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PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Hello, everyone and welcome to the
story broad, the story broad.
CHERIE PRIEST: That's me, apparently.
I've decided to start the show using a technique I think of
as the *** Van ***, where you take a pratfall, early on.
And it makes you--
whoops, we've got two.
TERRY BROOKS: I don't know what happened.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: We lost you for a sec.
But that's OK.
TERRY BROOKS: I know.
I lost it here.
The whole screen went dark.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: That's fine.
I think your other one will automatically
log out after a second.
So welcome to "The Story Board," brought to you by Geek
& Sundry and the American Ketchup Advisory Board.
In these troubled political times, please remember that
nothing is more American than ketchup.
This week, we will be talking about form and function, about
plot, about pacing, about how we structure stories and how
much that determines how well the story works.
It's kind of a slippery subject.
Character, you can kind of point at.
Plot, you can kind of point at.
But there are some other really subtle things going on
here, in terms of the actual behind-the-scene nuts and
bolts of what makes a story work.
And to help with this discussion, we
have our lovely guests.
And we'll start with Brandon.
Would you care to introduce yourself briefly?
BRANDON SANDERSON: I'm Brandon Sanderson, most recently and
best known for finishing Robert Jordan's "Wheel of
Time." I'm author of a number of various books, of all
shapes and sizes.
Pat told us we should plug our stuff.
So I've got a new book out on Audible right now, for free,
called "Legion." So you could just go download it.
It's completely free.
It's a little novella.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Cool.
Cherie.
CHERIE PRIEST: Oh, my turn.
Hi, I'm Cherie Priest.
And I've had about a dozen books published.
But when people tell me they've read my book, they
always mean "Boneshaker," just across the board.
And I'm great.
I'm having issues with my camera, my apologies.
I'm sometimes a little fuzzy over here.
But I wrote a bunch of stuff.
And nobody cared until I put zombies and steampunk in it.
And that's fine.
I'll take it.
It's a lot of fun.
I have another book coming out this
year, in the same franchise.
It's called "The Inexplicables."
And my website is cheriepriest.com.
You don't have to spell my name right.
Sometimes, I look at the site stats.
And it's just like the people at Google are wizards, to have
actually led people to my page.
I also did a Sword & Laser interview last week.
So you can find that online as well.
And that was a lot of fun.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: And Terry.
TERRY BROOKS: Well, I'm Terry Brooks.
I write non-fiction about elves.
This is my thirtieth year in the business as a
professional writer.
I just finished yet another "Shannara" book, this one is
number 21 or 22, called "Wards of Faerie." And I'll have two
more coming out, next year.
And I'll probably just keep writing until I fall over at
the keyboard.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: And I picked these particular guests
because they do something that I have not been really good
at, to date.
I tend to write one really great big, tangled story that
doesn't follow a lot of traditional plot structure.
I don't do very well at short fiction.
I don't have a lot of experience with that.
And I tried to write a novella.
And it turned into a short novel.
So everybody here has done short fiction, series,
standalones, all of these different structures.
And that's one of the things that I'd kind of
like to lead off with.
What is everybody's favorite?
Maybe not what you do the most of, but when you're writing,
what is it that you like best, in terms of structure, in
terms of writing your book?
What suits you the most?
BRANDON SANDERSON: Endings, I love a great ending.
And that's what gets me going.
It's like I write a book because I come up with this
powerful, explosive thing that's going to happen.
And then, I've got to figure out to make
that work in the story.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: So you actually know the ending?
And you work toward it, specifically?
BRANDON SANDERSON: Yes.
I'm very much an ending-based person.
I build my outlines backward, which is this weird thing.
I can't write non-linearly.
I can't write out of order.
I've got to start with the beginning and go.
But my outline, I have to do backward.
I've got to start with this ending say, OK, what pieces
need to be in place to make this ending explode like I've
imagined it.
What characters have to be in place?
What plots have to just be popping right together?
What foreshadowing has to happen?
Everything get built around making these endings work.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: It's interesting you mentioned that
because that shows that you have a better grip on some of
the craft than I do.
Because I just recently discovered
that's how I do it too.
Except, I wasn't smart enough to actually
start with an outline.
So I actually drafted the entire story, until I got to
the end and went there.
That's what it's about.
BRANDON SANDERSON: But that's not uncommon.
George Martin talks about that, right.
That's like the gardener method.
I spend all this time building this big outline.
You just write the book.
We both get to the same place.
I actually have to spend a ton of time actually then writing
the book, after I finish the outline.
You just go back and start the book over.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Kind of, yeah.
I've done it several times, to date.
How about you guys?
CHERIE PRIEST: I kind of fall into the
middle of that, I guess.
I usually know the beginning and the end.
And in the middle, I flail around, not knowing what to do
with myself.
And when it comes to shorter versus longer stuff, I really
struggle with short fiction.
I love it, when it's done well.
But I have a very difficult time producing it.
I think, maybe, it's a different sort of mindset.
Where if you're doing something longer, you take one
idea and you expand on it.
Versus something shorter, you have to take a bigger idea and
compress it.
And I feel like I work best in one gear, and not the other.
But I owe a couple of short stories,
before the end of year.
So I kind of need to get my act together on that.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: How about you Terry?
TERRY BROOKS: I'm with Cherie.
I don't like short stories.
I mean, I'm just not good at them.
A short story for me is maybe 40, 50 pages, is
the best I can do.
And even that's compressing it down quite a bit from what I'm
comfortable with.
I like big, sprawling sagas.
That's what I've always written. that's what I'm
comfortable with.
Like Brandon, I always know what I'm writing towards.
I always know the ending first.
And that's what I'm always working for, in the book.
But unlike Brandon, I actually begin in the beginning, with
my outline or my synopsis, or whatever it is.
And I try to find my way towards that ending that I've
got, rather than working backwards.
For me, every book is different,
which is no big surprise.
But what I always look for is the scene in the book that I
can't write, that's so difficult and so complex or so
emotionally challenging I can't write it.
And then, I have to write it.
BRANDON SANDERSON: Wow, that's cool.
TERRY BROOKS: You look for the challenges as
time goes on, Brandon.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: How about you, Brandon, short fiction?
BRANDON SANDERSON: You know, yeah.
I love short fiction.
Like, I think, the rest of the group here, as more of a
normal natural novelist, it's been very hard for me to do
short fiction.
I kind of felt annoyed by myself, by not
being able to do it.
So I started forcing myself to do it.
Kind of like a golfer will work on their short game or
their long game, I'm working on the short fiction.
So far, the shortest I've gotten is 12,000 words.
I feel pretty good about that though.
And so I've just started dabbling.
I'm going into novellas, which are really like short stories
for people who write novels.
They're like really short novels,
rather than short stories.
And I've been approaching them the same way I
do my longer fiction.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: I recently had what was almost a
miraculous experience.
I suppose it wasn't recently.
It was almost exactly a year ago.
I was finishing up last year's run at NaNoWriMo.
And it was the very last day.
And I was hoping that I could have a strong surge at the end
and maybe write 10,000 words and finish on schedule.
But instead of continuing with the project I was working on,
I actually had in my head, from the day before, when I
was walking, an idea for a short story.
And I sat down.
And I actually wrote the whole short story, in a single day.
It took about 10 hours.
And it was about 1,600 words.
But it was like, beginning to ending, a whole story.
And that's never happened to me before.
And I don't know if it'll ever happen again because that's
typically how I write poetry.
And I do seem to have two toggles.
It's short poem or long, complex multi-volume novel.
And I do kind of hope that I'll get a bead
on the short story.
Because I'd love to have those that I could kind of put in
anthologies and use to tide people over in this long wait
between books.
But maybe I just don't get it.
I've heard some people say that a short story--
a novel is about a series of events.
But a short story is about an idea or a moment.
And maybe I have trouble writing the whole story that
just kind of occurs in a moment.
TERRY BROOKS: You know, Lester del Rey used to write his
books in three days.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Three days.
TERRY BROOKS: Patrick, so you have something to shoot for.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: I'd be happy if I hit three
years, at this point.
BRANDON SANDERSON: You brought up something, though, that is
interesting to me.
Because of the main reasons I've tried to train myself in
this smaller form is because writing long-form novels.
And we write big novels, Pat.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Yeah.
BRANDON SANDERSON: Yeah, we write big novels.
I know how that goes.
Sometimes, there are ideas that just aren't going to fit
in that novel.
And they just sit in the back of your brain and scratch at
you and bug you and say, I need to be written.
And you're like, I'll find a novel for you someday.
But you know you never will.
You're lying to your children.
And when you're going to do the short fiction, you get to
say, OK, I'm going to give you your due.
Here you go.
Here's your story.
And then, it gets out of your head.
It's like exercising your demons.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: You know, that's what
happened with this novella.
I had a cool location all planned out.
It's a place in my world that I've developed and never used.
And I thought, this would be perfect for a little novella.
But my targeting was just off.
I was aiming for that 15,000, 16,000 word mark.
And the structure, I knew that I needed a big plot arc.
And it, of course, spiraled into madness.
But now, that leads me to another question I
wanted to ask folks.
I don't think in terms of traditional plot.
And honestly, if hard-pressed, I would probably really
struggle to come up with a definition for what plot is.
I think in terms of arcs.
For me, a book is a series of arcs.
And some of them are action arcs.
Some of them are mystery arcs.
Some of them are character arcs.
And I don't know if that's just the story that I'm
working on now, the whole Kingkiller Series.
But I certainly don't write a three-act something or a
five-act something.
It's like I have--
and I can't even point to a central arc that is truly the
meat of the story.
How do you guys think of the structure of your books?
TERRY BROOKS: Storylines.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Storylines like--
TERRY BROOKS: Plotlines.
Maybe that's the same thing you're
talking about with arcs.
For me, it's the threads that run through the story.
It's short and long.
Each of those leading to a particular resolution.
CHERIE PRIEST: See Brandon, I locked mine out of the room.
BRANDON SANDERSON: It's not mine even.
It's my son's.
He let him in, when I wasn't looking.
CHERIE PRIEST: I love it.
I love it.
I love your cat.
BRANDON SANDERSON: It adopted us.
It's a stray that just lived next to us.
And no one was taking care of it.
So it decided we were it.
And now, he lives here.
And so I have no idea what to do with him.
Because he just kind of jumps on people.
TERRY BROOKS: I have kids like that.
BRANDON SANDERSON: I have kids like that too.
So you may see the cat doing this.
It can find a way to my lap and ease
its way over my shoulder.
CHERIE PRIEST: See, I lucked out.
My husband was just out of town for four days.
So the cat and dog are thrilled to see him.
So they were easy to shut out this time.
For this large Sword & Laser interview, my cat's tail kept
appearing at the top of the screen.
And she'd walk the laptop but cutely, very cutely.
BRANDON SANDERSON: I wanted to say something about
what you said Pat.
Because that's actually how I construct stories too.
I hear people.
And I like to study it, the three-act format or the rising
and falling action.
Or some people call them Try-Fail cycles.
I love to study these things and talk about
them and what not.
That's not how I build a story.
I build a story based on OK, what's the soul of this little
thing that's happening here, like the character
interaction.
And then, what can you to make that awesome?
And over here we've got a mystery.
What are the clues in that mystery.
What are the things that are going to distract people.
What do you call them?
What's the foreshadowings?
CHERIE PRIEST: Red herrings.
BRANDON SANDERSON: Red herrings.
There we are.
What are all these things that are going to make
this mystery awesome?
And you just kind of put it together on
the fly, as you go.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Now, how about you, Cherie, because I
hear other people saying--
honestly, this is really reassuring for me.
Because I kind of thought I was a freak.
CHERIE PRIEST: Well, don't write yourself off yet.
My gosh.
What was the question again?
I'm sorry.
There were cats.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: How do you think, in terms of structuring
your story?
Do you just kind of do it?
Do you adhere to a particular kind of structure?
Is there like one central--
in "Boneshaker," the central theme was kind of go in, get
them, and bring them back.
But do you think of having a central story, and then,
there's subplots?
Or how do you put that together?
CHERIE PRIEST: I don't know.
It's a hard question to answer.
I typically start with--
often it's a character or a setting or like one particular
detail that everything kind of gels around, like little pearl
and a little piece of grit.
Sometimes it's a title.
Actually, I saw the word boneshaker, in reference to a
friend's vintage bicycle.
And it was late one night on the internet.
I'd had a drink.
And I started thinking, you know what a funny word.
And if you didn't know what that was, think of all the
things it could mean.
And kind of from there, just from the silly--
it was a little gift of somebody riding a penny
farthing, boneshaker-style--
So I don't know.
I mean, I've heard it said before that there's no right
way to write a book.
There's only the right way to write this book.
And I've kind of come at it from a handful of different
directions.
I don't know.
It's kind of like well, there's an expression.
I'm losing it.
We're coming up on midnight, my time.
It's situational.
It's situational plotting.
Sometimes, it's really easy.
"Boneshaker," for example, was very simple and direct.
Here's a mother going after her child.
Some of them are much more complicated than that.
Some of the shorter ones I've done were the most
complicated.
I did a novella that had three significant point-of-view
characters, set 100 years apart.
So I couldn't treat it that way.
But I think it's very situational.
I think that your results may vary, pretty much.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Well, I never outline.
I'll occasionally make lists.
And sometimes, they're elaborate lists.
And sometimes, they're even bulleted lists.
BRANDON SANDERSON: That's an online, Pat.
That's literally an outline.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Sometimes, the bullets have sub-bullets.
But it is still not--
CHERIE PRIEST: Footnotes, with footnotes.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: It's not an outline.
I'm not that sort of person.
TERRY BROOKS: Uh huh.
CHERIE PRIEST: He said.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: I will cling to that, to my grave.
But I do you think in terms of almost everything has a rise
and a fall to it.
A scene should have a rise and a fall to it, a chapter.
Sometimes, there's a little arc, that's over three
chapters or a big arc, over maybe 200 pages.
And sometimes, I find it easier to draw and to
understand it that way, than to think in terms of my
pacing, just on an outline.
That doesn't fit into my head, in a helpful format.
And I actually taught a writing class.
And just on a lark, I asked the students what book they
would like to read, to examine the structure.
And they picked mine because I could kind of show them the
man behind the curtain with it.
And I had them all study different plot lines.
And then, we drew it up on the board, like a big timeline,
with the different chapters all along the edge.
And then we draw the arc.
And I can't believe how well it worked.
It made me realize that this scene that everyone loves,
it's probably not because of the scene itself.
It's because five different plot lines converge and get
resolution in that particular chapter.
And it's the scene in the Eolian where
he plays the lute.
And that's always what everyone talks about in that
first book.
And it always struck me as odd because
there's no sword fight.
There's no car chase.
It's about as non-dynamic as a scene can get, if you think
about the raw action.
But it's that it does come to resolution.
So many things come to resolution, that I think it
gives everyone a very satisfied feeling.
Do you guys think in terms of satisfying your readers or
paying your readers?
What's your internal vocabulary like for that?
CHERIE PRIEST: I hope they don't read this and want to
push me off a cliff.
That's kind of it.
TERRY BROOKS: I hope they don't ask
for their money back.
CHERIE PRIEST: Yeah, yeah.
BRANDON SANDERSON: I'm usually looking at promises.
And this is basically the same thing you were saying, Pat.
I ask what kind of promises am I making and what's going to
fulfill those promises.
And the more I've learned as a writer.
The more I've learned that when things are not working,
it's because I've made the wrong promise.
I'm faking people out.
I'm promising them a romance, when I don't think I am.
Or I'm not paying attention to it.
Or I'm promising that this is a cool mystery or that this is
important and learning what kind of promises I'm making,
sometimes accidentally.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: That's interesting.
I think in terms of commitment, what
I've owed the reader.
Did we did lose Brandon?
CHERIE PRIEST: Either that, or he's holding very, very still.
TERRY BROOKS: He's right there.
CHERIE PRIEST: There he is.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Now, Terry, I was talking to you after to
last week's show, when you were gracious enough to come
on, as kind of a special guest.
And you mentioned Faulkner in terms of like a structural
referent to your stories.
Could chat about that a little bit?
That was fascinating to me.
TERRY BROOKS: Well, I did my college studies, senior thesis
in English literature on William Faulkner So I had a
lot of chances to study his books and
his approach to writing.
And I was taken with the fact that he creating this whole
body of work in a multigenerational saga, taking
place in one small county in Mississippi and following the
lives of the various families and various members of the
families, who were fatally flawed, many of them, in
various ways.
And watching how they were destroyed, I
knew they were snubs.
Or they were constants.
And either they were the destroyers, or they were those
who were destroyed.
Because of the fact that they couldn't adapt to the changes
in the life of the county the were in and of their families
at the times.
And that really became the whole structure for the
Shannara Series.
It was how to make that happen in a non-historical reference.
And I know that's a weird because everybody thinks,
Shannara that's just Tolkien.
But it really isn't.
It's closer to Faulkner, if you read the whole series.
And I don't know that anybody wants to do that.
It's really closer to Faulkner than it is to Tolkien.
But you know, I want to ask something.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Yeah.
TERRY BROOKS: Listening to this conversation, I was
thinking about my own process.
And I want to ask if anybody else thinks in these terms.
And the question is, when I'm working on a book, I always
start with what the call the surface story.
The surface story is-- maybe it's a quest.
People leave.
People go out.
People try to accomplish something.
And they came back again.
But underlying all this is always some kind of question
I'm exploring in the writing process, something that I want
to know about.
Well, in one series, it was all about redemption.
Can you seek redemption?
Can you achieve redemption, even if you have transgressed
in a way that is unbelievably bad?
Is there a way to come back from that?
And then, this last one, it was about the fact that you
start out to accomplish something.
And it's good and noble thing that you're trying to
accomplish.
But it ends horrifically.
And it results in destroying a whole slew of people.
And so should you have done this?
Or shouldn't you have done this?
But there needs to be something more for me, as a
writer, than just the surface story.
And I don't know if anybody else feels like this or not.
But that's what is interesting to me about fantasies that you
can do that.
You can take real-world issues and inject them into the
fantasy setting and into the fantasy story.
And you don't have to write about it directly.
But you can write about it subliminally, if I
can get that out.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: How about you guys?
CHERIE PRIEST: Well, I think you're talking about theme
there, pretty much.
I do know what you're saying there.
Generally speaking, I don't figure out what the underlying
theme is, what the underlying thread that's holding it all
together is, until at least about halfway through.
And then, I feel stupid.
And I have to go back and fiddle with it.
"Dreadnought," which was the follow up to "Boneshaker," I
had hell of a time with it.
I just I couldn't figure out--
it's a travelogue, in its way.
It's East to West coast, in the middle of the Civil War,
et cetera, et cetera.
But it has to be more than a travelogue.
So what is this about?
And eventually, I figured out it's about asking forgiveness
instead of permission.
You know, jumping first and just hoping you could explain
yourself later.
And so kind of from there--
especially the last handful of books I've done, if I try to
force it, like if I sit down and say, I'm going
to write this book.
And it's going to be about these people doing this thing.
But what's the theme?
I completely blow it.
I just can't figure it out.
I've just got to get started, get maybe a third of
the way into it.
And then, it's like, subconsciously, you're kind of
threading it through.
And it's building.
Until it hits such a peak volume.
And then, I see it.
And then, I go oh yes, that.
And now, I can move forward with it.
But sometimes it happens.
I get to the end.
And I realized what I've done.
And then, I have to go back a pull the thread tight, where
it's kind of been dangling and loose through the thing.
TERRY BROOKS: It's not always there in the beginning.
I feel that too.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: I think it's a quote from Faulkner or a
misquote from Faulkner.
Where some critic asked him if he built these themes into his
writing, and I think he said, "I was way too busy writing
these stories to think what they're about." And I kind of
appreciated that, at the time.
CHERIE PRIEST: Caitlin Kiernan said something on her website
a while back about how she seems to be telling the same
story over and over, just trying to tell it
right this next time.
And I'm paraphrasing.
I don't remember exactly.
But it kind of struck home for me.
Because I came across a review of my own books that said,
really, Cherie Priest is just telling the same story she
told in these other two genres, previously.
It's about XYZPDQ.
And I didn't even realize I'd been doing it.
So that was a little eye-opening.
And I turned off Google Alerts, after that.
TERRY BROOKS: Yeah, just ignore them.
CHERIE PRIEST: Yeah.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: How about you Brandon, theme?
BRANDON SANDERSON: Theme, I think Cherie covered it
wonderfully.
Yes, that's really how it is.
Theme really generally grows out of what the characters are
passionate about.
And the more passionate they are about it they'll usually
conflict with one another because they'll be passionate
about things on different sides or what they're wanting
will be different from one another.
And then that lets me explore this as the characters talk to
one another about things.
And from there I will dig into a theme.
I'll start to expand it and whatnot.
But it's something I think you really do discover.
I'm quite a bit of an outliner.
I like a good outline for my books.
I like a lot of worldbuilding.
I like this all set up.
I don't plan my characters.
That's the part I don't plan.
But everything else I really like to set up quite a bit.
But theme, I've got to discover them.
I think that when you go into it saying, this is going to be
my theme, sometimes you risk ruining your book because
instead of becoming about the characters and the plot you
want to tell it becomes about this hobby horse, this axe you
want to grind.
And then it's not fun for anyone to read, and it's not
fun for you to write.
CHERIE PRIEST: Well, it feels forced when it doesn't
organically kind of arise from the story or grows with it, I
would think.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: And I think you're
absolutely right, Brandon.
I was thinking the same thing where, in some ways I actually
stumbled onto this whole theme issue in role playing.
We do some tabletop role playing, me and my friends.
And I'm always very jealous of one of my friends because he
runs a beautiful game, and I run a really messy game.
I can't run things the way that he does.
And I realized eventually that that's because his games,
effectively they were about people being heroes and drama
and a very tight plotline, effectively.
There's a dragon.
You figure out what that deal is with the dragon, how to
kill the dragon.
You rush off.
And if you're heroic you're probably
going to beat the dragon.
That's the idiom.
That's the style of that story.
And I'm very jealous of that, probably because that's not
how I work.
That's not how my brain is wired.
I tell these rambling
character-centered gaming stories.
And one of my friends actually stopped somebody, because they
were about to charge blindly into the face of danger.
And the one friend stopped another and said,
no, no, no, no, no.
This isn't Todd's game.
This is Pat's game.
Heroes win in Todd's game.
Heroes lose in Pat's game.
And he says that's because Todd's game is about what
makes a hero, and Pat's game is about figuring out
what the truth is.
And I go, wow.
Is that what I'm doing?
And then I thought about my book, and I'm like that is
kind of what these books are about.
It's like uncovering the hidden truths of the world.
But I don't know how much of that is me in my head that I'm
designed to tell that sort of story, or if that is Kvothe,
because it's all his story.
And his life has been about uncovering the hidden truths
of the world.
And I probably won't know until I launch into another
big story to see how much of that comes out again.
Then it's me.
If it changes, then obviously it was Kvothe.
So we've talked about plot a little bit.
And plot is kind of a tangible thing.
It's almost like the machinery that a book runs on, whether
or not you're following like a traditional Star Trek
plot/subplot sort of interaction or a three-act
structure or these arcs that we all seem to think of.
But I want to talk about pacing, which, in my opinion,
is really different than plot.
And I always think of pacing as not the classic pinnacle
and then slight taper off to the climax.
But I think of it in terms of maintaining reader interest,
mixing humor and drama and tragedy, and keeping your
reader interested without exhausting them.
Do you guys think a lot about pacing when you structure
these books or when you revise them?
Or is pacing just structure to you guys?
Is it the same thing as plot in this outline?
CHERIE PRIEST: You go.
Sorry.
I was gonna fill time.
[CELL PHONE VIBRATES]
CHERIE PRIEST: It's not me.
TERRY BROOKS: OK.
Well--
BRANDON SANDERSON: I'm trying to rework my mic to make sure
it's working.
That's why I went silence.
Usually I'm never silent.
But my mic is, I think the kitty knocked it sideways.
TERRY BROOKS: Yeah, something's
wrong with your mic.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: You sound a little faint.
BRANDON SANDERSON: OK.
I'll let other people talk for a minute, as
I'll rework my mic.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: OK.
TERRY BROOKS: I think pacing, to some extent, is tied to
character development.
Am I coming through here or not?
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Yep.
We can hear you.
CHERIE PRIEST: Oh, yes.
OK.
TERRY BROOKS: Well, I think it's tied, to some extent,
with character development.
And it's a function of story.
So that what happens with the characters determines the
nature of the pacing at any given place in the book.
And it can have to do with the way the action develops, but
it can also have to do with your character development and
the interaction between characters.
Does that make sense?
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: That does.
I was always anxious about doing the classic fantasy
mistake where you have the big world and you follow in the
wrong sort of footsteps of Tolkien, where it's a lot of
description, a lot of worldbuilding.
And especially in the beginning of the book it can
get really, really boring if it's not interspaced with a
little bit of action, a little bit of something to keep the
reader tuned in.
But I actually recently stumbled on a couple of books
that go in the other direction where they're so full of
action and so full of drama that I find myself wishing
that the author would take a step back and give me just
some time to breathe and recharge a little bit.
It's so full of action that I find myself exhausted by the
book, and I can't mentally engage or emotionally engage
with any characters because I'm just emotionally--
I'm used up.
BRANDON SANDERSON: I've had that problem,
actually, in my writing.
Early on in the books that I was doing before I got
published what I would do is I was so
focused on these endings--
and I've talked about this.
I wanted these really powerful ones-- that I would overlap
like 20 different subplots, hitting you all at once with
magnificent revelations and powerful experiences and
emotion and just everything hitting on top of one another.
And readers just couldn't absorb it all.
I was hitting them with too many revelations, and so you
didn't have time to sit back and say, wow, that's cool,
before another one hits you.
And it actually taught me a lot about this idea of pacing
because pacing is one of these grand arts that it seems like
we learned to do naturally as writers.
It's one of those things that's hard--
You come to me and say, Brandon, how do you do pacing?
And I'm like, ah, ugh, um.
But the more I've talked about writing, the more I've studied
writing, the more I've realized that, yes, while I
can break down what I do when I'm actually doing it I don't
think a lot about a lot of these thing.
And I don't think a lot of writers do.
Like an athlete trains themselves to hit a baseball
when it's pitched at them, you can talk about it.
You can tell them what they're doing.
You can have them work on the fundamentals
and things like this.
But at the end of the day they've just practiced a whole
lot, so they know how to get that ball, and it takes over.
And I think this happens.
I was writing a scene today, and the pacing was just off.
It was wrong.
I can't tell you what was wrong with it, other than I
thought this is not compelling.
This is not interesting.
I'm doing all sorts of interesting things, but the
sum whole is not interesting.
I had to toss it aside and start over.
And almost every time I start over a scene like that it's
because of the pacing.
Something is not engaging enough.
The questions aren't being asked in the right way.
And the characters are influencing that a lot.
If it's time, if the pacing feels right to just dig into a
character, you can just have a character basically doing
nothing, but it can be fascinating.
Pratchett will do this, but I guess he has the
humor going with it.
You do this, Pat.
I'll be honest with you, you do things where I'll sit and
I'll read five pages and say nothing happened, but that was
fascinating because it's the right time for the character
to fascinate us.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: You flatter me by mentioning me in the
same sentence with Pratchett, because I think he is one of
these truly brilliant guys.
And you're right.
I think part of it is because there is humor.
And humor engages us even though it is not action.
And it's not necessarily drama either.
But I will.
I'll read sometimes a little exchange where obviously the
meat of the story is the information going back and
forth between these two characters, but what makes
that little dialogue really interesting is the
humor in it as well.
I'm trying to think who else does this really well, in
terms of pacing rather than plot.
I'll fall back on my standard, Joss Whedon.
And of course, we're not talking books here.
But honestly, I think if you watch the pilot episode of
"Firefly," it's like a master's class in pacing.
You have a little mystery, a little conflict, a little
mystery, a little resolution, some character arc, some
disagreement, a little humor.
And by the end of that hour and 20 minutes, the three plot
lines converge all at the same time.
And it's so intense but never becomes muddled.
And I think you're right, Brandon.
If there was one more plot line there it would
have been too much.
It would have freaked me out.
But he has three, and they all come
together in the same moment.
And it's amazing.
It's amazing.
And I don't know if I'll ever be able to do it like that.
And of course, he's doing it on TV instead of in a book,
but the same principles apply.
TERRY BROOKS: Well, I was going to say I think it's
pretty difficult to equate an hour and 20 minute TV show
with a 400-page book.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Yeah.
TERRY BROOKS: Or an 800-page book.
The pacing is entirely different.
The skill sets required are entirely different.
You can talk about one as being the
microcosm of the other.
But I really think it's a different experience
altogether and a different discipline.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Yeah.
Yeah.
I think the tools are nice.
Sometimes when I'm talking about some of these mechanisms
I do find myself defaulting to discussing television or a
movie, partly because you can kind of think of a whole movie
in your head, that hour and a half or that two hours.
But you're right.
An 800-page book or a 500-page book, it ends up our
experience of it is stretched over a week sometimes.
And so illustrating those points about pacing--
And that's another issue is sometimes people will put down
your book for a week and then pick it back up.
How can you manage their pacing if they're doing this
on their own time?
TERRY BROOKS: Well, part of it's the fact that your
relationships between characters and having them rub
up against each other in the book, it's going to take place
a lot of different times.
And you have multiple opportunities to redevelop
character and to show the ways in which the characters are
going to change.
And of course you always have to have change in
storytelling.
That's one of those cardinal rules about any book.
Your characters have to change.
Yeah.
Everybody knows that.
So you have a lot of space within which to work and
develop that.
And you can do it a lot of different ways.
And that's what I think makes it so fascinating.
BRANDON SANDERSON: Yeah, you know, Terry brings up a really
good point there that we should talk about with pacing.
When I teach my lecture on pacing and plotting like this
on the universe course, actually I break it down to
the concept of progression, a sense of progression.
And Terry's talking about characters, which is one of
the main reasons why we read.
It's the characters' sense of progression.
But honestly, pacing is about, in a lot of ways, and
sometimes it's an illusion.
It's an illusion of progression.
Because in books we can stop, and we could describe a second
in a hundred pages if we wanted to.
We could do that.
Wouldn't be interesting.
Well, if I did it, it wouldn't be interesting.
But we can do that.
It's all illusionary.
We can make things go as fast or as slow as we want.
But what we want with the reader is when they're going
through they get this sense of progression.
Things are moving one way or another.
And the example I use is actually Larry Niven and Jerry
Pournelle's book, "Inferno," which is my
favorite of their books.
It's a really fun book.
It's about a science fiction writer who gets drunk and
falls out a window and gets sent to hell.
And he goes to Dante's "Inferno," basically, the hell
that's represented there.
And what follows is a series of vignettes happening there,
and they're all very interesting.
But they feel very unconnected.
And yet the pacing felt brilliant in that book.
And I thought why did it work for me?
And I realize-- and this is going to sound silly-- it was
because of the map.
Now the map is a generic thing in fantasy books.
I think sometimes it's gotten too generic.
I don't think you have to have a map, for instance.
The map should add something.
But for this they had the illustration of the "Inferno,"
as hell represented in Dante's work.
And what the guys were doing is they were
shooting for the center.
And I knew whatever was at the center
was going to be awesome.
And it had been a while since I had read the "Inferno," so
I'm like I don't even remember what's there, but
it's got to be cool.
And they were slowly progressing toward this.
And myself as a reader was able to see this slow and
steady progress.
And so the fact that it was basically a bunch of vignettes
happening there didn't matter because I felt
an increasing tension.
And so we see this.
It's done overtly in some television shows, like the
show "24," the most overt sense of
progression you can get.
Every commercial break they would stop with the time
ticking down, and you knew that when the zero happened
the show was over, and this sort of thing.
And what I think our job, as writers, is a lot of the time
is to be giving them.
Every chapter should progress character or one of the
mini-plots.
It should give us tidbits about mystery.
It should move us if your story is a travelogue.
That's the promise you've given is we've reached this
awesome location.
We find this awesome thing.
Terry, you're very good at this.
Something cool is going to happen when we did here.
And then you're going to dole out the sense of progression
while you're actually giving character and all of these
awesome things.
But it's the sense of going somewhere that
is working for us.
All my books generally take place in one place, so I don't
actually have the travelogue sense of progression.
I've had to find other means.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Well, interesting you talked about
"24," which everybody talked about it being such a
brilliant device, whereas actually it wasn't a brilliant
new device.
It was a brilliant old device.
Aristotle laid out in his poetics what the Aristotelian
unity should be.
And one of them is that a play should always take place over
the space of one day.
And they just did that in a TV series.
But to underline what you said about sometimes the illusion
of plot-- and I think about the illusion of plot a lot,
because I'd like to think that I've gotten pretty good at
faking plot.
And I remember reading the Abhorsen books, the very first
one, by Garth Nix.
And what's great is you knew that this person was going
somewhere to do something.
There's the structure of the book.
And so every time they were going somewhere it was to a
purpose, and that gave the book sort of a sensation of
movement and progression, even though it was really just a
series of events on the way somewhere.
"The Lord of the Rings" works that way.
There's more going on in "The Lord of the
Rings" than that, obviously.
But all of these things, as they're traveling--
"The Hobbit," for that matter.
It's a series of interesting events that are important
because they're are on the way somewhere to a purpose.
I think of it as a plot MacGuffin, honestly.
Whereas other MacGuffins are sort of like character
MacGuffins or prop MacGuffins, like the suitcase in the
Tarantino flick.
CHERIE PRIEST: "Pulp Fiction."
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: "Pulp Fiction."
CHERIE PRIEST: Or "The Maltese Falcon."
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Yeah.
Yeah.
Other good examples of gripping books or good pacing
that we can think of?
BRANDON SANDERSON: You know, Pat, the thing about good
pacing, though, is I think you have to define it for your
genre and what you're trying to do.
Because thrillers pace a certain way.
And they drive me up the wall most of the time, because the
pacing is like it grabs you and it won't let go.
But it's dirty.
Like it's evil.
It's like the way that they're going to pace is they're going
to be like, and then a knock came on the door and a shot
rang outside.
And then you open the door, and it's like
nothing actually happened.
It was just a car backfiring or something.
But it makes you keep reading.
And they keep using these dirty tricks.
And sure, it'll pull you through the book, but by the
end you feel like you've had a Twix bar when
you wanted a hamburger.
And I think that there are things you can do.
You've got to ask yourself, what types of
pacing do you want?
And people tell me this is awful, and I think it's great
that a lot of times I say, this is the point where you
can put down the book.
A lot of people say, you never want to have
that in your stories.
I will build into it.
Things come to a resolution.
Take a deep breath.
You're reading an 1,000-page book.
You can put it down now.
It's OK.
Hopefully it was so good reading it along that you want
to read some more tomorrow.
But I don't mind if there's parts that slow down enough,
and you take a breath.
Some people think that that's awful.
And in a thriller that's not what you would want to do.
TERRY BROOKS: Most people are going to end up putting down a
1,000-page book before they get through it [INAUDIBLE].
I can tell you that right now.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Hopefully.
Hopefully.
We'd start having some "World of Warcraft"-type
deaths on our hands.
I think of those as resting places.
TERRY BROOKS: Yeah.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: And I think so long as they're chosen well
the book kind of dips.
The pacing, again, I think of the pacing as dipping down.
And then you go [SIGHS].
And of course there's still things you're curious about,
but it gives you a relief from the urgency of the book.
And you're right.
Yeah, go ahead.
CHERIE PRIEST: I'm sorry.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: No, go ahead.
CHERIE PRIEST: There's a little bit of a lag here.
I was going to say I think that's why horror and comedy
tend to go together so well, typically speaking.
Because if something is really intense you've got to have
that little release valve, that short break of, OK, well,
now we can move back along to the throat-slashing and the
stabbing and the teenager screaming.
But the thing about humor too, when we're talking about
pacing earlier, is I think it's a shorthand in television
and movies in particular when they are condensing something
like a 400-page book down to a screenplay.
It's only funny if it's true.
And so if it's saying something true and something
engaging, it's a shortcut after a
fashion, but a good one.
It's one that keeps people interested,
keeps moving along.
But it absolutely doesn't work unless it saying something
that's true and something that you recognize as true.
And when you're talking horror and comedy in particular, they
both rely on the element of surprise.
You laugh when you're scared.
You laugh when you're surprised.
And you laugh because a joke surprises you, but it's true.
So I don't know.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: I think you're absolutely right about
the humor and horror connection.
Has anybody else run into the term bathos?
CHERIE PRIEST: Yeah.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: OK.
Because once I learned the word for it, I went oh, great.
There's a name for that thing.
It's from the old Greek days when they had some of this
stuff figured out in their drama.
I think the technical definition is it's the
dramatic undercutting of an otherwise potentially
over-dramatic moment.
And again, I'll default to Joss Whedon.
He's really good at it.
Because if you keep building drama on drama on drama on
drama, eventually you get melodrama.
And you can't take melodrama seriously.
And so if you have drama and then the people in the scene
recognize that things are getting a little ridiculous
and they laugh at themselves, it deflates the tension of the
scene which gives the reader a chance to breathe and catch
their emotional breath, which means you can hit them again
hard right after that.
And it's such a great tool that I see used so seldomly in
our genre, partly, I think, because humor isn't used a lot
in our genre, in fantasy in general.
I'm not saying it's not there.
But there's a reason everybody points at Terry Pratchett and
says, there's the one funny guy in fantasy.
There just aren't a lot of people who are good at doing
humor writing in our genre.
CHERIE PRIEST: Yeah.
Scalzi likes to talk about how Douglas Adams was kind of a
ground-clearing event for humor in science fiction, how
that was it.
Yes, that's what you've got to live up to.
And people find that intimidating in some regard.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Yeah.
I think the same is true in science fiction.
Although Scalzi's carving out a niche for himself--
CHERIE PRIEST: He is.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: --as the funny guy in sci-fi now,
although not just the funny guy.
CHERIE PRIEST: No, no, no.
BRANDON SANDERSON: Yeah.
He's also really good at killing people.
But I guess that's kind of what Cherie was talking about
a little bit ago.
CHERIE PRIEST: Well, it's all context.
A guy hits another guy with a hammer.
Is it Stephen King or is it the Marx Brothers?
It's just that line of how it surprises you that determines
which camp that falls into.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: We talked a little bit about endings at
the beginning.
And so I'm curious to talk about
endings here at the ending.
And we will do questions.
I've let the time get a little bit away from us, but we'll
still do questions here at the end.
Now in terms of closure on a book--
And this is, I think, especially appropriate for
you, Terry, because you have this generational thing
happening, which means, for some people, writing a book in
a world continuously and they're kind of staying in the
same time period, they can always come back and maybe
revisit these characters or we see them.
But when you move on you really move on.
You kind of like shake the dust from your feet, and then
time passes.
Is that a little intimidating in terms of the closure you're
bringing to some of these stories and some of these
characters?
TERRY BROOKS: I'm really fond of this.
I'm sort of locked in a life or death struggle with Anne
Groll right now.
She's become my editor, and she wants answer to everything
at the end of the book.
And I'm saying to her, you don't get to have those
answers, Anne.
You only get what you get.
And in real life we don't know all the answers, and
everything isn't wrapped up.
And people do go off, and maybe
something happens to them.
And even in the most dramatic of situations, the most
difficult things, they're not resolved at
the end of the story.
And that's why when we talk coming in you don't come in at
the beginning of the story.
You don't end at the end of the story.
You stop.
It all takes place in the middle.
And there's things that happen before, and there's things
that happen afterwards.
And part of writing books is that it's an interactive
experience for the reader.
The reader gets the chance to imagine.
Everything takes place in their head, and for every
reader it's an individual process.
So they should be allowed a chance to imagine what happens
to some of the characters at the end.
Or how are some of these things resolved?
And you want to give readers a sense that they spent their
money well and that the story had a resolution that was
satisfying to them.
But you don't want them to feel like you've answered
every single question and that that's the end of it, and so
they don't have to work a little bit on their own.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: I couldn't agree more.
I think there is such a thing as too much closure.
And I honestly think in Rowling's last book I think
that's why so many people were irritated with the end is she
put such a tight close on it with that 10 years later scene
that people did not have the freedom to think into the
future and kind of have that little sandbox in their mind
of oh, I wonder what next.
TERRY BROOKS: Yeah, that was a mistake.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: And it was tight closure, but
you can be too tight.
You can wrap things up so tightly that it strangles the
end of your story.
And Brandon, you are in a similar situation.
Where I don't think of it as generational, you're going
almost in terms of epochs.
You have the one historical period and then you move far
into the future.
BRANDON SANDERSON: Right.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: How are you dealing with that?
You're kind of in some unexplored territory there.
BRANDON SANDERSON: I wanted to do that
because it sounded fun.
And then it turns out it's a lot of work.
And that is kind of mode-shifting and things like
this, it's been fun but it has been a lot of work.
Because you don't want to have everything
tied up neat and tidy.
In fact, I just finished the last "Wheel of Time" book.
And one of the pieces of direction that Robert
Jordan/Jim Rigney left in his notes is "don't resolve this,
don't resolve this, don't resolve this." Interestingly,
he left a lot of responses to things that I wasn't to
resolve because of this exact same concept that Terry was
just talking about that and that we've been talking about.
We want things to live on.
We want the characters to live on--
those who survive.
In reader's minds we want this story to continue going.
And if you tie everything up neat and tidy it just kind of
makes it feel artificial.
And so I want to jump forward 300 years.
I'm certainly not the only person who's done something
like this in a series.
But I tied up my trilogy, it was good, it was done, let's
jump forward 300 years.
How can I do that without ruining all of this?
And the answer was really for me to focus in on the new
characters.
Give lots of insider fun tidbits and hints and things,
but not give all the answers of what happened in those
intervening 300 years.
Lots did happen--
technology jumped, and things like this.
But we haven't dug deeply into what the characters who
survived the end of the trilogy did for the rest of
their lives, it's barely even mentioned.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Yeah.
You mentioned there are other folks that have done that sort
of jumping.
And when I tried to come up with it in my head, Terry does
the generational stuff, Herbert did "Dune," but "Dune"
kind of exists as an island unto itself as a weird thing.
Who else has done stuff like that?
BRANDON SANDERSON: actually thinking of Terry, because the
"Knight of the Word" series and the "Shannara" series are
in the same continuity.
And so he actually did a different type of jump, but it
is the same sort of mode shift.
But Asimov also did it, if you look at the whole idea with
Foundation and even going into then the robots and things,
you have mode shifting.
I've never seen it done in fantasy the way I'm doing it,
which is why I decided to do it.
I'm sure someone out there's done it.
But I pitched the series to my editor as three trilogies--
past, epic fantasy, present, urban fantasy.
And the same world, not our world but with the epic
fantasy being.
Then the mythology, and then a future science fiction trilogy
where the magic has become the means for FTL.
And I pitched that series, and we'll see if I can actually
pull it off.
But I hadn't seen it done before.
So I said well, if I haven't seen it done before, that's
part of why I write stories, is so that I can try it.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Cool.
OK, we've got a few questions lined up here, so let'***
some of these.
Here we go, "How many plots and subplots do you usually
have in your book?" And I think there's an implied
sub-question there which is how many should you
have in your book?
I know for me, I counted once, and not going into the minor
subplots I think I had 18.
And my advice would be you should have less than 18.
TERRY BROOKS: I think it depends on the book.
I really think a book tells you what you need to do, the
story tells you what needs to happen.
And I never think about that sort of thing, it's the way
the story plays itself out and however many plots or subplots
there are or what the story calls for to get to the
resolution.
Maybe it's back to Brandon's way of approaching things.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: I think the back to front--
didn't Tolkien do that as well?
He said he wrote the book from beginning to ending and then
he had to write it from the ending to the beginning.
I think about that all the time, because that's what I'm
doing, too.
TERRY BROOKS: Very hobbit-like.
BRANDON SANDERSON: I would say that one of the biggest
mistakes that new writers make is by trying to pile too much
of this on in their early books.
At least looking at the writing students I've known
and myself at early days.
When I sat down to write my first few novels, I was a fan
of things like Robert Jordan.
And I'm like well, he's got like 80 characters so I'll
have 80 characters with their own plots and subplots.
And I tried that, and it was a disaster.
And then I went back and read the first book and realized
the first book has two viewpoints.
In a series that now has 2,000 named characters, it started
with a book that had two viewpoints.
And the second one didn't start until the group of
characters split apart halfway or three-quarters of the way
through the book.
And I looked at George Martin and what he was doing.
And realized hey, almost everything is focused on the
family who are together at the beginning of this book.
And it isn't until we get comfortable with the setting
and with these characters that we begin to split them off
into their own subplots and things like this.
And so err on the side of making your core group of
characters really interesting.
Maybe try and keep them in the same place, even if you're
trying to write epic fantasy, for the beginning, and just
try to make that interesting.
And once you can make that interesting, then start to
expand and go a little more crazy.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Yeah, I see that happen a lot where people
accidentally identify the props or the symptoms of a
good book and try to adopt those things.
Instead of understanding why those things
were great in a book.
A lot of times a book is great despite multiple point-of-view
characters, instead of because of it.
Here's a question that is interesting just because I
don't understand it.
"Could you talk about the MICE quotient a little bit?" That's
M-I-C-E. Does anybody understand what MICE is?
BRANDON SANDERSON: This is Orson Scott Card's method of
plotting and for building a story.
I'm not terribly familiar with it.
The one I know who knows a lot about it is Mary Robinette.
In several of his writings about it he talks about MICE
quotient, where MICE is Milieu,
Idea, Character, Event.
And he builds a story by saying if the character story
you lead, we're talking about the character and then you
develop your character.
And then your climax at the end has to be tying back to
the character, the thing, that you talked
about in the beginning.
If it's an event, you introduce an event and then
the ending is the event happening.
If it's milieu, which is location, you enter a place
and then you leave a place.
It's his version of something like three-act format.
CHERIE PRIEST: So it's very "Sing to me, Muse, of the
Wrath of Achilles," and then it's over when Achilles is no
longer angry.
BRANDON SANDERSON: Exactly, yeah.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: I don't know that reference either.
You sing--?
CHERIE PRIEST: Oh, at the beginning of "The Iliad" "Sing
to me, Muse, of the Wrath of Achilles." And it ends with
Achilles crying in the tent of this man who
he'd come to kill.
The whole epic can be summed up in "Sing to me, Muse, of
the Wrath of Achilles," and then I cry.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Wow, I just shamed myself.
I've never read "The Iliad," "The Odyssey." I
know it's on my list.
CHERIE PRIEST: There's an old dog in "The
Odyssey," and it's great.
That's pathos right there, that's pathos-- the old dog
who wags its tail one last time and pft.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: And actually, I've know a lot of
arguments to say there's the classic character-driven
versus plot-driven story.
One's "The Odyssey" and one's "The Iliad," although you
could probably have a good argument about that, too.
Here we have "Whenever I read or write I become emotionally
attached to characters.
I'd love to know if they--" that's us I'm assuming--
"have ever changed a story due to emotional involvement with
our own characters." That's a fair question.
CHERIE PRIEST: Oh no.
No, I'm the tyrannical despot of that stuff.
I don't care how cute you are, you got to go sometimes.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Anybody else?
TERRY BROOKS: Well, I don't think the inmates should be
running the asylum.
When you develop your characters, it's OK to be
emotionally attached to them, but they always are serving
the purposes of the story.
So if they cross the line, that's it for them.
Their time is up.
CHERIE PRIEST: I hear writers talking about that sometimes.
How well, the characters got away from me and they started
telling me what to do.
Dude, no, no.
Get some medication, man.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: And you know what it is?
I feel the same way about them as I've always felt about
parents who can't control their children.
Where the author that says oh, they just took over the story.
And then there are parents who are somewhere, and their
little demon spawn are running around and chasing somebody's
dog and knocking stuff over.
And they're like oh, I just can't do a thing with them.
And I'm like yes you can.
You get in there and you do your job as a parent, and you
institute a little discipline.
And I thought this before I was a parent, mind you, but
now even as a parent I do still feel that way.
And it's the exact same feeling that kind of looms up
in me when somebody says oh, my characters
took over the story.
I'm like, don't you pawn off responsibility.
As the author, you need to make sure that your characters
are in service to the story.
Yes, they can surprise you.
Yes, you can have serendipity.
Yes, they can be strong-willed.
But you have to be the boss.
TERRY BROOKS: Let's remember this is fiction.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Oh, here we go. "In a long series, how do
you maintain continuity and consistency between novels?"
CHERIE PRIEST: Oops.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Yeah, I think we all have oops there.
CHERIE PRIEST: Oh man, we didn't have a Bible for the
steampunk universe until--
we had some interest from a comics company, and they
wanted to see our Bible doc.
And me and my editor were like, oh ***, we don't have
one of those.
So I had to sit down and pull one directly out of my butt.
And there are inconsistencies within the books like crazy.
Like once in awhile people will complain about how I
never mention the Republic of Texas, which becomes very
prominent later on in the series in "Boneshaker." And
that is entirely because I hadn't thought of it yet.
It's not complicated, it just hadn't occurred to me.
But then I forget how I've spelled things, I forget what
I've named people.
And sometimes I just can't find the doc on my laptop and
do the little quick find.
No, I'm terrible at it.
Anybody who wants to go picking through that franchise
will have a field day 100 years from now when I'm dead.
BRANDON SANDERSON: I want to know how Terry does it.
I mean, you have the opus here.
How are you doing that?
TERRY BROOKS: I'll tell you how, and it's very simple.
First of all you have to live long enough.
If you live long enough, what you can do is you can go to
your publisher and say Robert Jordan's got an encyclopedia
of his work, how come I don't have one?
And sure enough, they'll give you an encyclopedia of your
work that you can use as a reference.
And the second thing you need to do is make friends with, or
hire as in my case with my web druid Sean, somebody who knows
your books better than you do.
And then whenever you have a question, which in my case
becomes more frequent all the time, I just call up Sean and
say, go look in the books and tell me where this happened or
what happened there.
And then I spend a whole lot less time
fussing about this stuff.
CHERIE PRIEST: I'm just not that special yet, I'm afraid.
I'm working on it.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Brandon, how many checkers did you have for
the Jordan books?
BRANDON SANDERSON: We had, myself and my assistant,
Robert Jordan's two assistants, Harriett, his wife
and editor, my editor at Tor, and six beta readers.
And then the proofreader and the normal copy editor.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: And that's how I avoid most of mine.
Again, I'm odd man out here with two books.
And even so, I've had inconsistencies
between the two books.
Sometimes it's just a little spelling thing, but it's
irritating.
I spell Kirshan with a K here and a C here.
And one of them's in the map, so do we change the map now?
Do I go back and change the text?
BRANDON SANDERSON: No, no, no, you just say that that's
translated from a language that two different scholars
used two different translation techniques.
Just like Korean or Japanese, you have two different forms
of how they're spelled.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: You know, that makes
me feel a lot better.
Because I'm like can I pull that interworld complexity
translation issue?
CHERIE PRIEST: Just tell them a wizard did it.
BRANDON SANDERSON: I swear-- now, I don't know this for
sure and now the Robert Jordan fans are all going to call me
and say how dare you.
But there's one point where Robert Jordan had a person who
had a horse named Stare, and the next book he has a horse
named Stepper.
And a fan said, what happened to his horse?
And Robert Jordan said well, he's got two horses.
And perhaps Jim had two horses for this person, or maybe he
just did what we all do sometimes.
Anne McCaffrey forgot the name of one of her main characters
between book one and book two.
Maybe it just happened like that.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Really?
What was the character?
BRANDON SANDERSON: It was one of the apostrophe dudes.
It wasn't F'lar or F'nor, but she wrote about it.
You can go Google it and say Anne McCaffrey.
She wrote a whole thing about how she forgot about it.
It's a great essay.
I had never noticed it, she just wrote an essay about it.
It was like one of the leaders in one of the towns, one of
the main leaders, and she just called them
two different names.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: That's amazing, because I must've
read that whole series six times as a
kid and I never noticed.
BRANDON SANDERSON: I'm sure they fixed it by the time we
were reading those books.
Those were first published in the '60s I
think, weren't they?
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Right.
TERRY BROOKS: Yeah, but look.
Here's part of the trick from my perspective at least.
After you get 20-odd books in a series, if you haven't left
several hundred years between gaps, you're required to know
everything.
But if you leave several hundred years, it doesn't
matter what happened back then because it's all past.
You just need to know the schematic of magic.
You don't need to remember those characters.
Nobody's going to refer to anybody three hundred
years in the past.
You just let that go.
CHERIE PRIEST: Rocks fall, everyone dies.
TERRY BROOKS: That's right.
BRANDON SANDERSON: I will say, for practical
advice I do use a wiki.
It's been very useful for me and I try to keep myself
honest using that.
I've mentioned before, I just use Wicked Pad.
which is a free one for off-source storage, and it's
been really helpful.
And I'm sure I'll still miss things, but with that I can
keep things straight.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: I also rely extensively on beta readers.
Untold hundreds for the first book, and probably about a
hundred for the second.
They help me catch little things, and not just like
misspellings, but potential inconsistencies
to the world itself.
Where somebody says you know, a city like this cannot exist
without a closed sewer system.
It's nice to have a wide variety of people reading your
beta to hopefully weed out as many of
those things as possible.
OK, maybe one more question here.
"Have any of you had a character grow and develop in
such a way that they needed to be weeded out of the story."
I'm paraphrasing here.
Anybody?
TERRY BROOKS: Weeded out of the story?
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: That's my phrasing.
TERRY BROOKS: What in the world does that mean?
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: Well, it's like they say "Is there a
character that was developed and then didn't fit into the
story and had to be removed?" So I've never had somebody
that has cropped up and then had to be removed.
Sometimes people were in the first book and then just
didn't belong in the second book so they didn't show up.
TERRY BROOKS: Yeah, that kind of sounds like bad writing,
doesn't it?
If you introduce a character that serves no purpose so that
you have to get rid of them, normally you have some sense
of their purpose in the book and you don't just put them in
there and then have no idea what's going
to happen to them.
BRANDON SANDERSON: Sometimes through the revision process
this sort of thing does happen.
I have two examples.
Robert Jordan's work, he actually had an extra
character for the first half of "Eye of the World." And
it's funny, because he's in the cover art.
They commissioned the cover art and
there's another character.
Harriet, his editor and his wife eventually persuaded him
this character was doing nothing.
He was boring.
Everyone else had stories and this person didn't.
And so halfway through the book he cut this character,
but he ended up in the cover art.
It happened once to me with my very first book that I sold.
I sent it off, I sold it, everything's going well.
My agent calls me up and says you know, you probably ought
to get rid of this character.
And what had happened is the three-quarters mark I
introduced a new villain.
He was fascinating, I called him The Mad Prince.
He was crazy in a fun way.
He was doing all kinds of just ludicrous, insane things that
were just making me laugh and making life interesting and
hard for the characters and things.
And yet, the three-quarters mark is not the place to
introduce a new character, particularly an antagonist who
draws all the attention.
And he was really deflating everything else that had
happened in the book up to that point.
And he was a great character, but it was a darling that I
had to kill because he was wrong.
He was just completely wrong for that book,
and I cut him out.
Book streamlined so much better and the ending worked
so much better by not having this character who gets
introduced at the three-quarters mark and
defeated at about the 90% mark.
And then we go back and do the rest of the
climax of the book.
TERRY BROOKS: Well, did you kill him or did you just take
him out altogether?
BRANDON SANDERSON: Took him out altogether.
TERRY BROOKS: Well, I think he gets his own book later on.
BRANDON SANDERSON: Yeah, that's what I told my agent
when I pulled him out.
I'm like, I'm going to do a book about this guy.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: I've known one author that had two love
interests and effectively was persuaded to conflate them.
OK, is that the right word, conflate?
He ended up removing one of them and the understudy got
all of that second love interest scenes, effectively.
So I know that that sort of thing happens.
If anything, I go in the other direction.
Where in the revision process I might add a character who,
if you look at things really clinically, they may not be
vital to the story.
The best example of that is Ari, who in some ways does not
further a plot or something like that.
But is she important to the story?
I think she's vital to the story, even though she may not
be tied directly into a major plot arc.
She does so much for the story, she's one of the things
that makes the story beautiful.
And that by itself is justification, whether or not
she's pulling her weight in terms of structure.
And with that, maybe let's close off by mentioning a few
books that we feel handle structure, plot, pacing, these
things particularly well.
I'll lead off with Jim Butcher, who I very
much enjoy his books.
Not only from the point-of-view of each book
individually having a nice tight arc, but the arc of the
character over multiple books.
I don't know if I've ever seen a character make progression
like that in a series of novels.
I'm ridiculously invested in Harry Dresden and I really
like the structure of his books.
Maybe not particularly fancy, because these are detective
books in many ways.
But fancy is fine and good, I like seeing something done
immaculately and efficiently and successfully.
You don't need to fancy it up for me, you just need to do it
so well, and Butcher does it well.
BRANDON SANDERSON: I'll say the Moist von Lipwig books for
Terry Pratchett.
Since I mentioned him earlier, I should mention one that you
can look at.
I think Pratchett is one of those writers who has gotten
better and better with age, which
doesn't happen for everybody.
Some people, they write their best books early in their
career, he's writing his best books now.
And "Going Postal" was so tight, and so much fun, and
such a great character, that I was blown away.
CHERIE PRIEST: I'll second the Terry Pratchett.
A weak Terry Pratchett it is better than 90% of
anything on a shelf.
I love him.
I'd probably also call out Dashiell Hammett.
I know a lot of people are Philip Marlowe fans, but I
love me some Sam Spade instead.
And my first great true love was "Dracula." It was the
first book I ever read that actually frightened me.
It's a slow burn, and it's a Victorian pacing, but it gets
me every time.
It's comfort food.
Oh, and Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None." The
first story I ever read that told me that the
author could lie.
TERRY BROOKS: Well, gee.
I'm going to go a different direction here.
I think "Mists of Avalon," Marion Zimmer Bradley's take
on the Arthur legend is about as fascinating and
well-plotted and well-structured a book as I
can think of.
And I still go back and re-read that book, and it
never gets any less wonderful.
Mary Doria Russell's book that I cannot think of the title of
that everybody called "Jesuits in Space" is another one.
That's true.
It's a first contact novel, and I can't think of the name
of it as I'm sitting here, of course, so that's one.
And I'll just throw in something
that's totally different.
There's a writer named Jess Walter--
and I may have mentioned him the last time, Pat, I can't
remember-- but he wrote a book called "The Zero," and "The
Zero" was about 9/11, and ground zero and so forth.
And it was about a policeman who had escaped the collapse
of the towers, but he's lost his memory and it came back to
him in snippets.
So the whole book is structured with his memory
returning in bits and pieces.
And as it does, the story begins to unfold about who he
is and what's happened because you don't know.
You're not sure if he's a good guy, or a bad guy.
It's all about who was responsible, and who the
terrorists really were.
It's an absolutely fascinating exercise in structuring a
story and I could not put that book down.
I thought it was just fabulous.
PATRICK ROTHFUSS: As an interesting exercise in terms
of structure, I'd recommend, if you've got nothing but time
on your hands, people should try to read "Hamlet." Which is
Shakespeare, so it's kind of given that
it's going to be good.
But honestly, "Hamlet" drags on a bit.
And then watch like the Mel Gibson "Hamlet"
from back in the day.
And that "Hamlet," it's been completely molested.
They rearranged things, they edited out huge chunks, and
it's really good.
To say wow, somebody edited the hell out of Shakespeare
and it's way better, there is something to be said for
looking at different versions of a story like that.
And again, one is going to be on the page and the other is
going to be on the screen.
But if you want to remove that element, look at Kenneth
Branagh's "Hamlet" which was like two and a half, three
hours long.
I was at a party once and people tried to watch it, and
everyone fell asleep but me.
And then compare that to the Mel Gibson's "Hamlet" where
it's shorter, it's tighter, it's exciting.
There's a lot to be gained from examining those different
takes on the structure of a well-established story.
And with that, I will thank all of my lovely
and talented guests.
Thank you so much for coming.
And thank you, everyone, for tuning in.
And this is Pat Rothfuss with The Story
Board and Geek & Sundry.
Thanks much.