How To Worldbuild on Earth? - Brandon Sanderson's Writing Lecture #9 (2025)

This is Brandon Sanderson's "How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy" lecture series. Today, we are doing the Q&A on World building. So, we are going to listen to the students and do all of their questions, and I'm going to hopefully be very eloquent.

Now, if you want to get one of your questions answered, we will do a web exclusive Q&A for World building, just like we've done here and with our other things. So, leave your questions for me in the comments of this video. We will aggregate them, and I will do a special video just for you. Let's do class! Yay! Science F- Fantasy writing class!

[Applause]

Woo! Uh, this is "How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy." This is a World Building Q&A. Uh, you can also hit me with, uh, questions about viewpoint. Intense since we stealthily snuck, um, we pork-bellied that, uh, that one into the, the last lecture. Um, so we're going to, I've got your questions that you've asked here. I'm going to start with a few of those, and then I'm going to go to the crowd. As a reminder, uh, next, next week's "Business of Writing." Um, so "Business of Writing." If you want to know, I'm going to focus on traditional publishing. Uh, I will have thoughts on self-publishing and indie publishing if you want to ask me about it, but, uh, I will be focusing on agents, I'll be focusing on contracts, and I'll be focusing on how the publishing industry works. Why it works, why it sometimes doesn't. All right. So, uh, that's an important one, particularly if you, you know, have friends who are wanting to publish. That might be one for them to visit and listen, or if you have significant others that you want to be doing this as a business in the future, and they might, uh, they might do to understand some of the business side. Uh, we do have extra seats. Um, by the end of the semester, we always do. So feel free to bring, um, bring a significant other next time, or someone like that, uh, if you think it'll help him out. Just make sure that everyone who's registered for the class gets seats first.

All right. So, question number one, which is an excellent question: How do you handle world building when you're in a real-world setting, not writing a fantasy world? Um, I'm going to take this from the perspective of, you mean, it's an urban fantasy. There are fantastical elements to the world. Um, though, you know, if you want to read an excellent world-building book that is, um, not fantasy in any way, you can look to the great historical novels. Lays, um, Moby Dick. Moby Dick tends to be the go-to point to, "This feels like a fantasy world." Um, and things like that. The trick is, those books were written during an era where the tropes that you used and the ways that you tell stories were different. Their pacing is very, very different. Um, Moby Dick and L both actually have some very different kinds of pacing, let's just say.

How do I approach this? Um, so there is, um, there's some advantages. You can shortcut whenever you're using our world, um, even if it's a science fiction world, which is handy. There are certain things that readers established in a genre will just accept. I think we talked, maybe it was last week, maybe it was a small group, about how you can just say, "My, uh, future society uses wormholes to get around." You don't have to explain how the wormholes work, as long as, like, you go in this thing, they're stable, you come out the next one. Science fiction people are just like, "Okay, I get wormholes." You don't have to explain what wormholes are. Um, even easier, you don't have to explain what American football is, right? You don't have to explain all of these things. But like any book, fantasy or not, you are going to have to pick where you spend your effort bringing people up to speed. Um, every book has a learning curve, regardless, um, of what kind of story you're writing. And in every book, you can manipulate your learning curve to make it steeper or shallower. Steeper if you want to make the book feel more challenging in that regard, and to promise that you're going to be throwing a lot at them. Shallower to make it an easier on-ramp into a story.

Um, there are pitfalls to this. Today, Jim Butcher gets complaints from people in Chicago because he got the layout of Chicago wrong in "The Dresden Files" because he wasn't living there, um, at the time. Um, he swears that, you know, some of the things that happened, he experienced in Chicago, like the way the fog worked and stuff. But he says he gets, he gets super amounts of complaints. Getting things wrong is way easier in the real world, and the chances that there's an expert reading your book who knows more than you go up dramatically. This is why World War II books are, uh, famously hard to write because the number of armchair experts about World War II are very high. And in a lot of novels, you depend on getting some small details right in order to convey a larger sense of, of respectability to your story. Very easy in the fantasy world, in some ways, to give us these small details so that you trust and, um, and have authority over it. But if you get the small details wrong, you can collapse the entire, um, the entire, uh, aesthetic, the entire, uh, mystique for a reader.

Scar, does this happen to you when people, uh, write about the military and don't know how to write about the military? It makes me so angry. Yeah. Uh, it makes him so angry. Uh, and you can't really engage with the book anymore because you notice they get something fundamental wrong. No longer can you trust that they're getting the character arcs right because they don't understand fundamental things about what it is. And so, um, your research on these things needs to go up, or you need to make liberal use of bonehead characters, which we are all boneheads in some way. Meaning, uh, there is a reason why Kaladin doesn't like horses because I know there's a large number of fantasy fans who are horse people, and they know their horses in and out, and I don't. My wife knows horses. I could get there. I could do the research. But by having a main character who's like, "I don't do horses," then if the main character gets some stuff wrong about horses, and can be taught in later books so that it brings it back, people, people forgive Kaladin for not knowing about horses because he doesn't like horses. Um, that sort of thing can be very handy.

Um, this is where really good alpha and beta readers come in. Uh, the other thing that you want to be careful of in real-world world building is the potential to be even, to be damaging. The classic example of this, I would say, is how much fantasy writers like to take things like genuine Navajo beliefs and imply that they're part of some magic system, um, which, if it were any other religion, would be instantly recognizable as, um, as very condescending, right? Um, but for some culture things that pop culture has decided it can appropriate for, for whatever reason, um, it can be very damaging. And so, being careful about these things, I recommend being respectful. Remember, kind of my cardinal rule is, I want to be depicting, I want people to depict me well and do the research for me. Um, and so I want to make sure that I'm depicting them well. Um, I'm depicting all people well, not to other, um, everyone else, but I'm, you know, do your research. Do things consciously. Don't do them accidentally, is what I would recommend. Um, you can absolutely make decisions in your books that other people in, in this room would not make and would say, "You shouldn't do that." If you do them consciously, the ground you're standing on is much stronger than if you just do them accidentally.

This wasn't real world, uh, but this was Mistborn. Um, when I wrote the original Mistborn trilogy, one of the things I did is I wanted to build Vin as this dynamic character, um, partially because, you know, I was writing the book in part for my 14-year-old sister that I was drawing some Vin out of and things like that. It was after the book that I realized the entire rest of the thieving crew was men. Um, you can write like Bridge Four did not have any women in it. It is a battlefield situation where people have been recruited to carry bridges. I would not have put any women in Bridge Four. You could make a different argument and do it totally valid. When I did it in Mistborn, I did it because all the heist movies I'd seen were all guys. I didn't do it consciously. Um, and this is, you know, the theme of, uh, of my class. Do things consciously. Pick it because you think it matches the story you're wanting to do, whatever it is, um, and then own it. Um, do your research. Think about it. So for real, real-world things, I would say that, remember, for real-world, last little piece of advice, contrast is your friend. Contrast is your friend in all kinds of world building. I talked about with Sanderson's Third Law. Sometimes, if you're going to build, uh, two religions, having them be contrasting parts of the same religion, or have different views on something that's very important to the world-building plot, will help the reader understand the contrast. Same thing with the fantasy world. Um, it's instantly recognizable. Say the movie "Yesterday," where the Beatles don't exist. That's a contrast between our world. You can explain that in one term. Guy wakes up, no one's heard the Beatles. He remembers them. No one else does. Boom. You have a pitch. Um, using contrast like that. What is different between your fantasy world and our fantasy world? What is the same? And build from there.

All right. Uh, other world-building questions before I pull another one over here? Um, in a video one time, you said that Robert Jordan was one of, kind of like, the great examples of viewpoint. Yes. What does he do? Do you think that makes him great? Yeah. Um, so Robert Jordan and George R. R. Martin are two of the very best. Um, and what they both do is they make sure every character's description, every description that you get in a chapter is from a character's viewpoint. The descriptions are really key. Um, and Robert Jordan is a master of, um, I used the cup of water. Um, you know, he, one of the things that he, uh, was inspired by Dune by is that different people treat water differently. And so the descriptions of how a hill full of grass looks from the eyes of different people is going to be different. Um, and, you know, as, uh, you find the best passages in "Wheel of Time," you don't need a name to tell you whose viewpoint you're in from line one. It's by how they describe the people around them and, uh, how they describe the setting. Uh, again, George relies on this a ton. George Martin switches viewpoints really fast, lots of viewpoints. Uh, so many that even though he's using third limited, he names the chapters after the character because he knows he's switching fast enough that he has, uh, a danger of losing people. And he makes sure to hit particularly his opening paragraphs solidly in viewpoint, um, so that you know whose view you're in. And that means that the busy work you do of describing a scene is actually characterization and is often as also foreshadowing, right? Um, and it gives you that strength for a third limited that first often has. So that's what I recommend, uh, specifically those two authors, uh, two of the thing. One of the things that they're very good at, and there's a reason why those two dominated, uh, the '90s and early 2000s, um, and I think it's because epic fantasy, in particular, one of the emotions you're looking for in reading it is a sense of immersion, and characters pull you into that world. It's, uh, extremely important aspect. Whereas some other subgenres, like a lot of urban fantasy, it's not the immersion, it's the excitement, it's the, and the little spice of horror, the, the world that I knew has the uncanny valley to it as well, is a lot of what drives urban fantasy, and that's the emotion that they're looking for. So, you know, kind of identifying what kind of these emotions so you can set your tone promises is a good idea.

Uh, do you have a recommendation for how to get into the character's viewpoint, like if you're switching between writing different characters? Yes. Um, so, so just some quick tips. Number one is, as a rule of thumb, as you're starting, try to have the first name mentioned in a scene or chapter be the character whose viewpoint you're in. You can obviously break this. The more fluent you become with this, the more you'll get a feel for it. But readers do naturally start to scan to see which name it is, and they will settle you in that head. Um, it's not as artsy. And so sometimes if you want to have more of a flourish, often times, uh, authors will have, like, I think I talked about sometimes an omniscient sentence or paragraph at the start of something, and then into, um, but what you want to do is you want to make sure it's not vague. If you're mentioning someone else first, make sure the action verb is referring to the viewpoint character, um, or that the viewpoint character watches this person, you know, something like this. Cement us in, um, in this is third limited again. Cement us in that scene, and then give us a zinger of a description. Um, even, you don't want, when I say a zinger, don't give me three paragraphs, give me one line. Right? When you jump into Matt's viewpoint in "Wheel of Time," he says, "Men, she was so tough, she looked like she could chew, uh, steel and spit out nails." Right? That's in his voice. Um, it's a metaphor that no other character would make. And he said it actually better than that, um, you know, um, uh, and suddenly you're like, "I am locked into this character voice." And then do your things. Treat each scene like you are writing an essay from the, like you learned in high school. Give us theses, CCCs. What, what are we doing in this scene? How is it, how are we, what's our progress going to be in this scene? What's our tone in this scene? You often use it in paragraphs if you need to get something across. There's a thesis line in the paragraph, and then you explain it, and you pull us out with a transition. Um, all of these things will keep us in viewpoint as long as the character is the one doing it, not you ruminating upon it for us. Okay. Uh, this is a writing fluency thing. The more meaning, the more you practice it, and the more you notice it in other people's writing, the more you will be able to deliberately decide how you want to do it. Because what I just described is kind of the Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson, George Martin sort of way. There are perfectly valid other ways to go about doing this.

Um, so one thing you say is like, to make world building interesting, to make it interesting to a character. If you have world building that is important for the plot, but that characters are not interested in, how do you communicate that in a way that's still interesting? What an excellent question. So the question is, what if you have world building that is really important to the plot, but it's not important to the characters? How do you convey that? Uh, excellent, excellent. Um, so I'll give you a couple of strategies, which is what I do in these Q&As, and then maybe from that, we can derive a theme in how you're approaching this. Um, one strategy that is often very, uh, successful is you, through narrative, indicate to the reader that this is important, even if the character is not necessarily paying attention. That can be as obvious as the teacher smacking the table while the kid is daydreaming and being like, "You're going to need this someday. The a monster's going to have their jaws on your neck, and you're not going to remember how to get out of it." And then wise crack from character follows, right? Like there's a scene you've seen many times. The purpose of that scene is to say, a character act of our character is that they are not interested in the world building. However, the world building is important. And you can construct scenes that do that. Um, you know, you can cut away to other viewpoints to where it is important. Um, you can make an aspect of it very important. For instance, the character may not care about the magical security systems of such and such thing, but the character may care about going to a display about their favorite thing, uh, that's kept in one of these security things. Accidentally run afoul of it, so they have to learn. Building your scenes so that they have to learn, and indicating to the reader somehow that it is relevant, is really important. Otherwise, maybe cut it until it is relevant, or hint at it and dance around it, uh, by having the character be like, "Yeah, not interested." And like, "All right." Um, and then later on, it comes up. There are all sorts of ways to do this. Rule of thumb for you, uh, of readers, I have no way of knowing how many, but I do know it's significant. Skip epigraphs and skip prologues. Yeah, skip epigraphs. Epigraphs are the things that you put in the front of chapters, like, uh, the, the, the emails in "Ender's Game," or the biographies in "Dune," or, uh, things like this. A percentage of your audience skips both. So if you're embedding absolutely essential information in those, be aware that there are some percentage of your audience that won't do it. They're just not going to engage with that part of the book. Um, do you understand that a larger percentage of your audience than that percentage will read the ending first? Deal with it. And statistically, I think I mentioned that in this class, they will enjoy the book better for having done so. Not true. Not true. They will. You might not, but they will. So true. Okay. Yeah. So, um, so be careful about being like, "I'm going to get this information across in the epigraphs," because, um, the character doesn't care. The, as long as it's, um, information that for the deep reader is still relevant, they will read it. Um, but you, you got to be aware. There is, there is that danger. And people will read them and forget the epigraphs easier because they are not cemented into a moment in time. Um, and so, all right. Uh, other questions? I got this here. So maybe we'll pull, we'll do yours, and then I'll pull this one next.

Um, so I guess in the process of writing a story, when do you stop introducing, like, elements? Like, right, yeah, one versus halfway through act? Um, I'm not sure that I have a rule on this. Um, part of it depends on how big a series I'm doing. Um, I always want to be careful about gorillas in the phone booth. I think I told you guys about that, um, where you're introducing something new and it becomes more interesting. I can tell you a failure case, um, so, um, and fortunately, I fixed this, but the initial draft of "Aess" was 250,000 words. My first novel published in 2005. Um, and in "Aess," you know, I like twists and turns and surprises. No big surprise for people who enjoy reading my books. And so there was a foreshadowed son of the, uh, of the king, brother to Raoden, who showed up at the three-quarter mark, who had been said that he was, he was going to come. And he just threw chaos into the whole thing for 20,000 words in order to shake up the status quo. And I could cut him entirely without the book, uh, losing anything, and in fact, it made the climax stronger. So that was about the three-quarter mark, too late, even for a foreshadowed element, um, that turned into the, yeah, we're not interested in this because you've been building toward this great climax with these other characters. We don't want a deuce ex machina. If you remember the phrase, we don't want a new problem thrown at us out of nowhere. But once in a while, these big foreshadowed, looming problems that people are expecting and worried about come, and it's like, "All right, this means we're at final act." You know, the Death Star is finally here to blow up, you know, the, the rebel base. We have to go into overdrive. So it's not, I, you know, don't have something new, but it is dangerous to be adding things new at that point. Um, and I'm not sure that I have, you know, any basic rules for you on this.

All right. Let me do a question from here, and then you'll be next up. So, question from here: What tools do you use to world build? Do you research online, read books, ask people? Uh, the answer to the last one is yes. Um, so, um, I do read books, I do ask people, I do research online. Um, and it depends on the thing, how much, where the balance of the three is. Um, asking people and having beta readers has become my go-to. Main reason for this is, again, we're approaching this as if you want to be writing a book a year. Um, you can spend six years becoming an expert in something and then write a book about it. Um, and you, some of you in this class might do it, and they might be fantastic books. The thing is that the first few months of researching something, or even few weeks, is when you learn the most. You can get yourself a significant part of the way. If the 100% is Grandmaster and zero is novice, you can eat up a lot of that ground, uh, and get yourself like 50% of the way there with not that much effort. Um, then the, uh, the next, you know, getting from 50 to 75% takes 10 times as long, and then you get micro increments of improvement from then on. And this is just how learning skills works. It's how your writing skill is going to improve and is improving, um, as you write your early books. Therefore, getting yourself to a place where you feel comfortable that the mistakes you make will be fixable without undermining the entire narrative, and then writing your story and finding an expert to tell you, uh, "Yeah, you've got a problem here, you've got a problem here," um, and fixing according to demand is often, uh, the way that I go. That said, um, it has bitten me twice. One is dissociative identity disorder. Um, you know, I thought I was 70, 80% and I was more like 40% in understanding. And so, like, I'm trying to remember which one it was, book four, I think it was, is where I had to do some significant rewrites that changed plot structures, uh, that it would, if I would have done more research upfront, it which would have saved me, uh, time on the back end. Uh, the other one is, um, is, uh, G-forces for Skyward, which I thought I understood, and I was like at 10% and I thought it was like 60%. Uh, I really needed to be in a, um, a situation that flung me around with those kinds of forces. Um, fortunately, I managed to get the people who, uh, who were jet pilots to read the book, and that required significant revisions also to get my G-forces right. Um, and so those are two times where I thought I was, I had handled it, and I hadn't. So, um, people can be your best resource. You don't need to read 17 novels generally on a topic, or novels, research books, you know, in order to get there. But I would do your research, um, and I would try to find primary sources to help you out with it. And again, the more you do this, the more you'll know where you need to be. And again, you will make mistakes, and the mistakes can be, can, you know, require a lot of work on the back end, and it does happen.

Um, what tools do I use? Um, we still use, oh, is Karen now? Karen here? I think we moved wiki softwares, didn't we? I'm looking at you as if you, as if you would know. Sor. We did. You know? Okay, what's the wiki software we use now? I don't know. You don't know that. I know we switched. We switched. For the longest time, we used WikiPad. WikiPad. It's an open-source, um, uh, you know, so you can host your own, uh, wiki just locally, so you can access it out of, basically, just folders on your computer, saved as text files. That was really handy, but it's, you know, one of these, uh, these wiki softwares that's maintained by, in part-time, by some people on the internet who just wanted to make it, um, and so the documentation is not amazing. What it can do is great, and I'm really grateful for them. But I think we eventually found one that we might be paying for, uh, yeah, um, so that we have something that just got a little bit more documentation and whatnot. But we like a wiki, um, meaning that it has the wiki words that link that I can open up and be like, "All right, take me to Bridge Four." All right, I'm on the Bridge Four page now. Scan Bridge Four. Who do I need a description of? Click on that, and I go in. I'm like, "All right, here's the, uh, first places I introduce Lopen in each book, and what I described, how I described him. Let's make sure I'm not repeating myself. Um, let's make sure, you know, that I have the vibe on that." And it's, you know, I'm not going to miss on Lopen, but, um, on, you know, side characters, going back and reading the paragraph you wrote where you introduced them, very nice. And all the world-building elements are in there as well. It started primarily as a world-building document, that was a giant binder that I used for "The Stormlight Archive." Then I put it into a wiki, and then Karen took it over, and now it's a wiki for the whole Cosmere. You cannot tunnel into it. It's stored locally, not, you know, so, so there you are. Um, so that's what we use. Otherwise, I write in Microsoft Word. I do not have any other special tools. I know there are people who swear by Scrivener and some of the other tools. That's great. Um, you're just, I just consider myself very tech-savvy because, unlike a lot of my colleagues, I didn't just pick one program that I started writing on in 200 whatever and keep going in it. Ray Bradbury wrote on a typewriter till the day he died. George Martin still writes in WordStar for DOS. They do not, but he still writes in it. This is really, really common for writers. They pick a setup and a computer and whatever they do, and they write in that for the rest of their life because they don't want the program to get between them and what they're doing. And indeed, every time they, they update Word, they change things so that there's frustration. Like, I still can't get over the fact that you have to manually change in every document. I mean, I have a, I have a template, but any other document that it will add space between paragraphs of the same kind, as if you're formatting for the web. It isn't like, "How is that default?" This is a word processor. This is not a, you know, HTML editor. Like, it is baffling to me that that is default. Um, so, you know, I could rant all day about the things they've added to Word, um, but it, it, it is the program I use. I just use Word 365.

So, you had a question back here. Yeah. I just wanted to know how to maintain, I don't know, talking to not introduce things generally in the mar, want to leave the door right. How can you introduce things you don't want to introduce the three-quarter mark? How can you still introduce them? Epilogues are fantastic for this. If you want to introduce things for the next book, so basically, the best thing that you could probably do was start seeding these things for the next book at that three-quarter mark, but making sure they aren't so distracting that they pull attention. And then sometime in the damn, bring those to their own kind of head and climax, right? Um, think of Thanos, okay, from the MCU. Post-credit scenes. Post-credit scenes, then finally, "Fine, I'll do it myself" to bring you to the next, the movie where he does do it himself. Those sorts of things work very well for epilogues and whatnot. Just a little bit of seeding, and then bring it to a conclusion. But one of the other things you can do is you can, I, I think I talked about this, you can early on in your books indicate there's a whole world, but the character, for some reason, is like, "I can't, you know, I can't deal with that. I, I deal with my world." And it comes somewhat very naturally. Like, you might have a book where the whole book is about, you know, escaping the maze, and then at the end of the book, "Oh, great. Now what? We're out of the maze." The questions will follow, um, naturally. If you build it correctly, I would stress this less in your early drafts than you might be stressing it. Make that first book excellent, then say, "Okay, what can I do to seed the next book once I, you know, that your first book is landing and you're not distracting people with things?" You know, all right.

Question, um, when you have, when you have like only one limited, uh, point of view, but the character, the POV character, they're notably very different, distinct from the rest of the cast. How do you describe, like thinking their description without making it weird or like, right? So your viewpoint character is distinctive in some way in personality, visually, from the rest of the cast, but you're only describing from their viewpoint. How can you make this get this across? I'm glad you're asking this question, um, because the novice answer, which, uh, we'll often get an eye roll from editors, is they just look at themselves in the mirror and describe themselves in the first page. That said, I've had characters describe themselves in mirrors before. You can totally do it, just do it because you have decided in this story that's the actual appropriate way to do it, and be aware that it is a cliche.

So, contrast is your friend, right? Um, as I talked about, you have a character who's from a different culture than the others, for instance. Well, how they do things and how your character does things, and showing multiple people around them being fascinated by the differences will begin to indicate that for you. Um, you know, it is, it is okay to just say, "I'm, you know, I always feel out of place because I look different than the people around me, and here is why." Um, you don't have to dance around it. You can just say it sometimes. Again, um, we, we, oh, I didn't even get into this. Let me get into this. You've all heard "add show, don't tell," right? This is a good rule of thumb for those who don't understand. "Show, don't tell" is a storytelling and screenwriting, um, adage that goes back probably decades, maybe longer, where the idea is that a scene where a character takes an action to express an attribute or whatnot, um, is more memorable to a reader than a scene where a character tells you an attribute or tells you something. Saying, you know, "In this world, you know, frogs explode if you poke them," is less powerful than opening scene, character pokes a frog, and it explodes. Okay? Uh, this allows you to apply all of your word-smithing skills in your pyramid extraction to really show something off. Likewise, if a character, uh, tends to be kind of nervous, having the character often, you know, sitting and tapping their, uh, their, uh, their toes, rather than the character who's describing them saying, "They were such a nervous type," um, is generally more powerful. Showing takes more words, almost always, and you have a word budget for scenes and descriptions. Telling takes fewer words. The apprentice level is "show, don't tell." The journeyman level is where you start to learn, "No, when to show and no when to tell." No when to use a tell because shoehorning in a show is actually just way more awkward and takes more words than saying, "Hey, you know, I'm Caucasian and I'm living in Asia. Everybody else has a different ethnic heritage than me." You can just say that. Um, do you want to? It depends on the story you're telling, right? Um, do you want to indicate that your viewpoint character is in some way, uh, neurotypical, um, or things like this? Do you want to show that that might be something you spend more time showing that over time people come to understand? In some cases, you might want to just talk about it, or invent a scene that shows how this character interacts with the world differently from the characters around them and from what expectations might be. Um, so how do you do it? It really depends on your goals. It really depends on on what type of scene it is. How important the character is. Spending paragraphs to delicately introduce some really interesting description of a character who's never going to appear again may not be worth all the time, as opposed to just saying, "Oh man, that guard's super nervous. I wonder what makes that guard super nervous. I should be nervous, right?" That does something different. And maybe that's how you want to say it, rather than doing the show. Um, gain fluency with this and learn when to do which for your given story. Like, it is not a weakness in books that sometimes, um, authors summarize, right? You know, "Harry Potter" novels have all kinds of issues, but I, one of them that I don't think is an issue is sometimes she will just say, "And three months passed, and we didn't learn anything except one time, you know, Ron blew himself up." Right? That's that's tell, not show. But, you know, what she's covering a year in each of those books, and therefore taking three months and passing them like that, um, can be the narratively right choice. Okay.

Other questions? Yeah, go ahead. Uh, so what is your favorite example of a world-build gorilla in a? Oh, my favorite example of a gorilla in the phone booth? Oh boy. Um, can I think of one? Um, so I get them all the time in student works. I'm trying to see if I can remember one and something that might be more familiar to you, um, where I think, "Oh, that was a bit of a gorilla in the phone booth." Um, for me, and I'm trying to figure, like, um, I mean, it's not quite there, but the whole "Last Jedi" missing plot arc where we want a character to go find his friend Rey, and we are focused on, like, that's the emotion you want to avoid for gorilla in the phone booth, right? Character, we've been told he's going to find his friend Rey. He goes on a wacky side adventure that we have trouble bonding to because we've been told about this cooler thing that we want to have happen. And that's the problem, right? Like, for instance, "The Wheel of Time" starts with a very dynamic use of the magic, uh, in really cool ways that is, uh, thousands of years or thousand years ago, um, and then we jump to a kid on a farm. It's not actually a gorilla in the phone booth, right? Because this is a promise of what we're going to get. We are kind of told by the structure of a prologue, this is done, you will find more out about this. The nature of it being a prologue, and that's jumping to a farm boy, indicates, "Okay, you can let go of this for a little bit, and you'll be able to experience it." People like the video game "Symphony of the Night," Castlevania. Any, any experts? Oh, there's there's a few gamer, uh, true gamers, um, here. Um, this is a game that does a brilliant thing where it starts the game with all the power-ups that you are going to get through the game, and you get to be awesome for a very short period of time before the villain steals them all from you, right? That's a promise, and that's what "Wheel of Time" is, right? You are going to get to have all these powers eventually. Here, you get to experiment with them for like 10 seconds, and then they're all gone. It's, it's actually pretty brilliant. A gorilla in the phone booth might be, um, you know, what the biggest problem, um, that people had with Dan's initial book, "During," was that he had trouble figuring out how to indicate that "I'm Not a Serial Killer" has a monster, a magical monster, as the killer. People read it as true crime, and then the monster. But if introduced the monster too early, it became a gorilla in the phone booth. No one cared about the main character's problems at school when they knew there was a cool monster coming up. And he getting that balance right, to this day, he will say he's not sure if he got the balance right between gorilla in the phone booth and waiting so long that people expected it to be true crime. So when the monster showed up, they were annoyed at him. Um, and you get both of those. If you go read, uh, his, his reviews, people didn't like it. A lot of them are like, "I thought it was a great true crime novel, and then boom, it's a monster." And other people are like, "Tell me more about the monsters. Tell me more about this world. I don't care about this kid." So, um, I'm not sure if I can find a really good one. I'll watch for them, um, because if I see one that makes a good TikTok and be like, "Hey, I got gorilla in the phone booth than this, uh, this particular movie." Go ahead. Sorry. Thanks.

A question right now. "Fire and Blood." Okay. What do you think are the benefits and pitfalls of giant history books? Oh, benefits and pitfalls to giant history books? Okay. Um, I've never gotten this question before. What an interesting one. Um, I will say that, uh, that a lot of them demand a lot of art assets, and I think the people making them are not aware of how hard it is to get a lot of art assets. Um, I know for, uh, the world of "Wheel of Time," that was one of the things that really, like, getting that much art, um, was was difficult. Um, what are the, the pitfalls? Well, I don't know if there's pitfalls other than you're working on this instead of writing, and also they tend to sell about one-tenth as well as the actual book series does because they're very, to a very niche audience of people who like the books but also want to read an encyclopedia. I've never written any of these for mine. Um, I've, it feels like a lot of, a lot of work unless you're passionate about it. And the two, uh, you talked about, uh, the one for George and the one for, um, for Tolkien, obviously, this is a huge passion of theirs, right? George is a historian. George loves history. George loves all the little details of Westeros that are analogies to Earth history. Um, and that's like one of the main things he loves. It's not an accident that Westeros is like, um, Great Britain turned upside down with like Ireland stuck, uh, on it. Like he was very much doing something. And Tolkien, obviously, he loves his mythology, his lore, and his philology. Um, for me, I love the stories. The stories are why I write. The stories about the characters. The world building is a means to get there. And I do love the world building, but I'm not writing for the world building. Not writing for any of those things. I am writing for that story. And so writing the, um, the ephemera, is what we might call that, um, and things has never been as interesting to me. The only time we jumped on it was with the, uh, RPG, which kind of doubles for that with us because I had Dan full-time on staff who was a professional GM, um, that I could just be like, "You're in charge of this project on our end." Work with the game designers, and, um, you know, the whole, everyone got together. But art assets, the art department, even though Brotherwise was doing a lot of it, there's so much to to put together. You're like, "Well, suddenly we need world bibles with all of the different, you know, clothing styles and things drawn from multiple angles so that people can be on model if they're all doing all of these clothing models." Whereas before, what we could do is, and we still do this, we get an artist, they draw something, and then someone in-house, Ben McSweeney, mostly, goes and draws how the costume should look because he just knows, 'cause he designed them all. And so we don't have to have a guide for those. We just have Ben redraw the Shardplate, and then they go, and they paint over it and make it, uh, match our Shardplate. Um, so like that's how we got the, the cover. No, it's the inside, um, uh, pages to "Words of Radiance," the one that have Shallan sitting on the thing and painting, right? Michael Whelan, who did that, called Ben and had Ben come in and do sketches of the plants for him to paint over so it matched, uh, the rockbuds from book one. So yeah, we can do things like that. But suddenly, when you have a team of like 40 artists building an RPG or a world book really quickly, the art is going to become the big, um, the big, uh, clog in the pipes. Yeah. So there you go. Uh, and I know, uh, yeah, anyway, we will, we, we won't talk about the big white book, but I know fans of "The Wheel of Time" have talked about the art in that book, and the people who made it did an excellent job. There's just, there's so much art. Yeah. We'll go up here, and then we'll come down to you. Yeah.

So I guess kind of on that topic, yes, how does my process of writing differ when I'm doing a graphic novel? I write graphic novels as movie scripts because I'm more familiar with screenplay format. Um, and so far that has worked, having me know screenwriting and being able to write a script, and then having somebody on staff who knows paneling and layout, and is able to to transfer that. That's my process. Um, I don't know if that would work for other people. I just have access again. It is again, Ben McSweeney. Um, uh, if you don't know who Ben is, uh, Ben is, what's, what's his title? He's an art director. Is he? What's that? Director. Um, Ben was one of my, the person I hired to do concept art for the, uh, Stormlight Archive back in 2008, 7, um, and then we eventually hired him full-time. He does all of Shallan's sketchbook pages. He did the art for "Arithmetick and Morty." He was one of the animators on "Rick and Morty," and he's worked in graphic novels and animation, um, and things like that. So he just loves graphic novels. And so I can be like, "Here's a script. Ben, make panels out of this." And he will. They just magically come out. Um, and I get to see them and look over the sketches before we finalize. I'm like, "Move this line here," and these sorts of things. So, it works really well for me. But that's just because, uh, I am familiar with screenplays and not with, you know, I haven't written comics. I've only done screenplays. All right. You're up.

Okay. Do you have any like tips, tools, or like strategies for coming up with original, like particularly like geographic areas? Original geographic areas that aren't really analogous? Aren't really analogous? Oh boy. Tips and tricks. I mean, it really depends on, it is one of the things I would recommend that a fantasy writer do is while you're at college, get some basic geology and some basic psychology. Um, like those are just two of the things that'll help you. And if you can, this is for your students here, take a drawing class. Um, you know, take a class where you have to go and actually draw things so you start paying attention to light and

Shadow, uh, and these sorts of things, uh, those are just three things that'll do, do you a lot of good. I also happen to be lucky in that, um, in the English Department when I was there, uh, one of the best teachers was a linguist. And you can take all your kind of sub, uh, things like you have to have this many credits. I took the LCL Linguistics classic classes because he was hilarious. And by side effect, I learned enough about Linguistics that I could do some of these things. But knowing how, you know, continental divides work, and how rain shadows work with mountains, and where a lake is likely to be, and why it's likely to be there, and why biomes work, gives you some rules to break and play with.

But the, the, the thing to remember is, you're, if you're writing fantasy, you can always follow Xander Sanderson's zeroth law, which we didn't get into. Sanderson's zero law, um, is: "Air on the side of what's awesome." Um, I always say the difference between me and a science fiction writer is, a science fiction writer starts with what we have now and extrapolates to a plausible future. I start with the cool thing I want to have in a book and I work backwards, justifying it through internal and external logic, depending on the, the story. Um, and sometimes I can't justify it enough, and I change it until it starts to work. Um, but, you know, why are there, why does Shard plate exist? Shard plate exists in world because they needed it for fighting these certain forces and whatnot. Those forces exist because I wanted Shard plate to exist. I wanted to tell a story about knights in power armor, right? Magical power armor, and how that would change a battlefield. So I justify it backwards, as opposed to justify it forward, uh, at, like a science fiction writer might. Um, but tips and tricks: reading, um, non-fiction, particularly, you know, um, science articles, uh, science books, good survey books. Um, Guns, Germs, and Steel is kind of one of the go-to for this. Where you just kind of, you want the, honestly, for this, you want the kind of pop culture ones, right? Uh, because what you're looking for is not the deep science. You should eventually, if you're interested, dig into deep science. But the Malcolm Gladwell and things are fine for this, because they're, you're looking for things that are going to spark you into an inspiration for what's a visual I haven't seen before? What's a story I haven't, uh, seen before?

Shattered Plains came because my friend Micah, who's a photography major at BYU, uh, needed a lovely assistant for helping him do photography trips, what he called them, "lovely assistant." Um, what he meant was, "pack mule," right? But he would talk about how beautiful these things are. So I was a lovely assistant for him a lot, uh, where we would go down to Southern Utah, and then I carried all his camera equipment while he took cool pictures of things. Um, but, you know, he took me to the slot canyons. And, um, I'm in the slot canyons, I'm like, "This is like, there could be an alien ecology living just in these canyons." And that's where Roshar came from. Um, right? Uh, Mistborn came because I, I think I told you guys, I was driving on the freeway and hit a fog bank, and it went boom, boom, and I was getting the fog like there were patches in between it, and it moved in such an interesting way that I'm like, "This is a visual I want to use." And I built, uh, a world around it. I am looking for those. I'm looking for the sense of awe, uh, because often I use in my magic systems, my magic systems are often very structured, so there's a sense of engagement and interest in those. But the sense of awe, I try to get from the vistas and the being in an alien world that just feels different. Uh, that's how I do it. Uh, I'm sure there are lots of different ways to do it, and a lot of it I get from visiting places or from reading non-fiction articles. Yeah.

Okay, back here. Oh, yeah. Uh, do you have any, like, books you recommend to help us become better writers? Yeah, do I have books that you can read to become better writers? I mean, there are a lot of good writing books out there. Um, and, uh, I do think *On Writing* by Stephen King is a, is a, is a great book. It approaches writing very differently. For me, I often recommend it because it offers some contrast to some of the things I teach, in a good way. Um, Scott Meredith's *Writing to Sell* is my agent's favorite. It's a little agenty, meaning it's a little, uh, it, it misses a bit of the heart of writing. Like, it's kind of hard to teach in this class because there is so much wonder and, um, and art to telling a story. Um, and breaking it down into its structures, like nothing is less funny than a joke that you break down and explain why it's funny. You know, nothing is less wondrous than, "Here's how you make a wonderful fantasy." So *Writing to Sell* does tend to be a little too, you know, brick by brick, uh, for me. Um, people swear by *Save the Cat*. I like *Save the Cat*. Uh, that's a screenwriting one. But, um, you know, all of Scott Card's books are really good on writing. Um, the thing about it is, it's way too easy to read too many books on how to write. Um, and, uh, it's way too easy to take too many classes and workshops on how to write. This is the great conundrum of my life. What I can teach you here in the class is the bare fraction of what you will learn by teaching yourself by writing. And indeed, a lot of what they're talking about in those, those books won't be relevant to you until you have the basis of practice of having finished a significant amount of work on your own, so you can see how someone else did it and try it out and know if it has a better effect on your writing, right? And so, just like it's like playing the piano, how good can you get at playing the piano by reading books on piano playing? Um, you can do a little bit better with writing because there's strategies to try, but 95%, 90% of what you learn, maybe more, uh, in writing is all based on you building good habits and writing regularly. And so, only read the books on writing if you're already doing that. Um, otherwise, like, you shouldn't even be in this class if you haven't been doing the writing. It's okay if you're here and you're not, but that's what I mean, right? I can't teach you basically anything until you're trying out the things that I do to find out the ones that are totally broken for you and were terrible, and you need to throw out and iterate on and find something different. Yeah.

Uh, we'll go here and then here, and then we'll work our way back that way. So, what you just said, you're probably hate me, but, um, the, so, like, we're talking a lot about like, kind of, um, not over-describing things and like moving things forward. Yeah, but, but also like, padding is important for like pacing, right? Like, to not just have one, uh-huh. What's, what's like your kind of preferred, preferred method for both getting, keeping things moving and having time to breathe with those scenes? Um, so, um, one of the things that helped me understand this, uh, is when, um, Mary Robinette, uh, started talking about what she calls, what she learned from other people: scene, sequel. Meaning, uh, to every scene, there is a sequel, a next scene that is in some way giving us a chance to respond to the new status quo, whatever it may be, large or small. And books tend to be a back and forth between scene, sequel. Not necessarily so rigidly. Sometimes within a given chapter, you'll have scene, sequel. Um, part of it depends on how big your book is. So, one thing that I found is, do I intend them to read the whole book in one sitting or not? Uh, I don't intend people to read a Stormlight book in one sitting, right? Takes, depends on how fast you are, but the audiobook, 60 hours. Um, right? Um, a lot of thrillers, audiobooks are 9 hours. People tend to read it about double speed, depending. So you can finish one of those in four or five hours. A lot of people, that's, you sit down and you read that book. Um, it's one to two reading sessions in the short ones. Then you can keep the pace high the whole time, and you can have very short sequel with that that ends with an explosion and keeps you going. If you want to have that type of book, that's what, uh, generally "page-turner" refers to. Um, they're kind of minimizing the response and kind of keeping the characters hopping. Even in those, I do recommend the moments, um, where the characters have a little bit of time to, to just catch up. Um, you know, they, um, I did this in *Wax and Wayne*, uh, the last book, um, on the billboard, if you've read that. Um, they do it in the middle of *Avengers 2* where they go to a farm. Um, if your story is high octane, meaning you're giving less chance for sequel in the middle, having some big sort of midpoint or near the end chance to just slow down before you can ramp it up, uh, is a good idea. Understand that ramp-up of tension, um, in a book like, gets diminishing returns the longer you stay at that, that tension level. Um, and so when I'm writing a Stormlight book, what I look for is rising action through a scene or sequence that then comes to a conclusion, and then has a solid sequel, meaning, lot of times, time to respond to that as we spin something up, uh, up new. I, in a book like, uh, like *Skyward*, I give much, you know, I, I section off these sequels after I have boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Okay, relax a little bit. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Relax a little bit. Um, so, uh, it depends on this. This is how one of the way main ways you control pacing, um, is by how much time the characters have to respond to what's going on around them. Yeah.

You were next. Okay, so my question is on world-building and battles. Okay? Um, what are some guidelines or principles you could give that, um, for world-building to create, um, riveting, great battles? Great battles when you're going world-building wise, uh, that's an excellent question. Um, so my theory for myself is, generally, I'm a pretty good strategist. Uh, one of the areas is where you will look at that I've spent the time to learn, uh, to get myself beyond that 50% up until, you know, like I would put myself in the 80% there, maybe a little bit more, is understanding how historical battlefields worked, how different parts of an army work. And even I am afraid to be too real-world in my battles because I don't want the small details of how that plays out wrong to get the people who are even better than me kicked out of the story. And so, one, what I generally try to do, if there's going to be a lot of battles in a book, I try to create a fantastical battlefield of some sort, either with technology or setting, or the way the magic or the ecology interferes. And you see me doing this so that I control what does a fight between two Mistborn look like? It does not look like X, Y, or Z real-world fights. I control the rules. What is a battle on the Shattered Plains look like? Well, I control the rules. Um, and even if I'm not going on the Shattered Plains, there's a reason why I built into the magic system the ability to resupply with food, um, via Soulcasters, so that I could move large armies on the scale that people expect them to move on, not on the way that logistics actually move them, in the real world. Um, and this is just a cheat. Um, that knowing enough about real-world logistics and the actual numbers of, uh, troops you could field, and reading, knowing what people expect, and the pace, the speed I want to move the pacing at, meant that they had to have more mobile forms. They had, they have MREs, right? Scar smiling at that. Yeah. Uh, those, those were our food storage on my mission. MREs. Yeah. Uh-huh. Um, and so I'm like, "Okay, they need to be able to carry all their food with them and create it magically." Um, this allows me to have certain things. But then I took away horses. Um, so that we're, uh, we're going back to like more late modern tactics and technology, minus cavalry, which propels you back into antiquity. And this allows me to play with these rules in such a way that I can leverage my knowledge so that people can't come to me and say, "You got this wrong." I can be like, "Well, you didn't consider this factor." Plus, if I got it wrong, like, these are legit pro mistakes that historical people have made in things. So that helps me. Um, that is a lot of work. It's one of the places I put a lot of, um, of effort into understanding. If you, that's not a place where you're going to focus, but you know you're going to have to have some large-scale battles. Go ahead and pick a real-world battle. Is this on the same thing? Okay. Pick a real-world battle. Turn the map, uh, 90 degrees or upside down, and the beats by beat, have it be Agincourt. Have it be Waterloo. Have it be, depending on what your tech level is, right? Um, and kind of figure out why those beats were there and use those as kind of your broad story strokes that you're setting your character in. They're not making the big decisions. They're, you know, or they are, but those aren't the relevant part. People aren't reading your book to see the brilliant tactics. They're reading your book for your character who happens to be on a battlefield where the tactics need to be realistic. Yeah. Go read about Hannibal's invasion and be like, "All right, what tricky, tricky things did he do? Let's do something like that." So that I can indicate this is a character that's leading them that is Hannibal-esque. And then let's focus on the drama of the character that I've created. That's a really easy, short, well, it's not that easy, but it is an easier shortcut to having your, uh, your battles work, uh, realistically. Um, and I know a lot of authors who do this. Um, and so, yeah. Uh, does that answer your question? Question gives you the two ends of the spectrum at least. And I'm sure you can find things in between that will, uh, yeah.

All right. I promise someone, I'll come back over here. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about what you do in your 15-person class? What I do in my 15-person class. So, in my 15-person class, um, we split everyone up into writing groups. So we've got four writing groups this year. Yeah, four writing groups. Um, no, five. Four. Four. Four. Four writing groups. Um, and in the past, what I did for, for a number of years, is I sat with one group a week and gave feedback as if I was part of the writing group to model it. Uh, what I found was that I was not able to dig in as deeply. I ended up playing, um, uh, like school teacher more than professor, meaning I had to model how to writing group rather than dig into the person's writing. So a couple of years ago, we changed it so I have TAs run the writing groups, and then I do a 20 to 30-minute Q&A with that group, like I do in here, but kind of a little more in-depth. And then they, they break into the writing groups. My TAs, um, uh, you've got a group, Scar's got one, uh, this, this year we roped him in, uh, and they, because we had three last year and we have four this year, um, we have them kind of model how to writing group and teach good writing group, and also give good feedback. Scar's, you know, been in my writing group for 20 plus years. 20 plus years and has finished how many novels? Three novels. Um, Scar's got good advice. Then during that time, I do a one-on-one with two, with two different people for like 30 to 40 minutes each week, where I've read a larger chunk of their writing, and I read their writing, I give them back, um, that writing with all my notes on it, and we talk about it. And then we talk about their writing goals. So that's what my, my class is. Um, the 15-person, it works a lot better. I think people get a better experience out of it. And then I read a final from that person, which is either the same chunk of writing revised to my notes, or something new they want me to look at. And that usually takes me the rest of the year. Once I'm done with the class, I've read so many student works, and I've, the, like the class is kind of exhausting. Um, and so it's like, I used to try to do all the finals before I had to turn in the, the grades, and I'm like, "I'm not giving them good feedback." Um, so we changed it so that the grade in the 15-person class is just based on, "Did you get the work done?" And then over the course of the next year, I go through the 15 or 16, uh, submissions, and I read one every couple of weeks, and I dig into it deeply, and I give it about an hour of, of working on it, and then send them kind of that same sheet, but with more explanation at the end, um, of what I thought of that piece. So this is, this is the thing I can do. Uh, I can't, I get invited to read other people's work all the time and things, and I just can't do it, right? I can't. Um, and so it's the starfish metaphor. I can help 15 to 16 students a year. That's, that's the max I can really do. Um, and so that's what we do. Yeah.

Are there any tips that you can give us that can help us helping you get into the 15 so that you actually look at our work? Yeah, so getting into the 15, but they actually work. So, um, oh, the, like, final elimination pass, the lottery pass, the, the lottery. Yeah. Um, so Karen is in charge of this. She uses multiple assistants. Karen is an excellent editor. Um, and the, the real secret is the one you don't want to hear. It's the same thing I say all the time, and I'll get you next, okay? Um, is that if we brought two pianos in here and we had someone who'd been playing for a couple of months, maybe even a year or two, and someone who had been practicing for 20 years, start playing, it would take you that long to know which was which. Karen can tell which is which like that. Right. Now, we generally get more that are, like, we want in the 15-person class, people who are ready to get the high-level advice. So we can usually tell. Um, so we generally sort them. We did this this year by number of books finished, right? And start, she starts reading at those who have, who have done the most work. Um, we give preferential treatment to people who are in the major at BYU. The department is asked, they make sure that there's slots for actual students of BYU because the 15-person class can occasionally be no BYU students. Uh, they have to, you know, come and take an evening class to do it, but they want this to be available for their majors as well. So we do give some preferential treatment there. Um, and we, um, tend to just read the writing sample she does, uh, and judge it based on how close is this to, to professional quality work. All the writing submitted. Uh, so she starts, and what you do is, you go until you hit, uh, no, you cut it down for her. So Karen reads half, and then I read whatever's left. Okay. Karen reads half, you read what's left. You recommend the other half, yeah, of the ones. And then she takes whatever's left, and she does final cuts to get to the 15. Um, so, uh, I will, here's, here's a little tip. Karen doesn't like vampires. She will pass on a vampire book if it's good, but she doesn't like them. So don't submit your vampire book. Um, you know. Um, she does like, you know, like the things I've talked about: strong character who wants something. It can be dark, it can be light. Uh, she doesn't mind. But, for some reason, has a thing about vampires. We all have our things, right? Yeah. Do you want to hear my pet peeve? Let me talk about my pet peeve. This has nothing to do with anything, but I will get to you. The person I pointed at. Um, all right, here's my pet peeve. My pet peeve is that, um, I like when authors control their dialogue and paragraphing fluency. Meaning, I like when, um, we have a paragraph of dialogue, and then, um, if we start a new paragraph, it's a new person. And then if there's a new, um, thing, if this person's talking, I like to put the dialogue on that, not here, because new paragraph means new person. A lot of writers, and this is, this is probably still correct enough because it gets published, okay? But a lot of them will do, they'll be like, talk, then this person who did something has a beat, then another person talks, then they have a beat, beat, meaning they move. Um, and then it's all muddled, like, who is talking? You know, if you change paragraphs. So, uh, it gets complicated when you've got a big long description paragraph, and then you have that same person talking. And I will cut there, but I'll always put the attribution as close to the beginning as I can to control, so you know who's talking, so you don't have to read to the end and find out, "he said," and be like, "Oh, I've been in the wrong head all the time." So I shut, um, change paragraphs. Um, I love the past perfect. Drives me up the wall when people don't use the past perfect. But enough publishing doesn't use it that I can't strictly tell my students, "You have to use the past perfect." You write in past tense, but it's so much better, guys. Even if you have to deal with "had had," you can write around that, right? You don't have, you can, you can write around, uh, he'd had. You can write that it's okay. Um, or you can just write so it doesn't. Past perfect is, is so handy. Um, and paragraph fluency with dialogue just keeps things so much clearer and straighter, even if it's the wild west these days, no one follows manuscript format, and they, you know, they ignore all this stuff. So there you go. That was, that was extra nerdy. Half of you in this room have been writing for years and you have no idea what the past perfect means, and I only know it because I took French and I had to learn what the parts of speech were so I could name, and I named them in English, not the parts of speech, but the types of tenses. Um, so anyway, there you are. You're next. We got, uh, we got 7 minutes left, and we'll come down to you.

Okay. How much do you have to get astronomy right, and how much can you count with weirdness? Uh, it's something to do with the magic. You can get away with anything with the, it has something to do with the magic. The, it depends on what your goal is, right? Like, if you, you can, I won't even say you can get away with it. If you want, part of the reason to create fantasy, to write fantasy, is to create worlds that cannot exist by our laws of physics. Ergo, magic. Did it? Is not just, "and get away with it," is a perfectly viable answer, so long as your internal logic is solid, right? The moons of Roshar could not exist on a geologic scale around Roshar. Why are they there? A god did it. Like, literally, they built it and stuck it there. They'll degrade in 10,000 years. He planned to be there, um, to make sure it didn't happen, right? Like, um, you can do things like that. Um, and in fact, it's one of the advantages to fantasy. Um, now, if the, "why did it work like this?" is supposed to lead to a satisfying climax, and the answer is just, "Oh, it happened because, uh, uh, the magic decided," and then the reader's like, "I would have liked to see why," then you've done something wrong, right? So, yes, get away with anything. How, how accurate do you have to be? If I'm an example, astrophysics, how should I say this? Got, uh, two physicists in my writing group and a whole team of arcanists, one of whom is a physics professor. I make them really frustrated. Like, when, um, so, like, when you do, uh, speed bubbles in, uh, *Wax and Wayne* books, you should be red-shifting that light and IR radiating people. They said, "Why not?" And I said, "It just doesn't, right? At some point, you're creating, you're breaking the laws of physics. At some points, the laws of thermodynamics and things break down. I'm writing fantasy. We're not going to have the magic system radiate people. I want to have the magic system, it's part of the rules of the magic system that it doesn't red-shift the light." Um, right? Um, if you're really good at this, though, if you know your astronomy and stuff, it can be the external logic of that can be a source of offensivity and authority to you. I think *The Expanse* just gets enormous points, uh, for the amount of work that, uh, that Ty and Dan did, uh, who are the two authors that are the pen name there, in writing *The Expanse*. They just really, I like, I feel like if I had any physics questions, I could go to them and they would just know it. You know, you call them, or you call Andy Weir. But I don't know if that's because they're just good at explaining it, or it's real, or it's the verisimilitude. But there you are.

All right, the last question here. Um, so how should you handle it if the power source, your magic system, has a similar or identical name to another power source in another novel? How, what do you do if you have a power source that, some, some term, this just bring it broader. What do you do if you learn that a term that you have built your entire story around and the identity of your story is used in something else? Uh, the answer is, how big is the something else, and how generic is the term? Right? I don't think you can get away with calling something "The Force," right? Because Star Wars is so enormous. Um, but like after I wrote, uh, Mistborn, like, you know, I found out Janny Wurts had written a book called, some, *The Curse of the Mistwraith*. You don't worry about those things. They will happen. Um, and things like that. So, uh, basically, do your readers read it and get kicked out because the other term is so cemented in pop culture? And you have to be careful with your writing group because often times you'll submit a book, you'll be workshopping it, and one person has a bad reaction to a name because of something else. Half my writing group are teachers. So it's a student that they had a bad time with. Teachers know it's like, "You cannot name our child X, Y, or Z. Don't ask." Um, right? Um, and so in those cases, I'm like, "Sorry, you're just going to have to deal with this." But if, when, when I accidentally named a goddess, I was building the Aeons, and I had this really cool one called Ado, and I called the book *Adoness*, which reads Adonis. That was a big problem for the first people I gave the book to, and I had never seen it. And I'm like, "I have to change the name of this book because everyone's like, 'What does it have to do with grief mythology?'" Right? So, you know, there is the, the rules of thumb, vibes, things like that. All right, guys, if you did, I didn't get your question. Remember, we have another Q&A in three times next week. Business of writing. Thank you for coming. [Applause]