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

Hey everyone, Brandon here. It's somewhat sick 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 Fixer Fantasy Class. Yay, I'm back. So you may notice a certain ruggedness to my voice. I, during my trip to Hawaii, managed to get sick. Yay, yeah, yeah. And then that sickness managed to give me an infection. And my scientist says that burst my eardrum. Yeah, never had that happen before, unique experience. I have been on antibiotics now long enough for that to no longer be an issue, but I'm going to keep my distance back here just in case. So if I look a little red-eyed and sound a little rugged, that is why. So today, also, that ear doesn't hear so well, so I may have to ask you to repeat questions. We'll see. This ear is still here, it's just fine. So today we're doing Sanderson's Laws. So this is a fun lecture I always enjoy giving this one. Not just because I name these things after myself, but I do think magic systems have become one of my things. As I may have told you before, I did this somewhat deliberately. And I was breaking into the business. One of the things I noticed in the books that I really like to read was when they had a pretty well defined what we call hard magic system. I didn't coin that phrase, but it definitely is something that I've helped popularize the idea of a hard magic. And I think both hard and soft magic are perfectly viable methods of storytelling. They do different things. They're both tools in your toolbox. But I noticed I really enjoyed them, and I liked 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 over time, I developed these laws. And now, these are not laws that everyone needs to follow. They're not that kind of law. 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. That said, I do think these are three very important principles, not just for world building, but for storytelling in general, 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 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? 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 of the other, but really weak of one of the other, tends to be a weak story. And what has great world building is weak and 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. There is a rule above this, which is whatever you enjoy, whatever makes you write, whatever reason you're here, that's totally valid. 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 isn't 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, cool poems, cool mythology that he come up with. And that's okay. Then again, Grandpa Tolkien didn't have to try to sell books in today's environment, and indeed he worked as a professor the whole time, because books as a career, particularly fantasy books, writing epic fantasy for a career didn't exist when Grandpa Tolkien invented the job. 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. And I'm going to go through the laws, and we'll do a Q&A 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. Let's talk about rule number one, Sanderson's First Law. So Sanderson's First Law arose because I was sitting on a panel at WorldCon. WorldCon is one of the major science fiction and fantasy conventions out there. I had been attending a number of years as just a fan before I sold something. I finally did, and I went in and typed in, you know, they had 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. I'd love to be on paneling, and they, you know, in 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, I put the panel in together, and they put me on, how do you write magic systems to the panel? Which I thought was really excellent. I'm to this day, grateful that they did that. I think this was Boston, WorldCon in Boston, early 2000s. 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 are the basics of designing a magic system? And we'll just go down and have every person on the panel 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. So 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 it's not going to be controversy at all. And I said, well, obviously, to have a good magic system, you need to have rules. I thought non-controversial, right? It's 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. Suddenly, I'm like, I have no idea what I'm doing now. All these other pros, I thought, what's happening? What's going on? Well, we had a really good discussion. And turns out that I was the only one writing epic fantasy on that panel. And the others were writing urban fantasy. And the other fantasy being a genre that has one foot in horror, a lot of the urban fantasy does. 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 protagonist. 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. 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. It is 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 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, and turning magic into kind of another branch of science. A soft magic system is 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 a sense of wonder or horror accompanies the use of something magical. It's a magic system where it seems to have no internal logic. And you can't necessarily anticipate what is going to happen with the magic. Now a lot fall in between, right? 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, JK Rowling was pretty bad at taking the consequences of something she invented for one book and applying it to another book. This does create problems where she has to like destroy all the time turners 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, often the companies, 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 immediate what we say in the business, because it's an old term from Highline. It's a little bit of an act like you would expect it to in our real world. For instance, 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. 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 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 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. So as I started to think about this and started to focus on different magic systems, I realized that there are great examples of soft magic and they're usually trying to do something different. 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. 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, Sarenas Minions can see you. It doesn't make you invisible, it accentuates your powers that you already had. There you are, that is true. But as presented to the reader, see you're using appendix information, which is not in the stories, and we usually throw that out for narrative terms, but it is true. But good job, we know the actual Tolkien scholar, it accentuates your 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 Sarenas can see you. And if it gets to Saren, the world basically ends. Right? We have our narrative rules for the one ring. What can Gandalf do? No speaking Tolkien nerd. Whatever the plot needs Gandalf to do, Gandalf can do. Yes, lots of sparkles. In the movies, it has always to do with light in some way. The Tolkien nerd is just shaking your 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 lense 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. And these two magic systems work very well to show the advantages and disadvantages of both hard and soft magic. If you take 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 purposes that him using his powers does is usually to either complicate issues in some way, for instance, he saves them from the Balrog, 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 than it is a salvation. This is the real power of a soft magic system, particularly one that's like, 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 hybrid magic system that's really leaning into the soft side. 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 we know you get 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 being part of our world, not enjoying, it is like, I don't like fantasy because anything can happen. That removes the stakes and attention 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. It doesn't matter what kind of story it is. It doesn't even matter if it's historical fiction. You can probably name some Tarantino-esque stories that they just break what happened in history and say either, oh, it was recorded wrong or you know, like you don't have to follow history. 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 Bauerog and dying is an excellent example of the curbing worse than the disease narratively. I mean, not actually because if they've all died to the Bauerog, sorry, on wins, but you know what I'm saying. 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 a larger than just magic systems, the magic systems offer a great example. Because people pointed 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. Another example though of why you might not want to make it satisfying just so you understand. I don't believe I've talked about this yet this class. If I have, you know, throw something at me, something soft. So you will often see, oh, scars like don't throw anything at him, I'll tackle you. You've often seen in stories the sequence where a character shows up out of nowhere to save the protagonist from a big problem that they're having. Right? 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 we 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 first hand how great George is so that George can join the crew and then they 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 Lurtherings films as my example of this going well and this going poorly. My favorite of the Lurtherings 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 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? Look for me on the morning of the fifth day. 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 and survive that long. It's the plot setup is if you can last five days, therefore I will save you. Then we trust that Gandalf can save him, right? Like save them. He's going to go find bones, he's going to bring him back and it's not in the books, but it works really, really well as a plot structure. And that whole sequence where Peter Jackson makes you forget the Gandalf said that, makes you forget that it makes the characters feel like there's no hope. They've forgotten. When the morning of the fifth day comes and Gandalf crest the rise and there's bones with his whole team, then you're like, oh yeah. And then you'll have the little voice over, look for me on the morning of the fifth day. Boom, wonderful plot cycle, right? It's a setup and payoff. The setup is last five days you win. They last five days and Gandalf comes and save them. And it's beautiful. It's my favorite moment in all three films. They then don't manage to do the same setup with the ghosts and arogorn. 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 the ghosts arrive to save us. Instead, it's set up. This is our last stand. We must defeat and conquer. Otherwise, you know, Gandalf will fall. They fight, they fight, they fight. They lose. Arogorn shows up with ghosts and saves them. And your left is a reader or as a viewer just being like, why did we fight? Shouldn't we have just run and let Arogorn show up with the ghosts, right? Like, can we send those ghosts to board or-- yeah, they say they have to be let go, but come on. Just one more ride, guys. And it ends up being kind of a weaker plot cycle. You know, it's still there. 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 to do sex, mock, you know. We kind of get one. All right? So Sanages 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 saved the day in the end. Instead, you need to focus on characters and what they can do and what they want to solve. Less, you want a different kind of resolution. You can tell a different type of story. War of the world ends with simply the humankind has been destroyed and would have lost, except the common cold coincidental, saves them by killing all the Martians. 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. It's a warning that we could be destroyed and wiped out. 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. And then characters will put together the pieces, figure out how to manipulate these things. And you end up with stories that lean into science fiction, sort of plotting using the magic as a new brand of science. And Sanderson's first law is kind of the way to do that. Questions? Yeah. Kind of already touching on it, but can you have like a heart magic system that can swing all the way back to soft or soft? It goes there. Oh, yeah. Yeah. You can start completely soft. And then as people find the rules, they end up-- it becomes a heart 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, 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 see 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 see it enough that the reader understands it but doesn't give away what you're doing at the end? Couple of 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 see enough as a general rule. That's obviously not going to apply to every author, but keep that in mind. The other thing is be careful about infodumps. So the grand skill of writing science fiction fantasy, as I've said I believe before in this class, 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 because you're going into details on the magic. There are lots of ways to get these details across in ways that will not feel as much like an infodump. One is to make sure other things are going on in the scene. It's not just infodumping, you're going to cross character and things like this. Breaking up the lessons so it's not just like all dumped. It's usually 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. 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 the setting and the characters before I get into the magic. At the beginning of Mistborn, Kelsier goes and brings down like an entire man or house full of guards. He just goes, you know, John Wick on the mall, right? And I just cut because I'm not going to show all that magic. Yet, I wait until I've seated 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 infodump. We're doing things. We're experimenting. We're causing affecting 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 where she's learning about Newton's laws and things like this as it applies to Alamancey. I put it off to there and it works. In Stormland Archive, I just launched you straight into it. And it's a steeper learning curve. I make sure it's an action scene where lots of things are happening 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 dense in rules. And those are just two different ways that I decided to do it. Back here. How do you 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 characters. Yeah, excellent. And this arguably is what Tolkien actually did. 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. 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 question, 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 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. And you can set these up. You can have payoffs that don't relate to the reader, the characters manipulating the magic system. 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, 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. Right? But you still get a payoff because the cowardly lion showed courage. Completely unrelated to the magic he showed courage and he gets a medal. Right? It's not what he gets. He, you know, he, yeah, I guess the 10 men wants a heart and the lion wants courage. So the 10 men gets like a heart. But anyway, the lion gets his courage reward, but it's been a while. When I was a kid, you watched that show like every couple of races. There were three channels. Right? And you just turn on and you're 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 on different channels. But now I realize I haven't seen Wizard of Oz in like 30 years. So, 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 12, porting 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. Right over here. Yes, I appreciate that. Would you say that ending a story where a character overcome something using powers they didn't do they have? Oh, yeah. Oh, I'm glad you brought this up. Yes. So, minor spoils for Miss Four One. I said each of these rules came from me learning something by doing it wrong. You're bringing up at the end of Miss Four One 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 haven't devised Sanderson's first law yet. I was just trying to tell a great story. And the ending of Miss Four One lacked impact. My 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? And you can see how the stuff that happens is very relevant to book two. I pulled it forward. I used it. Then the book comes out and people are like, wow, I really like that book. It's a bit of a day of sex mock you at the end. It's in there. And I'm like, oh, yeah, there is now because I didn't seed or foreshadow that at all. 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? And you'll find other places where I do similar things 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. I think it is one of the weaknesses of Mistborn. The first book is 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. We'll let you notice that. All right. So I'm just wondering how feasible is it to be able to have like that sort of ending like the distance of our lives, but like not in a way that's something that nobody knows or like they're like, no, which is happened. It's like Kansas. It is written in rules. We just don't know why yet. Is that the same thing? 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 of twilight. What happens in the end of first week of twilight? Belly 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 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. 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 with your main characters unconscious for the main resolution? Well, that's not the main resolution. That's just the end of the quote unquote small p plot or evil vampires, whatever. And so if you're your resolution is something else and then you have this big event and 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 this thing happened that we didn't anticipate because it has huge ramifications. You'll see me doing that all the time 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? Especially when part of the plot is about characters learning new things or like re-analyzing rules, how do you, you know, lie about rules and a satisfying way without having readers just feel like nothing matters? Yeah, how do you lie about rules in a satisfying way? I recommend very early on indicating hanging 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 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 having to say, well, what about this? And they're just like, don't think about that. We don't know. Or that's beyond you, right? And then they're like, oh, that sounds like it's really important. 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 this as my way, but what about creating problems with match being may or may not understand? Awesome. Good question. So what about creating problems? Your may or may not understand. I think I quoted this once already, but if not, Bryce Moore, 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 "Dios X Rich," which does not work at all in the original Latin. Latin? "Dios, no, Greek." What's out "Dios" is Latin, right? Yeah. But it's for applied to Greek place. That's confusing. We should go back in time and tell them, you should write this in Greek. Right? But "Dios X Rich" does not work at all. But the idea is that he says readers will be, 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 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 foreshadowed, you know, how big these complications can be. If it's the middle of a story, you treat it differently than the end of a story. But readers want decisions and consequences, not just, and the 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. You can have that the same way at the end of six cents. You have the moment of realization where the clues are all there. You can have the clues all be there for something going wrong. Be careful about Deus Ex-Renche. 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. Like there are entire stories built around how awful things are for certain characters and how things constantly go wrong. George Martin made an entire career out of, you know, Sometimes people can take an arrow to the knee and then instead of retiring to another nice job in Skyrim, they just die. And that's realistic. Infection happening because you took an error to the knee. Readers will take that to an extent. But if you've given the right kind of tone promise, now you had a comment here. Where is the name from this comment? Which one? The day of sex wrench. Day of sex wrench. Yeah, not French. Sorry. This is probably the whole voice problem. Yeah, the French are always causing problems. Now, you call it day of sex wrench. Yeah, glad you said that. I'm not sure how articulate I am with my current ailment. All right, any questions over here? How would you present a magic system you want to have come across as hard, but it's like really complex and confusing and faced 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, I would tech no babble them to the point where their character's like, all right, I understand that you understand it wizard person. This is basically how Star Trek does all of its magic system. It's like, you know, Parkhard calls down and says, "Jordie, I need you to do X and Y." And Jordie's like, all right, me and data will do, you know, ABCD, and then Parkhard's like, OK, I trust you. Tacking on something, reflect or dish, something, solve it. How long will it take? Three days. Do it and two. Right? It's that Jordie and data know all kinds of stuff. We don't need to know it because Parkhard doesn't need to know it. All Parkhard needs to know is he has to stall for two days. And then if you actually have all that stuff worked out, which, you know, Star Trek sometimes did, then you can use it to great advantage through, to make your story have internal logic and things like that. But you don't have to throw it all at the reader. Be careful about using the cliches, right? Like, oh man, how many of you are tired of the-- In English, please, right? Praise 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 a crowd that is self-selecting into that not being confusing. But yeah. All right, we're going to do these two questions and we're going to be done, OK? So first here and then up there. How is this, you know, this first rule of applying this order where one of the main conflicts is kind of man versus nature, where magic is the nature? Right. Yeah, so how does supply and person versus nature where the magic is nature? I would say it does apply very well. Some of the strongest fantasy stories out there, Dragon Riders of Perne, is an excellent example 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 kind of a scientific race against time to see can we figure this out, can we solve this problem? Right. And if you have an red dragon's riders of Perne, it is basically this sort of thing. 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 what we've always pretended to understand before and we need to understand the actual why this catastrophe is happening. So yeah. My question is about how can you foreshadow things in a way that your reader understands but your character doesn't look too stupid? 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'd want the character to be thinking, the things that you want the reader to be thinking. So if the reader is going to guess something, you generally want the character to guess it unless they lack information because you've seen from other viewpoints, which is one way to do it. Or unless they lack information, but because you have external logic that they don't have. But that's dangerous. Even if 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's going to have trouble because they get it and the characters don't. And that barrier's going to be a problem. So generally, your solution is have the characters figure out early on the things that the reader's 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 red herrings, by having cause and effect reversed, meaning, minor spoilers, well, kind of more major spoilers for a launters. A launters gets by completely by everybody having mixed up cause and effect. They think the cause, cause and effect were really the effect was the cause. And they just have the timeline slightly wrong. And because of that, all 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. And so things like that, where you can have the reader, the character, be intelligent, and it's still not work out. And then slowly get them the information, particularly if you're using a red herring distract the reader. This works really, really well. 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 to the reader 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 the reader has to scramble to try to figure out a new theory. Well, their characters are doing the same thing. It works really well. So yeah. All right, let's go on to Sanders's second law. I touched on this one already. 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 because I spent a long time trying to think of really unique and interesting powers for my magic, right? When Miss Boren came out, I think I've told you guys this story before. But I'll reiterate because I'm the teacher and I can do that. I thought about how cool this-- like Miss the Alamancey, the Pushing and Polling came from watching films like Star Wars and reading books where people have telekinesis and thinking about, well, where's the leverage coming from? Denudence laws apply when Darth Maul points and then points and something zips across. Like, wait a minute. Have I ever seen the force do you just point in it zips across the room and hits the wall? What's going on here? And it works just fine for Star Wars. But I'm like, what if you built a telekinesis around vector physics and cause an 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. And someone comes through my line early on. Couldn't have been too early because no one read Miss Born One. But I told you guys that story, haven't I? Miss Born One kind of flopped a little bit. All right, I'll go in tangent mode. I'll finish my story then I'll go in tangent mode. Someone came through my line and said, wow, I love Miss Born. Magneto's my favorite super villain. And you just done a wonderful job of having magnetopowers. And I went, oh, I created magneto just with more steps. It's not that original. He's even my favorite super villain. I love magneto. And I just created magneto. And I'm 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 flaws. And by flaws, I mean, limitations and hindrances and costs and flaws themselves. And I realized what made it interesting was because you couldn't just move anything anywhere, which magneto kind of can. The characters had to position themselves in specific ways. And they had to account for the costs, the limitations of the magic, only being able to push directly away from your pull directly towards you, have to take into account the various weights. And it sounds all very finically when you explain it. But in the story, it makes the characters have to be strategic in their application 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, 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 that the characters had to use in interesting ways, the magic just got way more interesting. Like, Caledon can basically just fly poorly, right? He's got the superpower of flight, but bad. [LAUGHTER] Yet it's so much more interesting to write than just a character can fly. because he's have to make sure. 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. So Mistborn 1 came out and a launchers did pretty well. A launcher sold 10,000 copies in Hardcover, which is really solid. It's not breaking down any doors, breaking any records, I should say. It's not, you know, no one's breaking down my door to get me to sign for more books. There's the mixed metaphor I was looking for. 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. They got a good deal. They didn't over print. So Mistborn comes along and they're like, we're going to print a little extra on this, right? But I made the decision to not publish a sequel to launchers, 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 browsed in the new shelf, they'll be like, oh, a first book by a new author. People would buy it. Mistborn, it sold like 8,000 copies. Then the paperback at Mistborn came out, a really bad cover. Love my color real straight, or you did wonderful work 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 career came to just completely dying and recovered because I convinced them to put a new cover on Mistborn to release a $5 edition. And we pushed really hard for a repackage 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 say, well, it's 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. And so that's when that's when my career, that's when things started to take off and the Mistborn 3 became a best seller. So yeah, that's the closest I've ever come to my career completely flopping up. You don't have to clap for me. I got lucky. 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 Jornid done that once with I of the world. And so I guess it was his idea. Yeah, so don't applaud. It's scary. Those first three books are scary. They are scary. All right, flaws versus powers. This is a larger than just magic things. 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. 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 low slain is not in love with me. And my power is 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 low slain. My powers don't help me. This is not a coincidence. 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. What happens? Gandalf has to go up against someone stronger than Gandalf in Saruman who's been enhanced through the powers of evil and who has always Gandalf superior and then the Balrog who's like equally matched to him. Gandalf has to face challenges bigger than him. Aragorn, Gimli and Lightloss, they just have to fight armies. Those are barely a challenge for them. By the way, Lord of the Rings meme of the weak for those who love it in the movies, there's that great standoff where Aragorn and everybody's like drawing the forces of Mordor and they've chopped the head off the mouth of Saruman for some reason. You know, they're there and Aragorn yells "Fore Frodo!" and starts running. I saw a meme that then cuts to the soldiers behind them and they're like "For who?" 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. Dranic moment though. When you're building your magic systems, asking yourself what the magic cannot do or splitting up. It can be the cost 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 have a physical cost. It can just be hard to use. You can have an intellectual cost. You have to learn to use it. It can have other kind of mystical costs. But those will, how big the costs are, will influence how you use the magic. The one I always joke with is 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 as limited number of times. 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 these 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 bolts are in the gun of a gun slinger in an old western. The reader kind of understands that they're going to run out in narratively appropriate moments. You want to be careful not to show the hand of the author too much, but at least having the character say, "I'm almost out. I'm running low. I can maybe do a little bit more. Let the reader be able to gauge how much that is. Really that's better than adding a number to it that they have to track, but sometimes having a number like, "I have four bullets left. It can be really effective." I'm going to get through all this before I go questions. Costs are very useful in helping limit. Flows, by my definition, flaws are the things that the reader is expected to expect the characters to overcome. When a magic system, a flaw to a magic system might be the things that we're talking about. When we highlight early on, "Hey, the magic can't do this except sometimes it can." Well, we're going to have to figure out an overcome and fix that flaw on the magic. A launchers is a flawed magic system story. The magic used to work at no longer does. We have to figure out how to make it work. Narratively, for me, a flaw is, you expect the characters to fix this and they should. Whereas you have limitations on a magic or just what the magic can and can't do. Alamancey pushes directly away from you, pulls directly towards you. You're not expecting the reader of the characters to figure out a way around that or to fix that. That just exists and they're going to use that and have to manipulate it and it's part of the magic system. Then there's the hindrances thing which, for magic systems, is a little bit different. I always think of the hindrances of the lines that you don't want across, but that you could if you really wanted to. We aren't sure if we want the characters to cross them or not. These are all different things that you can add to a magic system. Generally, these will be where your story lies and where the flaws, the limitations, the costs are. They will not be what the powers can do. What the ring can do is make sara on super powerful. The flaws and limitations are where the story is. It can be destroyed by throwing an amount of doom. Ergo, we're going to try to make use of that 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. Questions on flaws being more interesting than powers. You had one, yeah. I was actually going to make a comment. There's a story called the Miss and Chances Sword. It's a really good example of the cost. It's about the sword that can only be drawn so many times. Once they pass that threshold, it turns and kills the wielder and finds a new owner. Is that, oh yeah. I've read about that story. Was that El Sprague de Camp? Who wrote that? I can't remember. It was from my. Yeah, it's a classic. We should look that up. It's a good story. Yeah. The story was called. The Miss and Chances Sword. Who wrote it? Lawrence Watt Evans. Okay, Lawrence Watt Evans. Okay. Oh yeah. I know Lawrence. Yeah. Okay. I should know that. I know Lawrence. Sorry, Lawrence. It's a good story. It reminds me of the Saber Hagen Sword's books, which had some interesting things back in the 80s. So yeah. Other comments or questions? 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 dream. Yes, exactly. You can change these. It starts as a flaw when you realize, no, we want this. The classic example of this is a lot of stories 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. That happens a ton. I won't give spoilers, but I've done it before. And a very large and important work that I worked on. So yeah. [LAUGHTER] Do you have any tips on catering your flaws in your magic system towards characters, or by-- Oh, yeah. Flows in the magic system toward characters. Do I have any tips on doing that? I say it's generally a good idea. This is often where you pull theme into your world building is by matching the magic system in some way to your characters and to the kind of story at large. And when you start pulling those things in with your world building, then you can really build theme and whatnot, like, you know, polytrades, 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, you know, Lisa and Al-Gaiba, right? And so suddenly the magic, 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? Should we do this? And all of that stuff comes out of just building into the magic system, these limitations, these aspects of it, they're related to character. And this is great stuff when you can do this. So yes. I would just caution of you too many flaws. How do you-- Like, how do you-- How do you make sure not to do too many flaws? Your major readers will help you with this. But yeah, you can over-- basically, this is where Sanderson's third law comes into play. You can over complicate your world's real fast. 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. And that goes for both flaws and powers. You know, the length of the series depends on how much you can get. But I'll tell the story with Sanderson's third law about that in a minute here. So all right. All right. Last question on this one. I talked a way too long on Sanderson's first law. 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, related to that too many flaws? No. The question is, would I avoid having a flawed character with a flawed magic system? No. 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 problems. The most interesting magic systems have these problems. I would say that your most interesting stories happen at the intersection of those things, right? Like, name of the wind is partially compelling because, quote, 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, and his desire's work. But it's like the mythical news 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. And 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. All right. We got a few minutes left. So we're going to do "Cears Since Third Law." After "Mispoir" took off and started hitting the best cellar list and "Warbroker" came out, people started asking me what my next book series is 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 it now when they have five minutes, but they put up a listing for it. 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. And they're like, oh, and then they'd be like, "Mispoir" had three magic systems. How many magic systems does "Storm" light have? And I'd be like, 30. And I got pulled into this hype of bigger is better. And this is really dangerous because you want to be giving people more and more and more. But if movies have taught us-- here are movies taught us anything-- more villains don't make for better stories. And indeed, more magic systems don't necessarily make for better stories. And what I realized I was going to go in crazy, I'm part of the reason that "Way of Kings" primed failed 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. 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 interesting religion in your books, and you're going to be adding another culture with a different religion, often first ask yourself, OK, 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? Does that add to my story? And a lot of times the answer will be, oh yeah. It adds way more interesting interconnectivity to have these two religions because in religions. Because it adds this different take on some things that happened and different philosophical takes on history with your magic. Before you say, I'm going to add a new complete magicism. 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. In the Elder Scrolls series, 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. I played Daggerfall, and Daggerfall had this thing where it had 10,000 dungeons. It was my first experience with procedural generation. It was 10,000 dungeons that repeat the same 50 different elements, 10,000 different ways. So if you went through one, the second one was already boring. And early games had this problem. They would say, it is an ocean and inch deep. You want to avoid having your world building be an ocean and inch deep. And instead, you want to have a handcrafted and a newer Skyrim game is like, we put in 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 when we 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. [APPLAUSE]