Sanderson's Laws of Magic - Brandon Sanderson's Writing Lecture #7 (2025)

Hey everyone, Brandon here. Somewhat sick, uh, to present to you my writing lecture. My first one on world-building. This is Sanderson's Laws. It's one of my favorite lectures. I hope that you enjoy it. Welcome to Science Fiction Fantasy Class! Yay!

I'm back. So, you may notice a certain ruggedness to my voice. Um, I, during my trip to Hawaii, managed to get sick. Um, yay. Yeah. Um, and then that sickness managed to, um, give me an infection in my sinuses that burst my eardrum. Yeah. Uh, never had that happen before. Unique experience. Um, I have been on antibiotics now, uh, long enough for that to no longer be an issue, but I'm going to keep my distance back here, just in case. Um, so if I look a little red-eyed and sound a little rugged, uh, that is why. So today, oh, also, that ear doesn't hear so well, so I may have to ask you to repeat questions. We'll see. This year, here's, uh, still here. Is, uh, just fine. Um, so, uh, today we're doing Sanderson's Laws.

Um, so this is a fun lecture. I always enjoy giving this one. Uh, not just because I named these things after myself, um, but, uh, I do think magic systems have become one of my things, as I may have told you before. Um, I did this somewhat deliberately when I was breaking in, um, to the business. One of the things I'd noticed in the books that I really liked to read was when they had a pretty well-defined, what we would call, hard magic system. Um, I didn't coin that phrase, um, but it definitely is something that I've helped popularize the idea of a hard magic. Um, and I think both hard and soft magic are perfectly viable methods of storytelling. Um, they do different things. They're both tools in your toolbox. Uh, but I noticed I was, I really enjoyed them, and, uh, I liked, uh, reading them, and I liked writing them. So I started talking about magic systems and kind of really digging into what a lot of different authors had done and experimenting during those early days, particularly before I got published, with different types of magic systems and really trying to zero in on what I love in a magic system. And, um, over time, I developed these laws.

Now, these are not laws that everyone needs to follow. They're not that kind of law. Uh, these are rules I made for myself, usually when I did something wrong in a book. And I'll share some of those things I did wrong, and I came up with a rule of thumb to help myself to avoid doing that. Uh, that said, I do think these are three very important principles, not just for world-building, but for storytelling in general. Um, for you to kind of focus on and just to use in helping you learn how to not just create magic systems, but in how to plot, and how to world-build, and how to do characters. This one is mostly a plotting one. This one is mostly a character one. This one is mostly a world-building one. And as I've said, I feel like stories are plot, setting, character, glued together with conflict.

Now, let's go ahead and make the, um, the point that in a story, world-building is usually the least important of those three, which is odd to say when you're here to hear me talk about science fiction fantasy, specifically, right? Uh, in fact, I am the magic system guy, and here I'm telling you magic systems are the least important of the three. Now, ideally, you'll do all three really well. You want to have really strong characters. You want to have really strong plots. You want to have excellent world-building. But it behooves you to recognize that a story with a strong plot and strong characters, but weak world-building, is still usually a strong story. But a story that has really great world-building and even good of one or the other, but really weak in one of the other, tends to be a weak story. And one that has great world-building and is weak in the other two tends to just be an encyclopedia entry. You might as well be writing an RPG guide at that point. And so we want to make sure that our world-building is done in service to story.

The, uh, the, there is a, you know, a rule above this, which is whatever you enjoy, whatever makes you write, whatever reason you're here, um, that's totally valid. Uh, but if you want to treat writing as a career, like we pretend everyone in the room wants to do, if you want to be selling books, then your world-building should be in service of the other two, rather than necessarily a good unto itself. This is in maybe direct contrast to Grandpa Tolkien, which is why there has to be kind of a rule above this. He kind of wrote his books to show off the cool philology, um, the cool, uh, what, yeah, cool philology, cool poems, cool mythology that he came up with. Um, and that's okay, right? Then again, uh, Grandpa Tolkien didn't have to try to sell books in today's environment. And indeed, he worked as a professor the whole time. Uh, because, you know, books as a career, particularly fantasy books, well, writing epic fantasy for a career, career didn't exist when Grandpa Tolkien, uh, invented the job. So, um, so just keep in mind, you can do it for whatever reason you want, but these days, I strongly recommend world-building in service of narrative. And hopefully, this will help you. Um, and I'm going to go through the laws, and we'll do a, a Q&A, uh, on each one after each one. And I'll also talk, hopefully, about some of my other kind of philosophies on world-building as we go through this.

So let's talk about rule number one, uh, Sanderson's First Law. Um, so Sanderson's First Law arose because I was sitting on a panel at WorldCon. WorldCon is one of the major science fiction fantasy conventions out there. Um, I had been attending a number of years as just a fan before I sold something. I finally did, and I, they, um, so I am, I went in and typed in, you, they have this form you could fill in saying, "Hey, do you want to be on paneling?" And I said, "I just sold my first book to Tor. Um, I'd love to be on paneling." And they, you know, in the, uh, the form said, "What are you good at talking about? What will you be interested in?" And I wrote, "Magic systems." I'd already started thinking, "This is my thing." And lo and behold, they made the, um, they put the paneling together, and they put me on, "How Do You Write Magic Systems?" the panel, which I thought was really excellent. I'm to this day grateful that they, they did that. I think this was, was Boston, um, WorldCon in Boston, early 2000s. Um, and so I got to this panel all prepared, ready to talk about magic systems, and they sat us all in a row, as happens. And the person running the panel, they asked the question, like, "Let's just start with your basics. What, what are the basics of designing a, uh, a magic system?" And we'll just go down and have every person on the panel, uh, talk about their philosophy on this, and just start with the basics. And they went to me first. And I thought, "Okay, I got a home run here. It's my first panel, the first question I've ever been asked as a pro. I'm going to just, you know, I'm going to be really do something that I'm sure everyone's going to agree with and is not going to be, um, controversial at all." And I said, "Well, um, obviously, to have a good magic system, you need to have rules." I thought, "Non-controversial, right?" Um, this is like basic stuff. Everyone else on the panel looked to me and said, "No, if you have rules for your magic, you ruin it. You ruin the storytelling." And I'm like, suddenly I'm like, "I have no idea what I'm doing." Now, all these other pros, I thought, "Where, what's happening? Um, what's going on?"

Well, uh, we had a really good discussion, and it turns out that I was the only one writing epic fantasy on that panel. And the others were writing urban fantasy. Urban fantasy being a genre that is more focused, has one foot in horror. A lot of the urban fantasy does. Um, and a lot of horror, you don't want to show necessarily what the monster is capable of doing. You don't want to give all the rules, because if you give all the rules, you put the power in the hands of the protagonists. And in a lot of horror stories, the horror is about lacking control. The horror is, "I can't do anything about this. The rules of society can't do anything about this." Um, and indeed, the types of stories they were telling didn't need to rely on the rules of the magic. They were writing soft magic systems with good reason.

So, what is a hard magic system? What is a soft magic system? Let's talk about this for a minute, because it's easy to mistake external logic for internal logic when it comes to magic systems. When I say a hard magic system, this is a magic system where the reader understands the rules, maybe not at the beginning, but can learn the rules of the magic, and they are internally consistent, and the story revolves in some way around the characters mastering those rules, using those rules to their advantage. Um, and, um, you know, turning magic, magic into kind of another branch of science. A soft magic system was a magic system where the reader does not know all the rules, and they can't know all the rules. It is a magic system where, um, a sense of wonder or horror accompanies the, the use of something magical. It's a magic system where, um, it seems to have no internal logic, and you can't necessarily anticipate what is going to happen, um, with the magic.

Now, a lot fall in between, right? Uh, this is a spectrum. You can have something in between. Indeed, some of the ways you can have something in between is, I would say, as an example, Harry Potter is a hard magic system for a given book, in general, but soft for the whole series. You never knew what the series can do, and indeed, J.K. Rowling was pretty bad at, at, um, at taking the consequences of something she invented for one book and applying it to another book. Um, this does create problems where she has to like destroy all the time-turners, um, to get people to stop complaining about them. But it also has the advantage of adding a sense of whimsy and wonder to the Harry Potter universe. You never know what crazy thing is going to happen, and that can be an advantage to a story.

Let's make sure that you understand that internal logic is different from external logic. Let me explain. External logic is often accompanying, often accompanies a hard magic system. I do this a lot where you use our real-world understanding of science to try to lend credibility to a magic system and or to give it some sense of, uh, immediate, what we say in the business, grokkability. You can understand it a little bit better because, um, that's an old term from Heinlein. Yeah, an old Heinlein term for being able to understand something. Um, its grokkability goes up if you can anticipate a little bit of it acting like you would expect it to in our real world. This is, for instance, um, when X-Men says, "Oh, there's a gene that causes the mutation which gives people powers." That is an attempt to apply some external logic to a magic system. Okay? That doesn't mean that it is a harder magic system than, for instance, Superman, who gets his powers from the sun. Why? Who cares? As long as they're consistent, that's a hard magic system. So don't, don't make this mistake. Don't look at something and say, "Oh, because it's completely whimsical in what happens, it's a soft magic system." No, as long as, as you, the reader, can anticipate it, if the rules are set out for you and you can anticipate what's happening, it's a hard magic system.

External logic can be fun. I use a lot of quantum physics. I use a lot of things like fundamental forces. I play with a whole bunch of these things in my books. But I would recommend you separate that. One is there to just kind of help lend a veneer of respectability, so to speak, and to have some fun with the way that physics works. The other is there as a narrative tool, meaning the internal logic is a narrative tool. All right.

So, as I started to think about this and started to focus on different magic systems, um, I, I realized that there are great examples of soft magic, and they're usually trying to do something different. Um, one of the quintessential examples of the difference between these two is in Lord of the Rings. The One Ring is a generally hard magic system. We can list the rules right here, right? What are the rules of the One Ring? You put it on, you turn invisible, but it corrupts you. And when you're wearing the ring, Sauron and his minions can see you. It'll betray you too. It doesn't make you invisible, it accentuates your powers that you already have. Okay, there you are. That is true. But as presented to the reader, see, you're using, you're using appendix information, which is not in the, the, the, uh, the stories, and we usually throw that out for narrative terms. But it is true. For instance, I'll get like, "Yeah, but good job. We know the actual Tolkien scholar." It accentuates your, your, the, the attributes you have. So Hobbits turn invisible because they are small, easy to look over. But in narrative terms for the story, turns you invisible, but Sauron can see you. And if it gets to Sauron, the world basically ends, right? We have our narrative rules for the, uh, for the One Ring.

What can Gandalf do? No, speaking Tolkien nerd, whatever he wants for the plot, whatever the plot needs Gandalf to do, Gandalf can do. Lots of sparkles. Yes, lots of sparkles. In, in the movies, it has always to do with like light in some way. Oh, the Tolkien nerd is just shaking her head. Oh, no. If you read all the supplemental material, you'll start to get some of this. But for narrative turns in the book, Gandalf is a soft magic system. We, and indeed the Hobbits, who are generally the lens through which we see the story, don't know what Gandalf can do. It's kind of mystical. He's very powerful. He might be some, like, he's really old. Is he a god? What is he? Is he an angel? Like, if, in the story, like, if you read the supplemental material, you know. But if you read the story, what is Gandalf? He's a friend, and he can do stuff. Um, and these two magic systems work very well to show the advantages and disadvantages of both hard and soft magic. With the One Ring, Frodo can use it to escape problems and to solve problems if he's willing to pay the cost. With Gandalf, he exists to indicate that the Hobbits are very small people, literally and metaphorically, in a very large world that they don't understand, and there are forces moving that are completely beyond them and their current ability to understand. Gandalf adds a sense of wonder and magic and mythology to the world. When he uses his powers, it is generally, you can't understand the ramifications or what he's doing, and the narrative purpose that him using his powers, um, does is usually to either complicate issues in some way. For instance, he saves them from the bog, but then he's no longer there to keep the fellowship together, so the fellowship shatters. Gandalf saving them from the Balrog is a bigger complication, um, than it is a salvation. Um, this is the real power of a soft magic system, particularly one that's like, has you understand a little bit about it, but you don't understand the full ramifications. For instance, the famous story of The Monkey's Paw. This is a kind of hybrid magic system that's really leaning into the soft side. Like, you know, you can make a wish, but you don't know the consequences. That gives you one foot in hard magic, but mostly in soft magic. And that not knowing the consequences, that soft side of the magic, lends a great deal of horror and mystery and even wonder to the use of the Monkey's Paw, to the point that you are horrified as the hard side happens, which is, you know, you get three, uh, three wishes, and you see the escalating danger.

So, Sanderson's First Law. Sanderson's First Law is a plotting law. The idea is that your ability to solve problems in a satisfying way with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic. One of the biggest complaints that people make about fantasy from the outside, not, uh, being part of our world, not enjoying, is they're like, "I don't like fantasy because anything can happen." That removes the stakes and the tension, um, in their opinion. Well, you've been in this class. We've already talked about this. Stakes and tension are something any story can fix with the snap of a finger if they want to. Doesn't matter what kind of story it is. It doesn't even matter if it's historical fiction. Uh, you can probably name, um, some Tarantino-esque stories that they just break, break what happened in the, uh, in history, and say, either, "Oh, it was recorded wrong," or, you know, like, you don't have to follow history. Uh, you, as the author, can do whatever you want. You have that power. Your job is generally to solve problems in a satisfying way, but not always. Sometimes you solve problems in a way that leaves a lingering hint of discomfort or dissatisfaction. I would say Gandalf saving them from the bog and dying is an excellent example of the cure being worse than the disease, narratively. I mean, not actually, because if they've all died to the Balrog, Sauron wins, but you know what I'm saying. Um, and so the idea is, you want to control, with proper foreshadowing, how you are solving problems in your story. This is why it's larger than just magic systems, though magic systems offer a great example because people point at us and say, "Oh, you can just, you know, wave a wand and solve the problems." Well, no, not if we want the story to be satisfying. And the art of a writer is to make it satisfying.

Uh, another example, though, of why you might not want to make it satisfying, um, just so you understand, uh, there, I don't believe I've talked about this yet in this class. If I have, you know, throw something at me. Something soft. Um, so you will often see, oh, Scar's like, "Don't throw anything at him. I'll tackle you." Um, you've often seen in stories the sequence where a character shows up out of nowhere to save the protagonists from a big problem that they're having, right? Um, this happens all the time in stories. This sort of story, this sort of sequence is very different when it happens in the first third of a story than in the last third. In the first third, you may want the characters to be like, "Oh yeah, my friend, you know, George, he's just amazing with a bow. If only we had George to help us." And then, lo and behold, they get trapped by thieves, and then a bunch of arrows come out of nowhere, and George saves them. Is that a satisfying resolution? No. But the purpose of that scene is to let us see firsthand how great George is, so that George can join the crew and then be later used in a more interesting way. The purpose of that scene is not to have a satisfying resolution, it's to introduce a character. If you do this at the end of a story, you have a very different reaction. And in fact, I'm going to use the Lord of the Rings films as my example of this going well, and this going poorly.

Um, my favorite of The Lord of the Rings films is the second, right? I absolutely love the second film. I love Helm's Deep, and Helm's Deep is a wonderful example of how to use something like Sanderson's, uh, First Law. We don't know what Gandalf can do. He is a soft magic, but you can set up a hard magic structure for using Gandalf, and Peter Jackson does that. What does he do in the films? "Daybreak, look for me on the morning of the fifth day." Right? They're going to this terrible fight that they can't possibly win. Gandalf says, "Look to me on the morning of the fifth day, um, and survive that long." It's the plot setup. If you can last five days, therefore, I will save you. And we trust that Gandalf can save him, right? Like, save them. Um, you know, he's going to go find Rohan, he's going to bring them back. And, you know, it's not in the books, but it works really, really, really well as a plot structure. And that whole sequence where Peter Jackson makes you forget the gals had said that, makes you forget that, makes the characters feel like there's no hope. They've forgotten. When the morning of the fifth day comes, and Gandalf crests the rise, and, and, and there's Rohan with, uh, with his whole team, then you're like, "Oh yeah." And then, you know, you'll have the little voiceover, "Look for me on the morning of the fifth day." Boom. Wonderful plot cycle, right? It, it's a setup and payoff. The setup is, "Last five days, you win." They last five days, and Gandalf comes and saves them, and it's beautiful. It's my favorite moment in all three films.

Um, they then don't manage to do the same setup with the ghosts and Aragorn. And again, this is some deviations from the source material. In large part, I agree with Peter Jackson's decisions. This one just doesn't quite land right. We are not set up as an audience or as characters to be like, "We need to last until, uh, until the ghosts arrive, uh, to save us." Instead, setup: "This is our last stand. We must defeat and conquer, otherwise, you know, Gondor will fall." They fight, they fight, they fight, they lose. Aragorn shows up with ghosts and saves them. And you're left as a reader or as a viewer just being like, "Why did we fight? Shouldn't we have just run and let Aragorn show up with the ghosts?" Right? Like, "Can we send those ghosts to Mordor?" Yeah, they say they have to be let go, but come on, just one more ride, guys. Um, and it ends up being kind of a weaker plot cycle. Very, you know, uh, it's still there. There, it's, it's a great film trilogy, probably the best. But that is one flaw. And you can kind of see why we are wanting the problems to be solved in the way promised to us. We don't want a deus ex machina. We kind of get one.

All right. So, Sanderson's First Law is to encourage you when you're building a magic system to think about these things. If you're doing a soft magic, don't have the magic save the day in the end. Instead, you need to focus on characters and what they can do and what they, they want to solve, unless you want a different kind of resolution. You can tell a different type of story. War of the Worlds ends with simply the humankind has been destroyed and would have lost except the common cold, uh, coincidentally, saves them by killing all the, all the Martians. Um, this is in many ways an unsettling, unsatisfying ending. That's the point. We are not the apex predator. We are not as powerful as we thought. Um, it's a warning that, you know, um, we could be destroyed and wiped out. Um, if you want to have a Sanderson-esque ending, generally what I'm trying to do is to seed pieces of the magic system that the characters can use as tools. And usually, I'll put one step into soft and be like, "There's things we don't understand yet," which allow me then to explore new parts of the magic in later stories. Um, and then characters will put together the pieces, figure out how to manipulate these things. Um, and you end up with stories that lean into science fiction sort of plotting, um, using the magic as a new brand of science. And Sanderson's First Law is kind of the way to do that.

Questions? Yeah. Um, kind of already touching on it, but is, can you have like a hard magic system that can swing all the way back to soft, or soft goes to? Oh, yeah. Yeah. You, like, you can start completely soft, and then as people find the rules, they end up, it becomes a hard magic system. And you can go the other way. We thought we had the rules. We don't have the rules. Everything we thought is a lie. Those are harder to do, but if you build your story around it, uh, you absolutely can. The key to keep in mind is, what's the emotion that you want to have specifically at the ending or in the conflict resolutions of your stories? And how are you shooting for that emotion? And how is the magic enhancing that emotion rather than kind of getting in your way? Here and then back there, how can you seed enough details about your magic system that they understand it, but it doesn't completely give away what they're going to do with it in the end? How can you seed it enough that they, the reader, understands it, but doesn't give away what you're doing at the end? Um, couple tips here. Number one, put in more clues than you think you need, and scale back if too many of your beta readers are getting it. My experience is that authors withhold too much and don't seed enough. As a general rule, um, that's obviously not going to apply to every author, um, but keep that in mind. The other thing is, be careful about info dumps. So, um, the grand skill of writing science fiction fantasy, as I've said, I believe before in this class, um, is to convey information to readers in such a way that they don't realize information is being conveyed to them, that they never stop and say, "Oh, this is getting boring." Um, because you're going into details on the magic. There are lots of ways to get these details across in ways that will not be as feel as much like an info dump. One is, uh, to make sure other things are going on in the scene, right? It's not just info dumping, you're getting across character and things like this. Breaking up the lessons, so it's not just like all dumped. You usually do that by inventing early on scenes that show off one little aspect of the magic system, show it off really well, and then you build upon that. Um, in Mistborn, I believe I've mentioned before, I purposefully don't show the magic system early on. I know it's got a lot of rules to it. I want to focus on, uh, the setting and the characters before I get into the magic. And so at the beginning of Mistborn, Kelsier goes and brings down, um, like an entire manor house full of guards. He just goes, you know, John Wick on them all. Right? And I just cut because I'm not going to show all that magic yet. I wait until I've seeded some scenes where we see a little bit of what Vin can do. And then once we get into a training session with Kelsier, which is really very physical, tactile, we're out in the world, it's not an info dump, we're doing things, we're experimenting, where, you know, cause and effect, and building kind of the master and apprentice relationship, all kind of dealing with Vin's issues all at once, and you get the training scene that's on the wall, uh, where she's learning about Newton's Laws, um, and things like this as it applies to, uh, to Allomancy. I put it off to there, and it works. In Stormlight Archive, I just launched you straight into it. Um, and it's a steeper learning curve. I make sure it's an action scene where lots of things are happening, uh, filtered through the lens of hopefully a very interesting character doing something very interesting. And I try to make sure I'm never giving too much at once, but the whole thing is much more, uh, dense in, uh, in rules. And those are just two different ways that I decided to do it.

Back here, um, how do you write a, write a system that you know is a hard magic system that 100% has rules, but the characters never really reach the point where they're hitting those? Character, yeah. Um, excellent. And this, arguably, is what Tolkien actually did, right? Um, that if you sat Tolkien down and said, "What can Gandalf do?" He'd be like, "Oh, this and this and this and this, and it has to do with this and this and this and this." Um, and so what you know is different from how you use it narratively. And narratively, I would recommend that, you know, if you have a soft magic system, knowing all of that is actually still pretty useful to you. You don't have to have it, but knowing it can be very useful. Watch for your conflict resolution. That's the thing. If the characters can't, don't know the rules, ask yourself, what little pieces can they learn and can they make use of them? And if not, then conflict resolve in different ways. Um, and you can set these up, right? You can, you can have, you know, payoffs that don't relate to the reader, the characters manipulating the magic system. Um, it's kind of not completely there, but it's the idea that came to me while I'm saying this. If you think about Wizard of Oz, the movie, at the end, the Cowardly Lion is given a heart, right? Like, it's just a symbol, but it shows, like, and it really doesn't relate to the magic system. They don't know what the Wizard can do. He probably can't do anything, um, right? But you still get a payoff because the Cowardly Lion showed courage, completely unrelated to the magic. He showed courage, and he gets, you know, uh, he gets a medal, right? Isn't that what he gets? He, you know, he, yeah, I guess the Tin Man wants a heart, and the Lion wants courage. So the Tin Man gets like a heart, but anyway, the Lion gets, gets his, his courage reward. Boy, it's been a while. When I was a kid, you watched that show like every couple of weeks because there were three channels, right? And you'd just turn on and you'd be like, "Oh, it's Wizard of Oz again. I guess we'll watch that." Like, you basically, you're basically watching Wizard of Oz or Die Hard because they're on 24 hours a day, uh, on different channels. But now I realize I haven't seen Wizard of Oz in like 30 years. So, um, but you can look, everyone gets their reward at the end, and it doesn't really matter that the ruby slippers can teleport or what the rules of the ruby slippers teleporting are. It's the fact that Dorothy showed the gumption to go do the thing she needed to do, and that's what the plot set up for her to do so she can get a magical reward, with it still being a soft magic system and still be satisfying because she achieved what she needed to achieve as an individual. That's what I mean by making sure that the ending is character-focused rather than magic system resolution-focused.

Um, right over here. Yeah. Um, I'm asked without giving any spoilers for this form. Yes, appreciate that. Yeah. Would you, would you say that ending a story where a character overcomes something using powers they didn't know they had? Oh, yeah. Is that? Oh, I'm glad you brought this up. Yes. So, uh, minor spoilers for Mistborn. One, I said each of these rules came from me learning something by doing it wrong. You're bringing up at the end of Mistborn book one, I violate Sanderson's First Law. A character discovers a power they didn't know they had and they use it to solve problems. How did this happen? Well, number one, I hadn't devised Sanderson's First Law yet. Um, I was just trying to tell a great story, and the ending of Mistborn one lacked impact. My, uh, editor said, "Can you do something to just heighten the power and the impact of the ending?" And I said, "Yeah, I've got this whole thing I'm planning for book two. We'll just start seeding it right now, right?" Um, and you can see how the stuff that happens is very relevant to book two. I pulled it for it. I used it then. The book comes out, and people are like, "Wow, I really like that book. It's a bit of a deus ex machina at the end, isn't there?" And I'm like, "Oh, yeah, there is." Now, because I didn't see or foreshadow that at all. Um, and it becomes really relevant to book two. That's when I started to be like, "I did something wrong there. What did I do? What's the difference? How can I avoid doing that again?" Um, and you will find other places where I do similar things, uh, in books, intentionally, because I want a different emotional reaction than, "Oh, wow, it all came together now. I understand." You want to be doing these things deliberately rather than accidentally. And there, I did it accidentally, and I think it was a mistake. Um, I think it is one of the, one of the weaknesses of Mistborn, the first book, is that, uh, that I relied on that instead of finding a better solution that really more relied on characters and or I should have gone back and seeded this. So, excellent question. You're on the ball. I'm glad you noticed that.

All right, I got to go to the middle here. I'll come back here if we, we've got time. So go ahead, and then we'll come to you. So I was just wondering how feasible is it to be able to have like that sort of ending, like the day, but like not in a way that it's something that nobody knows what just happened, it's like hinted that, like it is written in rules, you just don't know why yet. Is that? Yeah. Can you have an ending where it is written in the rules, you just don't know why yet? Yes. Right. You can do anything. Just make sure your emotional payoffs are something different. For example, ending of the first book, Twilight. What happens in the end? First book of Twilight, Bella gets knocked unconscious, and the main, kind of conflict gets resolved while she's unconscious. People still love this book. Why? Because it doesn't matter if the good vampires can beat the bad, bad vampires. It's not what the book's about. The book's about is, can this romance work? Right? And the romance working still is the main conflict. Um, some people are like, "No." We won't get into, we won't get into that. But as a novel, it's been very successful. And you could argue, "How can you have a successful novel when your main character is unconscious for the main resolution?" Well, that's not the main resolution. That's just the end of the, the quote-unquote, small P plot, or, you know, evil vampires, whatever. Um, and so if your, your resolution is something else, and then you have this big event, you're like, "We don't understand this. Something big just happened." You're satisfied for this reason, but you're disturbed for this other reason. We need to now go and investigate why this thing we anticipated happening didn't happen, or where this thing happened that we didn't anticipate, because it has huge ramifications. You'll see me doing that all the time, uh, in books. Just make sure you have, you know, it's, what is your promises and what are your payoffs? And are you balancing what's unsatisfying and what's satisfying? And you're making sure what's unsatisfying is there for another emotional purpose. Um, especially when part of the plot is about characters learning, uh, new things or like, re-, re-analyzing rules. How do you, you know, lie about rules in a satisfying way without having readers just feel like, not? Yeah. How do you lie about rules in a satisfying way? I recommend very early on indicating, hanging a lantern on it in some way, saying, "Okay, this is how we think it works, but here's three historical examples of something that happened that don't seem to conform to this, and we don't know why." And that does scare us, but we can learn this part and do it. That sort of thing is really handy for you as a writer. Um, and there's lots of different ways to do this. For instance, you can have your character learning, and they're like teaching, you know, blah, blah, blah, and have them say, "Well, what about this?" And the teacher's like, "Uh, don't think about that. We don't know." Or, "That's beyond you." Right? And then they're like, "Ah, that sounds like it's really important." "H, don't worry about it." Never comes up, right? Those sorts of things, you'll see all the time in fiction, and that's kind of the purpose.

Okay, back here. So I get that rule one applies to solving problems in a satisfying way, but what about creating problems with magic that you may or may not understand? Awesome. Good question. So, um, what about creating problems you may not, may may or may not understand? I think I quoted this once already, but if not, um, uh, Brandon Sanderson, writer friend of mine, he's a librarian up in Maine. He was in the graduate program with me at BYU. He coined a term that I still use, which is called Deus Machina, which does not work at all in the, uh, in the original Latin. Latin? No, Greek. What's now Deus is is Latin, right? Yeah, but it's applied to Greek plays. That's confusing. We should go back in time and tell them you should write this in Greek. Um, right. Um, but Deus Machina does not work at all. Um, but the idea is that he says readers will be, they will, they will take a little bit of you messing with things, hand of the author to make things harder on the characters. But if you do it too much, they'll start to see the hand of the author in the same way that they see the hand of the author solving problems. And readers do want the complications to come from choices that somebody has made. For instance, if you've got a soft magic system, you, you know, you can do X, but you do not know the consequences. Why? But they decide to do X anyway. You can make Y as bad as you want, as long as it's kind of forced out of, you know, how big these complications can be. Um, if it's the middle of a story, you treat it differently than the end of a story. Um, but readers want decisions and consequences, not just. And decisions can be someone else. You can have those moments where everything seems to be going well, and then something goes wrong, and you realize that flaw was there all along, and it was just waiting to explode. Um, you can have that the same way at the end of The Sixth Sense. You have the moment of realization where the, uh, the clues were all there. You can have the clues all be there for something going wrong. Be careful about Deus Machina. It is worth thinking about. The inverse of this is also true. Making things more hard for no reason on the characters works to an extent, but readers will get tired of it. There are exceptions to this rule, right? Like there are entire stories built around how awful things are for certain characters and how things constantly go wrong. George R.R. Martin made an entire career out of, you know, sometimes people can take an arrow to the knee, and instead of retiring to a nice job in Skyrim, they just die. Um, and, you know, uh, that's realistic. You know, infection happening because you took an arrow to the knee. Readers will take that, um, to an extent, particularly if it's the right type of, you've given the right type of tone promise. Now, you had a comment here. Where does the name for this come from? Which one? Deus Machina. Deus Machina? Yeah. Not French. Uh, sorry. This is probably the whole voice problem. Yeah, the French are always causing problems. Uh, no, he called it Deus Machina. Yeah. Glad you said that. I'm not sure how, uh, how articulate I am with, uh, with my current ailment. All right, any questions over here? All right, I'm going to go back to the, this person over here. I told I couldn't get back to. Yeah. How would you present a magic system you want to have come across as hard, but it's like really complex and confusing and and based off something most people wouldn't know about? I would present it that way, meaning I would have a reader, a character start to get involved, and then, you know, um, I would technobabble them to the point where their character's like, "All right, I understand that you understand it, wizard person." Right? This is basically how Star Trek does all of its magic system. It's like, you know, Picard calls down and says, "Geordi, I need you to do X and Y." And Geordi's like, "All right, me and Data will do, you know, A, B, C, D." And then Picard's like, "Okay, I trust you. Tack on something, reflector dish, something, solve it." Um, how long will it take? Three days. Do it in two. Right? Um, we get the sense that Geordi and Data know all kinds of stuff. We don't need to know it because Picard doesn't need to know it all. Picard needs to know is that he has to stall for two days. Um, and then if you actually have all that stuff worked out, which, you know, Star Trek sometimes did, um, then you can use it to great advantage to make your story have internal logic and things like that. But you don't have to, you don't have to throw it all at the reader. Be careful about using the clichés, right? Like, "Oh man, how many of you are tired of the 'In English, please'?" Right? Phrase that always gets shown. You go to nerd talks for a second, they say, "In English, please," when the nerd didn't say anything that confusing. Maybe I'm speaking to the, to the crowd that is self-selecting into that not being confusing, but yeah. All right, we're going to do these two questions, then we're going to be done. Okay, so first here, and then up there. How is this, you know, this first rule applied in a story where one of the main conflicts is kind of man versus nature, where magic is the nature? Yeah. So, uh, how does it apply in person versus nature where the magic is nature? Um, I would say it does apply very well. Some of the strongest fantasy stories out there, Dragon Riders of Pern, is an excellent example, um, where, like, because nature is the magic, generally these lean very well into hard magic systems. Characters are figuring out how the science of stopping nature works, and it's a kind of a scientific race against time to see, "Can we figure this out? Can we solve this problem?" Um, right. And, uh, if you haven't read Dragon Riders of Pern, it is basically this sort of thing. Um, there are some person versus person conflicts as well, but the idea is like, "We're all going to die because this certain phenomenon is happening. We have a small number of dragons that can protect against it, but we need to find out the extra powers our dragons have and learn to harness and manipulate them rather than just going with, you know, what we've always pretended to understand before, and we need to understand the actual why this, this catastrophe is happening." So, yeah.

Um, my question is about how can you foreshadow things in a way that your reader understands, but your character doesn't look too stupid for not? Oh, boy. What an excellent question. How can you foreshadow things in a way that the reader understands, but the character doesn't look too stupid? Generally, you want the character to be thinking the things that you want the reader to be thinking. Okay? So if the reader is going to guess something, you generally want the character to guess it, unless they have, unless they lack information because you've seen from other viewpoints, which is one way to do it, or unless they lack information, but like, because you have external logic that they don't have. But that's dangerous. Even if they, there's no reason they should understand that you understand germs and they don't, so you understand how this thing is spreading and they don't. The reader is going to have trouble because they get it and the characters don't, and that barrier is going to be a problem. So generally, your solution is, have the characters figure out early on the things that the reader is going to guess, and have them try and have those fail anyway.

So that there's a layer beyond. And you do this by having, um, red herrings, um, by having cause and effect reversed. Um, like, uh, meaning, re- like the minor spoilers, well, kind of more major spoilers for Elantris. Elantris gets by completely by everybody having M- having mixed up cause and effect. They think the cause caused an effect. Well, really, the effect was the cause, and they just have the timeline slightly wrong. And because of that, uh, the conventional wisdom doesn't work, and the magic is broken. And when they figure out cause and effect was reversed, then it comes together, right? Um, and so things like that where you can have the reader, the character be intelligent, and it still not work out. Um, and then slowly get them the information, particularly if you're using a red herring to distract the reader. Um, uh, this works really, really well. Uh, getting good at red herrings. Red herrings being the, the reader expects it to be this because they've read a lot of books. You make that thing sound like it's going to be the case, but not too obvious. So the reader's like, "I've got this figured out." Then the reader will stop trying to guess because they have their theory. And then near to where the climax is going to happen, the real is going to happen, you show them that they were wrong because the readers, characters think of that, and then it's not true. And then the reader's like, "Wait, this thing I've been assuming all along, that I knew who the killer was, isn't the case. I'm suddenly at C." And then they have the reader ask to scramble to try to figure out a new theory while the reader characters are doing the same thing. It works really well.

So, all right, let's go on to Sanderson's Second Law. Um, I touched on this one already. Uh, but I want to dig into it a little deeper. And this is that flaws are more interesting than powers themselves. I spent, this one came about, uh, because I spent a long time trying to think of really unique and interesting powers for my magics, right? Um, when Mistborn came out, I think I've told you guys this story before. Um, but I'll, I'll reiterate because, you know, I'm the teacher and I can do that. Um, I thought about how cool this, like, M- the Allomancer, the pushing and pulling came from watching, uh, films like Star Wars and reading books, um, where people have telekinesis and thinking about, well, where's the leverage coming from, right? Did do Newton's laws apply? Um, when, when Darth Maul points and then points and something zips across, I'm like, "Wait a minute. Have I ever seen the Force do you just point and it zips across the room and hits the wall? Where, what's going on here?" Um, and it works just fine for Star Wars. But I'm like, "What if you built a telekinesis around vector physics and, uh, cause and effect and things like this?" And I designed this whole cool magic, and I thought, "Wow, this is so original." And then I released the book, and people love it. They're like, "Wow, it's so cool. It's such a great magic." Uh, and someone comes through my line, um, early on. Uh, it couldn't have been too early because no one read Mistborn one. Um, but, uh, I told you that story, haven't I? U- Missborn one kind of flopped a little bit. All right, I'll go on tangent mode. Um, I'll finish my story, then I'll go in tangent mode. Um, someone came through my line and said, "Wow, I love, I love Mistborn. Um, it, I Magnifico is my favorite supervillain, and you just did a wonderful job of having Magneto powers." And I went, "I created Magneto just with more steps." Um, it's not that original. He's even my favorite supervillain. I love Magneto, and I just created Magneto. Um, and I'm like, "What made it so interest- like, why was it so much fun to write if it was just copying somebody else?" And I realized it was in the limitations, the, the flaws. Uh, and by flaws, I mean, uh, limitations and hindrances and, uh, costs, uh, and flaws themselves. Um, and I realized what made it interesting was because, because you couldn't just move anything anywhere, which Magneto kind of can. The characters had to position themselves in in specific ways, and they had to account for the, the, uh, the costs, um, the limitations of the magic, only being able to push directly away from you or pull directly towards you, having to take into account the various weights. Uh, and it sounds all very finicky when you explain it, but in the story, it makes the characters have to be strategic in their application of the, of the magic. And it turned out to be a lot of fun to write, and it turned out to be a lot of fun to read.

So, because of this, um, I realized that flaws are more interesting than powers. Rather than racking my brain for new and original powers, I found that if I focused on new and original limitations to a magic, um, that the characters had to use in interesting ways, the magic just got way more interesting. Um, like Kaladin can basically just fly poorly, right? He, he's got the superpower of flight, but bad. Yet, it's so much more interesting to write than just a character can fly. Um, because he's having to make certain decisions and apply certain skills to being able to use his bad flight. And because of that, the reader can anticipate what it can do and what its limitations are, and it becomes way more interesting to read because of that.

This is a large-scale rule that we're going to get into in a second, but I'm going to tell you my tangent. Um, so, oh boy, I gotta be careful. We'll run out of time. Um, so Mistborn one came out, and Elantris did pretty well. Uh, Elantris sold 10,000 copies in hardcover, um, which is really solid. It's not, um, it's not, you know, breaking down any doors, uh, bu- breaking any records, I should say. It's not, uh, it's not, you know, no one's, no one's breaking down my door to get me to sign for more books. There's the mixed metaphor I was looking for. Um, but solid. Publishers encouraged. They paid me $10,000 for it. I earned maybe $20 to $30,000 in royalties. That's what they like to see. Um, right, they, they got a good deal. They didn't overprint. Um, so Mistborn comes along. They're like, "We're going to print a little extra on this, right?" Um, but I made the decision to not publish, um, a sequel to Elantris, but do a new book series. And when you're a new writer, you have a little extra shine on you, and people pay attention. Particularly back in the day, the bookstore days. It's less so now when they get "New Releases" shelf and be like, "Oh, Brett, first book by new author." People would buy it. Um, Mistborn didn't, uh, it sold like 8,000 copies. Then the paperback of Mistborn came out, a really bad cover. Um, love my cover illustrator, he did wonderful work on on the others, but that paperback just didn't land, and then it just sank like a stone. And so that's the closest my, uh, career came to just completely, uh, completely dying. Um, and it recovered because I convinced them to put a new p- uh, cover on Mistborn, to release a $5 edition, and we pushed really hard for a package, and that paperback took off and sold really well. To the point that Mistborn 2, see, back in the day, the bookstores, they would look and they'd say, "Well, this first book sold 10,000, second book sold 8,000. Just to be sure, we'll order 6,000 of Mistborn 2." And that's what they did. But then it instantly sold out, and they had to reprint until it ended up selling like 12 or 14. Uh, and so that's when, that's when my career, that's when things started to take off, and then Mistborn 3 became a bestseller. So, um, so yeah, that's the close I've ever come to my career completely flopping. Oh, you don't have to clap for me. Um, I got lucky. Um, part of it was having a really good agent who was like, "Yeah, this is probably the cover. The book is really solid. People who are reading it love it. We need to get this book into the right hands, and we need to recover this." And then him going and fighting to get a new cover on that, and the $5 edition was my idea. Robert Jordan had done that once, uh, with Eye of the World. And so, uh, I guess it was his idea. Uh, yeah, so don't applaud. Uh, just, uh, it's, it's scary. Those are those first few books. Sorry, Rachel, are scary. They are scary.

All right, flaws versus powers. Uh, this is, this is a larger than just, um, magic system thing as well. I said this is a character thing. Your characters will generally be more interesting in what they can't do or won't let themselves do than in what they can do. Uh, Super- Superman is the classic example of this. Superman has like three different stories that people tell about Superman that are really good. What are they centered around? Someone has Kryptonite. There's a monster stronger than Superman. Holy cow. Or, ah, Lois Lane's not in love with me, and my powers, most of the time, depending on who's writing me, don't let me have anything to do with that. I have to interact as a normal human being, and I don't know how to do that with Lois Lane. My powers don't help me. Um, this is not a coincidence, right? Most of the, most powerful stories told hit characters where they're weak. Lord of the Rings works in part because it's not Aragorn or Gandalf who have to carry the ring. It's Frodo who has to carry the ring, right? What happens? Gandalf has to go up against someone stronger than Gandalf in Sauron, who's been enhanced, you know, through the powers of evil, um, and who was always Gandalf's superior. And then the Balrog, who's like equally matched to him, right? Like Gandalf has to face, uh, challenges bigger than him. Um, Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas, they just got to fight armies. You know, um, and those are barely a challenge to them, by the way. Lord of the Rings meme of the week for those who love it. Um, in the movies, uh, there's that great standoff where Aragorn and everybody's like drawing the forces of Mordor, you know, and they've chopped the head off the Mouth of Sauron for some reason. Um, um, and, you know, they're there, and Aragorn yells for Frodo and starts running. I saw a meme that then cuts to the soldiers behind them, and they're like, "For Frodo?" Dressing the audience a little bit there, Aragorn. Yeah, nobody knows who Frodo is. They're not supposed to. You shouldn't be yelling his name. Dramatic moment, though.

When you're building your magic systems, asking yourself what the magic cannot do, or, you know, splitting up, so what are the costs of the magic? Your cost of your magic is going to have a deep influence on your magic system. It can be like Dune and Mistborn, an economic cost. On one hand, it is expensive. There's a material cost. You have to do this. It can be have a physical cost. It can just be hard to use. You can have an intellectual cost. You have to learn to use it. Um, it can have other kind of mystical costs. Like, but those will, how big the costs are will influence how you use the magic. The one I always joke with is like, if you have a magic that's really powerful, but each time you use it, one of your grandparents has to die, you can use that magic a limited number of times, and it's a very different sort of story than, "Oh no, I'm going to run out of metal." Do be aware that some of the costs you have to be careful with because, how much metal a character has or how much strength a character has is very similar to how many bullets are in the gun of a gunslinger in an old western. The reader kind of understands that they're going to run out of narrative at narratively appropriate, uh, moments. You want to be careful not to show the hand of the author too much by at least having the character say, "I'm almost out. I'm running low. I can maybe do a little bit more." Let, let the reader be able to gauge how much that is. Usually, that's better than adding a number to it that they have to track. But sometimes having a number like, you know, "I have four bullets left," can be really effective. Okay.

Um, I'm going to get through all this before I go questions. So, costs, costs are very useful and help in limiting. But, you know, um, flaws, by my definition, flaws are the things that the reader is expected to expect the characters to overcome. So, in a magic system, a flaw to a magic system might be the things that we're talking about where we highlight early on, "Hey, the magic can't do this, except sometimes it can." Well, we're going to have to figure out and overcome and fix that flaw in the magic. Uh, Elantris is a flawed magic system story. The magic used to work, it no longer does. We have to figure out how to make it work narratively. For me, a flaw is, we expect the characters to fix this, and they, um, whereas you have limitations on a magic are just what the magic can and can't do. You know, Allomancer pushes directly away from you, pulls directly towards you. You're not expecting the reader, the characters to figure out a way around that or to, you know, to fix that. That just exists, and they're going to use that and have to manipulate it, and, uh, it's part of the magic system. And then there's the sort of hindrances thing, which for magic systems is a little bit different. Um, I always think of the hindrances of the, you know, the lines that you don't want to cross, but that you could if you really wanted to, and we aren't sure if we want the characters to cross them or not. Um, but these are all different things that you can add to a magic system, and generally, these will be where your story lies. And where the flaws, the limitations, uh, the costs are, they will not with what the powers can do. What the Ring can do is make Sauron super powerful. What the flaws and limitations are are where the story is. It can be destroyed by throwing it in Mount Doom. Argo, we're going to try to make use of that, um, flaw in the One Ring that is actually an advantage to us. We're going to fix it. We're going to break the thing. Okay, questions on flaws being more interesting than powers. You had one. Yeah, I just was actually going to make a comment. There is a story called The Mis-enchanted Sword that's a really good example of the cost. It's about a sword that can only be drawn so many times, and once they pass that threshold, it turns and kills the wielder and finds a new owner. Yeah, is that, oh yeah, I've read about, I've read that story. Was that Elric the Camp who wrote that? I can't remember. It was from my, yeah, it's a classic. Uh, we should look that up. Uh, it's a good story. Yeah. Um, so the story was called The Mis-enchanted Sword. The Mis-enchanted Sword. Who wrote it? Lawrence Watt- Evans. Okay. Lawrence Watt-Evans. Okay. Oh, yeah. I, I know Lawrence. Um, yeah, okay. I should know that. I know Lawrence. Sorry, Lawrence. Um, it's a good story. Uh, reminds me of the, uh, the Saberhagen Swords books, which had some interesting things back in the '80s. Um, so, yeah, uh, other comments or questions? We'll go here and then here. Differentiating hindrances from flaws. Could something maybe start as a flaw where you think it needs to be fixed, but then it turns out it's more of a hindrance? Yes, exactly. You can change these. Starts as a flaw, then you realize, "No, we want this." Um, the classic example of this is, um, a lot of stories, you'll, you'll have the story where they realize if they solve the flaw, something worse happens. This is here for a reason, and then they decide to work around it instead, or to keep it, or to not take that extra step. Uh, that happens a ton. Uh, no, I won't give spoilers, but I've done it before in a very large, uh, and important, uh, work that I worked on. So, yeah. Um, do you have any tips on catering your flaw, your flaws in your magic system towards the characters? Or, oh yeah, flaws in the magic system toward characters. Um, do I have any tips on doing that? I'd say it's generally a good idea. Um, this is often where you pull theme into your world building is by matching the magic system in some way to your characters, um, and to the kind of story at large. Um, and when you start pulling those things in with your world building, then it, you can really build theme and whatnot. Like, you know, Paul at Arrakis, right? Comes from a land of water. He then needs to go to Dune, where there is no water except the magical water that he needs to drink in order to become, uh, you know, Lisan Al-Gaib, right? And so suddenly the mag- like his background and one of the major sources of the magic are intertwined in interesting ways, and you start to build theme of water, of life, blood being water, what will return water to Dune, um, should we do this? And all of that stuff comes out of just building into the magic system these, um, these limitations, these aspects of it that relate to character. Um, and this is, this is, you know, this is great stuff. Uh, you can do this. So yes, I would just caution of, put too many flaws. How do you, like, how do you, how do you make sure not to do too many flaws? Your, uh, beta readers will help you with this, but yeah, you can over, you could basically, this is where Sanderson's Third Law comes into play. You can overcomplicate your worlds real fast. Um, and you got to be careful about this. Usually, a couple of elegant rules are way more viable than 30 very interesting but finicky rules. Um, and that goes for both flaws and powers. Um, you know, the length of the series depends on how much you can get. But I'll tell the story, um, with Sanderson's Third Law about that in a minute here. So, all right, all right. Last question on this one. I talked way too long on Sanderson's First Law. Yeah. So you want flawed characters and also flaws in magic systems. Would you advise against having a flawed character with a flawed magic system? Is that like, relate to that, too many flaws? No. Uh, the question is, would I avoid having a flawed character with a flawed magic system? No. Uh, definitely not. Every character should have some sort. They don't have to be, they don't have to be flaw- flaws. They can be any one of the kind of four things that I'm talking about, but the most interesting characters have these, uh, problems. The most interesting magic systems have these problems. Um, I would say that your most interesting stories happen at the intersection of those things. Um, right, like, um, yeah, uh, Name of the Wind is partially compelling because Kvothe is a deeply flawed character, and he's searching for a magic system that he does not understand in a world where he's used to being able to explain the magic using rules, because Name of the Wind has a soft and a hard magic, and he's really good at the hard magic, and he wants to learn the soft magic, and it's beyond his reach because of the way he, his mind, um, and his desires work. But it's like the mythical muse that he chases. And so he spends, I'm going to guess all three books, but at least two of the books chasing. Don't laugh, Pat is trying. He really is. Um, he's chasing this thing that he can't quite have, and it's deeply troubling to him, and that's part of what makes those books work. So, um, all right, we, we got a few minutes left, so we're going to do Sanderson's Third Law. Uh, after Mistborn took off and got, um, uh, started hitting the bestseller list and Warbreaker came out, people started asking me what my next, uh, book series was going to be. And I started telling them about The Way of Kings. This is in part because for whatever reason, Amazon figured out that I was going to write a book called The Way of Kings. I can't get in now when they have five minutes, but they put up a listing for it. Um, and so my fans started saying, "What's The Way of Kings?" I'm like, "Oh, it's my giant fantasy epic. It's going to be my magnum opus." They're like, "Oh." And then they'd be like, "Mistborn had three magic systems. How many magic systems does Stormlight have?" And I'd be like, "30." Um, and I got pulled into this hype of "bigger is better." Um, and this is really dangerous because you want to be giving people more and more and more, uh, but if, uh, movies have taught us, superhero movies taught us anything, more villains don't make for better stories, right? Um, and indeed, more magic systems don't necessarily make for better, uh, stories. Um, and what I realized I was kind of going crazy, um, and part of the reason that, uh, Way of Kings Prime had failed, it's because I tried to do 10 character arcs. And Way of Kings when I wrote it worked better because I really focused on a couple of character arcs. And in the same way, I focused on a couple of aspects of the magic. Um, and I started using this rule to tell myself to make sure that instead of adding something new, I explore what I already have. There's lots of depth to explore. To changing simple things, simple rules, to physics, change. You can write entire books about small changes. And so it doesn't mean you can't add new things. It just means before you do, ask yourself, "Can I do more with what I have?" Example of this, if you've got a really in, um, religion in your books, and you're going to be adding, you know, another culture with a different religion, often first ask yourself, "Okay, can I take what I have, the religion I have? Would it be more interesting if these were two different branches of the same religion, such as Judaism and Christianity?" Um, does that add to my story? And a lot of times the answer will be, "Oh yeah, it adds way more interesting sort of interconnectivity to have these two magic, these two religions be cousin religions." Because it adds kind of this different kind of take on some things that happened and different philosophical takes on history. Um, with your magic, before you say, you know, "I'm going to add a new complete magic system," say, "If I really explored every aspect of my magic system, can I make a character who uses it in a different way and in a different, interesting way? Can I explore that instead?" What you want to avoid is, I referenced Skyrim earlier. Um, in the Elder Scrolls series, they, they tend to be pretty good games, but some of the earlier games had this problem where, like, I remember when I played Daggerfall. This is how old I am, okay? I played Daggerfall. Um, back when, like, it took, yeah, I, I played Daggerfall. And Daggerfall had this, this thing where it had like 10,000 dungeons. It was my first experience with procedural generation. It was 10,000 dungeons that repeat the same 50, uh, different elements, 10,000 different ways. So if you went through one, the second one was already boring. And, um, early games had this problem. They would say, "It is an ocean an inch deep." You want to avoid having your world building be an ocean an inch deep, and instead, you want to have a handcrafted. In the newer, you know, Skyrim games, it's like, we put in, you know, 50 dungeons and make them all really good. We have a better game. Save your questions on this. I'll give you a chance to dig into second and third law questions next week, um, when we get then go into more world building stuff. So thank you all very much, and I'll see you next week. Hopefully, I'll be better by then.