BRANDON: All right, guys, World Building Week Two. Woo hoo! The fun stuff. We'll be talking about world building this week and then we will have Mary Robinett here to do next week, a lecture on short stories. And at some point I will do the Q&A on worldbuilding, either maybe next week is half of that lecture, depending on how much time Mary Robinett takes, or maybe the week after. I will get to the questions that you guys asked last week and we'll ask this week if they're things you're curious about. Before we kind of really dig
into this lecture, I wanted to ask you guys to list a few of your favorite stories in regard to worldbuilding specifically, film or book or video game. What are your favorites? Yeah. STUDENT: John Wick. BRANDON: Okay. John Wick. All right. What do we got here? STUDENT: Avatar the Last Airbender. CLASS: (cheering) BRANDON: I think you were priced into saying that one, right? All right. Yeah, go ahead. STUDENT: Firefly. BRANDON: Firefly, great. All right. Firefly. Yeah. Go ahead. STUDENT: The Expanse. BRANDON: You like The Expanse. All right let's get one more. Sure, we'll go over on
this side, because I haven't-- STUDENT: Dune. BRANDON: Dune. All right, great. OK. That'll be relevant later. We're going to use those. But let me ask you guys a different question. You are presumably in this class specifically instead of the other creative writing classes, which you might also be taking, but you're here because of worldbuilding. That's what differentiates this class from the others being offered. This is the sci-fi and fantasy themed creative writing course at the university. So why? Why do you want to learn to build worlds? Why are you building worlds? What is it to
you? What does it mean to you to have world building in a story? STUDENT: It means the world to me. BRANDON: It means the world to you. OK. Great. Yeah. Go ahead. STUDENT: I need a world that can implement cool designs I have in my head that aren't physically possible. BRANDON: OK. All right. Let's write a few of these up. That's one that I noted. The impossible made plausible, is one of the purposes of world building, to take that impossibility and make it-- you're able to suspend disbelief while you're in there. STUDENT: Theme. BRANDON: What's
that? Theme? So you can play with theme. All right. Like that. How does worldbuilding play with theme? STUDENT: Like if you're having, for example, a more serious story, you could have more Serious or grungy setting. You could do, like, sort of storypunk or something. BRANDON: OK. STUDENT: Versus something a lot more fantastical would be like a fantasy. BRANDON: Awesome. What else? What else have you guys got? Why do you like worldbuilding in stories? Why do you read stories with lots of worldbuilding? STUDENT: Because my real life is boring. BRANDON: OK. Okay. So can we say
maybe sense of wonder and/or exploration in regard to that? Or, you know, we could probably also wright down here shear coolness to encapsulate those things. What else? Go ahead. STUDENT: I really enjoy seeing like a cultural butterfly effect. You change one small thing. BRANDON: Right. OK. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'll write that up. I love how you put that "cultural butterfly effect." Butterfly. OK. Great. Yeah. STUDENT: The abilities to explore real world problems in a world that's disconnected from ours. BRANDON: Yep. Yeah. How can we phrase this? What's that? STUDENT: Zootopia. BRANDON: Zootopia. I actually had--
what did I write down? Let me look at my list of notes. I wrote down something for this. STUDENT: Inception. BRANDON: Yeah. Ability to approach ideas in a fresh way. How about that? Approach. How do you spell approach? Real world. I'll just make-- that spells approach. I totally got it right. Ideas in a kind of disconnected way, right? Disconnected. We'll talk about this. Your ability-- you can talk about something without the baggage that it brings to talk about it in a real-world setting. And this allows you just kind of to approach difficult ideas in directions
that are maybe not as immediately-- STUDENT: Polarizing? BRANDON: Yeah. Polarizing. That's a good way to put it. Immediately polarizing. Anything else, you guys? Yeah. Go ahead. STUDENT: It's reminiscent of the sins. BRANDON: What's that? STUDENT: It's reminiscent of the sins. BRANDON: Reminiscent of the sins. OK. OK. Play God. Yeah, absolutely. Actually, one of my favorite comics on the whole internet, look it up sometime, is Cave Man Science Fiction. And this comic is a bunch of cavemen science fiction scenarios. And at the end, the moral is, "I am play gods," meaning, "Oh, I've made a mistake.
I pretend to be the gods." Really funny. You guys should go read it. All right, let's talk about this because sci-fi/fantasy has this weird disconnect that I've noticed, at least in writing it, which is that the setting is both the thing that defines us as sci-fi/fantasy writers or sci-fi/fantasy works, and is at the same time the least important part of our stories. You may laugh about that, but in most cases I think it is true. Generally, if you have a story with excellent worldbuilding but bad characters and story, Or bad characters or bad story, you're
going to have a worse story than one that does an excellent job of character and story and has weak worldbuilding. And so of the three sort of things I talk about that make up our stories, our setting, our plot, and our character, your time is best spent learning how to make engaging and interesting characters, followed by learning how to tell a really good plot, with, in third place, your ability to have a really great setting. Now ideally you want to learn to do all three. However, I think there is a tendency to have what we
sometimes call world builder's disease. Yes. This is where you become so enthralled with building the world of your story that you never finish worldbuilding and never start your story. And if you do start your story, you've spent so much time on your awesome world building That you want to fill every nook and cranny of your story with that world building, and by so doing, you undermine the story that you're actually telling. And so because of this, one of the things I like to talk about when we get to world building, because, don't get me wrong,
it is important. Having a great world will be a bonus to your story. I'd like to talk about world building in service of story. Ways that we can use, as has been pointed out on the board, theme, that we can use the worldbuilding that we're doing to enhance the specific story we want to tell so that that worldbuilding becomes a big part of that story, and an important part of that story, and not just something that's there like billboards to watch on the way to actually getting to your story. That's what you want to avoid.
Now, as a little aside on this, I want to talk about info dumps, and about conveying information in a fantasy world or a science fiction world. I often say that I consider the grand skill of writing science fiction fantasy, the single most important thing to learn for sci-fi/fantasy, as opposed to other genres, is learning to convey information about your world in a way that is interesting and not boring. And this is a trick to master writing sci-fi/fantasy. That's not to say that this will make up for bad characters or a bad story, but if you
are doing a good job with those, mastering this, I think, is the single best thing you can do to get yourself picked up by agents, to get passed up to editors or to, you know, make it to that next round of acquisition, or if you're self-publishing, to make sure that people when they are reading that first chapter, say, "I want to read the next one," and that is to make sure you are conveying your world building without boring people. This can be kind of hard. So I've got a couple tricks to recommend to you on
doing this. And the first one is to always think of your worldbuilding in service of the story you're telling and in service of making good characters. And if you can find a way that you can convey your setting information through the eyes of your characters in a way that exemplifies who that character is, so that the point of the sentence or the paragraph is actually to give us more information about the character, but you, as a side effect, tell people about the world, it's what you want to do. For a kind of example of this,
a metaphor of this, my wife often has trouble getting my children to eat vegetables. This is really super uncommon. I know it's only my children who won't eat their vegetables. But she realized in the mornings they like to have a smoothie with breakfast, and they really like, because they're little boys, we have three little boys, when things look gross. And so putting a handful of spinach into a smoothie and turning it green, they loved. They're like, "It is so gross. It looks like snot. Yum!" This is just how my children are. "Oh, it's radioactive goo!
Yum!" And you do that by throwing in a handful of spinach. Well, this is how you want to have your world building gotten across to your readers. You want them to be getting the world building by saying, "Wow, this story and these characters are so fascinating. Oh, and by the way, I know a whole bunch about Hogwarts now." This is how you want to be conveying your world building. And you want to avoid the, number one, the encyclopedia entry. A lot of fantasy in its early days, in particular fantasy, some science fiction, would start with
an encyclopedia entry. Not very well-disguised either. Like you'd start up and it's like, here is the myth of this world. And then there's basically a whole bunch of broccoli or spinach thrown at you where you're like, you're going to have to track who all these gods are, so we're going to give you kind of a boring write up of the history and lore of this world before we start the book. Or sometimes they were literal encyclopedia entries put in the front or the back of the book. Tolkien. I love Tolkien. Lots of encyclopedia entries. He
invented a new subgenre. We can give him a pass. And he still did it better than almost anyone does it. But, a lot of encyclopedia entries. Like, "I can't get this all in the story, so I'm going to give you, you know, an encyclopedia." You want to avoid that. Now you can do this in a couple of ways. One is to start trying to get more of it into dialogue. You run into troubles when you're doing this, however, for some reason we call maid and butler dialog. Maid and butler dialog comes from the old stage
plays where they would often start the stage play by having the maid and the butler come up onto the stage and be like, "As you know, the master is away for the weekend." And the other one's like, "Yes. And as you know, the lady has been getting very close with the coachman." And they're basically explaining to each other things that they already know. Avoid maid and butler dialog. It reads really stilted and is kind of a problem. We'll talk about more if we're go into dialog later in the year. But the idea, stilted dialog is
often dialog that feels like the character is not acting according to their own sincere motivations, but according to the author's motivations in getting out certain information and making it the plot happen. So avoid maid and butler, moving things more to dialog, but also giving us less than you think we need is generally a good example. One of the things I learned in my grad program, and it wasn't from one of the teachers, but perhaps the most valuable lesson I learned was from another student, who taught me about something called the pyramid of abstraction. And he
said, imagine your descriptions as a pyramid. The goal of your descriptions are to form kind of the base of a pyramid, so that you ground a reader into a story, so that when you start talking about things that are a little more high level, or a little more abstract, or if you're going to go inside the character's Head for a little bit and do what we call navel gazing, where the is ruminating on, "Oh, man, I have all these problems, let me list them off one at a time so that you, the reader, are aware
that I'm aware that I have all these problems." Whenever you're doing things like this, that sort of stuff is pulling the reader out of the story, because it's diverting the reader from the setting, and they become more and more aware of the author doing things. If you want to have a character ruminate on the nature of art in a story, then the more you do that, the more, ironically, it will pull the reader out and make them start thinking, this is the author giving me a lesson or a lecture, instead of the character actually dealing
with this. And my friend said, and I really believe is true, the way that you offset that, because you want to have some of this stuff in stories, is you let the abstract, be the tip on the Pyramid that you earn by laying your groundwork with concrete language, so that the reader is very firmly set in your world in a real concrete place and time, that then when that character's walking along and starts having a discussion about the nature of art with someone next to them, you are still imagining them walking down the street in
this place that you have painted very well, so that you don't have this problem of losing them off in the ether. And this works very well for worldbuilding as well. By being able to-- you have this character say, "Well, magic works like this." You're already kind of going into this abstract. It's stuff the reader needs. It's that broccoli, that spinach. But you want to have grounded them first in the setting. And my friend did a really cool thing with me that helped me kind of understand what he meant by abstract versus concrete. And some of
you have watched these lectures before, have talked about this before will understand, that-- let's just say you've got at the bottom concrete and the top abstract. Where would you put, if you're going to talk about love, if you're going to say someone's experiences with love, where is that on the abstract-concrete scale. What's that? Yeah. More on the abstract side. Right? Love. Now you can pull that down by making sure you're talking about what love means to this Person and the actual emotions. Where would you put it if you say the character saw a dog? Where
is that? Dog is way up here, probably right underneath love, but maybe above it. Because everyone in this room, when you say dog, how many of you imagine the same dog? Almost none of you. How many of you imagined love, and are on the same page? Hey, my friend's argument, I put it right underneath. His argument dog is above love in abstractness. More of us, if you just say love, are going to have experienced a similar thing to one another, than if you just say a dog, because the picture that pops into your head is
going to be completely abstract from-- it's going to be completely different from everyone else. Now if you say it was a mangy little white dog with one leg that was whimpering on the side of the street in a puddle, flaked with mud from the passing carriage, then you're all imagining a very similar dog. And so that pulls dog down into the concrete. Now, there's a lesson to be learned here, however. Down is not always better. We talk about in writing this phrase called show don't tell. And it's become a mantra. It's this thing, it's like,
anytime anything's wrong in a story, people will be like, "Well, you didn't show enough. You told too much." And they're often right. But show versus tell is not something to hold up as, like, the absolute gold standard, because almost always showing more and pulling down on the pyramid of abstraction requires what? More words. And so the more words you spend, the more concrete you can generally make things. Now, if you understand this model well, what you're going to do is you're going to learn how to use those more words to pull yourself down rather than
just using words that are meaningless. And you will find if you actually look at your writing, you will be using a lot of meaningless words. You'll be doing a couple of things. I do this a lot in my first drafts. You will be doing what we call a tell then show. This is where your paragraph starts with a line kind of explaining, "He was a really nervous person." And then your next line is, "He sat at the table tapping his pen against it and moving his foot like this." That is what we call tell then
show. The show is enough. You don't need to have a thesis sentence in your paragraph telling us what you're going to then show us. But we do it a lot because as writers we're trying to organize our thoughts, and then we go on to the show. You will find these all the time still in published books where the author didn't catch that one and delete it out. You want to learn to delete those out? I have a word that comes up that is very controversial in this, is the word suddenly or abruptly. A lot of
writers will say, just don't use that, just make it abrupt or sudden, the thing that's happening. I still tend to prefer using the suddenly, because it becomes a marker very well to the reader. But this is why we say get rid of the passive voice. Get rid of too many adverbs. Get rid of too many descriptors that don't actually pull you down on the pyramid of abstraction. And you'll find you're doing this a lot. You're using a lot of verys. You know, "He was very mad," instead of saying, "He was irate." Irate is further down
than very mad, but very mad uses more words. Any time you can go down by using fewer words, you're almost always wanting to make that change. And you want to get rid of these sentences that'll often just not say anything or will have lots of just modifier words that don't mean anything. "A little bit," and things like that. "Little bit" is one I use all the time, whereas I'm going through my revisions, I don't need to say that he stumbled a little bit. A stumble is a little fall. It's already in the word. I don't
need the "a little bit," but I use it all the time. You will find all sorts of things like this that you can cut that will cost you nothing On moving up or down the pyramid of abstraction, or things you can cut and replace that will move you down. Learn to do these things to start really grounding your reader in a world that feels very real. Dan Wells, good friend of mine, has advice that if you want the reader to believe you about the big things, that there's this big problem in the political system, you
often describe one small thing very concretely that impacts the characters in a way that will make you really understand this. Saying that, they the cantina is a hive of scum and villainy is nowhere near as useful as having two random people decide to bully Luke and almost get him killed until a hand has to get cut off. So grounding people in these scenes, showing them the ideas you want, pulling down on the pyramid of abstraction, good to start grounding your world building. And you will find if you start to do this, then you will have
more space in your story to kind of talk about, now and then, slipping in worldbuilding details. This is why it is almost always better to start with your character in a situation where they want something, even if not relate to the main plot. They can't have it, and we get to see them working proactively to get the thing they want. And we explain only as much world building as you need for that single instance for that character, to grab us and ground us in a scene in a world, before you start to pile on more
world building. These things work differently for different stories. I intentionally in Mistborn, if you haven't read this book, it starts off kind of working to ground you in the world. But the first time that the main character uses the magic I cut, and you don't see that scene. This is Kelsior attacking the manor house in the early chapters. Do not show it because there's a whole ton of world building. I'd have to drop on you to explain the magic. And it works so much better if I hold that off until you are more grounded in
the actual setting and characters and then you get it. Way of Kings, I throw it all at you in the prologue, the second prologue. The one I actually called prologue of the three, I throw it all right at you. Why did I do this? Well, understanding I had already an established audience who already was looking forward to reading about an interesting magic system, knowing I only had to explain one of the many Types of magic I was putting into the story, and knowing that this story needed to start off with something dynamic that promised where
one of the character arcs was going to go later on, I made the decision in that case instead to lead with a character using the magic. But that increases my learning curve, and that increases the likelihood that someone is going to put the book down and get bored early on. And if you go read reviews of Way of Kings, people who give it low stars often put it down early because the learning curve was so steep, and I wasn't therefore able to hook them into the characters as quickly because I was spending so much more
time on lore and world. That was a risk I was willing to take for that specific story, but it also has a cost to it. Learn to make things more concrete. Learn to deliver your world building through the eyes of the characters. Robert Jordan was a genius at this. When a character walks in the room and says there's a cup of water sitting on the table, the way they describe that cup of water will tell you a ton about their culture and their history and who they are. When you can describe a cup of water
in a way that gives you more worldbuilding about a person's culture than most people's three paragraph-long encyclopedia entries, then you are mastering the grand skill of writing science fiction and fantasy. All right? Questions about these ideas? Yes. STUDENT: So in Warbreaker where you did something similar, to the fact where you show magic right away in that. BRANDON: Yep. STUDENT: So would you say a takeaway for that is if the excitement matches the level of the explanation you can pull it off? BRANDON: Oh, yeah. It's much easier. Like if you were able to explain-- oftentimes in
a fantasy book, it is good to lead with the magic, I would say, if you can do it through the eyes of a character who is achieving a goal and what they are doing is intrinsic to the magic, some of the best ways to start fantasy books is indeed in that way. And so "Here is a problem in the magic or some obstacle I need to overcome. Here's me using the magic in a simple, easy-to-understand way that evokes an entire world," that's more-- like, you can use that small instance of a description of one part
of the magic to indicate there's a much larger world to explore. But let's make sure you master this one thing first. That can be a really great way to start a fantasy story. But again, try to keep it grounded in the character's motivations. And a lot of times what's working is character motivation. Here's a line of worldbuilding. Character motivation, concrete description. Here's a line of worldbuilding. And you're moving this through. This is why so often you see authors using Watson characters in fantasy novels, apprentice Characters. A person who's unfamiliar with the world or setting getting
it explained to them as they're trying to navigate some sort of issue or problem in the world, lets you get it out slowly. But it also lets you have this what we call hang a lantern on it, where the person can be like, "I don't understand this." And the other person saying, "There's no time to explain. This is the one thing you need to know right now." And then that works really well. But there's a reason why the apprentice plot became the go-to plot in the '80s for fantasy novels. Almost all of them were apprentice
plots, all the big ones, where someone young is learning about a fantastical world and then gets introduced to it step by step by some old master, so That you, as the reader, can follow that path. That gets really repetitive if it's done too much, which is why in the '90s you saw an explosion of things that didn't do this, like Game of Thrones or whatnot, where it was like, no, we're just going to throw you right in. Boom. Deal with it. Here we go. But then Harry Potter came and portal fantasy is-- Harry Potter is
a hard one to use as an example, because portal fantasies are always going to be very popular in middle grade. They started basically with Alice in Wonderland and they go all the way through Narnia all the way up to Harry Potter. And this is because it gives you an easy way to make the Watson character, the protagonist, Who also gets to go with you and explore this fantasy world. And generally, by genre, as you're your age group gets older, the more you can count on a steeper learning curve. Middle grade needs the shallowest learning curve
in general, YA can get a little steep, and adult, it can be like this. It can be Stephen Ericksen, right? Just like, oh, here's a wall. Climb up it by your fingernails and then you'll love this. That is very hard sell in middle grade. I don't know that I've read a book that has had anywhere near that steep learning curve, even something like Sabriel by Garth Nix, which is more YA than middle grade anyway, starts you and then transition's you in, even though the character is part of the world. It's very common to do something
like this. Middle grade and YA have different sort of understandings there. But even in adult, sometimes you want to come up with a really shallow learning curve for various purposes. Yeah. STUDENT: What's your advice with including world building or magic systems with journal entries without it being too [___]? BRANDON: Right. World building or magic systems in journal entries. I do it a lot. I use them as epigraphs at the start of stories, because that forces me to dole it out slowly and only used it kind of as flourishes here and there. I tend to like
it. I think it works pretty well. But you have to understand there's a percentage of your readership who will not read them. Because of that, anything you're putting in there, you need to be careful to try and reinforce the story or make not vital to the A plot line of what your story is. You can't always do this, but I often recommend imagining that people are not going to read them or remember them because of the way they are. The majority of your audience will. But you can't count on it as much as if it's
in the text. And this kind of gets into this other idea of worldbuilding in service of story, like whether you want to use epigraphs, or you want to use songs like Grandpa Tolkien did, or whether you want to have a steep learning curve or a shallow learning curve, really Comes into the question of, what are you trying to do with your story and how does your setting enhance it? Let's go to our list over here. Let me ask you this. For those who love the assassins sort of thing of the John Wick universe, how does
the setting of the John Wick universe enhance the story that they're trying to tell? STUDENT: It sets the rules of the universe that the characters all have to abide by and establishes the consequences of breaking them. BRANDON: Right. This is a very violent, dangerous world, where if you transgress a simple rule, it can lead to massive consequences. And the world building is there to warn you that all of these rules, they're very touchy. They're very touchy. Anyone else want to talk about John Wick? Yeah, go ahead. STUDENT: This is like an entire world of assassins,
and John Wick's supposed to be the awesomest guy. BRANDON: Yeah. STUDENT: With the entire society of assassins, it makes him even cooler to be the top of this world. BRANDON: It's an entire world of assassins. I'm going to repeat it for the microphone here. And if John Wick is the best of them all, by showing how cool everyone else is, you then establish how cool he is, just through natural sort of consequences of the world Building. Star Trek did this sort of thing with Worf all the time. There's actually a TV Tropes page on it,
where if they wanted to establish how awesome a bad guy was, they had them beat up Worf, because you know how cool Worf was. And if Worf gets beat up, then this person must be cool. They did it enough that Worf, if you actually look at what happens in the things, is actually not that tough, because people are beating him up all the time. But this is the same sort of idea by establishing this world. I really like this idea. It happens a lot in in espionage stories, that your kind of like-- My wife and
I say, all right, we're in spy world now. In spy world you can accept that everybody has a minimum level of spy training. And every character you meet, like they're just certain tropes that if you're watching Alias, or if you're watching even a James Bond movie, that you just be like, you know what, this is spy world. There's going to be tons of double crosses because no one trusts each other because they live in spy world and they've just all been betrayed 100 times. And using the setting to enhance that idea, so that you're on
board for the fact that the main character is going to be not willing to trust. You're using your world building to enhance your story. Let's ask about Last Airbender, a popular choice. We'll go to you first and then we'll ask others. How does Last Airbender, how does Avatar, use its worldbuilding specifically in service of the story they want to tell? STUDENT: They set up a lot in the prologue and have Katara go through that. But it's not an infodump as much, because it personally relates to her and Sokka, I feel like. BRANDON: Right. STUDENT: And
then the next instant is Sokka and Katara hunting, and that's how they introduce bending, this mutual goal that they-- BRANDON: They introduce water bending by having them on a hunt. They've got a situation they're trying to accomplish, and the water bending helps them accomplish that. How else does the overall worldbuilding of Avatar enhancing its story? STUDENT: Well, the entire A plot of the story is part of the world. BRANDON: STUDENT: I mean, the bending, Aang as the Avatar. BRANDON: Right. STUDENT: It's [___] character arc and the whole thing with Sozin's Comet. That was the big
event that the story is leading up to that is just inherently part of the world. BRANDON: Yeah. And I would say that you mentioned Aang with all these things. I would mention that one of the best things they do is they establish factions that are at war and then they give you a person whose job is kind of to unite the elements. Hey, theme! This is about uniting the factions and making peace by having one person who represents the unification of all of these things. And so, therefore, worldbuilding becomes theme in that way. Go ahead.
STUDENT: It gives an excuse for why the fate of the universe is in a 12-year-old's hands. BRANDON: Yes. Excuse for why the fate of the universe is in a 12-year-old's hands, and a very silly 12-year-old as well. Go ahead. STUDENT: They show us all of these amazing powers, like the phenomenal, literal earth-bending abilities of this magic system, and then they put it on that 12-year-old kid to save the world, and a huge part of his character and the plot is him learning to deal with the fact that he, like, all these phenomenal powers that he
has to learn and overcome. It becomes the world building, but it adds so much to his personal character arc and The burdens he has. BRANDON: Right. I would say you nailed it right there. The fact that there are all these four factions and all of them are so powerful, and then putting all of these wishes, these desires, this responsibility on Aang, it's a story about him accepting his responsibility. And the world building enhances that by showing how tough it is to master all the different magics, which is a metaphor for him learning to master all
of the responsibilities that have been placed on him. Excellent. Yeah, go ahead. STUDENT: It makes it easy to break it down into three seasons. BRANDON: Makes it easy to break it down in seasons. There is a reason why Mistborn has three magic systems, as I told you in the previous week, and we dig into one in each book. Very nice structure. Go ahead. STUDENT: It's based on real world religion and philosophies that are familiar enough that it doesn't need too much explanation. BRANDON: Yeah, it's familiar. What he said is that it's based on real world
philosophies and religions, which allows us to not have to explain as much by using the four Aristotelian elements and kind of using like-- before Avatar came out, I remember talking to some people and being like, "I'm so tired of water, earth, fire, air as your magic system." And yet in this story, they did it fantastically well and kind of proved that anything that has become a cliché, done well, stops being a cliché real fast and starts being an advantage instead of like-- what do they say in programing? It's a feature, not a bug. The fact
that these bendings are established, that you can kind of kind of imagine what would a fire bender do, that you can make that leap by yourself, and then they can show this person and then expand on it in their world, can be very handy. Now, the danger with some of these things is, some things that have become used so often, such as the vampire, what is a vampire, that you also pull a lot of baggage. The Aristotelian elements, not as much. But you do have to watch for this. You're like, if I'm going to use
a vampire to cut corners, but then my vampires are very Different from vampires in other stories, you're losing some of that worldbuilding learning curve stuff that you've got, and you're going to end up replacing it with info dumps that you're going to have to constantly remind the reader that my vampires aren't like these other vampires, which in some ways is as much or more work than it is to just come up with your own thing. So that's a push and pull you have to kind of come up with on your own. STUDENT: Avatar has one
of the best maps to plot stories. BRANDON: Yes. STUDENT: Because they're constantly moving everywhere, and every place they move to has a big impact on the story. BRANDON: Right. Using the map, the actual, like we talked about, in the travelogue, that having a map With places you can go opens up a lot of mystery, but also opens up you can follow the characters along. And Avatar, of course, has the map split up by kind of factions, which really enhances the sort of we're having an argument together. All right. And there's a lot of conflict going
on. How about that? We have to move on. Otherwise, we'll spend all our time on this. Firefly. Anyone want to talk about how the worldbuilding of Firefly enhances the storytelling of Firefly? OK. Go ahead. STUDENT: It's really easy to feel the desperation and the difficulty that the characters are in when you understand how just kind of uncaring the universe around them is, on one hand, and then on the other hand. If they get noticed by the Federation or whatever the government group is called, they're just going to squash like a bug. They don't really care
at all. BRANDON: Right. Establishing an uncaring universe where you can get squashed like a bug, and also this kind of oppressive group. And then I would add to it, using the sort of Wild West metaphor to reinforce that they are in a place where they can get away with some things. They're outside the law, allows them to have some flexibility within the system. STUDENT: We learn a lot about Malcolm and Zoe's characters by the fact that they were in a rebellion that lost. BRANDON: Right. STUDENT: So you automatically learn a lot about the history of
their characters, as well as learning about how the Federation is now. BRANDON: Putting them in a rebellion that lost is an excellent way to talk about there being this evil empire. To talk about their characterization is that I fought, I lost, I've stopped caring. No, I really haven't. But I pretend I have. Like, that gives excellent worldbuilding that relates the story. Absolutely. Go ahead. STUDENT: I think the introduction of the Reavers was extremely well done, because it wasn't-- I mean, it was, like, they were meeting the readers. And then she says something super scary, which
tells you just how bad it is. And you're also in a super tense situation, which sets up for pretty much everything else that comes later. BRANDON: Yeah. Introduction of the Reavers. It's called Reavers, right? Reavers, she says, was done very well. And, yeah, I agree. And in fact, part of this whole uncaring universe enhances the danger. Like in a lot of science fiction, something like the Reavers, which are just like space pirates who've gone crazy, would not be that dangerous. But in this universe, they're super dangerous, because it's an uncaring universe and it's not full
of force users and things like that. Yeah. STUDENT: I think a big thing is over the course of the series, you become so familiar with Serenity that it almost becomes a character unto itself. BRANDON: Right. STUDENT: It becomes a place that you want to be. I think that's something that a lot of visual types of media have in common. BRANDON: Yeah. STUDENT: Like with Avatar, the aesthetic pulls you in. BRANDON: The aesthetic pulls you in. Serenity, the ship becomes a character. I would say that that's a good rule of thumb, regardless of what you're doing,
that you want your setting to become a character unto itself, and treat it much as the way you would treat a character, and apply some of the lessons that we're going to talk about in the character weeks to your setting, making it have interesting quirks. It maybe won't have motivations, but it can be consistent in what it presents to the characters. All right. Let's quickly just do one on The Expanse and one on Dune. The Expanse. Who wants to handle The Expanse? We'll go over here. STUDENT: The nice thing about The Expanse is that it
makes everything really dangerous immediately. You're in space all the time. You're always dealing with really physical problems and it forces the captain and his crew to make the captain and his crew to make difficult decisions all the time. BRANDON: Forces the captain and the crew to make difficult decisions all time, and it's another kind of uncaring universe, dangerous. And I would say some the world building in The Expanse, like, a lot of the tension in The Expanse is either political tensions, or it is something is broken, and we need to fix it, is kind of
how things go. And so they do a very good job of showing, you need to understand the physics of this World if you're going to fly around space because you need to fix things that are broken. And if you don't, you're going to get squished. Dune. We cannot cover Dune by one person, but let's see if somebody wants to handle Dune. By the way, Dune is my favorite worldbuilding sci-fi/fantasy world, probably of all time. So go ahead. Why does Dune's worldbuilding enhance its story? STUDENT: Well, you're dropped in a setting where computers are immediately illegalized
right at the start of the book, so you understand why there's not such a high technological place there. But at the same time, you're brought in to understand why there's this space war going on with the trading of spice. It just gives that sense of tension throughout the entire story, is when you're dealing with it. BRANDON: Yeah. Gives tension to the story and things like this. I would say one of the elements that makes it work is the spice. By having your fantastical resource be what the universe needs to function, but also be central to
the mythology and lore of the people living on this planet, and immediately important to the political control of the main character who's been put in charge of it, it becomes the lynchpin piece that makes it all work. And that making a fantastical resource work that way really enhances the fact that this is going to be about factions fighting over it and the religion and how it intersects with some people wanting it for money, some people wanting it for trade, other people Wanting for religious purposes, all just enhances this idea. We could talk about Dune for
an entire three-hour session, I'm willing to bet. But let's go ahead and move on to this idea of how you actually do this. This is all great. A lot of what we've been talking about here is kind of the abstract stuff. So how do you, Brandon Sanderson, sit down and build a system where this all works, where you're worldbuilding is done in service of your story. How do you begin? And I usually divide my worldbuilding into two general categories. I have what I call the physical setting and the cultural setting. This just helps me have
a division point in my mind of the different types of things that I'm going to try to world build. Now, physical setting, for me, is all the stuff that would exist whether or not there were sentient beings on the planet doing things. If you remove them all from the planet, this stuff would all exist. So this is things like the weather patterns. Or, the tectonic activity. Why don't you start throwing some more at me and we'll put them up on here? What else can you do for physical worldbuilding? STUDENT: The map. BRANDON: OK. The map.
Yeah. What else? STUDENT: Wildlife. BRANDON: Flora and fauna. OK. What else? STUDENT: Some magic. BRANDON: Magic. I think you could say that the law of the magic would exist without-- this is the physics, the cosmology of the universe. What else we got? STUDENT: The color of the sky. BRANDON: Yeah, yeah. The visuals. Yeah. STUDENT: The cosmology. BRANDON: What's that? The cosmology. Right. Yep. STUDENT: Climate and terrain. BRANDON: Climate and terrain. Terrain and climate. Are you guys going to make me spell climate? STUDENT: C-l-i-m-a-t-e. BRANDON: L-i-m-a-t-e. Yeah. STUDENT: What kind of people the people are. BRANDON:
Yeah. Races. We'll go ahead and stop there. We could go on for a little bit longer. But this one starts to get-- you run through them pretty quickly, what these things would be. Let's go over to cultural setting. Let's start talking about all the different things you can world build with cultural setting. Start throwing them at me. STUDENTS: (shouting out answers) BRANDON: Religion. Government. Economics. Economics. Gender roles. Borders. Fashion. Food lore. History. History, which is too big. But there's lots of things underneath it. Rites of passage. That's actually r-i-t-e-s of passage. Hierarchy. Oh, that's another
one that's hard to spell. Social ladders. That's one of the words that my computer has automatically, because I type it wrong every time, to just change for me in autocorrect. You know what else I can't spell? I can't spell villain. I always put the I in the wrong place. What else you say? Accents. Yeah. Languages. Taboos/mores. Military. Yeah. Military tradition. Greetings. Swear words. Yeah. Oh, boy. We could go on for a long time, couldn't we? One lesson of this is there's a ton of things that human beings do that are really interesting and really fascinating,
and you could probably spend the rest of your life building a world Where you took everything that we wrote on the board, let's say we took an hour, wrote everything we think of on the board, and then you could spend 80 years building a world where you consider every one of these things. Remember what we talked about last week with the iceberg? Yeah. If you realistically want to have a career in sci-fi/fantasy, you are going to need to be able to produce, I would say, a book every two years at minimum. Now it depends on
your subgenre and depends on how popular your first book is. If your first book's pretty popular, that moves to once every 10 years. No names mentioned. If you want to have a career in this, you need to assume that you're going to, once you go full time on it, want to be able to produce a book a year. All right? If you are producing a novel every year, they can all be in the same series, if it takes off, though, as a little aside, if you're trying to break in, you have a decision point to
make, which is how much you write in the same series and how much do you not. When I was breaking in, I realized if I sent off a book and someone rejected it that I couldn't send them book two. And so if I wrote 10 books and they were all in the same series, and then the first book got rejected by all six major publishers back then, there's only five now, but got rejected by all six back in the days before self-publishing was really viable, then those 10 books could not be sold, until maybe later
if I broke in. So that is why, of the novels I wrote before I broke in, there were 13 of them, only one of them was a sequel, and it was a sequel to my first book where, this will happen with Your first book sometimes, you just get halfway done with what you wanted to do and you realize it's too long and you're like, all right, this is the end. And then you just write the other half. That happens a lot when you're a newer writer because you don't know how to estimate how long a
story will take you. But basically I wrote 12, 11 if you count some of the things I did separate different things when I was trying to break in. That served me very well because I was able to always have a bunch of things on submission. Now there's somebody who did the very, very different way for me, and that's Naomi Novick, who broke out around the same time I did. She had already written several books in her Temeraire, His Majesty's Dragon series. And it turns out that the first one was really good, and it got picked
up and then she was Able to say them, "Yeah, I've got two or three." I can never remember how many more she had done, but she's like, "I got two more done." And they're like, "Wow." And this is the first instance of me seeing what eventually became a very strong strategy for self-publishing. And that was they published one a month for three months. It was May, June, July, I think something like that. First one came out. Boom. Second one came out; third one came out. Stephen King quote on the first, Anne McCaffrey quote on the
second, Terry Brooks quote on the third, I think. And they did them straight to paperback, which earns a lot less money, but generally is easier to get someone to try out a new author. And they flooded the bookstores with these, and everyone was reading them, and they were fantastic. And it just basically gave a huge jumpstart to her entire career. And then the next one started coming out in hardcover. And all of a sudden it was, like, overnight Naomi was one of the best-selling authors in the genre, selling what other people had taken 10 years
to build up to because of how well they had done that sort of marketing blitz at the beginning. That's what she gained by writing everything in the same series. This is very common, by the way, and self-publishing these days, in indie publishing, where you write a bunch of books in a series. Usually for indie publishing, you want them to be short, you want them to be episodic, and you want them to be fast paced. So you're looking at something either romance focused, something action adventure focused, something mystery focused, where each one is its own story
and then you get all those ready. You've written like 12, and then you're like, "I'm releasing one every two weeks or every week for this huge blitz, and I'm going to pay for all of my marketing money, and all of my book bubbing, and all of my Amazon ads during this three-month blitz where I'm releasing all these things to try to jump start a series. I have never done this. So you would have to ask some indie authors who have how it's worked for them, but I have seen it be very successful with various people.
Regardless, you're going to have this decision point of, do you write all in the same world or not? There is a halfway point, and this is where they're all in the same world, but different characters. They're like the fake sequels to each other, kind of like Anne McCaffrey did. You see this a lot in romance where it's like, here is a cast of characters, and here's the first one's romance, and the next one you're going to get this character's romance, and then this character's romance. And you could theoretically rejigger it so you could sell any
of those first if you needed to, depending on how you write it. Regardless, that was a little aside. If you're going to want to do this, you're going to have to be good at worldbuilding Effectively, which generally is a synonym for quickly, but not necessarily. This means you're not going to do all of this for every book. In fact, you're going to highlight a few of these things in a given story. Generally, I pick one from this side. A very big surprise for anyone who's read my books. From this side, hey, we're going to have
a really strange weather pattern in this world, and we're going to then let that very strange weather pattern let us spiral into a few of these other things. But they're all coming off of the interesting weather pattern. And then I will pick a couple of these and I will really focus on them. Elantris, I focused a lot more on the linguistics. Why? Because the linguistics was the same as the magic, and so I spent more time understanding what different languages people would speak. In Mistborn, no time on linguistics, almost none at all. All of the
linguistics in Mistborn were like, they speak galactic standard. They all speak the same language. There's been an emperor in charge for a thousand years. I'm not going to worry about the history. I'm not going to worry about the linguistics, because we're focused on the now. And I'm going to spend my time on the political situation right now and also have a more complex magic system with all of those sort of-- imagine you like have worldbuilding points. Like if you guys play, like, Warhammer or whatever, and they're like, you have 100 points to build your army,
you have 100 points to build your setting. And after you get above that threshold, you start to lose your audience because you're stuffing too much in there. And the number of points you get is depending on your subgenre that you're writing. Epic fantasy, more points. Urban fantasy, far fewer points. So you want to then target those points on the things that are going to enhance your story in a way that's going to be interesting, exciting for the reader, but not feel like you're leaving stuff out, just feel like you're focusing really well. This is kind
of Sanderson's Third Law talked about in this way. Let's just do a little experiment here. Let's write up, I'm going to write up four general genres of story. You have an action adventure. You have a mystery. You have a romance. And give me one more. STUDENT: Horror. BRANDON: Horror. You've got a horror. All right so let's pick one of these on this side, and let's come up with a different take on it for each of these four things to build a setting that would enhance our story. Raise your hand, somebody. We'll have you pick one
of these things we've written up here. Go ahead. Anyone want to pick one? Go ahead. STUDENT: Climate. Super cold everywhere. BRANDON: OK, climate. The climate's going be different for each one. We're just going to deal with the climate. So let's say you wanted to build a climate that was going to work really interestingly to enhance your action adventure story. How would you do that? STUDENT: Everything's on fire. BRANDON: Everything's on fire. I like that. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: I don't know if that's actually a climate. I don't know if Australia this summer is a climate but
give me another one. Let me ask you this. How would that enhance an action-adventure? Shyanne, was it you, the one that said that? Yeah. How does having everything on fire enhance an action adventure? STUDENT: It's volcanic. They're learning to live on a volcanic planet. BRANDON: They're learning to live. How does that enhance an action adventure story? STUDENT: They have to avoid not falling in the lava. BRANDON: OK, so you're going to have an action adventure story, which often will have moving from place to place and exploring exciting locations. You have a dangerous, it’s not really
a climate, but we'll go ahead. We've got a dangerous biome that is really dangerous to explore. But the characters are going to have to do it anyway. That enhances an action adventure. What else do we got on action adventure? Someone else suggest one. Go ahead. STUDENT: Super mild climate and then all of a sudden turns hard and everything breaks down. BRANDON: Yeah. Out of nowhere, the climate goes crazy. In fact, I think there are action adventure movies based around the idea of suddenly climate change hits us tomorrow. And now we have an action adventure story.
You can see that they've done that, though. Sudden change in status quo is fantastic for an action adventure story. This is basically how you kick off an action adventure story, is a sudden change in status quo. Whether that change in status quo is climate change happen tomorrow, for some reason, or it's, your father was investigating the lost ark of the Covenant and he's missing. Sudden change in status quo kicks off an action adventure is a great way to start. Yeah, go ahead. STUDENT: Regular fog banks reducing visibility to three feet. BRANDON: Regular fog bags reducing
visibility three feet. How does this enhance an action adventure story? STUDENT: Enemies are all around you and you have no idea. BRANDON: Enemies are all around and you have no idea. Great. All right let's move on to a mystery. Let's use-- shall we use climate, or do you guys want to move to a different one? Different one. All right. Pick something. STUDENTS: (answering indistinctly) BRANDON: Oh, wait. We'll do these ones in-- oh, fashion. We'll go ahead and do one of these. Why not? Someone said fashion. So we're going to talk about how fashion can enhance
a mystery story. How could you use some worldbuilding with your fashion in a way that will make your mystery more interesting? STUDENT: Many pockets. BRANDON: Many pockets. All right. Hey, someone said masks over here. A society that wears masks is going to be great for mystery because it will enhance the theme of your story, which is who is it? Who done it? They all wear masks. Go ahead. STUDENT: People change every single 20 minutes of the day. BRANDON: They change every 20 minutes? Maybe a little extreme, but maybe everybody changes for each meal. How would
that enhance a mystery? STUDENT: Well, say you have a detective. He has no idea. He knows what someone looks like, but they're constantly changing. BRANDON: Oh, you mean change their features as well? STUDENT: No. Just [___] BRANDON: Okay. Yeah. All right. Go ahead. STUDENT: Or if they're living in a world that destroys their clothes from living around there constantly, they go put on another pair of clothes because the atmosphere disintegrates them. BRANDON: Atmosphere disintegrating your clothes. Are you sure that's not for the romance? CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: All right. Let's go over here. Go ahead. STUDENT:
[___] BRANDON: Oh, cool. Look, listen to this. This is a great idea. Let's quiet down. Cool idea. STUDENT: The murder happened at Comicon, and it was Naruto day. BRANDON: Yeah. That's actually genius, right? There was a Naruto cosplayer who committed the murder, but there's 50 of them at the con and we have to try to find them all. That's using fashion perfectly in your story's world building. I love that one. Go ahead. STUDENT: Everyone's wearing the same clothes, or the person [___] camouflage. BRANDON: OK. Yeah. You've got a society where people look very similar to
one another. You could even go a step further and say, this is a society of clones. Everybody looks the same. But now you got to figure out which one of these killed someone, if there's specific motivation to one of the clones. Yeah, go ahead. Did you have one? STUDENT: Maybe everybody, or different families have, like, different embroidery they put on their clothes. STUDENT: Oh, like kilts, the tartans. STUDENT: You can trace where some article of clothing is from, and maybe they traded them. BRANDON: Right. So what she's saying is there's maybe special embroidery that certain
families have or things Like the tartan. Is it called tartan? Yes. And things like this. Like, you could imagine a detective who is a fashion expert and solves crimes based on the fashion. Which, there's got to be someone has done this. But I don't know. I'm sure. What's that? STUDENT: Legally Blonde. BRANDON: Legally Blonde is actually a really great mystery. It's paced very, very well. But something like that, you could totally use. Perfect idea. All right. Let's go to our romance. What are we going to use from around here for our romance? STUDENTS: (calling out
ideas) BRANDON: All right. All right. All right. We'll go with military structure. How can you have an interesting military tradition or structure and tell a great romance story In it? STUDENT: Lovers have to be star crossed. BRANDON: Lovers have to be star crossed. So--? STUDENT: The military star crosses them. BRANDON: I mean, are you saying that an enlisted man falls in love with an officer or something like that? STUDENT: Like, whatever military hierarchy. BRANDON: Yeah. You're breaking the military hierarchy. Or, I mean, the easy go-tos are she's on one side of the war and he's
on the other. But what can you do that is a different military tradition or thing from our world that does Not exist in our world that would be distinctive for a fantasy world that would let you tell an interesting romance? All right. Go ahead. STUDENT: Maybe there are different factions of the military and they each have honed their craft in their families. And they come from different paths [___]. But which-- BRANDON: Right. Right. STUDENT: Like what culture would you stay in. Would you stay in [___]? BRANDON: Right. The assassins are a certain hierarchy in the
military, and they all intermarry. But suddenly an assassin falls in love with, you know, a dragon rider. Right. OK. OK. Let's go back to you. I haven't had anyone back there. Go ahead. STUDENT: A Jedi can't date ambassadors. BRANDON: Jedi can't date ambassadors. CLASS: (groans and laughs) BRANDON: I don't like sand. CLASS: (laughs) BRANDON: All right. All right. All right. Have you done one yet? You haven't. Right. STUDENT: No. BRANDON: Yeah, go ahead. STUDENT: I was going to say, instead of having trial by combat, what if you had romance by combat. BRANDON: Romance by combat.
Actually, I've seen good romance stories on this, where it's like-- yeah. Star Trek. But also there's some classic stories about, if you want to marry my daughter, you have to defeat my champion. But then the daughter is the champion. Right. That's Brave. But there's also, there's a Greek story that's that, I want to say. Yeah, an old Greek story. But, yeah. Go ahead. STUDENT: Or like the Parshendi war couples. BRANDON: Yeah. STUDENT: In order to be in the military, you have to be married and fight with your spouse. But it's a BYU freshman and he
can't find his wife. BRANDON: That's actually a really great idea for a story. It's kind of this thing where you've got like the Pacific Rim where you need a team for some reason to work this military. You could have some Big Mac, where it's like this, and you need to be a pair. I mean, it works very interestingly in Dragonriders of Pern, where if your dragons hook up, it's kind of almost impossible for you to not hook up with the person that is the other dragon because of the way that the bond between human and
dragon works, which is also kind of the same but different sort of idea. There's so many things you could do there. So. Yeah. Great, wonderful idea. You should write that story. That'd be a great story. Yes. All right. Let's do a horror. Who wants to pick the horror one? STUDENT: Economics. STUDENT: Tectonics. BRANDON: Economics. Economics. I love it. All right. Oh, someone's really excited. STUDENT: The corona virus destroys China, and so the economy is in chaos. BRANDON: OK. OK. The corona virus, it destroys China. So the economy is in chaos? How else could you use
economy to enhance a horror story. We're going to go in the back over here. STUDENT: A certain monster is chasing you, and if you have the money, you can buy the solution to whatever the monster. You can buy a gun. BRANDON: OK. Monster is chasing you. You can use money to make the monster not chase you in some way. Maybe you can buy off the people who have sent the monster against you, and it goes to someone else. Maybe you have to be on the that the monster is going to kill. But you can put
a whole bunch of people by paying it on the list before you. And if you can fill the list with enough people for it to kill, that will never get to you, then you're in good shape. Yeah. Go ahead. Oh, yeah. Go ahead. STUDENT: How about you have some races infiltrated and they took over all of the major stock markets, and then it turned out that they came to the planet and took over. BRANDON: Right. Alien invasion via stock market first. Like this. Over here in the red hat. STUDENT: Adam Smith's invisible hand that controls
the economy actually is a real hand. BRANDON: (laughing) Gold star. Gold star. OK, people who haven't done one yet. People who haven't done one yet. Go ahead. STUDENT: Like in The Monkey's Paw, there was an economic pressure that made them make terrible decisions. BRANDON: Yeah. Yeah. Monkey's Paw. Economic pressure making people make terrible decisions is a mainstay of horror. Yeah. Go ahead. Back here. STUDENT: It's April 16th, the day after tax day. And you wake up and they're not done. CLASS: (laughing) BRANDON: Yeah. Yeah. OK. Isaac's got one. Isaac, what you got? STUDENT: It's a
world where people have horrible, debilitating nightmares. But you can get out of it if you get into a higher tax bracket. BRANDON: (laughing) That's a little more dystopian than it is horror. But yeah. OK. All right. We'll do a couple more. Go ahead. STUDENT: Everyone's a contract killer. BRANDON: Everyone's a contract killer. Hey, way to bring it back around to John Wick. Yeah. CLASS: (laughing) STUDENT: Hiring your neighbor to kill the person across the street. BRANDON: Yeah. I mean, the purge is basically an economic, or political, social hierarchy driven horror series. And that kind of
plays along those sorts of same ideas. Go ahead. STUDENT: Super rich people can buy you so they can hunt you down. BRANDON: Yeah. Yeah. Dangerous Game. Super rich people have a way that they can hunt you down. Let's go ahead. Well, we'll wrap these up. We could go on and on and on, I'm sure. So why do I do this exercise? Well, the point of this exercise is to point out we could take one of these things and we can riff on it to the point that that one thing, changed in an interesting way, can
make your whole fantasy story. Because of that, you don't need all of this. It is good to be aware of the different options that are available to you. But it's also really important to pick a narrow focus for most of your stories. OK? And the sub-genre you're in, again, will let you determine how many of these things you do. But remember Rule Number Three. One of these done really well is almost always better than trying to do 5% of all of them. Now, a lot of times, what I will do is I will pick, for
instance, weather, the high storms in Roshar. I'm like, all right, I'm writing epic fantasy. I've got a lot of worldbuilding points. This is my focus and physical setting. There's a magical hurricane that hits the world every couple of days. Now, what I want to do is I want to interconnect it. And if there's one thing I want you to take from this particular lesson, it is that picking an idea and then interconnecting it into the rest is a lot of times the best way to create an epic fantasy or epic science fiction. If you say,
okay, weather is our focus, that, of course, is going to influence our climate, obviously. How can I have the weather then influence my flora and fauna? Because what happens then is you're spending your world building time on the storm and how society reacts to this storm. Then when you mentioned some little thing, oh, yeah, these animals have a lifecycle that uses the storm, the reader says, "Wow, that's so expansive." Because their imagination then takes that and runs with it all along the directions you want them to. By showing one small thing, one small effect, done
really well, about how the worldbuilding works, your reader will add so much more to you. And then when you say, all right, I'm going to make sure the weather is tied into the magic somehow, because this is our major worldbuilding theme, that's where Stormlight comes from. If you haven't read the books, the storm deposit's magical energy, which you can use to fuel Your magic. No storms, no magic. Therefore, whether or not you're able to use the magic as much as you want is based on how often the storms are coming through and your ability to
tap into that. And so suddenly we start reaching and saying, all right, how does this affect our religion? How does this affect our government? How does this affect our economics? Not all of it interconnects. Once in a while, I'll pick a few things and say, OK, gender roles in this world are really wonky compared to, you know, what your average American's gender roles would look like. Women can read. Men are forbidden. What does that do? And then I start to look at say, all right, how does this affect this? How does this affect this? How
does this go here? Why do women wear one of their sleeves covering one of their hands? Well-- STUDENT: Why? BRANDON: Why do they. Well, the actual answer is, I think taboos are really interesting, and when I was in Korea, you didn't show the bottom of your foot to people. It was considered very taboo, which was just bizarre to me. And I thought human beings have really weird and interesting taboos. There are certain tribes in South America that walk about naked as we would see it, but they don't consider it naked because they have their gourd
on that is covering a certain part of their male anatomy, just a bit of it, but enough that it's not considered naked. And we look at them like they're just naked. They're like, no, I'm not. I'm perfectly well clothed. Taboos are really fascinating to me. And so I wanted a fantastical taboo. That's why it happened. Now, my explanation in world was that there was a really influential piece of writing a long time ago where a philosopher said, "Well, all the true feminine arts are one handed," and refined women can paint and do music and do
art and all these things, but All masculine skills require two hands and they're like smashing swords against each other and things like that. And so refined society began to take this less as one philosopher's random thing that she came up with, which is actually not all that accurate, and then started imposing social mores to reinforce behavior as what happens. And then Shardblades and Shardplate got abandoned in large numbers. And when you're in Shardplate, it doesn't matter if you're male or female. Because if a man has an average strength of nine and a woman has an
average strength of seven and a Shardplate adds 50, then it doesn't really matter anymore who's in that Shardplate in relative strength. And so certain factions started using this as the social structure, an excuse to keep women and basically eliminate 50 percent of the competition for their Shardplate. But this doesn't matter so much as doing something that feels like it works in the society that I'm writing. Your explanations are not as important necessarily as making it feel real. Remind me next week if I have time. One thing I missed from this lecture we didn't get to
is internal logic versus external logic. And we will talk about that another week. For now, go forth, build some worlds. CLASS: (applause)
