? What? What?

Well, years later, I was studying here at the Thousand Faces, and I get to the point where the virgin birth is a big part of the monomyth and the hero's journey. Going back to this idea of born of the gods. It wasn't always the virgin birth, but it was like the divine parent, right?

so that Lucas, who had built his whole framework around the monomyth, is like, well, I need to include this element in order to make it fit the hero's journey. And I think it personally was a step too far. Now, we're not here to criticize one of the great storytellers of our time too much. But I want to point out that the possible failing that you can have, any time a structure becomes too rigid,

for you as a writer that you start to use even the outline that you have designed to the point that it negatively impacts your story. If it becomes too rigid, if it can't be flexible enough, if it doesn't match your story after you're into your story, be willing to throw it away.

And that's kind of my kind of cautionary tale for the hero's journey in all of them, but especially the hero's journey. Three-act structure to an extent, too. If you read Save the Cat, you'll be like, all right, on page 16, I need to include this.

You're writing prose. You're writing stories. Some of the things that apply to Hollywood don't apply to us. And no one's going to look and see if you have at exactly the two-thirds point a certain thing happen. I don't think that even really happens in Hollywood to the extent that people imagine, but we'll get there. So what is the hero's journey? Well, the hero's journey is this idea of

that stories often fit into a certain framework that is circular. It's why it's the story circle. The idea is that a person in a state of ignorance and kind of believes the world is perfect or that their life will never change. They don't have to think it's perfect, but they'll think their life will never change, is forced onto an adventure that

where they travel and certain things happen to them, to which point they then return to where they started.

a better person having made their entire society better in some way. It's the idea of the child becoming the adult. And it focuses on this idea that you start at the top of the circle, right? And you start with this idea of there's a person kind of at a state of rest. Either they don't want to be at a state of rest or they really like it. It can be Bilbo who's like,

All I want to do is eat my food, smoke my pipe, and not cause problems unless it's for certain people that annoy me. Or it can be Luke Skywalker's like, my life will never change. I want to be up in the stars, but the reality is here is I'm on the ground and my life will never change. That

character is projected forward by a certain sort of need or requirement that they don't feel that they're able to fulfill, and they resist in some way. This is-- we will use Star Wars. I said I was going to. We'll use it right here. Luke is like,

learns about the Jedi, gets offered a lightsaber, and is like, no, I'm rejecting this. I said I wanted adventure, but that's not actually my life.

which is then propelled into being forced to go into the world. By some event, they call it crossing the threshold, usually. Something happens that there is a point of no return. You see this in three-act structure as well. A lot of people say in Star Wars, this is when Luke gets back and his aunt and uncle are dead.

and he knows he's being hunted, and he cannot return to that life. That life has ended. And so, you then go on what's called by Campbell, the road of trials. A very simple way to explain all of the first half of Act Two. Just a little thing of, now our story happens. But the road of trials is, the character is tested in certain ways.

learns that they lack the knowledge or skill to conquer those challenges so that an awareness can happen, is eventually propelled to a meeting with divinity of some sort.

You can just call it a come to Jesus moment, or you can call it a face-to-face, like direct confrontation with the darkness inside of you. This is often in Star Wars where he goes into the pit underground and sees Darth Vader. He cuts off Darth Vader's head and his face is there. This is this idea of

The hero needs to kind of confront usually a father figure of some sort or a parental figure, a deity of some sort, and needs to be transformed, paying some price.

to gain, and Joseph Campbell calls it the elixir, the knowledge, the skill, or whatever it is. Then you emerge from that, the master of two worlds, both the spiritual world and the physical world.

Luke becomes a Jedi, he masters the spiritual, and it lets him use a laser sword to cut people's heads off. Master of two worlds. And then by fulfilling that, the hero returns home in some way, bringing this knowledge and bringing themselves forever changed back in.

It's so vague it can fit a lot of stories, right? How could this be helpful because it's so vague? Well, there's a lot of points to this that are really useful for us to focus on. One is this idea of a circle. Stories do tend to do well if it feels like a character returns to where they were before, at least mentally or emotionally.

even physically, and we can see their progress. We talk about progress and payoff. Payoff can simply be, I was unable to do this at the start, and now I'm a master of it. Suddenly that payoff can be extremely powerful. And it really gets into this idea of the hero's journey is about learning and obtaining things that you need, but you don't quite know it yet, or you're not willing to reach for it yet.

Tons of people have written way more on the hero's journey. We're not going to go too much more into it here. It is a valuable tool. I don't like to use it very much. I find it just a little too, I don't know. I like a little more flexibility than I get in the hero's journey, but there's definitely some elements to it.

Questions, thoughts, things you want to bring up before we move on to some discovery writing methods. Is it just as bad to get sucked into the idea of not following it?

Is it just as bad? It depends on if this helps you write. The question is, is it just as bad to get-- to determinedly say, I'm not going to do the hero's journey? I mean, a great deal of literary fiction, rather than commercial fiction, is based around the idea of, how can I tell a story that lacks any of the identifiable structure components that generally make a story?

And there have been plenty of successful literary fiction pieces that have done that. The thing is, a lot of these structures are so vague that intentionally disobeying them, you'll get down and people will be like, oh, here's your structure. It just is right there. You just did it a slightly different way. It's a little bit how Tolkien was like, Lord of the Rings is not an allegory for anything. And then everyone's like...

This really feels like World War I in a lot of ways. And he's like, no, no allegory. And they're like, yeah, but were you in World War I? And he's like, well, yes, but not an allegory. You're like, I'm not going to use Hero Journey. And then someone comes to you and says, well, yeah, but your character learned something.

You're like, oh, well, that's part of the hero's journey? Yeah, that's why the hero's journey is a little bit vague. Hero's journey is characters learn stuff and get better.

And so, yes, you can indeed tell a story that doesn't follow any of these beats, but I would not be slavish about it unless you really want to do an art piece and you can really figure out how to do it. Mostly tell the story that you want to tell, and don't stress too much if it shares some DNA with other things. Is there a way to incorporate it so that the character's progress, like, even if they go up at some points, in the end it's negative?

Yeah, is there a way to incorporate? So at some points they go up, but at the end it's negative. I mean, Star Wars does this with Anakin, right? So obviously, yes. The idea of that is, is your progress the character backsliding, or is your progress more of a Greek tragedy? Which Campbell does talk about a ton, which are at the end, a lot of Greek tragedies are the character refusing to take one of the last steps.

in rejecting the last step and therefore because of it, it becomes a tragedy instead. The character has refused the elixir, the character has refused to return, and then they die, usually, or something like that. So it is totally possible to have a negative spin on this and still have the framework work really well.

And I would say that a lot of stories do that. Like, I'm on record multiple times saying I think this is the structure that Pat Rothfuss is going to use when he's writing the Name of the Wind trilogy, if we ever get the third one, which I'm confident we will. I know Pat. No one wants that book to get done more than him. I believe I've said that before. But

I think this is a classic Greek tragedy, a tragic flaw in a character that they are highlighted over and over again during the road of trials that they refuse to let go of to the point that it causes disaster rather than returns to save the day. Yeah. We'll go here and then there, and then we're going to go on to the next one. So how often is it done, or feasible would it be to, like,

chain and layer multiple hero's journeys together. Yeah. How feasible is it to chain, layer multiple? I would say very feasible. I think you can argue, again, one of the reasons Star Wars is so good is because I think it's doing the sort of thing that you do with a series in particular. Movie one, which is actually movie four, but you know, whatever. Movie one is its own circle, but it is also the first act

of a trilogy in which Luke has only just, if you kind of watch that movie at the end, he's accepted the calling to be a Jedi. And you can argue that that is him crossing the threshold

of point number three on the hero's journey. Well, he's already crossed the threshold and done the entire journey. He's now flying home and getting a medal and things like that. But really, he's only accepted point one. And now he's going to have to go do the road of trials again in a larger way and with belly of the whale, facing the father and things like this so that movie two brings us back to he's actually failed. He needs to do this again.

And this time, face the father and return with the elixir. And in this case, you can argue that the elixir is the idea that he has made the world a better place. He has redeemed the father. Rather than him becoming the father, the father's become him. That's the whole thing of the original trilogy. And he returns triumphant then from that road of trials. So you've basically got the hero's journey one loop, one episode.

and then a failure, and then again, and then succeeding. And it works really, really well. You can be doing it with multiple characters. The idea is to remember your whole idea of conflict and progress. What is your progress? How are you signaling that progress is getting made? In Star Wars, there's all these signposts of, "Luke needs to be a Jedi."

That is the full arc. He needs to not only be a Jedi, he needs to redeem his father. Revenge is what you think the first movie is, and then later it becomes redemption. And that's signposted all the way through. Your capital P plot is destroy the Death Star. But your actual story is Luke needs to be a Jedi, and that's what his calling is, and that's what a lot of his progress is about. Face the father, become a Jedi, change the father to be you.

All right. Last question there. How do you use this without being tropey? When does that start to become a problem? Yeah. Yeah, when does tropeyness start to become a problem? This is going to depend on your own kind of balance of these things. It's an excellent question to be asking. Every story will have tropes.

And there is a certain madness to trying to avoid all tropes, because every story has them. And if you are working really hard and building an identity around the person who doesn't use the tropes, then you're going to have a bad time.

Right? You really are because you'll be like, wow, this had no tropes. And then you'll go and you'll read and you'll realize that you've just done them just different ones because...

Certain things work for stories. It's like how, this isn't a trope, but I wrote the book Mistborn, right? Which has this really engaging magic system that I love where people are like, you know, pushing off of coins and flying around. I'm like, this is the most original thing ever. And I submitted it to my writing group. They're like, this is so cool. It's just like Magneto. You're like, well, there was four years of my life to write Magneto, but worse.

Right? Mistborn, Magneto, but worse. And to focus too much on that is maddening. Because the truth is that, yeah, they share some attributes, but the stories are different. And the story that you're telling, the more you write, the better you'll be at finding your own voice. Most people I know, their first book

It's over the line into using too many of the tropes, and your influences are a little too obvious. But at the same time, Lion King is Hamlet. They don't care that it's Hamlet. I don't care that it's Hamlet, other than from an academic presentation. It's a really great story, and they did it their own way.

I would say to you, practice and stress this less than you think you need to.

It's a bigger deal in first books than it ever is in second books. And later on, you start mastering your influences rather than just unconsciously using them. At which point, you'll be able to say, wow, I really like this. Let me figure out what I like about it and use it. I really like the hero's journey. How can I do something interesting and new with the hero's journey? You just saw me talk through the person who probably worships Campbell the most in pop media that I know of is Lucas.

and even his use of it in that original trilogy is really interesting and does some very cool things with it that makes the structure of Star Wars fascinating, even though you know, hey, he's hitting all these points. You can do things like that. And even these days, like, it depends on your genre. I get kind of horrified by the way that certain genres approach tropes.

where there's TikTok and they'll be like, "Here's the five tropes that make my story." And that's really appealing to some readers. Some people who like certain romance novels, did I mention this already? You can go to the Amazon page and it'll say, "This is a happily ever after with no cheating." And none of like, it'll list the things that don't occur in it, right? And what do. And that's like before the summary.

So that the reader knows that they can throw away this book if it doesn't match before they even-- That kind of horrifies me as a reader, because that's not how I approach reading, but that works for a lot of people. So the answer is, don't stress this too much. Find your own path. But particularly if it's your first book,

You could do way worse than leaning hard on one of these structures and going too hard on them. You'll find that in character and world building, you will stretch further naturally, and in so doing, make the story your own. Let's talk about yes, but, no, and. This is another famous one that I believe comes from Hollywood originally.

And this is the idea that stories are a series of escalating incidents, not just incidents. And that escalation causes progress, a natural sense of progress, because it can only escalate so far before it comes to a head.

And people using this who are generally more discovery writer will be asking, they'll come up with events and then they'll let them cascade into one another so they get more and more in line with the story you're telling. What do I mean by that?

Screwball comedies, they get more and more ridiculous. So that an event happening at the end, at the end of your story, for a screwball comedy that my wife just made me watch, it's her favorite, the characters are...

In a room with mobsters shooting at them. With top secret plans. And with rocks. You can now tell what this is. That are harmonic. And everyone's shooting each other. And there's millionaires there. And it starts with just a guy on a business trip. With his fiancée.

You spiral further and further out of control to where the point that the ridiculous events at the end don't seem outlandish because they were small steps that got you there. If you're escalating not in a screwball comedy, it's escalating stakes. We'll use Star Wars again because everybody knows Star Wars. It starts with, I need a droid.

It ends with blowing up a planet. Well, that's no moon, right? It ends with a military operation against the galactic empire in which our hero who only needed a droid...

Is now blowing up the most destructive space station in the world and has learned to be a space wizard. How did that happen? Small escalations. You go to buy a droid, but you bought the wrong droid. That droid has a message in it for somebody that you know. Well, take the droid to the person to let the message go. Okay, but you did that.

So let me explain what yes, no, but, and, yes, but, no, and. Yes, but, no, and says you start with a problem. I need a droid. You ask yourself, does the character solve this problem? And the answer in this case is yes, but...

You know, he got the wrong droid. You could also argue this is, no, he got a droid but it's not the droid that will work for him. But I think this is a yes but. Yes but. You answer it either with yes and you add a complication, or you answer it with no and you add a complication.

To start spiraling. So, yes, but it's a secret droid that has a story for Obi-Wan Kenobi. All right. Kenobi wants Kenobi to solve the problem. No. And you're being hunted by the Empire. They've killed your aunt and uncle.

Great. I need to get off planet. Do we know where to get off planet? Yes, but the guy that you hired to get you off planet is a scoundrel.

Who shot first and is only interested in money, right? You can see how this is. So now we're off planet. You're like, all right, we just need to get to this place where we can deliver the plans and we'll be safe. Do we get there? No. And you get pulled into the Death Star and there's a giant evil space wizard samurai there who killed your father. Right? Like, you can see how by the end you're blowing up.

That's no moon. Whatever it is. A giant space station. Yes But No Anne's whole goal is to keep you focused on making things worse and worse and worse. This tends to work best in shorter fiction.

Escalating across a 400,000 word book is a lot more difficult than escalating across an 80,000 word book. It's the reason why a lot of thrillers tend to be in that 80 to 100 range. And if they go longer than that, this sort of constant escalation

constant hyper, you know, the pacing is so fast. Everything's always blowing up. Someone's always chasing you. You run out of gas on that stuff. But it can be a great way to tell a story, particularly in the short term. You're like, I need to get them from point A to point B. Let's do some yes, but no, and. And

really escalate some things in small ways for each of the characters, building this conflict and this tension. Particularly if you keep in mind, like, the character's problem is this: They need to, you know, they need to learn to be more caring. Do they solve it here? No. And this. Do they solve it here? No. And this. Okay, they try a smaller thing. Does that work? Yes, but

you can see how you can kind of use this to give your sense of progress through the course of the characterization. I'm actually going to skip over three act and just do the other one that is really good for discovery writers I found. And that's the try/fail cycle slash points on the map.

is how I like to talk about this one. This is the method that Robert Jordan used to write books. Robert Jordan was a hybrid between an outliner and a discovery writer, but he veered toward discovery writer. If there's a line, he's over here. And you can tell that by when I sat down--

with his wife and with the owner of the company, Tom Doherty, and they were reminiscing about the Wheel of Time. And when Robert Jordan went in to pitch a three-book series that was the Wheel of Time, for those who have read it,

I wrote books number, like, what, 12, 13, and 14 to finish it off, right? And his three-book outline ended with the last part of book 14 that he had written and left for me. It's not like he just said, well, we'll get there and then add more on top. No, it just took him 14 books to get through the three books because he kept yes, but, no ending all this way through. He would call it points on the map, though. He'd say...

I know I'm driving to Washington, D.C. on a road trip. And I know what I want to see in Washington, D.C. I want to go and see the Lincoln Memorial. That's kind of the equivalent of you saying, all right, I know that I'm going to write a book about this character who has to fight the Dark Lord at Mount Doom for the fate of the world. And he'd say, I also know that along the way,

On my road trip metaphor, I'm starting in, let's say, I'm starting in Utah. I know that I want to see... I'm from Lincoln. Nobody wants to see Lincoln.

Um, but let's pretend I want to go see Lincoln, Nebraska. Uh, what is it? Uh, I'm going to have a runza. Brandon always talks about how great runs it is. So, uh, that's the equivalent of, uh, when Robert Jordan, he pitched a series, he said, I'm going to do this cool thing where a person pulls a sword. That's not a sword from a stone. That's not a stone. And everybody doesn't quite realize that he's a King Arthur, uh, archetype until much later on. Um,

because the sword's a magic... The stone is a fortress, and the sword is this magic item that you need to magnify your power. It's in the shape of a sword, but it's not actually used as a sword. So the sword that's not a sword from the stone that's not a stone, he gave that away a little bit by...

naming everybody after people from Arthurian legend, except for the ones that are from Norse mythology. But, you know, it works very well in the story. So he knows he wants to get there. And so he will come up with this map of the places he wants to go, and that's his outline. His outline is six bullet points. Character starts here, this big event, this big event, this big event, this big event, this big event at the end.

And then he'll be like, I'm going to discover right myself between points one and two and see how long it takes me. And that gives some structure to the story where you know the big moments so you can start foreshadowing them.

And despite what J.K. Rowling says, I think this is how she did Harry Potter. I don't think she had as much as she claims she has, just being a writer and knowing. But I do think she had points on the map. I do think she said, I know I'm going here. I know this is going to get revealed. I know this is going to get revealed. And those things she foreshadows really well because it can really help someone who's discovery writing have an ending in mind and be able to work on some of this progress and payoff as they go.

That said, do remember if you are naturally a discovery writer that you can fix anything in post. You can revise your story so that you can add all of these things on once you get to the end. Revision can do wonders. So...

It's okay to not have, but I have found more and more of the discovery writers I talk to actually use this. Why do I call it a try-fail cycle? This is how Dave Wolverton taught this kind of same idea in the class when I took it from him long ago, and it's always one of those points that he taught that stuck with me. He said, basically, if you don't know how to build the structure of your story, remember that before something can be accomplished, you have to know how to build it.

a character should generally fail at it at least once. In an ideal world, depending on how hard this thing is, they fail at it twice or three times, and they should try the most intelligent things you can think of and execute them cleverly and either fail because of their personal flaws or lack of skill or fail because they've been out-funked.

and the villain has already assumed that someone will try the most obvious thing that all the readers are like, "Well, why didn't you do this?" The character tries it and fails to prove to the reader that the author has thought of that, and indeed, the problem is bigger than that. It helps a lot with this, you know, points on the map idea, this idea of

Yes, we need to do this. We need to destroy the Death Star or whatever. Well, what can we try to destroy the Death Star that is intelligent, that's going to work? Well, we'll send our spies and they'll get the plans, but oh no, it fails because of this or whatever. This whole idea that the characters are being smart, but they're failing because of

the intelligence or power of the villain, or because they just haven't learned enough yet, which lets you do that whole hero's journey thing. Go ahead. And that can happen offscreen. I mean, the Bothans died offscreen. Yeah, the Bothans. This one's-- I was trying to force Star Wars into this rubric. It doesn't fit this one really well, because George Lucas was using a structure. So what would you do with this? I wouldn't probably use the Bothans. What I would do,

with this one is the try fail cycle would be Luke learning the force. So your try fail cycles for him are, here's the lightsaber, I get to get back to my family. You've just been offered to be a Jedi, you're running home,

to power converters? But yes, he does. Then it's like, all right, you've got the laser sword, but you can't block the things, because you're trying to block the things, and you're not good. And then it's like, here's Darth Vader. Darth Vader has come for you. Luke looks, and then Obi-Wan knows he's not ready yet and intervenes. Like, these are your try-fail cycles. It's really Luke defeats Vader. And then even at the end, Luke doesn't defeat Vader. Luke just takes the first step to becoming a Jedi, and

And Vader gets yeeted, as my kids would say, into the next movie. Yeah. So that's probably a better version of the try-fail cycle. Learn to be a Jedi, learn to be a Jedi, try to defeat Darth Vader. He fails at defeating Darth Vader in one spectacular way before he succeeds and has several little incidents along. And that really-- if Luke hadn't faced Darth Vader, got his hand cut off, and failed,

That whole trilogy would just not be as successful or as interesting because that failure taught him so much. Obstacles force you to learn if they're used correctly. Yeah? I feel like in 2025, I think this is CinemaSins' fault, but people always call things plot holes that are not really plot holes. Yes. Oh, CinemaSins. Oh.

Okay. What's the happy medium of like, you want to, like, you said, like, struggling, failing at it, but where do you find it? Where's your happy medium? So plot holes and happy mediums. All right, you'll get to be next, so you can put your hand down. So the idea is CinemaSins and things like this, people are now hunting for plot holes. I have big problems with the way that the internet criticism realm thinks about plot holes. And this is because

A story cannot lack plot holes by those definitions, right? Because a story cannot accurately represent real life without having infinite space and time to tell it. Because of that, every story must cut corners. Every story is going to. The best stories will. Now,

What we want to avoid is things that will kick the majority of readers out of the story because they are too focused on asking questions that are not helping you tell your story. And those are two very different things, right? So if you think about it, here, I'll give you an example. When I was in college, I had a friend who had a really great metaphor that I still love to this day. He said, you want to avoid gorillas in the phone booth.

Imagine that a character is walking along the street, talking on the phone to his significant other, and they're experiencing a breakup. And it's really tense. And then the narrative says, and he passed a gorilla in the phone booth. We don't have phone booths anymore. He passed a gorilla in the Starbucks, right? And then just kept on going. Well, some things like that

make it hard to focus on the story that you're trying to tell, because you've dropped an out-of-context problem on the reader. We'll have to get to you in a few minutes, so wait until I'm done with this. Out-of-context problem that boots the reader out, because they're like, "But what about the grill and the phone booth?" And this is often a matter of where do you place these things, and which things kick the majority of your readers out. How many readers, while reading Lord of the Rings,

worry about the eagles and wonder if the eagles could have flown the ring, right? If a significant number of beta readers are being kicked out of the story, you'd be like, yeah, but the eagles, you could see how that could, it never did to me, but you could see how something like that

could, as you're reading the story, you could be like, but wait, this whole story doesn't matter. And in those cases, I do recommend that the author be like, we can't do this because of X. Sometimes your first try-fail cycle is to get rid of those questions about plot holes. But normally, when you're writing your story, you accept that your reader will be on board for it,

and you tell the story the best way you can, and if a majority of beta readers or alpha readers are having a problem with something, then maybe you can address it. This is what we call, it was from an old stage play term, hang a lantern on it.

They would, oftentimes better than having one piece of the stage be poorly made, because they had no time to get it done, they would put a lantern on the part that doesn't look good and have the characters note it. Be like, "Oh yeah, that lantern doesn't work and never has." Whatever. So that the reader can stop worrying about it. And instead of,

There's a girl in the phone booth. You either don't put it there or say, he passed the girl in the phone booth. His friend Charlie was home from doing his duty on the street corner dancing with the sign. Suddenly, the girl is explained. You've got Charlie introduced. It's kind of indicating that Charlie will be important later on. And so therefore, we can get back to the story. You don't need to know who Charlie is.

You don't need to know any of that. You just need to know that you're going to get it answered. And hanging a lantern on it is a, I'm going to answer this, or don't think about this, don't worry, I thought of it sort of thing. Those are the plot holes you should be worried about, the things that are actively booting your reader and not the things that

Three years later, someone says, "Yeah, but what about this?" that you could explain with a sentence, and no one got bothered by it while they were actually reading the book. This is why CinemaSins is a problem. There's usually one actual plot hole, and then the rest of the whole thing is answers that could be given in one sentence or half the time that were given and they just ignore. Back here. And then we'll jump over here. Thank you. What about problems with characters that they can't solve?

Yeah. Yeah. Right, so the question is, what about things that characters can't solve, like a character loses a limb and you don't want to go the path of magically regrowing it. We will talk in Sanderson's laws during the actual world building thing about my distinction between what I call a character flaw, a character handicap,

And I've got it. It's in my notes. There's like three of them. One of them is a thing the character should solve. You want them to, like a character flaw. One is a handicap. This is something that, by my definitions, they put on themselves that makes things harder, but you don't want them to overcome, such as in this terminology would be Superman handicaps himself by having a moral code, right?

And then there are legitimate challenges to overcome that are not your fault, that the story is not about you fixing, but you have to get around them somehow, such as you have lost a limb, but you still need to save the world. How are you going to learn to sword fight now? Those three things are treated differently by narratives, and I might have different words to define them when I actually teach that lecture because I change it every year. All right? So...

So there we go. All right, we'll go to you and then we're gonna keep going. - Okay, just super quick then. - Yeah. - Is there, like, let's say you want that gorilla in the phone booth to stay there. Like, you're purposely putting it there because you want the reader to go, wait, why is there a gorilla in the phone booth? Is there a way to do that while keeping

Yeah, okay. You want the gorilla in the phone booth. How can you insert that and make the reader question without? So there's a couple. Depends on how much of a gorilla it is. In a lot of fantasy and science fiction, you can throw out a jargon term, and the reader knows that you're going to explain what the magic means later on. They'll say, well, we can solve that with

X, Y, Z, magical thing. You don't need an explanation there at all. If what you're really saying will kick the reader out, and you want that, then you better make sure that what's happening next immediately is not relevant for them to remember.

Because, you know, or you want to hang Aunt Lantern on it. A lot of times you'll be like, "I saw a gorilla in the phone booth and thought, 'I'll deal with that later.'" Right?

you see a lot of narratives do that with gorillas in the phone booth. And sometimes that's your story promise. Your promise says, "This story is weird." Like, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, there's a gorilla in the phone booth every few pages. And usually there's some sort of Watson character in those. The person's like, "Can you explain this?" "No." And then they just keep going.

That's a story a lot about yes, but, no, and, where the yes, but, the but is always something weirder than you thought it was, and the and is always something weirder, indeed, than you thought it was. Yeah. Mm-hmm? So last week we were talking about my book in my writing group, and I got the comment that it's kind of like wayside stories, which is what I was going for. Okay. So how do you get it to be something that

feels more like-- I don't know. I'm writing a middle grade book, and I want it to feel mysterious and magical, but I also want it to make sense. OK. So you're getting the comment that it's like Wayside Stories, where the randomness is the fun of Wayside Story, right? And you want it to feel more magical realism, which is,

The world is a magical place. We don't necessarily need or have explanations for it. Boy, this is really individual to your story. It's one of the things that's hard to answer in a lecture format, because there's all kinds of ways that you could solve this individual problem. In your position, what I would do is I would try to make the things that happen less of a non sequitur to the characters in the story.

Usually magic realism, there's some wonder to it, but they accept that this is just part of the world. And if they're like, "Wow, that's so wacky!" If you have a Watson character being like, "Wait, why towels?" then it makes it more funny. You also want to look at your diction.

And is your diction skewing toward whimsy and a little more literary to get you into that magic realism mode? Or is your diction skewing toward kind of a little bit silly and playful, which is going to head toward that?

It may not be as big a problem as you think. Opening of Harry Potter starts with a very wayside story, you know, a man with not enough neck and a woman with too much neck. But then, you know, ends up-- I mean, Harry Potter goes whimsical wayside fairly often and manages to come back to itself. So middle grade, it may not be a problem, but how your characters react is going to be a part of that.

But there's a hundred ways to solve this that we can't get into right now. All right, we're going to move on to three-act structure. And I end at 15 after? Yeah. OK. So we're going to go to three-act structure. So three-act structure, there's also seven-point story structure and nine-point story structure and things like this. They all kind of boil down to the same idea that starts with the Hollywood three-act formula.

And this is another one that you can just Google me on and you can kind of follow along. It is a little like The Hero's Journey, except three-act structure is really about propelling toward a climactic explosive ending. And it is less about the circle and coming back. And it is more about-- it's like an arrow pointed at an explosion.

and it is really focused around the idea of conflict and things going wrong. It works very well, once again,

if you follow the kind of formula more strongly, it works better for shorter stories. Not just short stories, shorter novels than it does for longer ones. But the whole concept of acts and what the first act means, what the midpoint means, and those things is really relevant to storytelling all around. So three-act format, it's three acts.

It's actually four acts, but they like three acts so much they keep it that, because the midpoint really divides the middle act into two, and usually the middle act-- The film majors back me up on this, right? They're like, "It's three acts, but the first one and the last one are short. The middle one's double length and has a big bead in the middle." You're like, "That really feels like four acts." They're like, "No, no, no." "Yeah, is the midpoint the most important point?" "Yes."

Yeah, it's kind of like four acts, but they call it three acts. So your first act is where you're going to try to get most of your exposition out of the way in a three-act format. You're going to try to introduce a character. You're going to introduce a need. You're going to introduce a status quo. And the big thing that a lot of people in Hollywood talk about that I do really like is the idea of what's the big question?

Joe Russo, who is one of the directors of the Avengers films, among other things, when I got a chance to chat with him about story structure, this was the number one thing he highlighted. I'm like, so what's the most important tool for you in telling stories? And Joe said, the dramatic question. What is the story about, particularly in relation to the character? What question will this story answer?

That, he feels, is the key to breaking a story. He says that every story that he's told has benefited strongly from knowing that question up front. This is something that a lot of the books on writing screenplays will talk about. They'll call it, what do they call it, the dramatic question? They've got a term for it.

Major dramatic question. Your major dramatic question. If it was going to-- Star Wars, the thing is, most have multiple. But you'd be like, will Luke succeed in becoming a Jedi?

and getting vengeance for his father's death. It's probably your major dramatic question because that question needs to be asked by the end of Act 1. And most people agree the end of Act 1 for Star Wars is when he finds his aunt and uncle dead and he cannot return. It's, again, that whole idea of the hero's journey. So you want to be asking that question. The question needs to be asked. It doesn't mean, like, a lot of stories, Indiana Jones, like...

The cold open is not act one. The cold open, moving into, will Indiana Jones find the lost Ark? That becomes your dramatic question at that point, rather than, will Indiana Jones get through this cave that's full of tarantulas that spin webs and hang on them for some reason? Yeah.

Act 1 then involves what they call the inciting incident. The inciting incident is not kind of your, like, propel you out of Act 1 into Act 2. The inciting incident is just this thing that starts causing a cascade of events. In Star Wars, it is probably Leia...

And sending the droids to try to take this story, these plans, to Obi-Wan Kenobi. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope. Inciting incident.

Droids land, because the droids land, Luke's able to find the droids. Because Luke finds the droids, he ends up with Obi-Wan Kenobi. Because he's with Obi-Wan Kenobi, he's not there when the stormtroopers kill his family. Because they kill his family, he's required to go with Obi-Wan Kenobi to try and find the princess. Because he goes with, right, the inciting incident is this thing that starts a cascade, and a lot of Hollywood formula, they like, you know, focus on this thing quite a bit.

I don't know if you need one, but the inciting incident for the Way of Kings is Zeth killing the king. And things just start cascading a lot from that. So, let's see. Did I miss anything? Yeah, there's usually an attempt, a refusal, right, as part of that. And then you hit that plot point at the end of part one, which is...

Life can never be the same. That's called plot point one, and it separates act one from act two. Act two, I once had a professor explain that act one, you chase someone up a tree. Act two, you throw rocks at them. Act two is the period of rocks being thrown at a character. And so you visualize this as things need to get worse.

Everything the characters try makes the problem worse somehow, in some way, and it is called rising action. Everything's always getting worse. And the characters don't have the skill, knowledge, or what's it to solve these problems yet.

This is kind of your progress, right? You're identifying, like, they can't solve the problem because they cannot solve the mystery because Hercule Poirot does not yet have all the clues to tell him who it would be. Therefore, Poirot...

I really like Poirot. They're good books. But he can't solve the mystery because he didn't have the answers yet. So he therefore must spend the story getting the answers. While things in that case escalate, and a lot of the escalation in mystery is, I thought I had the answer, but I don't.

Am I going to be able to solve this problem before there's another murder? A lot of times, there is another murder. Even if there's not, there's this rising tension of, I'm trapped in an enclosed space. Someone's committed a murder. My every theory is wrong. Is this the case? I'll fail. Happens a lot to established detectives. So then you hit your midpoint.

And your midpoint in Hollywood structure is your big twist. Does not have to be a surprising twist, right?

Your big twist, like everyone says the midpoint in Star Wars is they arrive to Alderaan and Alderaan is gone and they get pulled into the Death Star. Suddenly the story takes on a completely different feel. No longer are we just getting these plans somewhere. We are sucked into the problem. You want either a major escalation,

that happens as your midpoint. You want a reframing of the story in some important way, or you want to make it deeply personal to the main character in some way that it wasn't before. This is called your midpoint, and it's the point where everyone who is watching the film or reading the book, and was just a little bit whatever, sits up and says, "Oh!"

And that, again, that can be a big surprise. But it doesn't have to be. It can be a big escalation instead. But I would say in Hollywood format, that's the most important moment in your entire story is that reframing and expansion of it.

From there, you go into the second part of Act 2, where the attempts to solve the problem are more frantic, and the consequences of failing become even greater, leading to the characters having tried everything possible

That they can or that they think they can. And leading them to. What's the famous. It's a famous show that talks about the belly of the whale. Or the darkest moment. The point right before death.

Act 3, where the characters are at their low points. The all is lost moment. Where's that from? It's the all is lost moment. Someone in a movie that gets memed and clipped and things like that. But you generally in this have that all is lost moment. We tried everything we could. There are no answers. We have failed. And then something they've learned along the way or accomplished along the way makes them realize, wait, no, there is one last thing we could try.

And that propels you into Act 3, where you try, you set it up that this is the last chance. There is no more trying. If you fail now, it is the end. If you fail now, the Death Star will destroy

the Rebel base and the story, you know, there's no more story. We have failed. And then they either succeed or fail in a climactic moment that you have pointed the arrow at from the beginning. In Star Wars, once again, that arrow is we have a hole in the Death Star that you can, you know, the plans have a secret. And

And then it ends with Luke exploiting that secret while accepting his destiny to become a Jedi by rejecting technology and embracing tradition. And so, boom! Literally, you have the agroclimactic moment. Hollywood formula works pretty well.

I like it a little bit better than The Hero's Journey personally, partially because everyone has their own interpretation of it, and every essay you read on Hollywood Formula is going to present it in a different way. The Bible of this is a book called Save the Cat, but Save the Cat is referenced less often than all the people who learned from Save the Cat who made their own versions of it.

And so learning kind of this three act, this is how to create a western style story structured in the way that western style audiences expect them to happen. You do not have to at any point follow this, but it is the big one. Yeah, we'll go here and then over here. So my question is about adaptation. Yeah.

The Lord of the Rings, to me, I feel like it is the quintessential discovery story. Okay, yeah. I don't know if you agree with that, but Peter Jackson adapting it, I feel like he's adapted it into this Hollywood three-act structure where things happen, things happen, and then in the final film, they're like, well, let's go to the block game. Let's try and draw Sauron out. Would you say that that's like...

How do you feel about that relationship of adaptation from one plot point or one plot device into the three acts all the way through, translating in between? That's an excellent question that might be too big for this class, but I'll give a stab. How do I feel about adaptation? I do feel that film is a different medium, and you are going to have to change things to film. And I feel like book to film where people refuse to do that,

Often leads to other problems. There's a reason why I think the third Harry Potter film is stronger than the first two. And I think it has to do with more liberal adaptation to match the medium better. That said, we've had a lot of

and I mean a lot, of people poorly adapting source material in the last 10 years as the streaming boom has happened. And that's how we end up with Master Chief in a romance with a member of the Covenant. Where's my halo, homies? Right? Like...

Like, it's OK. Like, you need-- like, when Villeneuve made Dune, there are things he decided to cut. And some of them are different from the choices I would make. Like, I've talked about it. Movie 2 deciding to half keep the time jump and half not leads to some interesting storytelling problems for Dune 2. I still think they're both 10 out of 10 movies.

for a book that is virtually unadaptable, even if you're David Lynch, right? And so, like, I think that they have to be different things.

Hollywood is going to Hollywood. And you could make an argument that The Lord of the Rings as more of an episodic mid-century, you said exploration story, which I'd agree with. The Hobbits go here and discover and explore Tom Bombadil. The Hobbits go here and explore and discover this thing. And it wasn't really meant for three-act structure. It wasn't even meant to be three books.

that in some there are costs to that, right? I think movie three is largely weaker than Return of the King as a book. Movie two is as strong, I feel, and it really fit the format well. And he managed to make movie one and two just surprisingly strong films, making them fit the format, but it didn't work as well for three, but it doesn't matter because the scenes on Mount Doom between Frodo and Sam are just so good that we forgive him, right?

It's okay to have one 9.5 in a trilogy of 10s. We'll let you have that, Peter Jackson. But do you know what I'm saying here? I'm not sure that there is a line there. There's a whole continuum. It depends on the property, the person adapting it, what their passion is, and what matches for the actual story that's being told.

Yeah, I promised you I would get over here. Did I? Yes, there you are. I was just wondering, when you were kind of like--

I don't know how to say this. Growing up in your writing process, how aware of these three extractors and things like that, how conscious of them were you as you were trying to do them? I would say that I was not early on very conscious. The more I grew-- we're going to do this last question. Everyone else write your questions down, and I'll try to get to them next week. But let me tell you something I learned.

from a video game streamer. Well, no, a card game streamer. I learned this from a guy named Lewis Scott Vargas, who plays Magic: The Gathering. He was talking about how you learn to be a better player of a card game. And he says, "When you learn your first rules of a card game, it is just really hard to keep those rules in your mind."

The game is so complex that level one, you have to devote all your attention to, to just be able to remember, this is how this card is played. This is the time where I draw a card, the time in a turn where I draw a card.

As you play more and more, those things become second nature to you, which leaves room in your brain to level up and to start focusing consciously on other things. And the better you get, the more that becomes instinct, and you can then focus on something else. Writing, I think, is the same way. As a new writer, it is hard-- it is super hard, perhaps the hardest thing for a writer to learn to do it consistently

and to just sit down and write. That's all you can often do as a new writer. Thinking about all of this, if you try to keep this all in mind, will just overwhelm you, and you just won't get anything done. As you build habits in your writing more consistently, you can then start to say, "Well, what is this story about?" And you can start to ask yourself the great dramatic question and explore that.

As you start to do things like that naturally, as you start to pace naturally, figure out where chapter breaks feel right to you, these things will become second nature and you can start to focus on even higher level and higher level things. So a lot of this right now I'm giving you as tools to use later on, depending on where you are in your journey, or to use as diagnostic tools for what's going wrong, or to help you build an outline.

But don't stress keeping this all in your head as a newer writer at the first. You will not be able to. And so don't worry about that. Worry about what you can do. And each time you feel like you're ready to level up, add something else you're going to focus on until that starts to become second nature to you. We're going to get to the last one here, which is the structure model, using a structure model. I really like this one.

simply because this allows you to practice your chef versus cook. Structure model is you look at a sub-sub-genre. You're not looking at adventure. You're not even really looking at necessarily spy movies. You're looking at a specific kind of heist. You're like, I'm going to identify all of these books that I love that do this specific kind of heist, and I'm going to take it and use it

in a science fiction story. This is the, I love Hamlet, what's great about Hamlet? What other stories do revenge stories about a person restoring themselves to their father's throne? Who else has done this? What can I do with this? And you spend a lot of time researching these, and you build out the points that work really well,

that don't all have to be there, but that are points along the way, and you start adapting that to your story. I don't have a lot of time to go into this one, but this is one of the ones I use for The Way of Kings. I use the same, so Hoosiers and Miracle and all these underdog sports stories are the same story as Ender's Game.

which is the same story of the bridge crew in Way of Kings. Underdog sports story. Pitch Perfect and Way of Kings use the same plot structure. Okay? Right? When you can learn what makes those plot points work and what makes, like, the stakes are much bigger in Way of Kings. I don't think they're getting executed in Pitch Perfect very often, but the idea of we've got a team who are...

You know, it's cool runnings. Nobody's good at what they're supposed to be doing. And there's a coach who can come in and get them all focused and get the point in the right way so that they can pull off the impossible. That's a type of plot structure that I identified and said, I like this. Why do I like this? What makes this really work? And I spent years kind of reading these things, watching these things, building what points I think work to the point that I could take that

and I could use it as a structure to tell part of a giant epic fantasy story in a way that worked really well because I knew I could see the whole plot structure really easily because I'd seen it done so many times and I could then make it my own.

This is a really great method, particularly if you're having trouble with plot, and you are, even if you're a discovery writer, you're like, I am just gonna watch a bunch of these, build a plot, the points of them that I like, I'm gonna ignore the dumb ones I don't like, the plot points, and I'm going to adapt that into a new medium, particularly if you take it to a new medium or a new aesthetic, and I'm gonna tell my story with that structure. It can be a great way to springboard yourself into telling your great story.

That is our lecture for today. Thank you all for coming, and we will next week do a Q&A on plots.