I started watching Brandon Sanderson’s lectures on writing science fiction and fantasy after seeing Kate Cavanaugh’s review video of the class. I highly recommend watching this series if you’re interested in writing of course, but also reviewing, mainly because it helped crystalize and identify a number of issues I’ve been having with some of my recent reads.
Sanderson talks about his three parts of plot: Promise, Progress, and Payoff. In my understanding, Sanderson’s Promise is different than the Promise of the Premise referenced in other plotting methods, which tends to correspond to the Fun & Games beat of the Save the Cat method. Rather, Sanderson’s Promise is at the beginning of the book, a promise of the tone, character arc, and plot to come. This is why so many fantasy books begin with a prologue that sets or promises? the tone for the rest of the book. Farm boy going about his boring day – even if that is where our story begins – probably isn’t consistent with the overall tone of the book.
And this is where I’ve been finding a lot of my recent reads falling flat. A Crown for Cold Silver which I didn’t review on this blog, but will reference in my review of the second book of the series is the exception – it nails this promise from the first line:
It was all going so nicely, right up until the massacre.
A Crown for Cold Silver by Alex Marshall
Already, we get the darkly funny tone and set the stage for the amount of violence that is about to occur. Promises certainly don’t have to be delivered in first lines or even first chapters, but they should set the stage for the story to come.
Meanwhile, Queen of Coin and Whispers opens in a location we never see again and while there’s probably some symbolism in the dead sheep?, it doesn’t exactly set up the alleged intrigue and again, alleged romance of the rest of the book. The Gilded Wolves could have had a good promise if the heist actually had anything to do with artifact that is stolen in the first chapter I’m still salty about that. Because promises that aren’t consistent with the rest of the book piss off readers. The only reason I finished both of those books is because I was rage reading toward the end luckily, I enjoy complaining a lot.
It’s not just the promise, of course. It’s the progress too. Even the strongest promise doesn’t guarantee an enjoyable book. Both of the books mentioned above struggled in the progress department too. It’s here that reviewers often talk about a book dragging or issues with pacing seriously, am I the pacing police? – the book’s progress has not been clearly indicated or ‘signposted’. This is especially true for someone like me, who primarily reads on Kindle, where I can’t see the physical number of pages left in the story. Without clear markers, the reader feels lost in the story and while we talk about getting lost in books, this isn’t actually a good thing. Here again is where A Crown for Cold Silver does well – as we slowly realize how the wide cast of characters are connected, many of their stories begin intersecting, drawing the story and the reader forward to its payoff. This book took me three months to read, but it never frustrated me like Queen or Wolves. I wanted to keep reading, rather than desperately trying to get to the end.
Of course, this structure overlooks vital parts of storytelling and reviewing, including characters and setting. But it has helped my understand what sets my teeth on edge when I read inaccurate promises and wander lost through muddled progress. Maybe it can help you too.