I recently came across the following list on Amazon:  “100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books to Read in a Lifetime.”

As a fantasy writer myself, I decided to spend the next few years reading every book on this list and record the lessons I learned from each volume on how to be a great writer.

PLOT: Roshar is a world of stone and storms. Uncanny tempests of incredible power sweep across the rocky terrain so frequently that they have shaped ecology and civilization alike. Animals hide in shells, trees pull in branches, and grass retracts into the soilless ground. Cities are built only where the topography offers shelter.

…Kaladin, who traded his medical apprenticeship for a spear to protect his little brother, has been reduced to slavery. In a war that makes no sense, where ten armies fight separately against a single foe, he struggles to save his men and to fathom the leaders who consider them expendable.

Brightlord Dalinar Kholin commands one of those other armies. Like his brother, the late king, he is fascinated by an ancient text called The Way of Kings. Troubled by over-powering visions of ancient times and the Knights Radiant, he has begun to doubt his own sanity.

Across the ocean, an untried young woman named Shallan seeks to train under an eminent scholar and notorious heretic, Dalinar’s niece, Jasnah. Though she genuinely loves learning, Shallan’s motives are less than pure. As she plans a daring theft, her research for Jasnah hints at secrets of the Knights Radiant and the true cause of the war. – goodreads.com (greatly condensed)

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on Brandon Sanderson’s epic novel The Way of Kings, which is “Book One” in his mega-epic series The Stormlight Archive. In this  post I discussed some reservations I had regarding the book’s opening chapters. I also suggested that aspiring authors can learn from the “missteps” of prominent authors.

In this second post I’ll present some aspects of the novel that are more successful.

WHAT I LEARNED: One of the first things storytellers learn is that they need to challenge their characters.

Let’s say you write a book in which the main character is a girl growing up in a peaceful small town. Her best friend is the boy next door. They both get perfect grades and have loving, supportive families. They’re popular, healthy and excellent at sports, and they fall in love with each other at exactly the same moment. When they grow up they get married, have three wonderful kids, a golden retriever and each of them achieves their dream job without too much effort. Their children and their grandchildren all have successful lives. The husband and wife grow old together but remain healthy until (at the age of a hundred and seven) they die at the exact same instant, while holding each other’s hand.

Now, this sounds like a wonderful life. In fact I’m jealous of both of these people. However, it’s a pretty lame story.

But it becomes more interesting once we give them some problems:

• The girl falls in love with the boy but he’s already dating the captain of the field hockey team. He professes his love for her on the day her family moves to inner city Baltimore. Now she’s living in a much tougher neighborhood while he spends every waking moment with his girlfriend.
• The couple gets married, but on the morning of their third wedding anniversary she finds him in bed with her sister who has always been prettier and more talented than her.
• When their eldest daughter goes to college she gets drunk and kills one of her fellow students in a car accident. She moves back in with her parents for the duration of the trial.
• The couple has had the perfect life until, at the age of eighty-three, they move into an assisted living community. On that very day UFO’s appear in the sky and attack all of the world’s major cities. Now the husband and wife must lead a rag tag team of senior citizens into battle to defend their nursing home. Think Cocoon meets Aliens!

These are all examples of how to make the couple’s story much more interesting (although, let’s be honest, that fourth example is the best – damn, I want to read that now). If we want stories that’ll hold readers’ attentions we have to be willing to challenge our characters… to a certain extent.

Brandon Sanderson does an excellent job of challenging his hero, Kaladin. The guy was a medical student under his father’s tutelage but joins the army, is accused of a crime he didn’t commit and is condemned to slavery. A quick death is the best outcome he can realistically hope for.

Dropping your hero into such a hellish situation is a quick way to intrigue readers and build sympathy for your character, but it’s not without its pitfalls. Creating a seemingly impossible set of challenges is only the first step in telling a strong story.

Remember that poetry and those short stories you wrote in middle school (or at least I wrote in middle school)? Remember how dark and unrelenting it was, how you tried to cram all of the world’s pain into each… and… every… syllable.

Now imagine reading a thousand pages of that.

One mistake writers on every level make is that they ruin their characters’ lives and then leave them in a bog of misery for most of the rest of the story. There is no joy or hope in the tale. The heroes hate themselves. They hate everyone they meet. They hate God, the world and anyone who has ever loved them. The author thinks their story is tragic, but their story maintains the same tone so it isn’t tragic, it’s boring. If you want your story to be truly dark, you need to have light moments to make the tragedies even worse.

Writers who submerge their characters in internal misery are often trying to make their characters more realistic. When tragedy befalls us it’s normal to be overwhelmed by depression for quite a long time. This is a normal part of life. However, the difference between our lives and a book like The Way of Kings is that our lives are not  a form of entertainment.

Kaladin begins his story as a tortured, bitter man locked in a cage. There’s nothing wrong with this. It grabs our attention and makes us invested in him. However, Sanderson would be asking a lot from the reader if he maintained this tone for the next 900+ pages. A couple hundred pages in (if not sooner) we would become weary of the character. We might still pity him, but that pity wouldn’t be enough to keep us invested over the course of such a colossal book.

Not too far into Kaladin’s story, he is given a choice, either to kill himself or somehow (against all odds) improve his situation. In the end he chooses to not just improve his situation but the lives of his fellow slaves. THIS is what makes his story truly engaging. Of course Sanderson doesn’t have Kaladin whistling “Walking on Sunshine” right away. His journey to freedom is filled with setbacks but throughout the course of the story there is a perpetual sense of Kaladin moving forward and overcoming his misery.

First he knocked the hero down, but then he gave his hero a goal and this mixture of despair and hope keeps us coming back chapter after chapter.

Many of our stories begin with tragedy. Often a loved one is killed (as is the case in my novel) or something the hero believes in is irreparably destroyed. One way or another, the character’s life is permanently altered. However, we can’t leave the character out in the darkness. We need to give them a goal or other characters who will give them something to strive towards. It’s not the tragedy that makes a character a hero, it’s the willingness to push beyond that tragedy and find a better life.

* I want to note that by writing this post I’m not trying to make light of slavery or any other similar tragedies. People who have suffered great hardships often have a long road ahead of them. As I said above, the difference is that these tragedies actually took place while books like The Way of Kings (and my own stories) are works of entertainment.