Sanderson 2012.11 - Fight Scenes & Romances

Brandon Sanderson’s 2012 Semester at BYU: Creative Writing, Lecture 11

This video is a mirror of the materials posted by user writeaboutdragons. I’ve linked together the parts of the lecture into a single video, and provided some notes with timestamps below. Enjoy!

**Notes**

0:12 / Misc questions

13:02 / Making stories meaningful
- Novel writing is a form of entertainment
- Some people build stories around a meaning (C.S. Lewis)
- - Some don’t (Tolkien)
- Avoid being preachy by not putting in straw men

22:12 / Fight scenes
- Show, don’t tell; important here
- Blow-by-blow narrative is not as fun as visual media
- - Many people skip fight scenes entirely
- Clarity is king: be concrete and reduce metaphorical language
- You want the character to feel the chaos of battle, you DON’T want the reader to feel chaos while they try to read the scene

32:08 / Things movie fight scenes can’t do
- Show thoughts and emotions
- - Use character thoughts as “shows”
- We can control pacing better than visual media
- Hit all senses
- Emphasize these things over blow-by-blow

38:59 / Larger narrative flow
- What is main purpose of a sequence?
- - Plan the tone of the fight sequence to achieve this purpose
- Advancing the plot is usually not enough; have the scene accomplish more than one thing
- You don’t want filler scenes; every scene should have something cool

50:14 / Realism in fights & romance
- You can take license, just decide what style you are going for
- Real fights, two on one, hero dies; injury, hero is out of action
- Most armies will break after 10% losses
- Real romance is a lot of work in a story
- - A lot of people looking for a romantic subplot aren’t looking for a strictly real-life romance

1:04:15 / Plotting romances
- Make them compliment one another; not just because they are the only male/female of age in the story

1:08:30 / Exercise of plotting a romance
- Relationship sub-arc should parallel the main arc, but can peak just before or just after
- Build 3 scenes things go right; build 3 scenes where it goes wrong; string these together as a try-fail cycle

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